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POPSInformation age leaves our heads full of facts but empty of ideas INFORMATION Overload – what it is and how to get rid of it: • The high volume of information coming from sources such as the internet, 24-hour television and blogs has led to complaints of "information overload". While this sounds like a new phenomenon, the term was first used in 1970 by Alvin Toffler, an author, who warned that the human brain did not have the capacity to take in, interpret and store increasingly large volumes of information. • More recently, a psychiatrist at King's College London found that information overload can harm concentration just as much as marijuana, with men twice as likely to be distracted as women. • Research found information overload can reduce a person's ability to focus just as much as losing a night's sleep. • Psychologists who study visual processing and decision-making have shown the brain can cope with only about five messages at any one time.
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POPSIraq...Dollar...Euro...Oil ....join dots.... "The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said. "A few days' funding would be enough to provide health insurance for US children who were not covered, he said. "The public had been encouraged by the White House to ignore the costs of the war because of the belief that the war would somehow pay for itself or be paid for by Iraqi oil or US allies.
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POPSThe True Cost of Rewarding Greedy Bankers Note the names of some of these great institutions that rewarded greed. Note the immediate cost to UK taxpayers. I would be interested to see figures relating to the taxes of US citizens' tax bills compares. (Oh, meanwhile, Barclays in London have just guaranteed 2.5 billion dollars in bonuses and salaries to a firm called Lehmans that they just bought a bit of.)
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POPSDying Of Consumption "Crises are the ultimate in painful learning experiences. The United States cannot afford to squander this opportunity. Runaway consumption must now give way to a renewal of saving and investment. That’s the best hope for economic recovery and for America’s longer-term economic prosperity."
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POPSLame Duck, or Just Lame? Okay, so there have been people like me on the left, saying that Bush is ruining the economy, and there have been people on the right saying the economy is great for the last 7 years. Very rarely has history been so swift to vindicate a particular side. What amazes me is that there are still people out there who are using the same rose-tinted glasses, taking the rose colored pills, and then drinking the rose-flavored kool-aide as the economy goes down in flames. And you know what bugs me? Even after all of this, unmitigated disaster, there are still going to be people who argue with me that Bush's economic policies have helped the country. If anyone checked, his vaunted "business experience" consisted mostly of driving profitable companies into Chapter 7. Guess what? He did the exact same thing with our country! Maybe next time we can pick a SUCCESSFUL businessman for president!
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POPSFamilies Abandon Pets To Save Cash It angers me that people can abandon an animal as if it were a just another consumer item. If people can't or won't take proper care of their pets, they can at least make sure to give them to a shelter, so they can have a chance of getting re-homed. Times are hard for everyone. There's absolutely no need and no excuse, to make them unbearably hard for the poor animals too, by just dumping them on the streets. How cruel humans can be. :(.
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POPSUK Weather for Month Ahead The nights are drawing in, the last Bank Holiday of the year looks to be a washout, inflation is roaring, the credit crunch squeezing, and winter is around the corner. But hey the footie season has started! What joy to be British.
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POPSIs that so? This kind of business gives post modernism bad name, on top of really demonstrating poor taste in the usage of the concept Art.
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POPS America Will Remain the Superpower But that only means it had outperformed nearly every single major foreign stock exchange, including Germany's XETRADAX (down 28%) China's Shanghai exchange (down 30%), Japan's NIKK225 (down 37%), Brazil's BOVESPA (down 41%) and Russia RTSI (down 61%). These contrasts are a useful demonstration that America's financial woes are nobody else's gain. On the other hand, global economic distress doesn't invariably work at cross-purposes with American interests. Hugo Chávez's nosedive toward bankruptcy begins when oil dips below $80 a barrel, the price where it hovers now. An identical logic, if perhaps at a different price, applies to the petrodictatorships in Moscow and Tehran, which already are heavily saddled with inflationary and investor-confidence concerns. Russia will also likely burn through its $550 billion in foreign-currency reserves faster than anticipated -- a pleasing if roundabout comeuppance for last summer's Georgian adventure.
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POPS"We're going to be hanging a lot of people" You can gain a tremendous amount of insight from the types of demonstrations you see from the Right compared with those from the Left. It can really tell you a lot if you're willing to listen and watch.
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POPSEarth on course for Eco 'Crunch' Consumerism should be not just frowned upon or out of fashion, but seen as disgusting. This is something we as individuals are responsible for- and can do something about!
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POPSThe Economist: U.S. In Depression, Not Recession Where does that leave us today? America’s GDP may have fallen by an annualised 6% in the fourth quarter of 2008, but most economists dismiss the likelihood of a 1930s-style depression or a repeat of Japan in the 1990s, because policymakers are unlikely to repeat the mistakes of the past. In the Great Depression, the Fed let hundreds of banks fail and the money supply shrink by one-third, while the government tried to balance its budget by cutting spending and raising taxes. America’s monetary and fiscal easing this time has been more aggressive than Japan’s in the 1990s. However, these reassurances come from many of the same economists who said that a nationwide fall in American house prices was impossible and that financial innovation had made the financial system more resilient.