As you can imagine, no one wants to be tossed out in this economy : A staffer for a congressional Democrat who came up short on Tuesday reports that a team of about five people stopped by their offices this morning to talk about payroll, benefits, writing a résumé, and so forth, with staffers who are now job hunting. But one of the staffers was described as a “counselor” to help with the emotional aspect of the loss — and a section in the packet each staffer was given dealt with the stages of grief (for instance, Stage One being anger, and so on). “It was like it was about death,” the staffer said. “It was bizarre.” The staffer did say the portions about the benefits and résumé writing were instructive. The teams weren’t sent by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. Two people have suggested it may have been the Clerk’s Office or Human Resources. While Tuesday was definitely a major loss for the Democrats, I hadn’t heard it cast in a stages-of-grief way before. Work your way through it, people. Work through it.
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Conan O’Brien returns to late-night TV with ease; Photographer’s lawsuit against Chris Brown settled; New ‘Walking Dead’ already given life for season 2. (Nov. 9)
Continue reading …On NPR's Morning Edition on Monday, anchor Steve Inskeep welcomed a regular guest, Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel (from the liberal news side, not the conservative opinion-page side). The new Congress is already too “shrill” and “ugly” with libertarian argument against Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke's printing money to buy government bonds: INSKEEP: Rand Paul is a name that got a lot of attention in the election this past Tuesday. He won a Senate seat from Kentucky. But, of course, his father, Ron Paul, ran for president a couple of years back, is still in the House, and it looks like he's going to chair the committee that oversees Ben Bernanke's Fed. WESSEL: That's right. Ron Paul, who wrote a book called “End the Fed” – so you know what he thinks ought to happen. He'll definitely give Mr. Bernanke a hard time, but he's really seen as something of an outlier. He's a Libertarian. He doesn't believe in paper money. And I don't think many of the other Republicans are quite comfortable with that view. But it will be interesting to have him in the House and his son, a senator from Kentucky, taking a seat that was vacated by another shrill critic of the Fed, Jim Bunning. So, it will be a lot of fireworks there, I'm sure. read more
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You saw the key specs slip out a little ahead of time, now it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the GeForce GTX 580 has been thoroughly benchmarked to see if its claim to being ” the world’s fastest DirectX 11 GPU ” stands up to scrutiny. In short, yes it does. The unanimous conclusion reached among the reviewers was that the 580 cranks up the performance markedly relative to the GTX 480 — with some citing gains between 10 and 20 percent and others finding up to 30 percent improvements — while power draw, heat emissions, and noise were lowered across the board. ATI’s AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 wasn’t completely crushed by the newcomer, but it was consistently behind NVIDIA’s latest pixel pusher. Priced at $499, the GTX 580 is actually praised for offering good value, though its TDP of 244W might still require you to upgrade a few parts inside your rig to accommodate it, while current online prices are closer to $550. Anyhow, the pretty comparative bar charts await at the links below. Read – HardOCP Read – Tech Report Read – Legit Reviews Read – Bit-tech Read – PC Perspective Read – Hot Hardware NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 reviewed: ‘what the GTX 480 should have been’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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Residents of Yogyakarta, the city at the base of Mount Merapi, remained on high alert amid fears that the volcano would erupt again.
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Officials say an engine room aboard a cruise ship headed for Mexico has caught fire, leaving the vessel adrift. Carnival Cruise Lines says the blaze aboard the Carnival Splendor broke out Monday, some 55 miles off of the northern Baja coast. (Nov. 9)
Continue reading …Duracell myGrid USB Charger gives your Kindle 100 extra hours of life for $35
November 9, 2010 No Comment
While Energizer’s moving forward with its newfound Qi partnership , its bunny-less arch rival seems content right where it’s at. Duracell’s WildCharge-based myGrid charging mat , which was actually introduced over a year ago, is finally gaining a second good reason to purchase one: the myGrid USB Charger. The nugget you see above is a rechargeable Li-ion battery with a USB output, and according to Duracell, there’s enough juice in there to extend the life of most smartphones by four hours and the life of most e-readers (Kindle included) by up to 100 hours. It’s available today at CVS, Walmart, Target and Amazon for $34.99, and that does indeed include both mini-USB and micro-USB adapters. The full release awaits your eyes after the break. Continue reading Duracell myGrid USB Charger gives your Kindle 100 extra hours of life for $35 Duracell myGrid USB Charger gives your Kindle 100 extra hours of life for $35 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Veja Shoes Launches Chrome-Free Suede and Wild Rubber Shoes for Winter (Photos)
November 9, 2010 No Comment
Photo: Veja We have raved about Veja’s fair trade, organic cotton trainers and line of bags in the past and for fall/winter 2010, the French footwear label has introduced a new timeless footwear style, called “Veja Indigenos.” Made with chrome-free tanned suede and wild rubber –harvested by a cooperative of small producers on rubber trees in the Amazon–the Vej… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Hamas and Fatah have resumed reconciliation talks in a bid to heal the rift that has led to the Israeli occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip being governed by two separate bodies. Previous meetings have failed to unite the two groups, whose differences have brought about the most serious schism in Palestinian history. There is nothing so far to indicate that this latest round of talks, taking place in the Syrian capital Damascus, will be any different. But the suspension of talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), as the latter continues to demand that Israel stop building illegal Jewish settlements, has provided an opportunity for the gap between Hamas and Fatah to be bridged….
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