Flickr revamped w 1TB of FREE storage!

Flickr gets revamp — with 1 TB of storage space free — and Yahoo gets new NYC office

By Laura Hazard Owen

20 May 2013

Summary:More news from Yahoo on Monday: The company is revamping photo-sharing service Flickr and is also opening a New York office.

Yahoo’s already had a busy Monday, what with that little $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, but the company had a few more announcements to make at a press conference Monday afternoon in New York. It’s revamping its photo-sharing service Flickr , which has largely been left to languish since Yahoo acquired it in 2005. “We want to make Flickr awesome again,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said.

Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The photo service’s interface is also being redesigned to

NYC Seeks to Curb Painkiller Abuse With Hospital Limits

It’s only “deadly” if it’s misused or abused.

And yet, the idea is an excellent one because it limits potential for misuse and abuse by fraud.

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New York City is seeking to curb abuse of potentially addictive and deadly painkillers such as Oxycontin and Vicodin with new limits on how widely the drugs should be prescribed.

Emergency departments at New York’s public hospitals will only prescribe a three-day supply of opioid painkillers, won’t refill lost or stolen prescriptions and shouldn’t prescribe long-acting versions of the drugs, according to voluntary guidelines the city issued today.

The move is aimed at

CDC: Heath Data shows Abortions fall 5%, largest drop in a decade

CDC: Abortions fall 5%, largest drop in a decade

By Michael Muskal
November 21, 2012, 1:41 p.m.

The rate of abortions in the United States fell by 5%, the largest single-year decrease in a decade, researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

The decline is outlined in the annual abortion surveillance data for the year 2009, the latest available. It was published on Wednesday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

About 18% of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion, the CDC noted. Factors from the availability of abortion providers, state laws, the general economy and access to health services including contraception, can

Judge approves Hostess liquidation

Twinkies maker Hostess wins court OK to close

By Martinne Geller and Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK | Wed Nov 21, 2012 4:06pm EST

(Reuters) – Hostess Brands Inc on Wednesday won permission from a U.S. bankruptcy judge to begin shutting down, and expressed optimism it will find new homes for many of its iconic brands, which include Twinkies, Drake’s cakes and Wonder Bread.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain in White Plains, New York authorized current management, led by restructuring specialist Gregory Rayburn, to immediately begin efforts to wind down the 82-year-old company, a process expected to take one year.

“It appears clear to me that the debtors have taken the right course in seeking to implement the wind-down plan as promptly as possible,” Drain said near the end of a four-hour hearing.

The judge authorized Hostess to begin the liquidation process one day after his last-ditch mediation effort between the Irving, Texas-based company and its striking bakers’ union broke down.

Roughly 15,000 workers were expected to lose their jobs immediately, and most of the remaining 3,200 would be let go within four months.

“This is a tragedy, and we’re well aware of it,” Heather Lennox, a lawyer for Hostess, told the judge. “We are trying to be as sensitive as we can possibly be under the circumstances to the human cost of this.”

SALE PROSPECTS

Lennox said Hostess has received a “flood of inquiries” from

It’s not a joke. Republican voting states have lower education & income.

Like it, love it, or hate it… there must be something to 1.) Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” and; 2.) The line made famous (or infamous, depending upon one’s perspective) by then-Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf in 1993 about being “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.“ And, for the readers’ benefit, in context, he wrote, “Corporations pay public relations firms millions of dollars to contrive the kind of grass-roots response that Falwell or Pat Robertson can galvanize in a televised sermon. Their followers are largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.”
— Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf in a February 1, 1993 news story.

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America’s Best (and Worst) Educated States

Published October 15, 2012

24/7 Wall St., Michael B. Sauter and Alexander E.M. Hess

The number of Americans with college degrees has increased steadily in the last decade. According to the latest government data, 28.5% of U.S. residents 25 or older had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2011, up only slightly from 27.2% in 2005. While the number is relatively unchanged, there are substantial differences across the country. In West Virginia, the state with the lowest graduation rate, 18.5% of adults have at least a bachelor’s degree. In Massachusetts, the state with the highest graduation rate, the figure is 39.1%.

Best & Worst educated states & Presidential voting record

This article was originally published by 24/7 Wall St. 

Based on education data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s’ American Community Survey, 24/7 Wall St. identified the U.S. states with the largest and smallest percentages of residents 25 or older with a college degree or more.

The difference in median income between those with only a high school diploma and a college degree is dramatic. The median pay for U.S. adults with just a high school diploma was $26,699 in 2011. For those 25 or older with a bachelor’s degree, median annual earnings came to $48,309. Residents with a graduate or professional degree did even better; median annual earnings was $64,322.

Differences in poverty rates related to education are just as dramatic. For U.S. adults with at least bachelor’s degrees, the percentage living in poverty in 2011 was just 4.4%. For adults with only a high school diploma, 14.2% were living below the poverty line.

The effects of wage gap by education becomes clear when comparing the states by graduation rate. Of the 10 states with the largest percentage of college-educated residents, eight are in the top 10 for median income. Among the worst-educated states, eight are among the 10 with the lowest median income.

24/7 Wall St. reviewed the percentage of U.S. residents 25 or older with at least a bachelor’s degree for 2011 from the annual American Community Survey. From that survey, we obtained

Can you hear me now? FCC likely to get an earful from cellular power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy.

For many – if not most – people, communication issues and law are a complete mystery. They just want their #*@^$%! cell phones to work. That’s all.

But here’s a thumbnail sketch of why your service sucks, no matter your cell phone carrier.

In the beginning of cellular, it was once called “wireless” – it still is by insiders – and there was the “A” carrier, and the “B” carrier. The “A” carrier was the wireless carrier, while the “B” carrier was the wireless carrier for the landline company, which in most cases was BellSouth, which was gobbled up by AT&T.

The two carriers operated on different frequencies, but within the same bandwidth.

Then, cellular grew. It grew so much it needed more bandwidth. So, the FCC allocated more airwave “space” for cellular frequencies.

That was where the problems all began.

The Federal Communication Commission has regulatory purview and authority over all communications in the United States. And instead of telling the carriers that they had to adopt a common standard, they allowed each and every carrier to different technology and standards to build their networks.

Some built networks along major highways, such as Interstates. Others, concentrated on small local areas, while yet others adopted strategies that focused upon large markets like major cities. And yet none of them collaborated, and each one did their own thing.

The landline telephone in your house has one standard. Not several. As well, the routing it uses – that is, the wires that carry the signal – are invisibly routed to the end users. So, if a wire is knocked down, or damaged by digging, the signal is re-routed through another node – all which is invisible to the end users – and the call continues. That is called “redundancy,” and there are at least two back-ups to such system, which is called “dual redundancy.”

That is NOT SO with wireless.

If a signal from a cellular telephone to a cellular tower is broken, there is no recourse. The call is dropped/disconnected. And often times, once that call is dropped, neither the caller, nor the party being called can reach each other – even if one party is using a landline phone. (We’ve all gone through “cellular dead zones,” right?)

However, IF the FCC had mandated that all cellular carriers adopt a unified standard of signal transmission, they could’ve also required those same carriers to share cellular tower space. As it is now, competing cellular companies DO NOT share tower space with each other – which is why it’s possible to see cellular towers nearby, but not have any quality signal (if any) in many cases. The reason why, is that it’s not the tower for the cellular carrier you use. Too bad, eh?

Truth be told, the United States is at least 15 years or more behind the rest of the world when it comes to cellular communications. For example, in South Korea, the people in that nation have nationwide WiFi and have been watching teevee on their cellular phones for quite some time. Not so in the United States.

Why?

I refer the reader to the previous remark.

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F.C.C. Details Storm-Related Cellphone Problems

October 31, 2012
The New York Times

By EDWARD WYATT and BRIAN X. CHEN

WASHINGTON — For all of the modern communications that keep people connected, cellphones rely on an age-old technology that has repeatedly demonstrated its own instability during emergencies — electricity.

Power systems failures throughout the Northeast have been the main culprits in the shutdown of more than 20 percent of the cell tower sites in 10 states, causing millions of lost calls on Wednesday, government and industry officials said.

Slow progress was made in restoring some services. Federal Communications Commission officials said that the percentage of cell tower sites not working in the storm-damaged areas declined “by a few percentage points” as of Wednesday morning, down from about 25 percent on Tuesday.

Wired broadband and cable television systems remained out of service for

Man that predicted Great Recession dead aged 90

Jay Levy, Part of ‘Dynasty’ That Forecast 2008 Crash, Dies at 90

Jay Levy, who worked with his father, then his son, to publish an economics-forecasting newsletter, now in its seventh decade, that predicted the collapse in housing and latest recession, has died. He was 90.

He died on Oct. 4 at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, New York, according to his son, David. The cause was pneumonia. A resident of Somers, New York, he had suffered a series of mini-strokes in recent years.

The Levy Forecast, founded in 1949 as Industry Forecast, bills itself as the oldest paid newsletter devoted to economic analysis in the U.S. It is published by the Mount Kisco-based Jerome Levy Forecasting Center LLC, of which Levy was most recently senior counsel and managing director. The center carries the name of his father, Jerome, who died in 1967. Jay Levy’s son, David Levy, is chairman. They were part of what Forbes magazine, in 1983, called “a kind of economic dynasty.”

Levy and his son were “right as rain” in predicting the financial crisis and recession that began in 2007-2008, Alan Abelson wrote in Barron’s in January 2009.

Among the red flags they had raised was this from the November 2005 Levy Forecast:

“Just as the last recession was caused by

Bain Capital among firms subpoenaed by NY AG – suspected of tax evasion

The noose tightens.

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UPDATE 2-New York probes private equity tax strategy – source

Sun Sep 2, 2012 8:00am IST

* NY AG subpoenas at least 12 private equity firms
* AG probing conversion of fees into fund investments
* Bain, Romney’s former firm, among those subpoenaed
* KKR, Apollo, Silver Lake, TPG also get subpoenas

By Karen Freifeld and Greg Roumeliotis

Sept 1 (Reuters) – At least a dozen U.S. private equity firms have been subpoenaed by the New York state attorney general as part of a probe into whether a widely used tax strategy that saved these firms hundreds of millions of dollars is proper, a source familiar with the situation said on Saturday.

Among the firms that were subpoenaed are Bain Capital LLC, KKR & Co LP, TPG Capital LP, Apollo Global Management LLC and Silver Lake Partners LP, the source said.

Bain was once headed by Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who hopes to unseat President Barack Obama in the Nov. 6 election.

The subpoenas, which were sent out in July, seek documents related to

Grand Old Party of Xenophobic, Racist, Hypocrites

Someone please tell me… how does one spell xenophobe?

And tell me again, just so I’ll be certain… what is racism?

Finally, just so I won’t forget… isn’t hypocrisy saying one thing, and doing the opposite?

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The GOP‘s Immigrants 

By JASON L. RILEY

• POLITICAL DIARY
• September 1, 2012, 6:28 p.m. ET

Rare was the speaker at the Republican convention in Tampa this week who did not invoke his immigrant forebears, almost always described as poor or, at best, of modest means upon arrival to the U.S.

This is hardly surprising because we are not simply a nation of immigrants but overwhelmingly a nation people descended from immigrant strivers. The “huddled masses” of the 1800s and early 1900s were tired and poor, not Indian computer engineers and Chinese biochemists.

This point is worth making because although the Republican speakers were

Research shows new residential constructions burn faster, but states refuse to require sprinkler systems.

Nozzle Team Attacking on Knees – Photo ©2009, by SouthernBreeze, All Rights Reserved

How does one spell stupid?

Stoopid.

Stewpid.

Stupid.

Now, here’s a thought: What if the mortgage agencies REQUIRED sprinklers in all new construction? That way, they’d completely sidestep the obstinately stupid legislators. Besides, it’d be a way they could protect their investment.

Further, legislators’ assertions  are completely opposite the economic claims they make on other issues. That is, that as the availability of a product increases, the price decreases. So rather than being more expensive, the installation of residential sprinklers would be less expensive because there would be more of them, more competition, more private enterprises arising to meet the need, more jobs, etc.

Honestly, it just seems that, as a rule, Republicans just don’t get it.

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New homes burn faster, but states resist sprinklers

1:01am EDT

By Melanie Hicken

NEW YORK (Reuters) – In Scottsdale, Arizona, any new home must come equipped with fire sprinklers, a decades-old rule lauded by fire safety advocates nationwide. But 12 miles away in Phoenix, city officials are not even allowed to discuss adopting a requirement like Scottsdale’s, because of a state law passed last year.

The same is true in Texas, Alabama, Kansas and Hawaii, where in the past four years state governments have enacted bills forbidding cities and towns from requiring sprinklers in new homes. A dozen have forbidden statewide building code councils from including the requirement in their guidelines.

Advocates — including firefighters, fire safety groups and the sprinkler industry — say