Category: Economy & Business

When Life Begins at 5: A New Wake-Up Call

WSJ.com – When Life Begins at 5: A New Wake-Up Call (Subscription Required)
By a wide variety of indicators, from electricity usage to water consumption, more U.S. households are starting their days before dawn.

Of course, for the sleep-deprived, becoming a morning person can be an uphill battle — 70% of us are not naturally alert and active in the morning, according to the National Sleep Foundation, an educational organization…."It's like these people are a different species,"

The shift to sunrise comes thanks to everything from heavier rush-hour traffic to BlackBerry overload that has left predawn as the last refuge for many people.

North Korea Exporting Fake $100 Bills

North Korea Might Be Exporting Fake $100 Bills
China’s central bank warned its lenders about an influx of high-quality counterfeit American $100 bills — which the United States alleges are made by North Korea — as the spread of the forgeries moves toward the center of a standoff between Washington and Pyongyang.

Governments around Asia are stepping up surveillance for the bogus currency, which law-enforcement officials have dubbed supernotes because they are so difficult to distinguish from genuine money

WIND ENERGY Cost Dropping Below Conventional Sources

March 22, 2006: WIND ENERGY DEMAND BOOMING: Cost Dropping Below Conventional Sources Marks Key Milestone in U.S. Shift to Renewable Energy
Three of the 50 states—North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas—have enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs. The cost of wind-generated electricity has fallen from 38¢ per kilowatt-hour in the early 1980s to 4¢ to 6¢ today, offering an almost endless supply of cheap energy.

Rail Freight Tries to Catch Up

Reuters Business Channel | Reuters.com Rail Freight Tries to Catch Up

"If a ship is loading up in China, we should know what's being loaded, where it's headed and when it's going to enter our network,".

The pace of U.S. imports has seen double-digit growth over the past three years as more goods originate in rapidly developing economies such as China and India.Combined with high fuel prices and an acute shortage of drivers hurting the trucking industry, a rising tide of cargo is hitting the rails, leaving railroads scrambling to match demand.

Europe’s Ailing Social Model: Facts & Fairy-Tales

Europe’s Ailing Social Model: Facts & Fairy-Tales | The Brussels Journal
Europe’s social disaster is unfolding while the rest of the world is booming at its fastest rate in three decades. Paradoxically, the Old Europe of the West must now learn from the New Europe of the East, where after years of disastrous socialism, low and simple flat taxes are being introduced, luring investors from all over the world. The higher the tax level, the lower the incentives to make productive contributions to society. The higher the fiscal burden, the more resources flow from the productive sector to the ever more inefficient government apparatus.

Who owns the Internet? We have a map that shows you. |

CIO Blogs – Who owns the Internet? We have a map that shows you. |

What is this ball of colors? It is the North American Internet, or more specifically a map of just about every router on the North American backbone, (there are 134,855 of them for those who are counting). The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else

A Sharp Debate Erupts in China Over Ideologies

A Deabte
BEIJING, March 11 — For the first time in perhaps a decade, the National People’s Congress, the Communist Party-run legislature now convened in its annual two-week session, is consumed with an ideological debate over socialism and capitalism that many assumed had been buried by China’s long streak of fast economic growth.

Snow Ski in the Desert

Click here to see a slide show

Ski Dubai, the world’s largest indoor ski resort — boasting Alpine chalets, 400-meter ski runs, and 6,000 tons of artificial snow — opened for business in late 2005.

Ski Dubai is actually one of the more modest in a series of extraordinarily ambitious commercial projects undertaken by the Gulf state of Dubai, including the world’s tallest building, the world’s first underwater luxury hotel, and, believe it or not, an archipelago of man-made islands shaped like a map of the world. (While you’re at this site look at some of the other Dubai Developments)
No wonder Michael Jackson moved there.
Not content with merely topping the rest of the world, Dubai will actually best its own record in 2008, if all goes well, with the opening of the new world’s largest indoor ski resort, the 15 million-square-foot Sunny Mountain Ski Dome.

Europeans to counter Google print project

Europeans to counter Google print project – Tech News & Reviews – MSNBC.com
the first culture war in cyberspace. I read this article about Google’s ambitious project to digitize several libraries and the European response to it. I think it speaks volumes about the differences between our cultures. America puts books online because a private corporation figured this is a service people want, and it would be a good way to make a profit. European heads of state decide to make this a giant public works project, and they do it because they don’t want an ‘Anglo-American’-centric online library which offers the literature people desire. I like how the article mentions French cinema as if it is a success story about how government intervention can save the arts. Which project do you think will succeed?