Category: Business

Corporate news from all over

Martin Peers Despises the iPhone

Seth Anderson1 Comment

After reading articles like this, you have to wonder if Martin Peers is short-selling Apple stock, or perhaps a paid consultant for a competing cellphone corporation. Or else is quoting, without attribution, trash-talk from a friend who is a member of one of these cult-like Wall Street industries.

Original Palm Pilot

If the iPhone 4 has become “the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” as the company says, one wouldn’t want to imagine the worst.

Apple’s statement overlooked the fact that its fourth-generation phone has an antenna design that may require consumers either to buy a case or learn to hold the phone in a particular way to ensure reception. Usually the idea is to produce phones that get clearly better, not worse, with each new version.

So far at least, Apple’s cult-like fan base seems willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt. Apple said Monday the product had sold a remarkable 1.7 million units in the first three days.

Investors shouldn’t take too much comfort, however. A lot of those sales likely came from preorders placed before reports of the antenna weakness circulated. What’s more, many of the initial sales also were likely upgrades by existing iPhone owners. These people already have shown themselves willing to put up with reception problems—although in the past they could blame AT&T’s clogged network.

The real question has to be whether concerns about the antenna, combined with carrier congestion issues, will slow uptake of the iPhone among customers not yet converted to Apple worship. Not only are they likely to be less patient with any product failings, they can now choose from an ever-widening array of alternative smartphones.

(click to continue reading HEARD ON THE STREET: The Curious Case of iPhone 4 – WSJ.com.)

Oh yes, this is the worst launch of a new product, evah! Worse than the Edsel, worse than the Palm Pre, worse than Zune, yadda yadda. Even worse than the Apple Lisa!

In Mr. Peers world, isolated media reports about antenna failure if you hold your fingers in an odd spot is the same as an antenna failure in all 1,700,000 iPhone 4s sold.1 Also, if you purchase an iPhone, you apparently join some sort of religious cult, though I don’t know why this is even relevant to the WSJ readership. I’m not sure how purchasing an electronic gadget transforms one into a brain-eating zombie, Mr. Peers forgot to include his exposition explaining how this occurs, or the editors removed it for space reasons. Maybe FaceTime does something to your neurons?

Another point worth noting, Mr. Peers believes there are exactly zero improvements in the iPhone 4; battery life increases, better camera, higher pixel display, these are actually downgrades. Who knew? Silly me for believing that doubling the RAM2 would be an enhancement.

Look, corporations are not people3, and Apple is not your aunt Millie – Apple deserves and should receive criticism sometimes. But this Martin Peers dude isn’t dishing any valid criticisms, he’s just asking to replace John Dvorak as linkbait troll of the day, worthy of cynical laughter, no more.

Footnotes:
  1. disclaimer, I don’t have an iPhone 4, nor have I ever held one myself. I plan on joining the cult once my application essay is approved sometime soon [↩]
  2. from 256MB to 512MB [↩]
  3. despite the morons in the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling to the contrary [↩]

AT&T Discloses serious IPad Security Breach

Seth Anderson0 comment

I have to assume I’m in this group: I have an iPad 3G, and an AT&T data plan for it1

AT&T Inc. acknowledged Wednesday that a security hole in its website had exposed iPad users’ email addresses, a breach that highlights how corporations still have problems protecting private information.

Bored with the iPad

A small group of computer experts that calls itself Goatse Security claimed responsibility for the intrusion, saying they exploited an opening in AT&T’s website to find numbers that identify iPads connected to AT&T’s mobile network.

Those numbers allowed the group to uncover 114,000 email addresses of thousands of users, including prominent officials in companies, politics and the military, Goatse said. Gawker Media LLC, which reported the breach earlier Wednesday, said 114,000 email addresses were revealed. It doesn’t appear any financial or billing information was made public.

AT&T, the sole U.S. provider of wireless service for the Apple Inc. tablets, said it had fixed the security problem by Tuesday. It said it would inform all customers whose email addresses and iPad IDs may have been obtained.

(click to continue reading AT&T Discloses IPad Security Breach – WSJ.com.)

What I don’t know is what Goatse did with the data – are they planning on selling it to spammers? Or use it to compromise our email accounts in some way? My passwords are firewalled – i.e., I have different passwords for different websites, but no password is invulnerable to a determined hacker. Maybe AT&T will take a PR-friendly response, and offer a years worth of identity-theft monitoring for their customers?

Footnotes:
  1. plus my surname begins with the letter A – which was fine in school, not so good always [↩]

BP GOM Spill and Conflict of Interest

Seth Anderson0 comment

BP is more powerful than you’d think – in what other kind of investigation would the corporation be able to influence the outcome like BP is in the GOM1 spill?

Bingham Gardner Gas Box Taylor

Local environmental officials throughout the Gulf Coast are feverishly collecting water, sediment and marine animal tissue samples that will be used in the coming months to help track pollution levels resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, since those readings will be used by the federal government and courts to establish liability claims against BP. But the laboratory that officials have chosen to process virtually all of the samples is part of an oil and gas services company in Texas that counts oil firms, including BP, among its biggest clients.

Some people are questioning the independence of the Texas lab. Taylor Kirschenfeld, an environmental official for Escambia County, Fla., rebuffed instructions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to send water samples to the lab, which is based at TDI-Brooks International in College Station, Tex. He opted instead to get a waiver so he could send his county’s samples to a local laboratory that is licensed to do the same tests.

Mr. Kirschenfeld said he was also troubled by another rule. Local animal rescue workers have volunteered to help treat birds affected by the slick and to collect data that would also be used to help calculate penalties for the spill. But federal officials have told the volunteers that the work must be done by a company hired by BP.

“Everywhere you look, if you look, you start seeing these conflicts of interest in how this disaster is getting handled,” Mr. Kirschenfeld said. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there is just too much overlap between these people.”

(click to continue reading In Spill’s Aftermath, Conflict of Interest Worries – NYTimes.com.)

Standard Oil Co of Ind

especially when you add in the successful controlling of information, both of news, and information:

As BP withholds information on impact of massive oil spill, Coast Guard says that ’embedded’ media have been allowed to cover response effort

As oil from the massive BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico approached the US coastline, a CBS News crew was threatened by the US Coast Guard with arrest if they attempted to film a beach in South Pass, Louisiana.

“When we tried to reach the beach … a boat of BP contractors with two Coast Guard officers on board told us to turn around under threat of arrest,” CBS’s Kelly Cobiella reported on Tuesday.

“This is BP’s rules, it’s not ours,” an officer can be seen calling from the other boat in the CBS video.

(click to continue reading After blocking CBS crew, Coast Guard denies ‘BP rules’ | Raw Story.)

such as

BP, the company in charge of the rig that exploded last month in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn’t publicly divulged the results of tests on the extent of workers’ exposure to evaporating oil or from the burning of crude over the gulf, even though researchers say that data is crucial in determining whether the conditions are safe.

Moreover, the company isn’t monitoring the extent of the spill and only reluctantly released videos of the spill site that could give scientists a clue to the amount of the oil in gulf.

BP’s role as the primary source of information has raised questions about whether the government should intervene to gather such data and to publicize it and whether an adequate cleanup can be accomplished without the details of crude oil spreading across the gulf.

(click to continue reading BP withholds oil spill facts — and government lets it | McClatchy.)

or of scientific measurements of the oil flow volume

 

Despite scientists’ growing skepticism about the accuracy of those measurements, the government has stuck with its 5,000-barrels-a-day estimate. It has not pressed BP for better measurements, and when asked about video footage, has deferred to BP. From ABC News:

Asked if the White House could compel the company to release the video, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday the decision rests with BP, which controls the tapes. When Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) pressed a top BP executive on the question during congressional hearings Tuesday, she was told the videos are under joint government and industry control at the incident command center in New Orleans, where they are teaming up to orchestrate the spill response.

McClatchy reported that when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was asked about air sampling data that BP has shared with the agency, an OSHA official again deferred to BP:

“It is not ours to publish,” said Dean Wingo, OSHA’s assistant regional administrator who oversees Louisiana. “We are working with (BP) and encouraging them to post the data so that it is publicly available.”

In one case, a federal agency leveled pointed criticism at the press for reporting on the spread of oil. After independent scientists discovered giant plumes of dispersed oil forming in the deep waters of the Gulf and heading toward the Gulf loop current, a spokeswoman from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration criticized media reports about plumes, calling them “misleading, premature and, in some cases, inaccurate.”

According to the Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin, NOAA—the agency whose job it is to monitor and keep data on the oceans—“currently does not have a single research vessel taking measurements below.”

(click to continue reading While BP’s Oil Gushes, Company Keeps Information to a Trickle – ProPublica.)

Industrial Temple

Simply amazing. There really are two tiers of law in the US: big corporations, and the rest of us. Big corporations get all sorts of “winks and nods”, as they repeatedly evade responsibility for their actions, merrily paying lobbyists to legally bribe Congress with campaign donations.

Footnotes:
  1. Gulf of Mexico [↩]

Gulf Coast Tourism Biz Asks BP For Handout

Seth Anderson0 comment

Nicely done, tourism boards, begging for cash before the cleanup is even completed, much less paid for. How about BP stops the leak first, cleans up the leak second, pays the fishermen and other Gulf workers who have lost their livelihood third, and about a dozen other agenda items before spending money on advertising.

Meditation with Cyprus Trees

Even as BP struggles to control the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico and government authorities and scientists struggle to determine the extent of the environmental damage, Gulf Coast states have landed on a way for the oil company to start making amends: shoring up their tourism industry with advertising dollars.

Joe Raedle NO VACATION: Florida Gov. Crist said a campaign is ‘critical to our economic survival.’ Authorities in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida have turned to the energy giant to fund ad campaigns, fearing that their summer-tourism business will disappear as major media outlets continue to fill the news cycle with reports and images of the catastrophe. There’s a lot at stake. According to figures cited by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Gulf of Mexico’s shores and beaches stretching from Texas to Florida support a $20 billion tourist industry. “We just want to get the word out that we are open for business,” said Kenneth Montana, president of the Harrison County Tourism Commission, the convention and business district bureau on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

(click to continue reading Gulf Coast’s $20B Tourism Biz Asks BP to Foot Ad Bill – Advertising Age – News.)

But hey, if BP is just handing out money, I’ll take some too. Where do I sign up? 

Debit Fee Cut Is Rare Loss for Banks

Seth Anderson0 comment

Poor poor lil’ banking corporations, might have to cut back on their bonuses. Or more likely, find other ways to screw their customers in the name of profits.

National Bank of Pakistan

Retailers have begged Congress for years, in vain, to limit the fees they must pay to banks when customers swipe credit or debit cards. Bills never reached a vote. Amendments were left on the table. The Senate did not even grant the courtesy of a committee hearing.

That long record of futility ended in a landslide Thursday night. Sixty-four senators, including 17 Republicans, agreed to impose price controls on debit transactions over the furious objections of the beleaguered banking industry.

The amendment to the Senate’s sweeping financial legislation could save billions of dollars for family restaurants and dry cleaners, Wal-Mart and Amazon.com, and every other business whose customers increasingly pay with debit cards. It does not address credit card fees directly.

Consumers also could save money, particularly at businesses like grocery stores that compete on price. But some experts warned that lower profit margins could lead banks to curtail bank card reward programs.

The Senate approved a series of amendments unfavorable to the banking industry over the last week, but this one was widely regarded as the most surprising. Meddling in dealings between businesses generally is anathema to Republicans and a relatively low priority for Democrats.

And this was not an easy vote. Lobbyists for the wounded but formidable banking industry made clear to some senators that this decision would affect future campaign donations, according to people who participated in those conversations.

But retailers mounted an unusually effective yearlong campaign to frame the issue as a chance for Congress to help small business. A leading trade group for chain retailers worked with small-business groups to make sure that every time a senator held a town hall meeting back home, a local business owner showed up to ask about card fees.

The industry also rode the support of Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Democratic whip, who wrote the amendment and pushed the sponsor of the banking overhaul bill, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, to allow a vote on the Senate floor.

(click to continue reading Debit Fee Cut Is Rare Loss for Largest U.S. Banks – NYTimes.com.)

 Did you catch this bit of anonymous sourcing?

But some experts warned that lower profit margins could lead banks to curtail bank card reward programs

Oh, noes! Profit margins might be reduced by 2%! Won’t somebody think of the children (of bankers)?

Farewell, Facebook

Seth Anderson5 Comments

Here’s why I’m selectively changing a lot of my information in Facebook – faking my demographic details and so forth – Facebook wants so desperately to make a dollar off of my data, they have become skeevy, and untrustworthy. I’m old enough that there isn’t too much that is embarrassing in my Facebook profile, but I don’t every corporation in America to have access to my information without my permission1

Nothing remains from the past

The chorus of pro-privacy, anti-Facebook bloggers is getting louder. Facebook wants to keep track of everything you “like” — all over the Web and even in the real world. McDonald’s has signed on as Facebook’s first geolocation partner. Whatever that means. The Observer has a deeper relationship with my Facebook page than my best friend. Today I’m deactivating my account. Here’s why.

…

Then I stumbled upon a list of the various third-party groups that have access to my account. In all, there were 32, including the makers of “Which Jane Austen heroine are you?” (I’m Fanny Price), The Awl, a snarky, high-brow commentary site, and Business Insider. The latter two I didn’t recall approving. The media sites, I discovered, were installed automatically when I browsed their websites while logged in to Facebook. Jane Austen, I’m afraid, I must take responsibility for. Reports are unclear as to what information applications can pull from your account. Some warn that developers have broad access and do not distinguish between what you mark as public and private, and some quizzes even get access to friends’ information.

Considering Facebook’s track record of shifting privacy settings, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation wraps up here, and you can get a visual sense of here, it seems pretty much guaranteed that user control over personal information will only get weaker. At the same time, Facebook is collecting new data based on user browsing habits across the Web. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently unveiled Facebook’s “Connect,” a tool integrated with sites across the Web so users can “like” everything from articles on major news sites such as The Washington Post, to items for sale on retailer sites. Those connections are public, and if you don’t like it, Facebook has this advice to offer: “If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.”

At the same conference, Zuckerberg also announced that the company will let third parties store information longer (previously, outside developers could store user information for no longer than 24 hours). So not only do we have to worry about Facebook’s policy; we also have to worry about the huge ecosystem of parties that hold Facebook data.

(click to continue reading Farewell, Facebook | The American Prospect.)

One could just delete one’s Facebook account, or take the guerrilla warfare route, and make lots of false data points. The latter option sounds more fun, actually.

Senator Al Franken of all people, with the help of The Consumerist, has published some detailed instructions on how to modify your Facebook privacy settings, which at the very least you should glance at.

Footnotes:
  1. such as, if I purchase a new Nikon, I’ve given Nikon permission to update their records of me, and so on. McDonald’s on the other hand, shouldn’t have any information about me as I haven’t stepped into one of their restaurants in decades [↩]

BP Has a History of Screwing Up

Seth Anderson0 comment

Roiling

British Petroleum1 is just not having a good week. Don’t worry about them though, they won’t have any real penalties, based on previous problems BP has skated away from.

Despite those repeated promises to reform, BP continues to lag other oil companies when it comes to safety, according to federal officials and industry analysts. Many problems still afflict its operations in Texas and Alaska, they say. Regulators are investigating a whistle-blower’s allegations of safety violations at the Atlantis, one of BP’s newest offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

Now BP is in the spotlight because of the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, which killed 11 people and continues to spew oil into the ocean. It is too early to say what caused the explosion. Other companies were also involved, including Transocean, which owned and operated the drilling rig, and Halliburton, which had worked on the well a day before the explosion.

(click to continue reading BP Has a History of Blasts and Oil Spills – NYTimes.com.)

Because BP just doesn’t give a rats-ass, and nobody is making them care either

But BP, the nation’s biggest oil and gas producer, has a worse health, environment and safety record than many other major oil companies, according to Yulia Reuter, the head of the energy research team at RiskMetrics, a consulting group that assigns scores to companies based on their performance in various categories, including safety.

BP Amoco is not greener than me

And…

government officials say that they are troubled by the continuation of hazardous practices at BP’s refineries and Alaskan oil operations despite warnings from regulators.

For example, last year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found more than 700 violations at the Texas City refinery — many concerning faulty valves, which are critical for safety given the high temperatures and pressures. The agency fined BP a record $87.4 million, which was more than four times the previous record fine, also to BP, for the 2005 explosion.

Another refinery, in Toledo, Ohio, was fined $3 million two months ago for “willful” safety violations, including the use of valves similar to those that contributed to the Texas City blast.

“BP has systemic safety and health problems,” said Jordan Barab, the assistant secretary of labor for OSHA. “They need to take their intentions and apply them much more effectively on the ground, where the hazards actually lie.”

Gas At Last

and…

Problems also remain in Alaska. In January, leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent BP a letter highlighting “serious safety and production incidents” over the last two years in Prudhoe Bay, the nation’s largest oil field.

So you make up your own mind: is BP cavalier about drilling safety? Or do they just consistently have “bad” luck, year after year after year…

Footnotes:
  1. as BP plc used to be known as [↩]

Threadless moving to West Madison

Seth Anderson0 comment

Cool, I’ll pop in there more often, perhaps.

Threadless on Broadway

T-shirt firm Threadless moving to West Loop | Crain’s Chicago Business: “Internet T-shirt retailer Threadless.com plans to move its headquarters from Ravenswood to a former FedEx Corp. warehouse in the West Loop. Threadless, which lets online visitors choose the designs of the T-shirts it sells, hopes to move into the 45,000-square-foot building at 1260 W. Madison St. in July, says Charles Stephens, the company’s vice-president of operations. The 10-year-old firm, which shipped two million T-shirts last year, is quickly outgrowing its operations in Ravenswood on the North Side, where it has two warehouses that would function more efficiently if they were in the same building, Mr. Stephens says. ‘We’ve got some pretty aggressive growth targets, and in order to scale up and meet that growth, we’ve got to eliminate that bottleneck,’ he says. Threadless signed a seven-year lease for the West Loop building with a five-year extension option, says Larry Bell, chief financial officer at JRG Capital Partners LLC, the Chicago-based firm that acquired the FedEx property last year. Mr. Bell hopes the Chicago City Council this month will approve a zoning change that would allow Threadless to use the building. “

(Via T-shirt firm Threadless moving to West Loop | Crain’s Chicago Business.)

This location1 was originally just going to be a mixed use condo building, Threadless is much better from my perspective.

Via GB

Had Enough for a Long Time
This photo taken on a friend’s balcony, right next door on West Madison

Footnotes:
  1. which I went to frequently when it was an active FedEx drop-off point, closing at 9PM [↩]

Google Moves on e-Books

Seth Anderson0 comment

Interesting. Hope Google uses ePub format, and not some goofy proprietary format that can’t be used on other platforms. Sounds like they are, but the article doesn’t give details, so who knows?

Te' Jay's Adult Books

Google Moves on e-Books: “Google plans to begin selling digital books in late June or July, aiming to let users to access books from a broad range of sites using multiple devices.”

Google says its new service—called Google Editions—will allow users to buy digital copies of books they discover through its book-search service. It will also allow book retailers—even independent shops—to sell Google Editions on their own sites, taking the bulk of the revenue. Google has yet to release details about pricing and which publishers are expected to participate.

(Via WSJ.com: What’s News Technology.)

Ten Things You Don’t Know About the Goldman Sachs Case

Seth Anderson0 comment

Barry Ritholtz is very confident that Goldman Sachs is either going to lose or settle and wants to educate interested non-lawyer observers1 about certain assumptions being promulgated that are not accurate.

Wheels grind exceedingly fine

8. The case looks thin: What we see in the complaint is the bare minimum the prosecutor has to reveal to make their case. What you don’t see are all the emails, depositions, interrogations, phone taps, etc. that the prosecutors know about and GS does not. During the litigation discovery process, this material slowly gets turned over (some is held back if there are other pending investigations into GS).

Going back to who the prosecutor in this case is: His legal reputation is he is very thorough, very precise, meticulous litigator. If he decided to recommend bringing a case against the biggest baddest investment house on Wall Street bank, I assure you he has a major arsenal of additional evidence you don’t know about. Yet.

Typically, at a certain point the lawyers will tell their client that the evidence is overwhelming and advise settling. That is around 6-12 months after the suit has begun.

9. This case is Political: I keep hearing that phrase, due to the SEC party vote. It is incorrect. What that means is the case is not political, it means it has been politicized as a defense tactic. There is a huge difference between the two.

[Click to continue reading 10 Things You Don’t Know (or were misinformed) About the GS Case | The Big Picture]

Hope Goldman loses their shirt, and pants on this and subsequent cases.

Footnotes:
  1. or whatever you would call folks like me, and you [↩]

Republicans Mindlessly Support Wall Street Criminals

Seth Anderson1 Comment

To the Republicans on the SEC, and elsewhere, corporate crime is a category that does not exist. Even crooks like Goldman Sachs predictably are supported by Republicans. Shameful.

Urban archeology SwankoPrint version

The Securities and Exchange Commission decided to sue Goldman Sachs Group Inc. over the objections of two Republican commissioners, suggesting an unusual split at the agency that could politicize one of its most prominent cases in years.

People familiar with the matter said the five-member commission held a lengthy meeting Wednesday to debate the civil-fraud charges against Goldman, and ultimately voted 3-2 in favor of pushing forward. The charges were filed Friday.

Normally the agency prefers to have unanimous support when bringing enforcement actions against the firms it regulates. Word of the SEC split could exacerbate partisan tensions in Washington over the Obama administration’s proposed financial-regulatory overhaul.

[Click to continue reading SEC Was Split Over Goldman Case – WSJ.com]

Fraud is partisan, apparently

On Tuesday, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro is likely to get a grilling over the internal dissent when she appears before the House Financial Services Committee for scheduled testimony.

People familiar with the vote said Ms. Schapiro—a registered independent—joined two Democrats on the commission, Elisse Walter and Luis Aguilar, in supporting the fraud case against Goldman. The two Republican commissioners, Kathleen Casey and Troy Paredes, were opposed, they said.

Again, this sounds like whining to me, there are five members of the SEC for a reason, just like there are 12 jurors in a criminal case, and 9 Supreme Court justices, sometimes there are differences of opinion on important matters. Expecting that every decision is unanimous translates into Doing Nothing, and while that is the Republican mantra, the rest of us would like Wall Street to be reined in.

Evanston Wind Farms

Seth Anderson0 comment

Are wind turbines ugly? I think they are kind of cool looking, actually, sleek, modern, and of course they are a tangible symbol of alternative energy. I’d like to see a few spinning out in Lake Michigan.

No Lifeguard On Duty

EVANSTON, Ill.—Residents here are used to seeing nothing but water, sky and sailboats as they survey the horizon on Lake Michigan.

Now, many are wondering whether wind turbines would add to or detract from that view, as the city explores the possibility of harvesting the wind that barrels down Lake Michigan at an average speed of 18 miles an hour.

“We’re determined to find a way to reduce our carbon footprint,” said Elizabeth Tisdahl, mayor of Evanston, where the city council last week approved a plan to seek information from developers interested in building a wind farm about seven miles offshore.

The proposed wind farm, which is expected to be privately financed, is projected to cost $400 million, take about seven years to complete and include 40 large wind turbines capable of producing power for 40,000 homes. It is unclear how this would affect utility rates in the college town, which has about 30,000 homes.

[Click to continue reading Wind Farms Catch a Gust on Great Lakes – WSJ.com]

Postpone Your Obedience

All of those factors come into play with the biggest proposed development in the lakes so far, a $4 billion wind farm off Western Michigan proposed by Scandia Wind Offshore, a Norwegian-American concern. The project would supply enough power for 300,000 homes and have easy access to the Chicago and Detroit markets.

“This is the best spot in the U.S. for industrial wind power, without a doubt,” said Harald Dirdal, development director of Havgul Clean Energy, a Norwegian firm that is majority owner of Scandia Wind.

Scandia’s plans, unveiled late last year, have drawn heavy opposition from the tiny resort and retirement community of Pentwater, Mich., where residents fear the project four miles offshore would hurt property values while providing little benefit locally. Jobs would largely flow elsewhere, and the electricity would be fed into the regional grid.

“We won’t benefit from jobs, and we won’t benefit from reduced electricity [rates]. And we certainly won’t benefit from the windmills being in front of our sunset,” said Juanita Pierman, village president.

Scandia has since split the planned development in two, moving half slightly north of Pentwater and the other half offshore of Muskegon, where Scandia hopes a windmill manufacturer might locate a factory to take advantage of the large-scale development.

Shanghaid

Any new project will have some Not In My Back Yard response, such as:

In Evanston, a community group called Citizens for a Greener Evanston spent about two years studying alternative energy sources, said Nate Kipnis, an architect who co-chaired the group’s renewable-energy task force. The group recommended the wind farm to the city council because it best captured the city’s most unique resource and could even become a draw for visitors, he said.

Others are skeptical. City Councilwoman Judy Fiske supported the vote to gather more information, but first read from three pages of questions she wants answered.

A picture provided by the backers meant to show how small the windmills would look from shore worried her. “It does give you a very strong sense that there is some development on the lake,” she said. “Suddenly you’ve lost that quality of serenity that comes from living on a large body of water.”

Goldman Whines It Was Blindsided by The Law

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Poor lil’ Goldman Sachs didn’t get a memo from the S.E.C. before the case went public. Of course, when the police arrest a serial killer they give at least 48 hours to the suspect so that the evidence can all be boxed up neatly. Right? I don’t care if this is common practice for Wall Street criminals, it shouldn’t be. I hope the Security and Exchange Commission has changed their modus operandus, and no longer is complicit with covering up financial malfeasance.

Funny also how the Republicans are all for law and order, when it applies to non-white collar crimes, but when their donor class is threatened, the tune changes.

crime plus 8 mailbox

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. officials said they knew as far back as August 2008 that regulators were examining controversial mortgage securities created by the firm but were stunned by the bombshell civil fraud suit lodged against it Friday, with most having learned about it from news reports.

Firms typically get a chance to settle such suits, but not in this case, Goldman said. The Wall Street giant said it was alerted to the probe in the summer of 2008 and was warned that it might face a suit in July 2009. It says it then responded in detail to the Securities Exchange Commission’s inquiry in September, but heard nothing back from the government until Friday’s unveiling of the civil suit. The SEC usually notifies firms ahead of a lawsuit as a courtesy to give them a chance for a last-ditch settlement or to prepare for the public fallout.

…

Lawsuits by the SEC are subject to a vote by the agency’s five commissioners, and the tally on the Goldman case will be closely watched in Washington, as the current commission is split along party lines—with two Republicans and two Democrats, plus one independent who was appointed by President Obama.

The way the SEC launched the suit “certainly doesn’t follow the spirit” or practice of the agency, said Paul Atkins, who served as a Republican SEC commissioner.

[Click to continue reading Goldman Contends It Was Blindsided by Lawsuit – WSJ.com]

Well, Paul Atkins is part of the problem then, isn’t he? If SEC commissioners aren’t interested in regulating Wall Street, they should go ahead and resign to get a job in a Wall Street bank.

Companies Slowly Join Cloud-Computing

Seth Anderson0 comment

Cloud Computing: buzz word of 2009, and apparently going to be the buzz word of 2010 too.

Sunset number 8704

This year, Netflix made what looked like a peculiar choice: the DVD-by-mail company decided that over the next two years, it would move most of its Web technology — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — over to the computer servers of one of its chief rivals, Amazon.com.

Amazon, like Netflix, wants to deliver movies to people’s homes over the Internet. But the online retailer, based in Seattle, has lately gained traction with a considerably more ambitious effort: the business of renting other companies the remote use of its technology infrastructure so they can run their computer operations. In the parlance of technophiles, they would operate “in the cloud.”

Ah, the cloud — these days, Silicon Valley can’t seem to get its head out of it. The idea, though typically expressed in ways larded with jargon, is actually rather simple.

Cloud providers, large ones like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and AT&T, and smaller ones like Rackspace and Terremark, aim to convince other companies to give up building and managing their own data centers and to use their computer capacity instead.

[Click to continue reading Companies Slowly Join Cloud-Computing – NYTimes.com]

Clouds and meat

I actually do see the usefulness of cautiously outsourcing the creation and maintenance of data centers, as long as certain privacy oversights are part of the process.

Almost every big company is cautiously testing the waters these days. 3M, the St. Paul, Minn., conglomerate, is using Microsoft’s new Azure cloud service to allow advertisers and marketers to tap into a service that mathematically analyzes promotional images and evaluates how visually effective they are likely to be. “It took a lot of the risk out of whether to commercialize it or not,” said Jim Graham, a technical manager at 3M.

But most big organizations say they are wary of placing more critical software and business operations on another company’s computers.

…

Government agencies are looking at it too. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab currently runs various experiments on the computers of Amazon, Microsoft and Google — to avoid committing to a single company, said Tomas Soderstrom, the I.T. chief technology officer there. Among other experiments, the agency is using Amazon’s servers to process vast amounts of telemetry data coming from the rovers on Mars.

But NASA executives also tell of the seven months it took to reach its licensing agreement with Amazon. NASA wanted, among other things, to be able to inspect the hardware it was using; Amazon declined.

Looters in Loafers

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Goldman Sachs, aka Gold Sacks, aka corporate criminals, are not having a good PR month. They are an easy target – so greedy, so arrogant that even their allies are keeping mum. Whether any real penalties will be levied against Goldman Sachs remains to be seen.

Financial Blues Brothers

Paul Krugman writes, in part:

Most discussion of the role of fraud in the crisis has focused on two forms of deception: predatory lending and misrepresentation of risks. Clearly, some borrowers were lured into taking out complex, expensive loans they didn’t understand — a process facilitated by Bush-era federal regulators, who both failed to curb abusive lending and prevented states from taking action on their own. And for the most part, subprime lenders didn’t hold on to the loans they made. Instead, they sold off the loans to investors, in some cases surely knowing that the potential for future losses was greater than the people buying those loans (or securities backed by the loans) realized.

What we’re now seeing are accusations of a third form of fraud.

We’ve known for some time that Goldman Sachs and other firms marketed mortgage-backed securities even as they sought to make profits by betting that such securities would plunge in value. This practice, however, while arguably reprehensible, wasn’t illegal. But now the S.E.C. is charging that Goldman created and marketed securities that were deliberately designed to fail, so that an important client could make money off that failure. That’s what I would call looting.

And Goldman isn’t the only financial firm accused of doing this. According to the Pulitzer-winning investigative journalism Web site ProPublica, several banks helped market designed-to-fail investments on behalf of the hedge fund Magnetar, which was betting on that failure.

So what role did fraud play in the financial crisis? Neither predatory lending nor the selling of mortgages on false pretenses caused the crisis. But they surely made it worse, both by helping to inflate the housing bubble and by creating a pool of assets guaranteed to turn into toxic waste once the bubble burst.

[Click to continue reading Op-Ed Columnist – Looters in Loafers – NYTimes.com]

Continuing to Talk

and the part that interests me, as a non-Wall Street banker, will the proposed financial reforms stop future meltdowns?

The obvious question is whether financial reform of the kind now being contemplated would have prevented some or all of the fraud that now seems to have flourished over the past decade. And the answer is yes.

For one thing, an independent consumer protection bureau could have helped limit predatory lending. Another provision in the proposed Senate bill, requiring that lenders retain 5 percent of the value of loans they make, would have limited the practice of making bad loans and quickly selling them off to unwary investors.

It’s less clear whether proposals for derivatives reform — which mainly involve requiring that financial instruments like credit default swaps be traded openly and transparently, like ordinary stocks and bonds — would have prevented the alleged abuses by Goldman (although they probably would have prevented the insurer A.I.G. from running wild and requiring a federal bailout).

Read the rest