After a month of being happily Costco-less, I rejoined yesterday because their perscription drug prices are close to 50% cheaper than anywhere else. The $50 / year membership pays for itself in about six weeks for us. It’s still a big crowded mess though.
The one thing I don’t do enough is the one thing I should do more often. To accomplish a lot of the stuff I’d like to accomplish, I need to write more. And I need to write more better, too.
I watched an episode of Nova called Einstein’s Big Idea on PBS about Einstein’s theory of relativity and the other sciencetists like Faraday and Lise Meitner and a bunch of other people. It was a very rich production, with costumes and great locations and actors playing the different people and with dramatized moments and I found myself not believing any of it - not the history or that the people ever really existed or that E=MC2 is anything but a bunch of goobedly gook. Time slows down as we approach the speed of light. What the fuck? None of it made a damn bit of sense and I felt like even the real experts were actually all actors cast as experts. I think it all really has to do with keeping everyone confused and scared of the atomic bomb. Such is the power of television.
There’s a coup going on in Thailand, right now. Like, right now. It’s on the news and I’ve found a few Thai blogs covering it.
This was shown on TV and it’s very…polite.
A rough translation is:
At present the government reforms the democratic regime with the King as chief . The army commander and
national police commander have controled the situation in Bangkok and boundary areas already.There is no opposition.To maintain the peace of the nation we ask people’s cooperation and forgive the inconvenience.
2Bangkok.com - High tension in Thailand
I hope this works out peacefully for everyone there. I don’t know enough about the situation to be able to say much else, but watching it unfold live is surreal.
technorati tags:thai, thailand, coup
Blogged with Flock
Google.org has accomplished in one week what it took its parent company years to accomplish: It has already stolen market share from Bill Gates. As the New York Times reported last week, Google will commit $1 billion to a for-profit philanthropic operation that will do everything from back startup companies to lobby legislatures. Among its first projects: helping to build a superefficient ethanol-gasoline-electric car engine.
Trendy and utopian? Absolutely. And yet the hardheaded John Tierney, the Times’ house libertarian and an avowed foe of corporate do-gooding, has given his grudging approval. Google, which has managed to make Microsoft look old and stodgy as a business, is now trying to make the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation look stodgy as a philanthropy.
Philanthropy smackdown: Google vs. Gates. By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine
There’s a business model in philanthropy that these large companies have figured out.
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