Two for One News Blurb: Stormy Weather for West Coast and for OLPC

Stormy Weather Ahead Whether meteorological or economic in nature, the stormy weather being felt in parts of the nation today may simply be a brief taste of what is to come. Starting with the meteorological via CNN,

Severe storms that have brought heavy rain, snow and high winds to California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado claimed their first victim and probably triggered a levee break Saturday.

A levee break -- shades of Katrina? Possibly, only this time in the desert. From the LA Times online:

LAS VEGAS -- A levee break early Saturday sent up to 8 feet of icy water coursing through hundreds of homes in the northwestern Nevada town of Fernley, the largest catastrophe tied to the weekend storms that have lashed California and Nevada. The flooding stranded thousands of people, some of whom were carried out of their neighborhoods in pontoon boats or helicopters. No injuries were reported, but more than 1,500 people were displaced, officials said Saturday night.

And, according to an Associated Press story in Yahoo! News,

To the west, a dangerous layer of heavy snow covered the Northern California mountains as rain and wind from the third storm in as many days hit the West Coast. The storms have been blamed for at least three deaths, and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in California, Oregon and Washington were without power Saturday.

And, of course, that's not the worst of it -- the storms are expected to continue through the weekend, according to this piece from Reuters (also via Yahoo! News):

"(The bad weather) will continue through at least tomorrow, and then there's another round on Monday," said Jane Hollingsworth, a spokeswoman for the U.S. National Weather Service.

If I recall correctly, detractors of claims of global climate change poo-poo the idea that storms (particularly hurricanes) would increase in intensity, not frequency; perhaps this wave of deadly weather could be the second such physical manifestation of that prediction to cause major floodwater-related damage in the contiguous United States. ___________________________ Economic and Business Stormfront Other than $100 per barrel oil prices and the skittish stock performance on Wall Street amid fears of the recent abysmal jobs report, what else could possibly be going wrong? Lots. Far more for a brief newsblurb, in fact. However, news about the One Laptop Per Child ("OLTP") program caught my attention in light of the recent article recently published here by Aaron Barlow. Via The New York Times, from the piece Intel Quits Effort to Get Computers to Children by John Markoff:

SAN FRANCISCO — A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs.

Things may be rocky ahead for the little laptop. That's just one business faced with a tough economic year on the immediate horizon. If fears of a U.S. recession are realized, many more businesses might find themselves in a far tighter spot than they are prepared to deal with. It looks like the time has come for folks to start gathering the rain gear, both physical and economic: stormy weather ahead.