Category: News

Transocean, Ltd., the giant oil contractor that leased its Deepwater Horizon rig to BP, held a “closed-door meeting” with shareholders Friday, “just days after” executives appeared before Congress to explain the company’s role in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.  As ThinkProgress noted, the meeting took place at the company’s headquarters in Zug, Switzerland, where Transocean relocated two years ago to avoid paying taxes. Though CEO Steven Newman “ignored questions from reporters,” the company said in a statement that it would distribute $1 billion in dividends to shareholders:

The revelation that Transocean is distributing a $1 billion profit to shareholders as one of its drill sites leaks millions of gallons of oil into the sea is sure to inflame an already smarting debate over offshore drilling and the company’s role.[…]

To put the distribution in perspective, the amount of profit that Transocean plans to pay out in the next year is half of what Exxon ultimately paid for the Exxon Valdez disaster off the Alaska Coast.

It’s also more than double what BP has said they’ve spent on the cleanup to date.

Meanwhile, Transocean has “passionately argued” to limit its financial responsibility for the disaster. The company filed a court request last week to cap its liability under $27 million, a paltry sum considering BP has already spent over $450 million on cleanup, and analysts estimate the effort could ultimately cost up to $8 billion. As Raw Story notes, Transocean has actually made money from the disaster, collecting over $400 million from insurers, leaving it with a profit of $270 million after the costs of the rig are subtracted. As maritime attorney Jeff Seely told NPR, “They are the only people who have been compensated for this tragedy. The decedents [of the 11 workers killed in an explosion on the rig] haven’t been the compensated. The injured people who still are suffering, all the fishermen out in the Gulf that can no longer work haven’t been compensated.”

Reposted from Think Progress.

Article Tags: Habibullo Abdussamatov, YouTube

Russian scientist to alarmists: ‘Sun heats Earth!’

CHICAGO – A new “Little Ice Age” could begin in just four years, predicted Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia.

Abdussamatov was speaking yesterday at the Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago, which began Sunday and ends today.

The Little Ice Age, which occurred after an era known in scientific circles as the Medieval Warm Period, is typically defined as a period of about 200 years, beginning around 1650 and extending through 1850.

In the first of a two-part video WND recorded at the conference, Abdussamatov explained that average annual sun activity has experienced an accelerated decrease since the 1990s. In 2005-2008, he said, the earth reached the maximum of the recent observed global-warming trend.

Source: wnd.com

Read in full with comments »   

FOX News just broke the story (with few details) that eight-term Indiana Rep. Mark Souder (R) will announce his resignation today “after it came to light that he was conducting an affair with a female staffer who worked in his district office.”

Multiple senior House sources indicated that the extent of the affair would have landed Souder before the House Ethics Committee.

The news comes just two weeks after Souder won his party’s nomination for re-election.

Stay tuned…

There’s an old O. Henry story, The Gift of the Kisai that recounts a tale of a young man who sells his Kisai Round Trip LED pocketwatch to buy his wife a hairbrush and his wife cuts and sells her hair to buy her husband a pocketwatch chain. The story, a classic in the oeuvre of “how-the-other-half-lives” fiction, is heartbreaking in itself, but fear not: you’ll never have to go through those privations. There are plenty of $72 LED pocket watches to go around and their affordable for even those in relationships bathed in irony and penury.

This new Tokyoflash watch charges via USB and clips to your bag or pants. You’ll also notice the maddening fact that to check the time you have to press a button and the time is told in Tokyoflash’s inimitable WTF fashion. Some specs, in case you’re curious:

Displays the time
USB rechargeable*
LED animation mode
Stainless steel case and key ring included
Case dimensions: 41 mm x 50 mm x 11 mm
Weight: 58 grams
Water resistance: 3ATM
Japanese and English instructions
One year warranty
Battery: LIR2032 standard rechargeable and replaceable watch battery
Pocket watch, key ring, USB cable and spare USB cap included.
* Charging time 3.5 hours. Each charge should last approximately 1 month. Battery lifetime will vary depending on use but is estimated at approximately 300 charges.

There’s a cause all politicians claim to love: ending bailouts. A recent amendment by Barbara Boxer (D-CA) made this clear, passing 96-to-1. It sought to end bailouts, no matter what. Of course, as Michael Kinsley pointed out in a recent piece, short of a constitutional amendment, that’s impossible. But should bailouts be avoided at all costs, as Congress appears to be calling for?

Brookings Institution economic policy scholars Martin Neil Baily and Douglas J. Elliott say no. In an article, they assert that “bailouts are necessary to avoid the risk of a depression.” For that reason, they oppose any attempts to tie the government’s hands with inflexible rules that would prevent Washington from saving the economy, if necessary. They go on to say that the tools need to be in place for the government to act quickly when bad things happen.

On one hand, they’re right. Because it’s impossible for us to ever predict precisely what the world will look like in the future, we can never be certain that a bailout won’t be better than the alternative. As ugly as the bailouts of 2008 were, 25% unemployment would surely have been worse. So any move to completely eliminate the government’s ability to perform bailouts is likely ill-advised.

On the other hand, you don’t want to make the prospect of bailouts too easy. Firms need to fear bankruptcy. Just because bailout is possible doesn’t meant that it should be expected. While the financial panic that gripped the markets in 2008 was awful, in a sense, it was also wonderful because it showed their fear of failure. Firms worked very hard to keep the economy afloat, never assuming a bailout would occur. This is made abundantly clear if you read accounts (like former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s “On the Brink”) about the big banks working together to try to figure out a way to save some of the firms that were collapsing during the crisis, including Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

So the right government reaction is to criticize bailouts and make them very difficult. If they’re too easy, then businesses will take too much risk. Congress should have to approve any major bailout initiative on a case-by-case basis, just like they did in 2008 for the bank bailout. That was a brutal time, and Congress wasn’t thrilled, but ultimately they all put politics aside and did what needed to be done, no matter how bad it stunk. Its action wasn’t lighting-fast, but its speed was sufficient to prevent a depression.

In the meantime, actions should also be taken in an effort to avoid future bailouts. That’s part of what financial reform intends to do. Congress hopes a systemic risk regulator will help. A non-bank resolution authority couldn’t hurt. But they aren’t enough. Higher capital requirements and leverage limits could also bring greater stability, though the Senate’s bill overlooks them.

What all Washington’s reform lacks at this time is some effort to prevent financial panics. It wasn’t really the mortgage-related losses that caused the financial crisis — it was the uncertainty of financial market participants. Financial institutions and investors didn’t know how big the losses of other firms would be, or the amount of capital cushion they had in place. Was there hidden leverage that would magnify losses? The complexity of securities made it even harder to figure out what a firm’s assets were worth.

So many financial institutions were on the verge of failure because they couldn’t turn over their debt. They weren’t only highly leveraged, but much of their debt was short-term — and it was coming due faster than they could secure new funding to roll it over. Why hasn’t anyone talked, not only about leverage limits, but about leverage maturity concentration limits? It might be fine to be leveraged 15-to-1, but not if 90% of that debt has to be refreshed each week.

Transparency is also important, and somewhat taken up by the bills being considered by Congress. But they should be doing more to create an environment where, even in a financial panic, firms have time and disclosure in place to easily present clear and convincing evidence that there’s no reason for financial institutions and investors to fear the worst. The fundamentals at very few big financial firms should have actually caused failure during the 2008 crisis based on losses alone, but all were on the verge of collapse due to widespread uncertainty that caused liquidity to dry up.

If you want to avoid bailouts — and it seems just about everybody does — then you need to reform the cause and prevent panics from becoming severe. Just watching the financial system more closely in the hopes that you can spot a problem before it results in a catastrophic event isn’t enough.

Financial crisis – Lehman Brothers – Congress – Barbara Boxer – Merrill Lynch

The Guardian has now sunk to the level of Peak Energy circa 1997, devoting valuable column inches to conspiracy theories about Maurice Strong (why bother quoting an imbecile like Glenn Beck – if you want good tinfoil about Maurice, read Jeff Wells who does a much classier take on him) – Glenn Beck holds up Maurice Strong as evidence of ‘global government’ conspiracy. I guess debunking the quote about collapsing industrial civilisation does need to be done occasionally though…

Lock up your children: the bogey man cometh. We know this because Fox News rabble-rouser Glenn Beck has kindly forewarned us. Yesterday, he informed his devoted followers that they should be on the look out for the approaching tentacles of a “global government”. The contention of many ideologically fuelled climate sceptics, such as Beck, is that global warming is being used by malevolent, socialist forces lurking in the shadows to usher in a “new world order”. The commies have invented this faked, jumped-up “science” as a Trojan horse to achieve their master plan. Or something like that, anyway.

Beck has obviously been thumbing through the catalogue of conspiracy theories online because he decided to use a quote from a man called Maurice Strong which has been bouncing around unchallenged in the sceptic echo chamber for years as evidence that the heralding of a global government is a clear and present danger. Here’s what Strong, a former executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme is said to have told a reporter in 1990:

What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?

Beck responds to this quote with his trademark “humour”:

Now, I want to be very clear here, because we talked to the reporter that did this interview in 1990 up in Canada. And I want to be very clear: He [Strong] was fantasizing about a plot of a novel he was thinking about writing. [Pause.] Yeah.

Beck then reveals to his audience that Strong has not actually written any novels since 1990 – or ever.

You know what? He’s been busy – he’s got this great novel idea, but he hasn’t had time to do it because he’s involved in collapsing the global economies into the hands of a global government. Isn’t that interesting? It’s almost like his book. Hmm. Maybe it’s performance art.

Media Matters has already performed a detailed take-down of Beck’s “analysis”, but, needless to say, this is unlikely to influence Beck’s legion of truthers who, judging by the fact that the term “Maurice Strong” is now trending on Twitter, have evidently rushed online to find out the real deal about this – in their lingo – “watermelon” evildoer. When they throw his name into the search engines they will also see that his name has been linked to the Illuminati, the Bilderberg group and the “Jewish banking conspiracy”. Frankly, it’s a bit of a surprise that this 81-year-old Canadian hasn’t been accused of lurking in the undergrowth on the grassy knoll in Dallas on 22 November 1963. (What isn’t a surprise, though, is that the Maurice Strong meme is also being perpetuated by the likes of our dear friends Lord Monckton and James Delingpole – both of whom have appeared on the Glenn Beck show.)

Glenn Beck did not include Strong in his show and I wonder how many of Beck’s viewers will bother to visit Maurice Strong’s own website where he actually goes to the bother of responding to the many accusations that have been tossed his way over the years?

The short-term future in South Africa is the Fifa Soccer World Cup, and at the moment it is really hard to get anyone to see or think beyond it. Football is life. Nevertheless a few hundred intrepid thinkers gathered in Cape Town earlier this month to consider South Africa in 2030, under the auspices of the World Future Society, South Africa Chapter, and its very capable leader Mike Lee.

I was lucky enough to be asked to do the opening address at the conference, and even luckier in that this Web site: South Africa – The Good News summarized some of what I and others said:

“Adam Gordon, Foresight Project Director and author of “Future Savvy” gave us some pointers:

1. Beware of sector experts, they are deeply entrenched in the present.
2. The consumer and choice is the determinant, not technology.
3. Change is about overestimating followed by underestimating.
4. Trends are patterns in the data, behind the trend are enablers and drivers, but frictional forces exist and in front of the trend are turners and blockers.
5. Trend extrapolation is limited, don’t fall foul of the turkey syndrome.
6. There is well behaved and badly behaved change. Both can be predictable and unpredictable. The potential of sudden shifts always lurks.
7. Scenario planning wraps up the key uncertainties over which we have no control.

.
“The ‘BIG’ question he asks is ‘when do we influence the future and when do we adapt?’ There are big predictable forces out there (like population growth / the diminishing availability of oil etc), and there are big unpredictable forces out there (ja, well no fine!). Importantly, we can design our ability to influence and we can design the way we adapt. It is critical that we are able to do both.

“But managing the future is more than just about scenario planning, it is also about the implementation of the plan. It is about developing a methodology that prioritises, engages with stakeholders, and enables proactive actions on the ground.

So how?

Some important considerations (from various speakers):

1. Often we know what causes the problem (poverty, crime, HIV) but we don’t know what to do about it.
2. Often the logic that gives rise to the problem is not the logic that will solve the problem.
3. Mostly the problem does not contain the makings of the solution.
4. Solutions in one area can exacerbate problems in another.
5. The current situation has momentum, change to the system should happen concurrently not suddenly.

.
“What is critical is the foresight process, it must be well-informed so that the implementation strategies that follow have buy-in, are doable, are relevant and far-reaching. There is a very real danger of visions being disconnected, unachievable and, at the end of the day, a pipe-dream.”

Dr Elizabeth Dostal talked of a stakeholder democracy in which she promoted the design of a matrix that recognised different stakeholder levels on the vertical axis and different environmental dimensions on the horizontal axis. A multi-level, multi-dimensional model.

“Imagine” she said, “putting four Nobel Peace laureates together and asking them what the causes of global conflict are. One may argue poverty, another ideology, another resources, and another greed. In no time, they would all be in different silo’s defending their view, in one sense they are all right, but in another sense they have not looked at the whole picture. A multi-level, multi-dimensional model would reveal this, the gaps in their logic, and the opportunities for agreement.”

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The problem with the eurozone as currently constituted is that there are wide differences in both the business cycles and the relative productivity of various members.  Normally those differentials are handled by currency fluctuation and monetary policy.  The US finesses the problem of imperfect currency union with mobile labor markets and automatic fiscal transfers.  Absent these, all the work of adjustment has to be done by flexible wages.

Unfortunately, wages just aren’t that flexible–at least not downward.  Wages are what’s known as a “sticky” price, which is to say that they get stuck at various points.  In the case of wages, that means that they’re very unlikely to adjust downward.  In part that’s psychological adjustment, and in part that represents the long-term nature of peoples’ obligations; if you have a mortgage, a couple of car payments, and some student loans, it’s hard to suddenly take a 10% pay cut because business is off.  That’s why recessions tend to be characterized by sharp spikes in unemployment; unable to spread the pain, employers have to fire workers.

Paul Krugman offers a taste of just how big an adjustment will be required:

WAGES IN THE PERIPHERY NEED TO FALL 20-30 PERCENT RELATIVE TO GERMANY.

How hard will it be to achieve this? Look at Latvia, which has
pursued incredibly draconian austerity. Unemployment has risen from 6
percent before the crisis to 22.3 percent now — and wages are, indeed,
falling. But even in Latvia labor costs have fallen only 5.4 percent
from their peak; so it will take years of suffering to restore
competitiveness.

The official answer is that this just shows the need for more
flexible labor markets. But this was a subject we all batted back and
forth in the initial debate about the euro, circa 1990: nobody has labor markets that flexible. If the euro isn’t workable without highly flexible nominal wages, well, it isn’t workable.

I don’t know whether Krugman is right that wages in the periphery have to take a 20% nosedive in order to mediate the productivity differentials.  But I do know that he’s right that nobody’s labor market is that flexible.  In theory, it could happen, over a period of long years.  But it is nearly impossible for me to imagine any country sticking it out that long when devaluation is so tantalizingly possible.

US states don’t talk about this sort of thing because our labor markets are more flexible, because federal policy considerably eases the frictions, and because most of our states never had the capacity or identity to act as an independent government.  (Given labor mobility, people would refuse to secede simply because they have too much family and other ties in the rest of the country).  None of these things are true in any of the eurozone nations; they’re nations, with a strong national identity.

All of which is to say that, like Paul Krugman, I find it hard to imagine all this ending well.  But the universe has surprised me before.

Paul Krugman – United States – Latvia – Monetary policy – Economic

O que era especulação pode ser confirmado com a revelação de um flagra de uma unidade do futuro Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione GTA, que foi fotografado e descoberto pelo site especialista em carros italianos UnicaStrada.com.

Dessa forma, a versão mais apimentada do 8C Competizione virá com um motor mais potente, sofrerá um redução de peso, além de ganhar uma aerodinâmica mais refinada. Tudo isso para dar ao modelo ainda mais desempenho e caracteriza-lo como um legitimo GTA.

Seu motor V8 de4.7 litros deverá ter uma potência média de 500 cavalos e sofrer uma redução de peso de 150 quilos. Seu sistema de escapamento também foi revisto e, ao contrário das três saídas especuladas, o modelo visto tinha apena duas. Essas mudanças possibilitarão ao Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione GTA, fazer de 0 a 100 km/h em menos de 4 segundos e alcançar uma velocidade máxima de 322 km/h.

Além disso, seu chassi deverá receber novos ajustes, assim como sua suspensão que sera redimensionada pra sua nova potencia. Por fora podemos observar a inclusão de um extrator no para-choque traseiro, com a intenção de melhorar o fluxo de ar em altas velocidades. As noticias são de que o modelo terá um produção limitada de apenas 100 unidades, que serão vendidas na Europa por cerca de 232.500 euros.

Fonte: WCF

Today is the day where Lian Li, will be launching its PC-8FI tower series in red chassis, black, and silver and they look very different from the other chassis. Lian Li’s latest chassis is very soothing in the eyes and offers a lot of options for the hardware and gaming fans. Check out the specs it offers to users below:

• Anti-vibration rubber ring suspension hard drive rack
• 3 Optical Device Drive bays
• Eight included PCI mounting brackets all enabled CrossFireX
• Three-way SLI graphics card setups

The chassis now also have two 120mm @1200rpm intake fans that can be found on the front panel and the other one on the back panel both are having anti-vibration mounting features. The top panel has an extra space for another 140mm fan if you find it necessary.

The latest Lian Li’s chassis has a dimension of 210×460x490mm and can handle support video cards for your gaming experience as large as 285mm. It is also to disassemble the said chassis which makes it easier to clean the fans and air filters.

The product only costs $299 for the red color chassis and $189 for the other color chassis.

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Bill Ackman’s 13f filing is always a fun one because he keeps very few positions that he believes strongly in on his portfolio; he’s “activist investing.”

Last quarter, in Q1, Ackman’s Pershing Square fund sold out completely of a ~$80 million stake in Hyatt and a ~$5 million investment in Automatic Data Processing (ADP).

He picked up a huge new investment in Kraft, around $1 billion, which we knew about already because he made a big case for why he thinks the Kraft and Cadbury merge will be successful.

We also discovered Pershing’s ~$600 million investment in YUM brands (lots of delicious food brands are owned by YUM like, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC – maybe Ackman knew the Double Down would be a hit?? ), which they made sometime in Q4 but only disclosed in a 13F amendment last month.

Marketfolly has a breakdown of how Pershing’s entire Q1 portfolio is made up:

1. Target (TGT): 32.79%

2. Kraft Foods (KFT): 29.89%

3. Yum Brands (YUM): 17.56%

4. General Growth Properties (GGP): 11.62%

5. Corrections Corp of America (CXW): 6.55%

6. Landry’s Restaurants (LNY): 0.84%

7. Borders Group (BGP): 0.55%

8. Greenlight Capital Re (GLRE): 0.20%

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So, you’ve been with us from the beginning, back when Ally first popped her head out into the wild, then during her adventures with Iron Man, and finally, with her full spec sheet leak.

You two have grown so close over the last month, that it seems that all you now need to achieve completeness is a video review.

Oh, hullo, looky here!

Phone Dog have just posted their 13 minute review of the device!

The basic gist is that it’s (obviously) no match for the Snapdragon-powered Incredible, but is a good, solid alternative to a messaging phone (albeit with a data plan attached).

The reviewer even recommends it over a Kin One or Two, even though he says the keyboard is “so so”.

Funnily enough, just like the Kin, there doesn’t appear to be a retweet option in the Twitter client. Bizarre.

But enough of me, why not hear it straight from the horse’s Phone Dog’s mouth?

On March 3 and 4, 2010, the ELI community gathered for an online focus session on mobile learning. This white paper is a synthesis of the key ideas, themes, and concepts that emerged from those sessions. The white paper also includes links to relevant focus session materials, recordings, and archives. It represents a harvesting of the key elements that we as a teaching and learning community need to keep in mind as we work to integrate mobile technology into teaching and learning in higher education. It is clear that while the application of mobile technology to learning is just now getting under way, the potential is enormous and we can expect that the rate of development will be very rapid indeed.

Last week, everyone is looking for someone to blame on the oil spill that happened in the Gulf of Mexico.

Last Tuesday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and some other officials underwent questioning for what the government should have done and what should not have been done to prevent the oil spill that happened. Some of the questions also asked how to respond in the certain situations such as this one.

Scientists have already made some speculations that the oil will move into a so-called loop current soon. Scientists could not exactly know when or how much would be present in the loop. Once it enters the loop, approximately 10 days or longer before it can reach the Keys.

BP has been working for a month to prevent further leak of the oil spill. During the weekend, the oil company finally stopped a month of oil leak with the use of a stopper-and-tube combination to stop the oil that has been gushing out of the tanker, but they are afraid that almost already a million gallons of oil were already in the Gulf.

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With an eye towards its German competition, Infiniti is reportedly considering a coupe version of its M sedan. If given the green light, the M coupe would compete directly with the Mercedes-Benz E-Class Coupe and BMW 6-Series.

According to Inside Line, Nissan officials are seriously considering a coupe variant of its M sedan for launch during the 2011 calendar year. The decision to produce and M coupe would likely pave the way for an M convertible, although that model would likely trail at least a year after.

If given the production nod, the M coupe would likely mirror the two-door styling previewed by the Infiniti Essence concept. The all-new Infiniti M adopted many of the Essence’s styling points, and it would seem safe to assume the coupe version would continue those themes.

Powertrain offerings would be carried over from the M sedan, so M37 and M56 coupe offerings seem likely. This strategy would also line up with Mercedes’ E350 and E550 models. However, Infiniti’s M range would trump the E-Class models in power, giving reason for a slightly higher MSRP.

Infiniti will have to make a decision on the project in the coming weeks, so stay tuned to this space for any updates.

References
1. ‘Infiniti M Coupe…’ view

Source: Leftlane

Michael Bay’s Transformers 3, which has started filming in Los Angeles, will be released July 1, 2011. Autobots are coming back and hopefully better than the sequel, shares Shia Labeouf who plays Sam Witwicky. Labeouf admitted he was not thrilled in the second movie because it seemed it got lost in the chase among machines that overshadowed the human element. Addition to the previous sequel were hip-hop twins Mudfly and Skids that Bay claimed added personality and besides they were included for the satisfaction of kids. “I purely did it for kids. Young kids love these robots…,” he retorted. However, they will not appear in the upcoming film he said. But there can be a lot of changes in a year’s time and Labeouf hopes it will not just be about fighting robots.

Transformers earned a whopping $246.1 million worldwide according to ComingSoon.net and its sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen amassed $387 million in gross sales, indicates China Org. The pressure is on for Bay and the casts.

No related posts.

FOR anyone from the ex-communist world with a medium-term memory, the frantic efforts under way to save Greece (and the other wobbly southern members of the euro zone) are rather puzzling.

For a start, what is so bad about default and restructuring? In the 1990s Russia restructured $32 billion worth of Soviet debt into PRINs and IANs (both are now stored in the Museum of Financial Archaeology and may be viewed on application to the curator). In 1998 it defaulted on those debt instruments. People said Russia’s financial credibility would never recover. One banker said he would rather eat nuclear waste than invest in Russia again. But within a couple of years, Russia was flavour of the month.

Continue reading at The Economist >

Join the conversation about this story »

The previous trailer (qjnet/games-for-windows/watch-two-very-different-spideys-in-the-official-shattered-dimensions-trailer.html) for Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions seemed pretty cool. Activision follows it up with one more, showing both kinds of Spideys (qjnet/playstation-3/spider-man-shattered-dimensions-details.html) doing their thing.

Gamers kvetch about the walk of shame that ends with flopping a stack of used games onto the counter of GameStop or some other used game business for pennies on the dollar. Selling your stuff online via eBay or Amazon is another option, but that requires tenaciousness and responsibility.

Venture Beat profiles Glyde, a service that promises to streamline gamer-to-gamer sales. Glyde also lets you sell books, movies and CDs.

From the story:

With Glyde, you can start selling a video game almost immediately. You register once. Then you log in and click on selling. You start typing in the name of the game you want to sell. The autotext takes over and you can click yes if it guesses correctly. Then it suggests a price to you that is based on the average market value for that used game. You can set your price slightly lower than market if you want it to move fast. If the market value of a game drops below the price you’ve posted, Glyde sends you a notification so you can make an adjustment.

Then you’re done. You get an email if the game sells. Then Glyde mails you a package with the postage paid and address of the buyer. You stick the game in the envelope and drop it in the U.S. mail. When the buyer verifies that he or she got the game, Glyde will release the funds to you. It takes a 10 percent fee and a $1.25 fee for postage. On average, buyers can save 90 percent on prices for used games; sellers can get more than twice as much as they usually get by taking it into a store to swap it for store credit…

Please share your experiences if you’ve used Glyde or a similar service.

Glyde hopes to take used game market with easy web interface [VentureBeat]

I was going to write something up about Mount St. Helens, which erupted 30 years ago today. But then The Big Picture went and did an incredible retrospective of it, so I’ll just send you there. Here’s a taste:

If you’ve ever wondered what my nightmares are like, you’re looking at one.

I’ll add that a few years ago, when I still lived in California, I flew up to Seattle for a meeting. I literally gasped out loud when I saw the volcano out my window. I stared at it for as long as it was visible. The whole story was laid out clearly for anyone to read it: the side of the caldera was collapsed, and I could see the long run out from the lahar, the mudslide that followed the eruption. Even nearly three decades later the devastation was incredible. Over 3 cubic kilometers (0.67 cubic miles) of rock and ash blew out of the volcano that day.

You can read about the details of the event on the USGS site and on their 30th anniversary page. It’s a hair-raising story. [Edited to add: This NASA series of pictures is also way cool.]

And by the way? The volcano is still active. Have a nice day.

Image credit: USGS.