Those gas bubbles are *under* and have lifted the lining of the sewage lagoons with swamp gas. The soil and water table under the lagoon have already gone anaerobic - perhaps it is just because the natural soil is covered with an airtgiht seal. More likely the soil is already polluted with sewage.

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The MIT study used a 40 year baseline for nuclear reactor lifespan. Many current plants have been extended to operate well beyond this period, ...

WikiAnswers - What is the lifespan of a nuclear power plant
Environmental Issues question: What is the lifespan of a nuclear power plant? Typically 40 years.

Mostly sales.

My Career Builder account is being flooded with openings at insurance companies. Seems to me the healthcare law is creating jobs.

re: John Wayne quote: Maybe that should be: "If you;ve got them by the remote, their hearts and minds will follow."

Quick turn on PBS and see if the Cookie monster is pushing Oreo's or Chips Ahoy in his skits.

Don't feel bad Tim, few of us have the choice to work for a honorable corporation. We may as well try to find the Pot O' Gold at the end of the Rainbow, if we're going to hold out on getting a job with a honorable corporation. (Or at least heavily invest your retirement funds in lottery tickets).

Oh My. I just realized that as a retiree and long term disability beneficary from my previous employeer my benefits are connected to Koch industries. So far I can't complain as they have taken care of by benefits until now. But somehow I feel like I need to go take a shower, even though I just took one.

"Koch - its the REAL thing"!

"If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?" -george carlin

Economists can sometimes seem like the two quacks in Hogarth’s “A Harlot’s Progress” arguing between themselves over whose potion is better while the patient dies. There seems to be as many theories as there are professional and amateur economists. Some of these people may claim to understand all the convolutions and obscurities of their trade. It is all so simple, they say. Back in the day, a man might take his stone ax into the forest, and cut down a tree for firewood. His neighbor down the cave doesn’t have a stone ax, and pays him to cut him some wood with a side of venison he carved out of a deer he killed with an arrow. One service exchanged for another with resources readily at hand, given the limitations of transport. With the development of large urban areas, resources to develop industries and feed people had to imported from the countryside, bartered for finished goods or coinage.

The more resources from the countryside was diminished, the further afield it had to be obtained, sometimes from other nations, who might demand some resource or goods that they lacked. In order for a society to advance, the more complex were the goods needed to accomplish this, and the greater reliance on imported technology and resources. Sometimes you couldn’t just take what you needed; the Roman’s discovered that the Celts in the wilds of the Baltic and North Sea coasts were not willing to just handover their amber. You had to make deals with other nations to get what you wanted. And that was just the trade part of a complex web; economics turned out to be not so simple after all.

Many people believe that simply focusing on the issue of trade will solve a multitude of problems. If it were only that simple. The United States itself is a “globalized” market comprised of 50 separate entities that are governed semi-autonomously. In order to maintain their economies, the parties in power must maintain a favorable climate for which business can prosper, and this includes barter with other states and even other nations. What is interesting here is that the U.S. has states large and small, some richer in resources and trade goods than others. There is unfettered free trade among states, and no state puts up trade barriers with another. Yet we don’t talk of trade deficits due to imbalances in interstate trade, or the fact that jobs move from state to state or region to region (mainly to the South). Why is this? Because at least it remains “in-country” even if different parts of the country are affected in different ways? Or because chaos would occur if every state put up trade barriers?

Most economists would say that the benefits of free trade outweigh the costs of implementing trade barriers in a complex economy, such as inefficient allocation of resources and reducing markets. There are even those who argue that high tariffs of the past had little or no value in creating or sustaining domestic industries or jobs; some even blame the Smoot-Hawley tariffs for much of effects that would cause the Great Depression, because in keeping prices artificially high it reduced the market both internally and externally for excess U.S. production. The fact is that there are just as many domestic industries that benefit by free trade as there are that are hurt by it, and this occurs in all countries, including that convenient scapegoat Mexico.

Instead of blaming the usual suspects for job losses, we should ask why a net 22 million jobs were created during the Clinton years and only a net 2 million during the Bush years. One reason is because the Bush tax cuts benefited the people least likely to drive the consumer economy beyond their current spending. The rich already have enough of what they want; it is the middle and lower income levels that have unfulfilled consumer needs. Lower-income consumers ability to sustain real job creation has also been stymied by the failure in almost a decade to reshape the earned income tax credit to fit the times, which is one of the few genuine anti-poverty mechanisms that has actual value.

Trade deficits are only a symptom of the failings on the macroeconomic level. Reducing trade deficits, and by doing so believing that this will cure a multitude of social, political and economic ills, is now commonplace now amongst “populist” and tea party-types. This allows people to engage in scapegoating “foreigners,” and this is at best simplistic. This is no more factually-based now during the “Great Recession” than it was during the Great Depression. Garment production is virtually non-existent in this country, so it is pointless, for example, to continue to blame that sector for depressed wages. Debt has been rising at or near record rates in every sector of the economy, not just in trade. Manufacturing jobs in this country were actually stable until the Bush years, because new, although perhaps less robust, industries were replacing those that were lost; but in the last decade, 3 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. Why? Because, in part, economic “growth” during this period was due almost wholly to unsustainable sectors like the housing market and financial transactions relating to it; tax cuts for the wealthy created a risk market not in sustainable, long-term job creation, but gambling in phony money for quick pay-outs.

The bottom line is that there is no convenient “fix-all” for the economy; we can even “thank” China for bankrolling our debt and investing in U.S. market with their excess trade dollars (because they have to do something with that $1.7 trillion in foreign currency reserves that has increasingly diminished value), but like the housing market, that is another unsustainable avenue of “growth.” Instead of whining about free trade and searching for foreign scapegoats, the U.S. has to expand its own job growth horizons in new industries capable of sustained growth, like green energy and the products that grow from it.

Jerey Rifkin says that the temperature rising by 3% in the next century, now looks optimistic (which would still equal mass extinction).
A harbinger would be this one statistic: “One in Seven People in The World Go to Bed Without Access to Food.” That has never happened before. We have become the “Monster Species”
We are only 6.8 billion, yet we only make up half a per cent of the animal biomass on the earth. Unfortunately, we are currently using 24% of all the photosynthesis available on the earth.