I received the following interesting pamphlet along with my monthly Verizon bill (which they were kind enough not to pad with bogus charges for once). Is the Boston Talk Party forthcoming? FEDERAL EXCISE TAX ON COMMUNICATIONS — ”Tax on Talk”
Cap’n Arbyte has a wonderful post on Bill O’Reilly’s ghastly and embarrassing demand to know who precisely sets the price of gasoline.
School kids across the country will again be taught a chief doctrine in the civic religion: recycle, not only because you fear the police but also because you love the planet. Jim Fedako, however, explains that if recycling were really efficient and not wasteful, people would not have to be browbeaten, and trash companies wouldn’t have to undertake this charade that they are helping preserve the planet by picking up sorted garbage. Reusing and reducing are viable market activities.The $1.4 billion Wall Street research settlement, devised by New York politician Eliot Spitzer, compels investment banks to pay their “independent” rivals to publish competing investment research reports. This is necessary, Spitzer argued, to give investors access to research that is not tainted by conflict of interest. Banking conflicts, he said, make Wall Street analysts overly bullish on stocks.
From the Washington Post:
In Brookhaven, Miss., for example, where Wal-Mart operates a vast distribution center, the company had 45 trucks full of goods loaded and ready for delivery before Katrina made landfall. To keep operating near capacity, Wal-Mart secured a special line at a nearby gas station to ensure that its employees could make it to work.
