As much as I’m not looking forward to the emergence of the cicadas, I’ve got to say I’m incredibly impressed by the biology behind their arrival. This amazing video chronicles the short, above-ground life of the cicadas. Watch them in all their HD glory.
Return of the Cicadas from motionkicker on Vimeo.
Regal Cinemas plans to distribute new closed-captioning glasses from Sony to more than 6,000 screens across the country by the beginning of summer and hopes to have them in all their theaters by the end of the year. As you can see from the picture (right), the glasses look kind of like bulky 3-D glasses except these are used for captioning, not 3D. The captions are projected onto the glasses and appear to float about 10 feet in front of the user at the bottom of their field of vision. In ddition, the glasses also provide "descriptive narration" which describes the action on the screen for the visually impared and they can also boost the audio levels of the movie for those who are hard of hearing.
Joffe-Walt spent 6 months exploring the disability program. As she reports, the story of the U.S. economy we normally hear is not the full picture, not by a long shot. Our federal disability program is only slightly caused by an aging workforce; it is primarily an increasingly expensive, relatively hidden safety net.
The federal disability program, along with the associated health care benefits, costs about $260 billion a year. That’s not only eight times more than we spend on welfare, it’s more than we spend on welfare, food stamps, the school lunch program, and subsidized housing combined! And the worst part is that the disability program incentivizes people to stay on the program forever and never get off of it. You know, the opposite of what a welfare program should do.
Watch this video and decide for yourself if the current reality of wealth (not income) distribution in the U.S. is healthy and/or fair.
Amazon really knows how to treat its customers right. In addition to the low prices, they make returns so easy. In fact, sometimes you don’t even have to return something that doesn’t work out for you.
I needed to return an $8 curtain rod holder. To my surprise, when I went to generate the RMA on Amazon, I got the image above.