Letters to the Editor
BJD Cruz
Published Letters: 60 Editor's Choice: 4
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There's gold in dem dar hills--and greed in dem dar eyes.
[Read the article: Obama casts out the mortgage lenders]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]ANECDOTAL: I am a reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-paid person raised and living in Southern California. Even with my income, I absolutely have no interest of buying a home. In the past 5-6 years, I will occasionally meet folks in the real estate/mortgage industries in casual settings and just drop the line "I'd been thinking about buying, but the market has me worried...." Their eyes light up and they'll start telling me there is no better time, prices are climbing, they can get me into something for little/no down, reasonable rates. I will express no interest in any exotic loans. "But everyone is doing it--it is no problem--in California, no one buys with a 30-year fixed--everything is jumbo nowadays--renting is throwing your money away." They'll go on about ARMs and PMIs. They'll hand me a card. Some of them are long-time mortage professionals, others are folks who jumped into real estate just to ride the wave.
I pity the person desperate to sock something away, make a little equity, and put a roof over their family's head.....
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Response
[Read the article: California power gridlock]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why is California's energy usage so high? How about because it has the most people. On a PER CAPITA usage, California is #48 at 0.652 MkWh/person. [snark] The state with greatest PER CAPITA use of energy is the home of Dick Cheney, Wyoming, at 2.543 MkWh/person. [http://tinyurl.com/36ek7s]
Internationally, the US is #9, after Iceland, Canada, Kuwait, and far ahead of Russia, China, and Mexico [http://tinyurl.com/2ca6sk]
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Also,
[Read the article: California power gridlock]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]California is #46 is PER CAPITA use of coal at 7 tons per 100 people. Again Wyoming is #1 at 5494 tons per 100 people. Average usages across all states is 497 tons.
http://tinyurl.com/2qp2up
But I'm sure that web site is just a bunch of liberal lying scumbags making up lies.
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Crazy like a fox?
[Read the article: Has NBC gone mad?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here](All puns intended.)
Unless as other blogs have suggested, it was a ploy for NBC/Universal to break the contract and attract attention to their new service--that shall remain unnamed here. :-) If Apple had swallowed the deal, then consumers would be screaming "$5 for an episode of Heroes?!? When I can go to (rhymes with boolah).com and get it for free?! Screw Apple!" If Apple says no, NBC/Universal points fingers at them for being poor sports and bullying content providers.
But never, never underestimate the power of Reality Distortion Field!
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@"Wall Street still hates Apple"
[Read the article: A wireless touch-screen iPod. A video Nano. And a much cheaper iPhone]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I feel your pain as I look at my AAPL stock, but look again. The market as a whole is taking a dive today, mostly being attributed to the >12% drop in housing sales in July [http://tinyurl.com/3xbcrp].
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Fare thee well, Ms. L'Engle
[Read the article: L'Engle's last wrinkle ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was driving when I heard the news about Ms. L'Engle's death and I gasped so loud my mother thought I was having a heart attack.
Count me among those who memorized the cant from "A Swiftly Tilting Planet". When I was in junior high, I probably recited it as often as I did the Lord's Prayer.
Ms. L'Engle, if you can see this: I had read the library copy of "Wrinkle in Time" until it was falling out of its spine. The Time Trilogy was the first set of books I ever spent my own money on as a kid of 11 or 12. I learned about tesseracts and mitochondria from you. In high school, when we were studying the mitocondria, I saw one of the first electron micrographs of the mitochondrial F0F1 ATPase. The little structures inside the mitochondria that I always imagined were farandolae. I've long thought you must have been inspired by early micrographs like this one: http://cbe.ivic.ve/hfmcover.html. Whether or not, it certainly inspired me.
Because of you, at least in part, I became a biologist. As an undergraduate, I studied the vacuolar ATPase, an evolutionary distant cousin of the mitochondrial ATPase. As a PhD student, I studied the genes in the mitochondria. I even put in two quotes from "A Wind in the Door" in my dissertation.
>“I thought if I was interested in mitochondria...
>other people would be too.”
and
>“Mitochondria are tiny little organisms living in
>our cells. That gives you an idea of how tiny they
>are, doesn’t it?”
>
>“Enough.”
>
>“A human being is a whole world to a mitochondrion,
>just the way our planet is to us. But we’re much
>more dependent on our mitochondria than the earth
>is on us. The earth could get along perfectly well
>without people, but if anything happened to our
>mitochondria, we’d die.”
In closing, for a long time I've thought if we could just Kythe, we would have no more hate and war. And if every day, I put my heart between us and the Echori--the forces that seek to destroy and create chaos--then maybe, just maybe, each one of us would incrementally make the world a better place.
Fare thee well, Ms. L'Engle.
PS Tapati McDaniels, you the same Tapati from Santa Cruz? I used to be m adbard@ucscb. Hello!
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It's all good
[Read the article: Amazon's MP3 store: Better than iTunes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Perhaps this is at last the _real_ competitor to the iTunes throne and keep Apple on its toes. I am an unbashed Apple fanboy and I had various iPods but I rarely use the iTunes Music Store. I am part of that vast majority where most of my music is ripped from my own CD library. On the few occasions I've bought music from iTunes, I've forgotten to "backup" the files and if I delete them or just hose my drive, I have to buy the music again. If I own the CD, I can just rerip. Will the Amazon Music Store allow you to redownload songs you already bought?