How Phone Companies Rake In Profits With Texting

Be careful how much talking you do in this free country because you might talk yourself out of house and home if you prefer to do most of your talking on a cell instead of face to face. If you have a cell phone and can use it to send text messages and you are on a per-text plan with your phone company you may already have some idea of this, especially if you have got teens in the house. The profits that the phone companies make are huge. On some plans they can charge about 20 cents per text to either send or receive a message. The actual cost to them to send a text is less than half a penny. The reason its so cheap to the phone company is because the amount of information that is being transmitted is very small. To give you an example to compare it to a 1 minute phone call on a cell phone uses up the same amount of a network as 600 text messages. All the major carriers all do the same thing at the same time it seems including raising prices. When one company raises its prices the rest usually follow suit within weeks or months of each other. This has been referred to as lock step price increasing. Phone companies now charge about 4 times what they did less than 4 years ago. Unlimited plans are without a doubt the best way to go but you are going to take a beating on those as well considering how little it costs the phone company to provide you with the service.

Training The Afghan Army Will Be All Up Hill For U.S.

If you are one of those people who believes President Obama when he says that the U.S. is going to get out of Afghanistan in a year and a half you must have to do some serious wishful thinking in order to get yourself there. Consider the fact that the whole plan for an early withdrawal depends on how quickly the U.S. can raise and train the new Afghan Army. The latest plan is to increase the number from the current level of about 95,000 to about 400,000 in little more than a year. Consider some of the problems however. The U.S. is attempting to attract new recruits by raising the pay of the average Afghan soldier to about $250 a month. Even with the increase that is about $50 less a month than the average Taliban fighter gets. Out of the current Afghan force only 1 out of every 9 members is capable of reading or writing. They are basically a force of illiterate soldiers and the new recruits that are being attracted are no better. A little less than 20% test positive for drugs. The training that these new recruits are getting now is being cut from 10 weeks to 8 weeks in order to accommodate the time line for leaving in 18 months by trying to train as many soldiers as possible as quickly as possible. There are also problems with retention. Usually these newly trained soldiers return to their villages after one year and never return back to the force. The drop out rate is about 20%. There is also a big problem with corruption in Afghanistan. Many Afghan soldiers and police are often accused of demanding bribes from villagers. It is also estimated that of the current 95,000 that make up the Afghan force that about 25% of those don't really exist. Local Afghan commanders often make up names of soldiers and place them on paper to be counted in order to meet recruitment goals for which they collect additional fees and salaries. President Hamid Karzai has said himself that it is going to cost about 10 Billion dollars a year to keep and maintain this Afghan force at this size for about 20 years. Due to the fact that the Afghan government has no money the bill is going to have to be footed by the United States. With all this it seems pretty hopeful to believe that the U.S. can extricate itself from Afghanistan in a mere 18 months.

Why The Yankees Won't Repeat As World Champions in 2010

If you are a Yankee fan like I am you should savor the victory of a championship season as long as possible because it will likely not happen again next year. If you know anything about baseball you know that championships are won in the General managers office. The moves that a teams GM makes in the off season are the moves that count above all in determining who the champion will be the following season. I offer as the latest example of this the three great acquisitions that the Yankees made last off season when they spent the better part of a half billion dollars to acquire First baseman Mark Texiera, and pitchers C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett who all proved to be pivotal to their championship season. This off season the Yankees are getting out maneuvered in every direction. The first big blow that I heard about to the Yankees chances of a repeat was when the Boston Red Sox acquired pitcher John Lacky from the L.A. Angels. If there is one thing that is true about Lacky it is that he owns the Yankees. He has almost never had any kind of trouble shutting them down when he pitches against them. If you team him up with another Yankees killer named Josh Beckett, who is currently the ace of the Red Sox staff, what you got in my opinion is a One -Two pitching punch that the Yankees are not going to know how to deal with either in the regular season or the post season next year.
That isn't even the worst of it either. The Philadelphia Phillies have acquired probably the biggest Yankee killer out there right now in Pitcher Roy "Doc" Halladay. Not only does Halladay own the Yankees now but he has owned them his entire career. If by some miracle the Yankees could get past the pitching combo of Beckett and Lacky from the red Sox and move into a World Series where they end up having to face the Phillies I can't really see what they would be able to do in a situation where they would have to face Halladay probably three times in a seven game series. All I can say is as a Yankee fan that I am going to enjoy the moment as long as I can because I really can't see how they repeat next year if they have to deal with either of these teams in their new configurations. All the Yankees have to counter with is Sabathia, who is a quality ace, A.J. Burnett, who is good but shaky especially in big situations, Pettitte who is still good but at the end of his career, and then Joba Chamberlain who has proved nothing as a starting pitcher. Both The Red Sox And the Phillies effectively dealt with and corrected the weaknesses that they had in dealing with the Yankees last year. Now both teams look like they are ready to knock the Yanks out of the box.

Predator Drones Hacked By Insurgents In Iraq and Afghanistan

If you have ever wondered why The U.S. despite the fact that it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to prosecute both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still has not really got that much to show for it in terms of progress in either "theater" this next story might help shed some light on it. The insurgents in both countries have figured out a way to hack into the Predator Drones computer systems in order to evade their attacks and also monitor some U.S. military operations. The Predator is basically an unmanned slow flying attack plane. It is computer driven and it searches for and bombs selected locations using G.P.S. satellite systems to fix in on its targets. They usually cost about 4.5 million a copy and the newest generation will cost over 10 million each. The insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan have figured out that they can tap into the predators on board computer systems by using an inexpensive software program called Skygrabber which anyone can buy off the shelf for about $25. It takes advantage of an unprotected communications link that sends out video feeds that were not encrypted. It can keep the insurgents one step ahead of the "surprise attacks" and help them evade them or minimize their effects. The predator is considered the future of Air warfare but it has had problems and this latest one is not even the least of it. The biggest problem it has as a system is that it keeps crashing. It has been reported that over 1/3 of the predator drones that have been deployed have been lost due to system malfunctions which have led to crashes.

The Real Unemployment Rate

So exactly how many people are unemployed these days in the United states? Well if you go by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (B.L.S.) they are currently putting the number officially at 10.2%. There is a little catch about this though. The catch has to do with the way they count people as "officially unemployed." For example if you are not currently looking for a job because you are totally discouraged by the current state of the job market then you are not counted as "officially unemployed" because you are technically not looking. The B.L.S. calls this not being "officially in the labor market." Another kind of accounting trick that it uses is to count under employed individuals as employed. For example, if you lost your full time job due to an industry down sizing and the only thing you could find in the meantime is part time work say working in a Home Depot a few hours a week the B.L.S. counts you as "Officially Employed" even though you would not be making enough money to live on. They only count people that they consider are "actively looking." If you do not currently have a job and you looked in a classified section this week for a job then you are considered "officially unemployed" because you have looked for a job but have not found one. If you take away all the accounting tricks so to speak and count all the people in the country who are really unemployed then the unemployment rate would not look like the 10.2% that the B.L.S. puts it at currently but more like 17.5% which is almost 1 in 5 people in the whole country. Oh by the way, 1 in 5 people was about the same rate of unemployment during the Great Depression. It was roughly about 75-80% employed and 20-25% unemployed at that time give or take.

Holiday Suicide Rate Increases Are Largely A Myth

It has been believed by a large portion of the population for a long time. That the onset of the holiday season also brings with it an increase in the number of suicides that occur in the general population. That people's feelings of loneliness and despair are exacerbated by the holiday cheer and this leads to greater levels of depression. This was actually studied as a phenomenon decades ago and it was found to be largely untrue. That if anything the holiday season actually served to dampen down the number of suicides and serves to lower the numbers from their more normal levels. The study was undertaken by The National Center for Health in the 1970's and what it discovered was that on a typical day there were 34 suicides reported for every 1 million people in the U.S. population. For the holiday of Thanksgiving that number dropped to 26 suicides per 1 million. For Christmas it was at 30 per 1 million. It did however record an increase for New Year's Day. For that holiday the number would rise to 41 per 1 million. Researchers attributed this to the fact that New Year's day signified the end of the holiday season and that would bring on depressed feelings among some in the general population and lead to that kind of a spike. New Year's day aside however the rest of the holiday season actually does serve to bring on feelings of hope and optimism and good cheer and does help a good many people to perk up and chase away the blues at least for as long as the holiday season goes on.

First Decade Of The Century The Warmest Ever Recorded

Is it getting warmer in here or is it just me? Well according to the United Nation's weather Agency the first decade of this century is going to go down as the warmest ever since records began being kept starting in 1850. They also state that by the end of the century we are likely at this pace to increase the temperature on this planet by 2 degrees. There have been temperature spikes all over the world. This year Alaska experienced it's 2nd warmest July on record, New York City just experienced it's 5th warmest Month of November on record and Australia it's 3rd warmest year ever. Scientists also warn that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are reaching new highs as well. In 2010 they expect to record a new CO2 high of 390 Parts per million. Fifty years ago the level was recorded at 315 ppm. This year on it's own is the 5th warmest year ever recorded so far. According to NASA the 5 warmest years ever recorded are in order: 2005, 1998, 2007, 2006, 2009.