Utah's Capital City Home to World's Largest Costco Store

World Domination!

(abcnews) - Customers may need a map along with their membership cards to shop at the Salt LakeCostco, which is dubbed by the company as the largest worldwide.

"We decided to add a business center and combined it with a (traditional consumer) warehouse for a hybrid," said general manager Craig Jamieson. "Currently, we're the largest Costco on the planet,"

Costco is helping customers acclimate to the new building by giving them layouts of the 235,000-square-foot facility, where traditional consumers and business owners alike can shop, the Deseret News reported ( http://bit.ly/20iOYVE ).

It's estimated that the perimeter loop of the store is a third of a mile long. Jamieson said the expanded space is about 42 percent bigger than the average Costco warehouse store.

Originally 165,000 square feet when it opened in 1994, the Salt Lake warehouse added the business center to serve customers like coffee shop owners and academic institutions. Now, the facility is about 235,000 square feet. With the additional space, Costco can offer 2,700 items including pallets of soft drinks and whole lambs and roasting pigs.

"The focus is on convenience stores, offices (and) restaurants," he said. "We also added delivery as part of that process."

Jamieson said Salt Lake City was picked to launch the hybrid store concept because company officials were unsure a business-only center would work in that market.

There are 11 other Costco business centers operating in the U.S., a sector that Jamieson said the company plans to expand rapidly.

The business center opened to members in October. The official storewide grand opening is set for Nov. 12.

More Americans On Welfare Than Work Full Time?

We need a revolution..

(townhall.com) - A new report from the Census Bureau showed a total of 108,592,000 people were on some sort of means-tested government benefits program in the fourth quarter of 2011, yet only 101,716,000 people were employed full-time for the entire year.

A individual counted as a beneficiary of a means-tested program if they resided in a household where someone received benefits.

Means-tested benefits programs are the second-largest category of government spending. The government spends more on these programs than public education and defense spending. From a Heritage Foundation report:

The 69 means-tested programmes operated by the federal government provide a wide variety of benefits. They include:

12 programmes providing food aid;

10 housing assistance programs;

10 programmes funding social services;

9 educational assistance programmes;

8 programmes providing cash assistance;

8 vocational training programmes;

7 medical assistance programs;

3 energy and utility assistance programmes; and,

2 child care and child development programmes.

Programmes such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, and veterans benefits are not considered to be "means tested," so recipients of those benefits are not included in the 108,592,000 figure.

Clearly, this is a huge problem. A country cannot survive if its citizens are not willing or able to work. In 35 states welfare pays better than an actual job. This is what we call an "incentive"--and the U.S. is incentivizing people to not work. Why would a person actually get a job if they could be paid more to stay home? InPennsylvania, a single women with children working a job that pays $29,000 a year actually receives $57,345 in total income when benefits are factored in. Conversely, if the woman were to work a job that paid $69,000 a year, her net pay after taxes is only $57,045.

If the woman were to make more than her $29,000 salary, she would miss out in nearly $30,000 in government benefits. Short of winning the lottery or developing some sort of hot product, a person's income is not going to increase rapidly from $29,000 to $69,000. This is referred to as the "welfare cliff." There is no incentive for the woman to better her life and stop receiving welfare.

This is a major problem with how means-tested benefits are distributed in the United States, yet nobody is actually doing anything about it. The amount of people on SNAP (food stamps) has nearly doubled since 2006, despite the economic recovery. This is not good.

Disability claims are also at record highs. Even 60 Minutes thought those numbers were suspicious and did an investigation about it. The system is being gamed.

If American welfare recipients were counted as a country, they would be the 12th largest in the world.

This is not change we can believe in. (Source)

Putin: Global Warming "a fraud"

(Daily Caller) Russian President Vladimir Putin believes global warming is a “fraud” — a plot to keep Russia from using its vast oil and natural gas reserves.

Putin believes “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries, including Russia,” Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and Putin critic, told The New York Times.

“That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general,” Belkovsky said.
Read the full story ›

 ( SOURCE)

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Related:California: Activist spends one year in freezer to denounce global warming

Daylight-saving time ends this weekend

(techinsider.io) Get ready for a shock to your system on Nov. 1 — it's time to turn back our clocks an hour for the end of daylight-saving time.

Daylight-saving time ends on November 1, 2015 at 2:00 a.m.

At 1:59 a.m. on Sunday morning our clocks will bump back an hour, to 1:00 a.m. instead of turning to 2:00 a.m. That gives us an extra hour of sleep and means the sun will seem to rise an hour earlier than we are used to.

According to lore, daylight-saving time (yes that's the right way to say it) was created during World War I to decrease energy use. This John Oliver clip also mentions that it started with the Germans during that time as a fuel-saving measure.

The debate still rages as to whether or not this time-switch does save energy (there are even groups that want to abolish it all together), but along the way we've seen signs that it has negative effects on our health and the economy. (Source)

China to allow all couples two children to counter aging population

(Reuters) - China will ease family planning restrictions to allow all couples to have two children after decades of a strict one-child policy, the ruling Communist Party said on Thursday, a move aimed at alleviating demographic strains on the economy.

The policy is a major liberalization of the country's family planning restrictions, already eased in late 2013 when Beijing said it would allow more families to have two children when the parents met certain conditions.

A growing number of scholars had urged the government to reform the rules, introduced in the late 1970s to prevent population growth spiraling out of control, but now regarded as outdated and responsible for shrinking China's labor pool.

For the first time in decades the working age population fell in 2012, and China, the world's most populous nation, could be the first country in the world to get old before it gets rich.

By around the middle of this century, one in every three Chinese is forecast to be over 60, with a dwindling proportion of working adults to support them.

The announcement was made at the close of a key Party meeting focused on financial reforms and maintaining growth between 2016 and 2020 amid concerns over the country's slowing economy.

China will "fully implement a policy of allowing each couple to have two children as an active response to an ageing population", the party said in a statement carried by the official Xinhua news agency.

There were no immediate details on the new policy or a timeframe for implementation. (Full Story)

Not again! Walmart is under fire for selling an 'Israeli soldier' costume to kids

#retailproblems 

(businessinsider.com) Walmart's "Israeli soldier" costume for kids is drawing outrage on Facebook and Twitter.

The $27.44 costume includes a dark green shirt, pants, belt and red hat.

The ad for the costume features a young boy wearing the ensemble and holding a toy machine gun.

The costume has sparked anger at a time of increasing violence between Israel and the Palestinians.

"The fact that you have chosen to carry 'Israeli soldier costumes' for kids on your website and in your stores is extremely offensive and highly insensitive, not only to the millions of Palestinian-Americans that shop in your stores, but to anyone who has an ounce of humanity in their bodies," Sarah Amor Itayem wrote on the company's Facebook page.

"I urge you, as a Jewish-American, a wife of a Palestinian, a shopper, and most importantly, as a human being, that you reconsider your decision to sell these costumes and pull them from your shelves," she wrote.

We reached out to Walmart for comment on the costume and will update when we hear back. The company has in the past withdrawn costumes that provoked similar reactions.

Last year, the retailer pulled a "Pashtun Papa" costume after it was criticized as racist and offensive on social media, The Independent reports. Two years ago, it was also forced to withdraw an Osama bin Laden costume. (Full Story)

Tuberculosis now rivals AIDS as leading cause of death: WHO

(Reuters) For the first time, tuberculosis infections rivaled HIV/AIDS as a leading cause of death from infectious diseases, the World Health Organization said in a report released on Wednesday.

It found that during 2014, 1.1 million people died of TB in 2014. During the same period, HIV/AIDS killed 1.2 million people globally, including 400,000 who were infected with both HIV and TB.

Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO TB program, said the report reflects the dramatic gains in access to HIV/AIDS treatment in the past decade, which has helped many people survive their infections. But it also reflects disparities in funding for the two global killers.

"The good news is that TB intervention has saved some 43 million lives since 2000," but given that most cases of TB can be successfully treated, the death rate remained "unacceptably high," Raviglione said in a telephone interview.

The report features data from 205 countries and territories on all aspects of TB, including drug-resistant forms, research and development and financing.

It found that 6 million new cases of TB were reported to the WHO in 2014, fewer than two-thirds of the 9.6 million people worldwide estimated to have fallen sick with TB last year.

Among the estimated 480,000 cases of multi-drug resistant TB in 2014 - a superbug form of the disease that resists the two most potent anti-TB drugs -, only one in four was diagnosed.

Dr. Grania Brigden, interim medical director of Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, said the report "should serve as a wake-up call that enormous work still needs to be done to reduce the burden of this ancient, yet curable disease."

Funding disparities were a key issue, Raviglione said, noting that international funding for HIV/AIDS is 10 times higher than for TB, with $8 million spent on HIV/AIDS interventions, compared with a total of $800,000 spent on TB.

Part of that disparity is because HIV/AIDS largely affects resource-poor countries in Africa, whereas TB is more prevalent in countries such as India and China, which are better able to finance their own domestic efforts to address TB infections.

Even so, there remains a $1.4 billion gap in the amount of funding needed for TB interventions in 2015.

Raviglione said it is time to start funding TB at a level that can make even more of a difference in curbing global deaths. (Full Story)