Cash For Gold Type Offers Usually Bad Deal For Customers

If the bad economy has got you in a financial hole then you may have been tempted by one of the many ads that are all over the TV about how you can make quick money fast by sending in your old unwanted gold. Its a good idea but for one little thing. Be prepared to get far less out of the deal than your gold is worth. Usually it is a standard in the industry to pay out somewhere around 30%, that is provided that the company you are dealing with is reputable in the first place. What 30% means is that your going to get about 30 cents for every dollar of gold you send in. For example if you were to send in $100 dollars worth of gold it would be a normal business practice for the company you are dealing with to send you back about $30. For $500 dollars of gold you would get back about $150 and so forth. The company would then melt down the gold and sell it for the full $500 and pocket the difference as profit.
Some of the companies in the industry are a little more reputable than others however and even this small return on your gold might be wishful thinking for customers. There have been incidents where in which some of the companies in the industry have been sent $1000 dollars worth of gold and they have returned less than $200 to their customers. The problem with the whole system is that the customer has to trust the company they are doing business with to be honest and provide them with a fair assessment of the value of their gold and that sometimes may be the biggest wishful thinking of all.

New $2000 Indian Car Set For Launch

It has been talked about for a while now (including an article on this very blog several months back) and it seems like the Indian auto maker Tata Is finally ready for the launch of the Nano. The car will be interesting and attractive for two big reasons. First the price. It is set to go for 100,000 rupees which translates to about $1,983 U.S. dollars by current exchange rates. The second is the miles per gallon it can get. It is said to be able to go 50 miles and more on one gallon of gas. There has been incredible interest in the car. The companies website has gotten over 30 million hits in just the last year. Tata Motors is the largest conglomerate in India. The company is said to be worth about 50 billion dollars and is comprised of almost 100 different companies involved in several sectors of manufacturing. Tata recently acquired the companies that manufacture both the Jaguar and the Land Rover. While the Nano has a 625cc gas powered engine the company is working on an electric version of the car and also a version that can run on compressed air. The best way to think about the car is as a lesser version of The British Mini car in terms of style but more in terms of mileage. The mini will get you about 37 m.p.g. while the Nano can get you over 50 m.p.g. This fact is sure to be appealing to buyers in this economy. The car will be officially launched on March 23rd, 2009.

Hair Weave Stops Bullet - Saves Woman's life

The saying goes if you live long enough you will see everything and this is one of those things you would never expect to see no matter how long you lived. Some people have been calling it a miracle including the young woman involved. On Wednesday February 18th Brianna Bonds was sitting in a car in Kansas City when suddenly an ex-boyfriend came upon her and shot her in the head. She remembers feeling a sharp pain and some intense heat but other than that she remained unhurt. Police were called to the scene after the shooter had fled and upon examining the victim found a bullet lodged in her hair weave. Apparently the weave had stopped the bullet from penetrating her skull and thereby saved her life. The victim has decided to give credit to the lord above for saving her life instead of crediting her hair stylist for making her weave so tight that it became bulletproof. Miss Bonds says that after the incident she suffered from one of the most intense headaches she ever had but other than that she seems fine.

Economy May Already Be Beyond Saving

This week should be the last week of discussing and debating in the house and senate over the economic stimulus bill. The final amount will probably come in at just under 800 billion dollars in total. It will likely be about 790 billion or so if some republicans stop insisting that more of the aid package be cut in order to get them to vote for it to pass. The trouble with this whole idea may be simply that even if the package were 1 trillion dollars it may not be enough. The entire U.S. economy is worth about 15 trillion dollars and some economists have estimated that the damage that has been done to it in the last 5 months totals something more like 2-3 trillion and growing and that 790 billion is just not going to pack enough of a punch to move things in the right direction. Last week Vice President Biden was quoted as saying that the stimulus package has about a 30% chance of failing and ending up accomplishing nothing. Most economists would put that percentage much higher. It would be something like a boxer throwing a punch at an opponent but not having enough power on the punch to effect him and as a result not getting the desired result of laying his opponent incapacitated. Most economists are saying that 790 billion dollars will not be enough of a punch to do any good in an economy the size of that of the U.S.
In the meantime a total of about 3 million Americans have lost their jobs in just the last 6 months which is a pace that has not been experienced before in the nation's history and that rate of loss is increasing with almost 600,000 of those lost just in the month of January of this year.

Why Switch To Digital TV Will Leave Millions Behind

Last week both the house and senate passed a bill which the president has already signed to extend the date from which anonlog tv makes the switch over to digital from february 17th 2009 to June 12th. Despite this change of date some channels are planning to go right ahead and make the switch over to digital on february 17th as planned anyway. No matter what the date it is likely not going to make much of a difference for millions of tv viewers who still get their signals over the air and watch tv on anolog sets. The F.C.C. estimates that there are about 6 million households nationwide (thats about 10% of the viewing public) for whom anolog over the air viewing is their only means of watching tv and for many of them it is the only viable way. Many rural areas of the country are simply not hooked up to cable and so there is no service and therefore no option to switch over to cable even if they both wanted to or could afford to start paying for tv, which is something that they have not traditionally done before. These people may in effect be left out in the cold.
The virtues of DTV have been tallied for months now. The superior picture quality and sound have been used by proponents of the switch to promote it and get the viewing public to embrace this change. One thing they usually wont tell you about is how fragile the signal sometimes is. DTV does not work like analog. Analog is a stronger signal generally than the signals that are sent out by digital transmissions. On an analog channel even if the signal is weak or less than perfect the likely result is that the picture will be fuzzy or slightly out of focus or even have some snow on it but it will usually be viewable. On digital there are only two possibilities. The picture will either be there or it wont. If the signal is strong enough the picture will be there if it isint your tv will display a box that indicates that there is no signal and the screen will be black, there is usually no in between. The signal can also be effected by weather. If it is very windy for example the signal may disappear on your set and you will have to rescan the entire digital spectrum in order to retrieve it. All these factors will of course depend on how strong the signal is coming from the station broadcasting it. This is still very spotty and varies from region to region in the country. In some areas it is not going to matter what you do. You could even install an antenna on top of your roof to pick up signals and it still may not help because some stations signals are still going to be too weak based on where you live and you are just going to be out of luck.
The other selling point about digital TV is the increased number of channels that will be offered for free. It's called "multicasting" and what it means is that every individual station will be able to broadcast multiple channels at the same time and offer more viewing options to the public. For example, if you watch channel 5 on your tv you will notice that there will be also a channel 5.1 and 5.2 and so on. These additional channels will have different programs running at the same time from the same station and you will no longer be limited to having just one channel and one program running at a time. This is a great idea if only these stations had something to put on these extra channels that was worth watching. Channel 5 in new york, which is the local FOX station is multicasting already as are most of the channels here. On channel 5.1 it runs its usual Fox lineup of shows. On channel 5.2 it runs a channel that it also owns called MY9. If you switch to channel 9.1 you will see all the usual shows that run on MY9. If you switch to channel 9.2 you get the Fox station. The local ABC affiliate channel 7 runs an all day weather channel on its multicast. The local NBC station runs high school swimming meets and tack meets all the time. Simply put you will have more channels if you can pick them up that is but you are going to be more bored than ever. Its a lot like that old Springsteen song, "57 channels and nothing on."
Like it or not the change is gonna come and it will be permanent soon. Lets hope that the people behind it can get their act together and boost up those signals so that everyone can pick them up from a technological standpiont and lets also hope that they can find it in their hearts to put something on worth watching from a programming standpoint. I know im hoping against hope on both of these things but i cant help but keep hoping.

"Messiah" Like Expectations For Obama

The Inauguration went off almost without a hitch today. All the expected pomp and circumstance came off pretty much as planned and the nation celebrated the dawn of a new presidency. As i was watching the coverage on television the reporters on tv kept pulling people from the public aside and asking them the same question over and over. "How do you feel today about the country's first black president?" It was a cliche question and it usually garnered the same cliche answer. First of all 9 times out of 10 they were pulling over a black person and when they answered the question 10 times out of 10 it was something like "Oh I never thought i would live long enough to see this day." Once in a while though you got a different answer. There was this one reporter who went to a black middle school on Long Island that had recently changed its name to the Barak Obama Middle School and she asks one of the students there the same question. She was a teenager and she said that O.K. now that we got Barak Elected he owes us. Us meaning the black community, that's how she put it. You don't usually expect teenagers to say anything intelligent and they don't usually do and it didn't happen in this case either. As soon as she said that it got me thinking. She seemed to have no understanding of the millions of white votes it took to get Obama elected. More white votes than black votes in fact. Despite this She was like Oh No, black America got this done. As soon as she said it i got slightly pissed. I was thinking well o.k. lets see if i got this straight. Barak Obama's black father abandoned his family when Obama was 2 years old and went back to Kenya where he ends up over the years fathering 7 more children from a bunch of other women and ends up visiting his son Barak only one time the rest of his life. Obama ends up being raised by his white mother (who used to push him to study his school lessons for three hours every morning before he even went to school) whom he has said was "the kindest person i have ever had in my life" and his white grandparents in Hawaii and they not only love him and care for him they also raise him and educate him and he ends up going to Harvard and becoming the intelligent, thoughtful, charismatic person we all see before us today. So i was thinking what does a guy like that owe the African American Community in particular. The answer is he owes them nothing more or less than he owes any other community or race or anybody. Maybe that teenager and the rest of black America will get its head around this fact someday but Obama has been elected President of all the people of the United States and not president of Black America. Does he owe black America? Yes, but he owes all of America too. As president he owes everybody the best he can do to those who supported his campaign and even those who didn't. If your an American the President of the United States owes you. He does not owe the blacks first or the whites first or the women first or the Hispanics first. He owes everybody first if you know what i mean.

Obama Overdoing The Lincoln Thing

Let me ask you how have you been spending your weekend before the inauguration? The way Barak Obama has been spending it is tracing the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, which is one of his favorite things to do i am beginning to understand. He took a train from Philadelphia to Washington D. C. where he copied the same route that Lincoln took to his Inaugural. Along the way he stopped by Delaware to pick up his vice - president Joe Biden who resides in that state. This is the latest Lincoln connection that Obama has made. Did I also mention that he is going to take the oath of office on tuesday swearing on the the same Bible that Lincoln used in 1861? Did i also mention that he is studying Lincoln's speeches in order to come up with his own inaugural address for the big day too? How about the concert that he will be attending two days before the inaugural at the Lincoln Memorial with people like Springsteen and Macy Gray set to perform? Look we all Love Lincoln O.K. he was great but its getting to the point where im thinking about refering to Obama as Barak Lincoln. O.K. already you like Lincoln we get it but he is on the verge of overdoing it i think now. He is starting to look and feel like a Lincoln groupie now. President Lincoln was not the only great president we ever had o.k. It's o.k. Mr. Obama Sir if you refer from time to time to some of the other great presidents that we have had in this Union of ours over the centuries. You know George Washington was pretty good. Jefferson too was known to string a few sentences together with a great degree of skill. F.D.R. did that as well. Truman, Kennedy as well as some others. You dont even have to limit yourself to presidents either. You would do fine to refer to people like Ben Franklin or Alexander Hamilton or Winston Churchill or Martin Luthur King once in a while as well. They were pretty smart and accomplished individuals would you not agree? Its just that everytime i see Obama mentioned its also some kind of reference to Lincoln all the time too. What is Obama gonna do when he gets into the White House? Is he gonna sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom only? Is he going to sleep on the same side of the bed that Lincoln slept on too. Is he going to wear elevator shoes to achieve the same height of 6 foot 4 inches that Lincoln was believed to be? I understand about the fascination with Lincoln, I totally understand it but my point is that there are more than a few other presidents and framers in this nation's history that can also be admired as well so why not spread the admiration around a little bit and include some of these other great men once in a while. It's o.k. to broaden your scope a little bit.