First, a pair of stories out of China (one about a strike, one about a pay raise following some suicides) suggest that China’s standard of living is starting to rise. I’ve mentioned before that this will probably slow its growth a bit, as it will raise costs, making Chinese labor correspondingly less attractive to foreign businesses.

Next, I hope you’ve got your plans for a warmer world ready, as the warm seas look to make this hurricane season a doozy. An added wild card this year will be to see how these storms churn all that oil leaking into the gulf around.

More depressingly, the “global economic meltdown” is causing doctors in eight African countries to turn AIDS patients away. You will see “triage” like this a lot more often in the future. During battle, combat medics have to make choices about where to spend their limited resources and time to best effect. When things get bad, the first to get passed over for care are those who probably won’t make it even with care, the mortally wounded who have not yet died. It’s a crappy choice, but a moral one, because it means that care instead is given to someone with a fighting chance to survive. If you can treat them all, you will, but if you can’t, you pick to save as many as you can. It won’t be long before that happens on a global scale, and you can see it starting with this story in Africa. When health care is rationed, assume that those with incurable, terminal illnesses will get abandoned first. And, of course, Africa will get the shaft, as always.

On the more upbeat side of healthcare, a study shows a correlation between brushing your teeth and reduced heart disease. I bring this up because it points to something that I’m guessing will start happening a lot more often: connections being discovered between things that don’t seem like they are connected, but are. (In this particular story, the connection may be that inflammation anywhere does things to your blood.) One reason this will happen with more frequency is that people are now actually looking. That is, rather than looking for cause and effect for a particular ailment, research is now being based on the notion of “well, we have all these huge data sets from various places, let’s mash them together and see if they tell us anything”. One such project takes the human genome data, information about drug interactions, and data on connections between diseases and certain genes, and builds “neighborhoods” of related information. This might reveal that a drug that treats one disease, for example, might wind up treating something that seems totally unrelated. This kind of thing will totally change medicine in your lifetime.

Before bill: Health care degrading by the day due to unneeded, unwanted interference from corporations lining their own pockets. Hospitals closing because of it. Doctors no longer able to afford to practice. Government racking up debts for reasons mostly unrelated to health care.

After bill: Health care degrading by the day due to unneeded, unwanted interference from corporations lining their own pockets. Hospitals closing because of it. Doctors no longer able to afford to practice. Government racking up debts for reasons slightly more related to health care.

Photos from NBC and the official Vancouver site, who gathered them from various sources (mostly Getty, AP and Reuters).

As with my earlier auction, I am keeping a couple of things: the gilded Limited Edition and the Dreams of the First Age box set.

(Also, I’m selling a surplus microphone as well, if that interests you.)

Let me say this again: you can now buy Tim Tams at Target.

Some readers may not appreciate the importance of this news. Perhaps they have never been in an international airport in Australia and witnessed the stores containing nothing but Tim Tam cookies, and watched as visitors buy cases of them for their return home, or open their large carry-on bag to reveal only an empty void they then fill to the brim with Tim Tams. Perhaps they have seen this, but never have done a Tim Tam slam with tea, coffee or hot chocolate so don’t know what all the fuss is about.

On the other hand, maybe you do know about Tim Tams, but think the American versions are inferior. All I know is that even if that is true, the American versions still induce involuntary biological reactions. I had nearly repressed the memory of Tim Tams to avoid the pain of not being able to get them locally.

Repress no more.