– The North Carolina legislature, never one to shy away from taxing anything that moves, is considering taxing digital downloads like music and movies. This is hardly surprising, as North Carolina has the highest tax rate in the South. Unfortunately, the $12 million that such a tax would allegedly take in is only a squirt of water in the $20 billion bucket that is the state’s current budget deficit.
– Speaking of deficits, the United States Post Service has such an operating deficit that it’s considering dropping a day of mail delivery as a cost-cutting measure. What may surprise you about this is the actual day the USPS is considering: Tuesday! Yeah, I thought it would be Saturday, too.
– Travel site TripAdvisor has come up with a list of the worst hotels in America, based on the ratings users leave on the site. The “winner” is Hotel Carter, a budget hotel located near New York’s Times Square. You should check out the reviews of the place: not only does almost everyone rant about how awful the place is, many have also uploaded pictures of the bed bug bites they recieved whilst staying there.
– In sports news, although the Charlotte Bobcats (the team) are showing signs of life, the Charlotte Bobcats (the business entity) are still struggling. Amusingly, while the Bobs have beaten several good teams lately (causing local media and bloggers to start talking about how the Bobcats are “for real” this year), the team is actually only 1 game ahead of last year: 18-26 this year vs. 17-27 last year. But then again, what do you expect from a team with an absentee owner that doesn’t even know his way around town?
– It seems like there have been a million articles published about the Super Bowl this week, but so far I’ve only found that this one could hold my interest. It’s all about how the Steelers and Cards are a lot alike in business terms. It’s a good read – you should check it out!
– Lastly, Davidson phenom Stephen Curry hit a 75 footer in last night’s game. Check out the video here.
Why Tuesday? My dad used to be a mailman, I’ll provide my 2nd-hand insight. Monday mail is HUGE. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: It’s two days worth of mail. If they were to stop Saturday’s mail, the Monday delivery would be 3 days worth of mail. Even more HUGEROUS. In addition, since mail carriers are not paid any differently for Saturday than they are for the other 5 days of the week (barring complicated overtime scenarios), which day they cut makes no monetary difference to the USPS. I would think Wed or Thu would make more sense, but perhaps because of the normal 2-day delivery time and the lack of pickup on Sunday, Tuesday is the lightest day, thereby not impacting Wed as much as Sunday does Monday.