Another Newspaper Bites the Dust -- Google Sends Up Delivery Balloons -- Inflation Eats Up Wage Increases

The The Raymond/Prinsburg News has published its weekly edition in Kandiyohi County for 6,124 consecutive weeks. That streak is now over. The paper that was founded in November 1900 is no more, the West Central Tribune says . . .  It hasn’t made money since Ted and Kari Jo Almen bought it 20 years ago. 

NPR

Newspapers lacking subscriptions

mostly go into conniptions.

They stop being inked

when ads are extinct,

and fade like the ancient Egyptians. 

SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s efforts to build delivery drones and internet-beaming balloons are no longer just science projects. Both ventures are becoming their own independent businesses within Alphabet, the technology conglomerate that owns Google . . . 

NYT

My packages come by balloon -- 

if they don't float off to the moon.

Jules Verne would delight

in such a grand sight,

and H.G. Wells no doubt would swoon. 

For a second month in a row, annual inflation fully offset average hourly wage growth in June, leaving workers’ real hourly earnings flat from a year earlier despite falling unemployment and a generally strong economy.

WSJ

Whenever I'm given a raise,

I watch with a mortified gaze

as inflation guts

my pay to peanuts --

and my savings slowly decays.

Neutrinos are so small that they seldom bump into atoms so humans can't feel them. They don't shed light, so our eyes can't see them. Yet these very qualities make them invaluable for conveying information across time and space, scientists say. Light can be blocked and gravitational waves can be bent, but neutrinos are unscathed as they travel from the most violent events in the universe into a detector at the bottom of the Earth.

Washington Post

It's something so small and discreet

that chances are you'll never meet

a neutrino chunk,

unless you are shrunk

to smaller than a microbe's feet.