Offshorecash.net

Anti-smoking is ratcheting up, it seems. Choice Hotels International recently announced that its 433 Comfort Suites hotels in the US will be 100% non-smoking as of May 1, 2007. They claim the decision to make these 34,000 hotel rooms was driven by market research, but I wonder if it was becoming too costly to get the smoke-smell out of its suites.

Here are a few other places that have implemented anti-smoking laws recently or will be doing so in the near-ish future-ish:

• Effective, October 2006, Buenos Aires has banned smoking in public spaces smaller than 1,100 square feet.
• Hawaii banned smoking in public places on November 16, 2006.
• On February 1, 2007, France made it illegal to light up in public places including schools, hospitals, and offices. The second phase of the ban, which extends to bars, restaurants and night clubs, goes into effect on January 1, 2008.
• England will launch their smoking ban July 1, 2007.
• In the US, smoking laws are passed fairly haphazardly. Some cities ban smoking, some counties do it, and some states do it. Here’s a breakdown of the policies by state.

If you run a blog I’m sure you’ve heard the name John Chow before. John Chow likes to refer to himself as a “dot com mogul”. He’s probably the biggest douche bag I’ve ever seen.

This guy goes out to dinner, comes home and takes pictures of the recipt to show everyone how much he spent on dinner.

John Chow made the statement “There are many ways to make money in this world. By far the most common is trading hours for dollar, also known as a job. Maybe it’s the fact that I have never held a job for more than a year of my entire life, but I just can’t understand why people would choose to make their income this way.”

John Chow has to buy blog posts to achieve any kind of decent ranking in Technorati. If it wasn’t for the fact he’s paying for reviews no one would give him favorable reviews.

I hate people who shit on everyone because they’re not as wealthy as somebody else. It’s a shame with the money this guy has he can’t buy himself some class.

By the way, Kid from “House Party” called, he wants his hair style back.

Here’s a cool site I discovered while leafing through Outside Magazine yesterday.BreathingEarth.net is a world map which displays the real time birth/death rate and CO2 emissions around the planet.

Click on the United States, for example and see how the population of 299,102,661 is decreasing by one person every 12.8 seconds while another is born every 7.5 seconds. In addition, 1000 tons of CO2 are emitted every 5.4 seconds. In Norway, on the other hand, a person dies every 12 minutes and another is born every 9.9 minutes. It takes the Norwegians almost ten minutes to pump out 1000 tons of CO2.

The map also shows how many births and deaths have occurred since signing on to the site. Watching how fast the birthrate is overtaking the death rate is rather frightening. In the time it took me to write this post, 4460 people were born but only 1930 died.