Feeling secure because your new credit and debit cards have the state-of-the art chips? Well, don’t; the crooks are relentless and are working to steal that from you also.
Question: When paying your restaurant tab, why does the server take your card away and then bring it back with your receipt? Outside the U.S. the norm is for the server to carry a handheld device to read your card and print your receipt. Your card is never out of your sight. The U.S. was behind other countries in adopting chip technology; maybe some year we’ll catch up with card-reader technology..
If you are a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon aficionado, expect to pay ever-higher prices for your favored wine. The price of Napa Cabernet grapes from the 2016 harvest was $6,943 per ton, 11% higher than the previous vintage. Over the hill in Sonoma, Cabernet brought $2,954 per ton. Sonoma’s priciest grape is Pinot Noir at $3,669. Overall average price for Napa wine grapes was $4,666 per ton, Sonoma $2,585, Lake County $1,664, Mendocino $1,532. The average for all varieties in these four counties was $2,955, an increase of 5.8% from 2015.
What does the future look like? Marijuana, of course!
The Texas State Board of Education approves the textbooks used by five million students in its public schools. Because of the size of the Texas market, many textbook publishers print the Texas-approved books to sell in other other states. (Advances in technology are making it easier to publish other versions for other markets.) This is particularly problematic with history texts, as the politically-charged Texas board is firmly controlled by right-wing nutcases.
Students are taught that slavery was only an incidental cause of the Civil War, after states’ rights and sectionalism. (The state’s right being the right to own other human beings.) Textbooks make no mention of the Ku Klux Klan.
Texas students learn that slavery was simply part of immigration patterns that “brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” As part of the effort to purge liberal bias from curricula, Thomas Jefferson is ignored, but the purported “Christian” foundation of our country’s beginning is emphasized. Textbooks also stress the importance of guns to our freedom. After a heroic battle, the Texas board allowed evolution to be broached as a possibility.
With our new president and a new Secretary of the Department of Education who is no friend of public education, we’ll see how things go. For now, historians in higher education are concerned about the teaching of U.S. history. In the radically changed political climate, revisionists are becoming much more emboldened, eager to flaunt their ignorance.
Remember the year 2000? I do. We expended time and effort to reassure business partners that we had made preparations to prevent all our systems from crashing at one second past midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999. We even had high-tech shorthand: Y2K. (Y2K – get it?) Today, we would expect a logo and theme music as well. All because the tech-wizards in whose genius we relied, didn’t know the year 2000 was coming. Guess what? They’re back. The subsequent tech generation is unleashing the Internet of Things. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Continue reading “The Internet of Wh-a-a-a-t?”
Douglas County Oregon, at the south end of the Willamette Valley, has for many decades been the fortunate recipient of revenue from tax on timber harvests. As the logging industry has declined, so has income from it. Now its citizens are faced with difficult decisions about paying for things themselves that previously were “free.” In the recent election, Douglas County voted down a tax to keep its library system operating. The margin was 55% to 45%. (Donald Trump won the county with 65% of the vote.) The county’s libraries are scheduled to close April 1.
“If you want to use the library you should pay for it yourself. We are tired of being taxed. Property owners are tired of being taxed to pay for something that’s free.”
Feeling secure because your new credit and debit cards have the state-of-the art chips? Well, don’t; the crooks are relentless and are working to steal that from you also.
