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Monday, October 14, 2013

October 2013 News Factoids

September: New Mexico House Speaker Ken Martinez announced a new initiative that the B.N.S.F. Railroad will soon undertake: their locomotives will start using natural gas, instead of diesel. Not only will this help the environment but it is a resource that New Mexico has an abundance of.

September: Did anyone else notice that the pumpkin harvest was three to four weeks before Halowe'en this year? Giant displays at Home Depot and on the back of trucks in vacant lots in my area showed up *before* October First.

DEPT. of LAME JOKES
How many incontinent senior citizens does it take to change a light bulb?
Well, that depends...

DEPT of CLIMATE CHANGE
The historic first-ever departure of a bulk-cargo ship from Vancouver, BC to Finland via the Arctic Sea took place on September 17th; the Nordic Orion carried 73,500 tons of coal (a 25% increase because not restricted by depth of the Panama Canal). Meanwhile, both the Russian and Canadian governments are beefing up ports and coastal police & rescue units in the Northwest Passage due to expectations of increased traffic – one of the few positive benefits of Global Warming/Climate Change.

JOBS WATCH
Economic Policy Institute introduced a new monthly economic indicator in October that more accurately gauges the weakness of the labor market; the new 'missing worker' tool accounts for potential workers who are neither employed nor actively seeking work – workers that are therefore not included in the official unemployment rate. If these nearly 5 million missing workers had been seeking work and thus counted as unemployed, the unemployment rate in August would have been a staggering 10.1 percent instead of 7.3 percent.

THE CLASS WAR
"The world’s richest one percent have $52.8 trillion [in assets] — about 40 percent of the world’s wealth." ~~ Joel S. Hirschhorn
Copyright 2013 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

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