"Just this year, consumers lost about $100 million in gift cards that they could not use when major retailers went out of business." NY TIMES
"But of the 62 percent who received gift cards in 2007, some 25 percent said they were still sitting in drawers somewhere, unredeemed. And of that 25 percent, more than half have two or more gift cards." NY TIMES
LeverageCard "instituted a policy allowing customers who had bought gift cards from its Web site to trade them in for another retailer’s card, said Jennifer Mathe, chief operating officer and co-founder of the year-old site." NY TIMES
"Customers must notify Leveragecard.com within 30 days of a company’s bankruptcy that they want to make the exchange and must do it within 60 days of the retailer’s filing for bankruptcy and only if the company stops selling gift cards." NY TIMES
fington Post, YouTube, FiveThirtyEight and NPR. Here's a site to help you navigate the transition and read beyond the red and blue maps, one of the National Journal Online blogs - Lost in Translation: Helping You Navigate the Presidential Handover. 
"You're honored and flattered, of course. You may have been hoping for this call and doing everything possible to make sure it would come. Or it's possible that this summons has arrived out of the blue. Either way, there's a new president in town, and he wants you to join his management team. If you've always wanted to perform public service, this is a golden opportunity." From the website Excellence in Transition.org.
"task is to move the discussion away from talking heads and talking points, and give it back to you. That is Big Think's mission. In practichttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife, this means that our information is truly interactive. When you log onto our site, you can access hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with today's leading thinkers, movers and shakers. You can search them by question or by topic, and, best of all, respond in kind. Upload a video in which you take on Senator Ted Kennedy's views on immigration; post a slideshow of your trip to China that supports David Dollar's assertion that pollution in China is a major threat; or answer with plain old fashioned text. You can respond to the interviewee, respond to a responder or heck, throw your own question or idea into the ring."From the BigThink website.
From GreenLivingTips, I've found this article, Recycling By the Numbers.
On most plastic jars, containers and other packaging of products you buy, you'll find what's generally accepted as the recycling logo with a number in the middle and letters underneath stamped into the plastic.
The recycling logo can be a little misleading - just about anything can be recycled, but sometimes not without major effort. It's a little bit like extracting oil from under the ocean bed compared to extracting oil from tar sands; none of it's really good as such, but some plastics are far, far worse than others.
The Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) implemented the system in 1988 to allow recyclers to be able to tell the different types of plastics when sorting. Basically, the numbers in the triangle indicate the grade of plastic - the resin ID code. It's now a system that's used in many different countries.
1 - PETE - Polyethylene Terephthalate
The easiest of plastics to recycle. Often used for soda bottles, water bottles and many common food packages. Is recycled into bottles and polyester fibers
2 - HDPE - High density Polyethylene
Also readily recyclable - Mostly used for packaging detergents, bleach, milk containers, hair care products and motor oil. Is recycled into more bottles or bags.
3 - PVC - Polyvinyl Chloride
This stuff is everywhere - pipes, toys, furniture, packaging - you name it. Difficult to recycle and PVC is a major environmental and health threat.
4 - LDPE Low-density Polyethylene
Used for many different kinds of wrapping, grocery bags and sandwich bags and can be recycled into more of the same.
5 - PP - Polypropylene
Clothing, bottles, tubs. Can be recycled into fibers.
6 - PS - Polystyrene
Cups, foam food trays, packing peanuts. Polysterene is a real problem as it's bulky yet very lightweight and isn't really worth recycling.
7 - Other
Could be a mixture of any and all of the above. Or plastics not readily recyclable such as polyurethane. Avoid it if you can - recyclers generally speaking don't want it.
G - GLT - Green Living Tips Logo
The Green Living Tips logo of course!.
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue. I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from.
When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.
Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.
I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.
Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual. ~Michael Lewis
The First Republic of the United States, assembled following the American Revolution, lasted from 1788 to 1860. The Second Republic, assembled following the Civil War and Reconstruction (that is, the Second American Revolution) lasted from 1860 to 1932. And the Third American Republic, assembled during the New Deal and the civil rights eras (the Third American Revolution), lasted from 1932 until 2004.
"The Federal Trade Commission is the nation's consumer protection agency and one of the government agencies responsible for keeping competition among businesses strong. Its job is to make sure companies compete fairly and don't mislead or trick people about their products and services. Three bureaus do the work of the FTC: Competition, Consumer Protection, and Economics. Several other offices help implement the mission of the bureaus." quoted from the website.
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