Very Local News

• My phone didn't charge last night Not sure, but I bet the plug didn't go all the way in the socket. I noticed before I walked out the door this morning, but what are you going to do? Glad I have the old Motorola charger. I use it as a travel charger. Handy using USB ports for connectors on phones.
  
• Gallery Furniture burned to the ground. Of any one in the world, that guy, what's his name?, will survive. I know someone who knows his family. They tell me he is kind of nuts. You have to be to run a business these days. He ran for years with a pile of furniture covered by a tarp. I don't remember when the warehouse went up. Channel 2 had the camera on the roof of their studio watching the fire and smoke from 26 miles away.
• More efficient cars.
• People drive more, make more discretionary trips. Go places and buy things when they get there.
  
• More people on the road. More accidents. More congestion.
• More use and less taxes. The more efficient you make vehicles the higher you have to jack up taxes to make up the difference.
• Forget White Castle. McDonald's is getting in to small hamburgers along with mini donuts and all things fast food. Experts say it is a fad. Nat got some mini burgers from Jack in the Box. I haven't tried them. She says they taste like the big burgers.
• Ralph Nader is back on the car industry's back. He is attacking DRM in automobiles. Cars are so frigging complex that car companies have locked out local repair shops. They want to force people to use their computers and software to fix your car. It is the same idea as printer ink cartridges. Bastards. Go Nader. Give'em hell.
• Marketplace Money did a whole show on retirement. It was depressing  because I will never retire. I hope I will not be a burden on anyone, but I think I will work until the day I drop.
  
• You can't park a mobile home (and live there) for under $2000 a month in Southern California. How fucked up is that?
• In Germany, people get about 70% of their salary after retirement. In the U. S. it is about 40%. In thirty years neither will have enough people paying in to support those being paid. Both will fail long before that moment.
• The only thing it would take to fix the Social Security problem is to raise the retirement age to either 70 or 72. That would fix it for a while. Young people today envision 75 or 80 as a retirement age. Young people being defined here as 25. God I'm old.
  
• Started a copy of about 10G to my 16G thumb drive. It started and said 121 minutes for the copy. This is on a Windows box. I checked on it ten minutes later and it said ten minutes. Useless.
• When I have the computer read to me I speed it up. Same with the blind library tape player. When I listen to blogs, I wish there was a way to speed it up. I remember being able to speed up media in MS player. I can do it with mplayer on Linux. Not xmms as far as I can tell. I'll keep looking.