The Miracle Berry – Fruit Tablets
I just got these and can’t wait to try them!
The miracle berry (Synsepalum dulcificum), is native to West Africa and has been used for centuries by local tribes to sweeten their generally acidic diets. By eating the fruit and swirling the pulp around in their mouths, they discovered that their taste perceptions were temporarily modified, changing their normally sour foods to taste sweet.
Recent scientific studies reveal the reason for this naturally occurring phenomenon is contributed to the active glycoprotein within the berry itself, known as Miraculin. After the protein coats the taste buds, Miraculin causes a temporary change in the taste receptors, allowing the mind to perceive sours, bitter, and acidic flavors as sweet.
The miracle berry is the most expensive berry in the world because there is no other berry like it. This premium price is attributed to the highly perishable nature of the fruit and the limited supply in the global market, each individual berry is sold for a price between $2-$5. Through innovation and commitment to share the miracle berry’s benefits, the mberry miracle berry fruit tablet was introduced.
The Myth of Free Wi-Fi
One of the greatest things to happen to business air travel in recent times is gogo Inflight Internet. On a six hour flight from New York to Los Angeles for $12.95 I can stay connected, responding to emails and doing various other tasks that one would normally do while on the ground.
Under normal circumstances the connectivity is great, with decent through put, largely owed to the fact that it would seem few people are willing to pay the price to stay connected.
For the holiday season whoever Google and Virgin America (the greatest US domestic airline ever launched) have teamed up to offer gogo Wi-Fi for free for two months till January 15th 2009.
I would not normally look a gift horse in the mouth, nor I am not one to call Google evil, but in this one case, I might have to part for normalcy.
Unfortunately with the revised price tag of free, everyone and their mother has suddenly decided that they need to stay connected. The end result is extremely low through put and a lack of reliability.
I for one will be happy with January 15th rolls around and gogo cost $12.95 again,
Money Laundry Clothing
The first clothing line in history to blend recycled 100% real US currency!
http://www.moneylaundryclothing.com/
The FairTax
With all of the talk lately of raising taxes to pay for universal health care and to reduce the national debt (which is a great topic for a future post), I’ve been thinking that there has to be a better way, and I think I have found one. I have been reading about the FairTax lately, two really good books The FairTax Book
What is the FairTax?
The FairTax plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll based taxes with an integrated approach including:
* A progressive national retail sales tax.
* A prebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level.
* Dollar-for-dollar federal revenue neutrality.
* Repeal of the 16th Amendment through companion legislation.
SEC Misses The Boat Again!
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairwoman Mary Schapiro announced last week her push to eliminate “Flash Orders” as part of a broader investigation into High Frequency Trading and it’s impact on the markets.
“Flash Orders” are Immediate or Cancel Orders (IOC’s) placed into a market (such as NASDAQ or BATS Exchange) which are displayed to a subset of market participants for 30ms (or there about) before being routed to the full market. At first glance, this seems like an unfair advantage given to this subset of participants, however with little effort and investigation (which it seems the SEC didn’t bother with) you find that it’s completely within the ability of market participant to join this group and be able to receive these “Flash Orders.”
What is even more disturbing about the SEC concern is the similarity of these “Flash Orders” to an extremely common practice in the trading pits of the traditional floor based stock exchanges. In these pits, brokers regularly give each other the opportunity to trade directly amongst themselves before routing their orders to the markets as a whole. When done to allow a trade to go up in front of a customers order, this is called “Front Running”, when done as a normal course of business, we call this business as usual.
As a result of her statements as well as those of Senator Charles Schumer, both NASDAQ and BATS have announced they will be ending support for “Flash Orders” in the coming weeks. While they may view this as a “win”, I see this as the start of a slippery slope into the the over regulation of our financial markets. On top of their review of “Flash Orders”, they are looking at the practices of High Frequency Trading and Collocation of servers close to the electronic exchanges.
Perhaps the SEC should spend it’s time enforcing existing rules and less time investigating irrelevant issues, and perhaps we could prevent the next Madoff.
