McClatchy has a thoughtful opinion piece, Wal-Mart and the high cost of ‘cheap’, about the efforts by WalMart to build a store near the Wilderness Civil War battlefield.

As always, Wal-Mart stresses new jobs and the economic benefits to the area of the store, but that isn’t the way it works, and I know from local experience.

First off, WalMart has a corporate contractor building their stores, and the actual construction doesn’t generate local jobs. The only local boost from construction is from the purchases of the crew that are brought in to build it.

A newly opened WalMart does indeed feature very low prices, but those go away after all of the local competition withers and fails. When you allow a WalMart you are transferring jobs, not creating them. Almost everything in a WalMart is trucked in, including the meat and baked goods. Most local supermarkets have butchers and bakeries these days. Despite that you can find things that are cheaper at a Publix, than a WalMart, and you can get really fresh baked goods, instead of defrosted goods.

There is a difference between inexpensive and cheap – WalMart sells cheap.

If you are a US resident, as you recover from whatever you got up to on Halloween, don’t forget that the clocks are “falling back” at 2AM on November 1^st. You get an extra hour of sleep.

[Offer not applicable in Hawaii or Arizona, because they refuse to play, and don’t bring up Indiana, because they are on their own and need to decide what they are going to do. YMMV]

Also, it is time to put a new battery in your smoke detector.

If you can’t figure out how to reset the clock in your car, disconnect and reconnect the battery ground at noon, if am and pm make a difference to you, you’ll have to do it at midnight.

Hurricane Rick has been under attack by wind shear and has dropped down to a Category 2 storm, with wind shear and cooler water acting to probably reduce it to tropical storm strength when it grazes Baja Sur.

Typhoon Lupit has gone down to a Category 3 storm, but the conditions are favorable for it to be at least a Category 2 storm when it hits the northern end of Luzon island in the Philippines.

Baja Sur and Luzon are the wrong places to be this year as both are braced for their third storm of the season.

While the Atlantic basin benefits from the El Niño condition, the warm waters in the Pacific make times “interesting” in the Pacific.

The US has seen Tropical Storm Claudette, which popped up in the Gulf off the Southwest Coast of Florida and came ashore at the Coast Guard station on the eastern end of Okaloosa Island. There is the possibility of something building in the Western Caribbean off Costa Rica, but that’s about it, and the cool spell that hit is reducing the heat potential of the northern Gulf.