Category: Business

Corporate news from all over

Public Financing and Private Profit

Seth Anderson0 comment

part the nine-gazillionith

Which End Has the Pot of Gold?

The federal government has committed more than $50 million to build a sophisticated highway traffic monitoring system that has produced unreliable data and cannot freely share live reports on highway bottlenecks with the public, an audit by the Transportation Department’s inspector general has found.

Thousands of tiny traffic-monitoring sensors are being installed along highways in 27 cities nationwide under the program. The monitors collect information on lane occupancy and traffic speed, and the data then is supposed to be transmitted live to electronic message boards and other devices.[quote]

But the decade-old agreement that the department signed with Traffic.com, the contractor hired to install the system, included a provision that granted the contractor exclusive control of the data, says the report, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times in advance of its public release.

That means Traffic.com, a subsidiary of Navteq of Chicago1 can sell the data to commercial providers like The Weather Channel or post it on its own Internet site. But state and local governments that are partners in the project have been told they are not allowed to share the information with the public unless they pay a fee, the report says.

In San Francisco, for example, the state collects and distributes its own traffic data, offering traffic updates for the metropolitan area. But it cannot do the same with the detailed information gathered by Traffic.com through the federally subsidized system.

The Massachusetts Highway Department, the report says, was formally prohibited from using the data to offer highway message board estimates to Boston-area commuters on traffic delays. Local and state governments were also prohibited from posting the traffic information on government Internet sites or traffic information telephone hotlines, unless they paid Traffic.com a fee for the data.

State and local governments are allowed to use the data to study trends in highway use. But for the most part, Traffic.com is the only entity that stands to profit from the equipment installed in the public right of way and paid for with federal money, the report concluded.

[Click to continue reading U.S. System for Tracking Traffic Flow Is Faulted – NYTimes.com]

Time to go home

What lobbyist wrote this bill anyway? Was Bill Cat Killer Frist involved in some way? Really, why is this even a valid use of public tax dollars? Navteq doesn’t need federal money to underwrite its own infrastructure improvements. If it does, Navteq should rent the space on public highways, not be given the data for free, especially if its plan was all along to sell the data for profit.

Footnotes:
  1. apparently, right down the street from me, 425 West Randolph St [↩]

Stilton Cheese and Stilton England

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Strange byproduct of EU food rules: Stilton cheese is not really Stilton cheese, and probably will never be.

John Major is a Twat

STILTON, England — This small hamlet shares its name with a famous curd. But under European Union law, it’s illegal to make Stilton cheese in Stilton.

The bar on producing Stilton cheese here is a curious consequence of EU efforts to protect revered local foods by limiting the geographical area where they can be made.

The EU’s protected list of more than 800 foods and drinks includes famous names like Champagne and Parma as well as lesser-known delicacies such as Moutarde de Bourgogne, Munchener Bier and a Spanish chili pepper called Asado del Bierzo. It even covers Foin de Crau, a hay for animals from the fields of Bouches-du-Rhône in southern France.

But to the chagrin of locals, no cheese made here can be branded as Stilton. That’s because a group of outsiders, called the Stilton Cheesemakers Association, raised a formal stink.

The association, whose members have been making the cheese for more than a hundred years, in 1996 sought to protect the “Stilton” name by applying for a Product Designation of Origin from the EU. In its application, the group wrote that “the cheese became known as Stilton because it was at the Bell Inn in this village that the cheese was first sold to the public.” The 17th-century inn, which still stands in the main street, is the village’s oldest.

[Click to continue reading English Village Tries to Milk a Connection to Its Cheesy Past – WSJ.com]

Gotta love this detail:

One 18th-century notable who dropped by was Daniel Defoe, author of “Robinson Crusoe.” He wrote about the inn, and the cheese he enjoyed there, in a travelogue published in 1724. He remarked that the cheese, unfettered at the time by EU product rules, was known as the English Parmesan, and he offered a mouth-watering description of how it was consumed. The cheese, he wrote, “is brought to Table so full of Mites or Maggots that they use a Spoon to eat them.”

Unions Push to Finish Tallest Tower in Chicago

Seth Anderson0 comment

The 2,000 foot planned condo tower, designed by Calatrava, has been stuck at hole-in-the-ground status for a while now. [Wikipedia has a few photos, including this one]. Wonder if this latest surge will help complete the project?


[artist’s rendition of the Spire, via Wikipedia]

The stalled construction of North America’s tallest building, a 150-story luxury residential tower planned for downtown, may get a boost from unionized construction workers desperate for jobs.

Any effort to save the Chicago Spire faces major hurdles, especially coming after a real-estate glut that flooded Chicago with new condos. Plans call for the 2,000-foot-high Spire to have nearly 1,200 units — more than are expected to be completed for the entire downtown area in 2010. Prices start at $750,000, with the bulk of the condos costing $2 million to $15 million.

Workers broke ground with great fanfare in 2007, but the project stalled last year amid the financial crisis when funding dried up. That left many doubtful that the Santiago Calatrava-designed tower would ever emerge from the circular foundation that sits about a block from Lake Michigan.

Now a group of union pension funds is conducting due diligence on a plan to lend $170 million to Irish developer Shelbourne Development Group, said Tom Villanova, president of the Chicago and Cook County Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 24 unions with some 100,000 members.[Click to continue reading Push to Finish Tallest Tower – WSJ.com]
[Non-WSJ subscribers use this Digg-enabled link]

The Chicago Spire website is a flash-centric p.o.s., but if flash annoys you less than it annoys me, browse the Chicago Spire website here for lots of photos, descriptions and the like.

and the failed Olympics bid continues to have a ripple effect on the Chicago economy:

The Spire got an unlikely break in early October with the demise of Chicago’s hopes to host the 2016 Olympics. Mr. Villanova, who was on Chicago’s Olympic bid committee, said the unions had committed to help fund the Olympic Village to house athletes. “When that went south on us, we started focusing on the Spire project,” he said.

After cranking out an average of 4,500 new condo units a year downtown for the past four years, Chicago developers expect to complete 900 units next year and fewer than 100 in 2012, said Gail Lissner, vice president of Appraisal Research Counselors, a Chicago appraisal and consulting firm. “We don’t see cranes in the sky anymore,” Ms. Lisser said, which could mean the Spire would arrive in a much-changed market in four or five years.

Cancer From the Kitchen

Seth Anderson0 comment

Nicholas Kristof asks a question I’ve asked many times: what if our chemical-friendly lifestyle is directly linked to our increased death rates from cancer, and other illnesses? Especially since, in the US, toxins don’t have to be proven to be safe1 before they are used. I’d rather we used the European model, and mandated extensive testing before chemicals are allowed. The American Chemistry Council has too much power in this country.

Thirsty?

What if breast cancer in the United States has less to do with insurance or mammograms and more to do with contaminants in our water or air — or in certain plastic containers in our kitchens? What if the surge in asthma and childhood leukemia reflect, in part, the poisons we impose upon ourselves?

…

Dr. Philip Landrigan, the chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai, said that the risk that a 50-year-old white woman will develop breast cancer has soared to 12 percent today, from 1 percent in 1975. (Some of that is probably a result of better detection.) Younger people also seem to be developing breast cancer: This year a 10-year-old in California, Hannah, is fighting breast cancer and recording her struggle on a blog.

Likewise, asthma rates have tripled over the last 25 years, Dr. Landrigan said. Childhood leukemia is increasing by 1 percent per year. Obesity has surged. One factor may be lifestyle changes — like less physical exercise and more stress and fast food — but some chemicals may also play a role.

[Click to continue reading Nicholas Kristof – Cancer From the Kitchen? – NYTimes.com]

and what to do? Simple answer is to make a few changes around your house:

I asked these doctors what they do in their own homes to reduce risks. They said that they avoid microwaving food in plastic or putting plastics in the dishwasher, because heat may cause chemicals to leach out. And the symposium handed out a reminder card listing “safer plastics” as those marked (usually at the bottom of a container) 1, 2, 4 or 5.

It suggests that the “plastics to avoid” are those numbered 3, 6 and 7 (unless they are also marked “BPA-free”). Yes, the evidence is uncertain, but my weekend project is to go through containers in our house and toss out 3’s, 6’s and 7’s.

Bill Moyers did a piece on this topic several years ago, including testing his own blood, and discovering tons of toxins, at levels unsafe.2

The “precautionary principle” – adopted by the European Union in 1992 as the basis for regulation of toxic chemicals –- holds that in the face of scientific uncertainty, government should err on the side of protecting public health and safety. In other words, if scientific evidence indicates there is a good chance that a chemical may pose a risk of irreversible harm, regulators should not wait for absolute proof before acting.

One of the major themes running through the internal chemical industry documents investigated in TRADE SECRETS: A MOYERS REPORT is the industry’s opposition to the precautionary principle. It has used its wealth to win favorable treatment from politicians, sponsored surrogates to promote the industry point of view with the media, and now is quietly pushing legislation through state legislatures that will overturn many of the gains citizens believe they have made in their right to information about toxic chemicals.

Footnotes:
  1. the so-called precautionary principle [↩]
  2. I’ve blogged about it, but can’t find it at the moment [↩]

Short Selling and Wall Street

Seth Anderson0 comment

Matt Taibbi points out a strange occurrence that happened in the last year that George Bush was in office

National Bank of Pakistan

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — “like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets,” according to one financial analyst.

But what’s even crazier is that the bet paid.

At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…

Or what? That this was a brazen case of insider manipulation was so obvious that even Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the pillow-soft-touch Senate Banking Committee, couldn’t help but remark on it a few weeks later, when questioning Christopher Cox, the then-chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. “I would hope that you’re looking at this,” Dodd said. “This kind of spike must have triggered some sort of bells and whistles at the SEC. This goes beyond rumors.”

Cox nodded sternly and promised, yes, he would look into it. What actually happened is another matter. Although the SEC issued more than 50 subpoenas to Wall Street firms, it has yet to identify the mysterious trader who somehow seemed to know in advance that one of the five largest investment banks in America was going to completely tank in a matter of days. “I’ve seen the SEC send agents overseas in a simple insider-trading case to investigate profits of maybe $2,000,” says Brent Baker, a former senior counsel for the commission. “But they did nothing to stop this.”

The SEC’s halfhearted oversight didn’t go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers — another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blown crater mode.

[Click to continue reading Wall Street’s Naked Swindle : Rolling Stone]

Strange indeed. Strange also that the case hasn’t gotten as much news coverage as say Tiger Woods hitting a fire hydrant near his house.

When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone

Seth Anderson0 comment

I guess it depends upon what your motivation for blogging was when you began…

many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

[From When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone … – NYTimes.com]

For me, blogging is just a way to help myself remember interesting tidbits of information, possibly helping others do the same. If a magic genie appeared, and granted me a wish, suddenly growing an audience to become a full-time blogger would not be one of my requests1.

Ginseng

note: this entry never even got posted back in June, 2009. I’d hazard a guess that I had another thought on the topic, but got distracted before starting to type it out. Oh well.

Footnotes:
  1. working on a film, perhaps, and being a full-time highly paid art photographer would take precedence [↩]

Playboy Magazine Outsources Business Duties

Seth Anderson0 comment

An iconic Chicago magazine is seemingly in its death throes

Red Light Night

Playboy Enterprises Inc. has agreed to outsource most of the business operations of its namesake magazine, as it seeks to stem losses and restore the cachet that helped embed the brand in the popular culture.

Under the deal, reached last week, Playboy will turn over all the magazine’s operations except the editorial ones to American Media Inc. AMI, of Boca Raton, Fla., publishes more than a dozen titles, including Star and Men’s Fitness. The five-year partnership will help return the magazine to profitability by the end of 2011, said Scott Flanders, chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises.

Playboy and AMI wouldn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal. What it costs Playboy will be based in part on advertising sales, which AMI is taking over. But the partnership will significantly reduce Playboy’s costs, Mr. Flanders said. Playboy has roughly 30 full-time employees working in these areas, and while some will be offered jobs at AMI, most will be let go.

[Click to continue reading Playboy Magazine Outsources Business Duties – WSJ.com]

Doesn’t bode well for those who read Playboy “just for the articles”, editorial operations will be the next to be downsized.

Daley Wants to sell Chicago down the river

Seth Anderson0 comment

Ok, headline writing is not my forte, but if Mayor Daley sells Chicago’s fresh water to private corporations, there just might be rioting in the streets.

Blue Moon

Michael Hawthorne writes:

Mayor Richard Daley says any part of city government is up for grabs if the price is right.

But if he is tempted to dangle Chicago’s vast water system as his next lease deal, he might want to first consult Atlanta, which is still smarting from a botched experiment with privatizing a big-city water supply.

Or the mayor could look someplace closer to home, like Bolingbrook, one of dozens of suburbs and downstate communities furious about steep rate increases imposed by a private water operator.

Daley is searching for more jackpots as his administration draws heavily on the money it reaped from leasing parking meters and the Chicago Skyway to ease the city through the recession. The mayor recently told the Tribune editorial board that he has met with consultants who outlined new privatization deals, but he would not provide details.

“Everything is always on the table,” Daley said, though mayoral aides later insisted that nothing immediate is in the works.

If Chicago tried to sell off its water department to a private company, it would be the largest U.S. city to do so. Such a deal also would run counter to movements in dozens of smaller towns across the suburbs and the rest of the nation, where local officials are having second thoughts about private control of public water.

[Click to continue reading Leasing water system could be a risky move for Chicago — chicagotribune.com]

Water Pumping Station tonemapped

One of Chicago’s great assets is its plentiful fresh water. Why give this away for pennies? And what percentage would be pissed away on corrupt consultants/buddies of Daley?

Chicago’s recent parking meter privatization fiasco is still lingering in everyone’s minds, I’d be extremely surprised if Mayor Daley will be able to push through a water program as easily. The public opinion is already strongly opposed to a water boondoggle, if the internet poll currently hosted at the Chicago Tribune is any indication1.

Working the Fire Hydrant

Footnotes:
  1. currently 97% opposed [↩]

Verizon and Bogus Data Charges

Seth Anderson0 comment

David Pogue on how Verizon screws their own customers with bogus data charges:

Escaped Red Guard

“Here’s how it works. They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch ‘Get it now’ or ‘Mobile Web’—usually a single key like an arrow key. Often we have no idea what key we hit, but up pops one of these screens. The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn’t matter; they’ve told me that ANY data–even one kilobyte–is billed as 1MB. The damage is done.

“Imagine: if my one account has 1 to 3 bogus $1.99 charges per month for data that I don’t download, how much are they making from their 87 million other customers? Not a bad scheme. All by simply writing your billing algorithm to bill a full MB when even a few bits have moved.”

As it turns out, my correspondent is quite correct. My last couple of Verizon phones did indeed have non-reprogrammable, dedicated keys for those ridiculously overpriced “Get it now”-type services that I would never use in a million years.

At about the same time, I got a note from a reader who says he actually works at Verizon, and he’s annoyed enough about the practice to blow the whistle:

“The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data. NOT COOL. I’ve had phones for years, and I sometimes do that mistake to this day, as I’m sure you have. Legal, yes; ethical, NO.

“Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!

[Click to continue reading From the Desk of David Pogue – Verizon – How Much Do You Charge Now? – NYTimes.com]

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were telecom corporations that tried to grow their customer base by being nice to them? Ha, not bloody likely. The US telecom corporations seemingly attempt to be a bigger dick than their competitor, a veritable battle to the bottom. Meh, a pox on all their houses.

Pogue concludes:

The more Verizon gouges, the worse it looks. Every single day, I get e-mail from people saying they’re switching at the first opportunity, or would if they could. In time, the only people who will stay with Verizon are people who have no coverage with any other carrier.

Every company’s dream, right? A base of miserable customers who stick with you only because they have no choice.

Marketers Still Prefer a Garbage Trail

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Despite opting out of nearly every catalog I could think of1, we still receive mounds and mounds of paper trash from various retailers. Garbage cans full every week, most of which gets2 recycled, at least in our household. A shame, because so much energy is wasted attempting to stimulate sales of crap we don’t even need or want.

Rings of fire

Jeffrey Ball writes:

[The paper and catalog industry] is the third-largest energy user within the U.S. manufacturing sector, trailing the energy and chemicals industries, according to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. Making paper accounted for 2.4% of U.S. energy use in 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

Little data exist on how much energy is used specifically to make catalogs. A 1999 report by the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group that sought to highlight catalogs’ impact, said they consumed more energy in one year than one million homes.

[Click to continue reading Marketers Still Prefer a Paper Trail – WSJ.com]

The damn things are not even very effective at stimulating sales:

only 1.3% of those catalogs generated a sale, the survey found. The average U.S. catalog retailer reported mailing about 21 million catalogs in 2007, sending out a new edition every 26 days

and for no good reason, the catalog paper is not even recycled paper, by and large, meaning virgin lumber is sacrificed for 98.7% of the virgin lumber to end up in a trash can, unopened, unread, unwanted.

The paper typically used in catalogs contains about 10% recycled content, according to industry consultant RISI. That is far less than paper in general, which typically contains about 30% recycled content. For newspapers, a bigger paper user than catalogs, the amount of recycled content is roughly 40%.

Bent Towards Golden Shade Light

Pretty sad statistics.

Catalog Choice wants to update the mindset of catalog retailers, but the industry is reluctant to change long-established practices:

Chuck Teller, executive director of Catalog Choice, is working on an idea that could wean catalog retailers away from paper-based marketing without hurting their businesses. His “iCatalog” aims to adapt the accessibility of a paper catalog to the digital realm. Using an online widget that consumers can install on a personal Web page or social-networking site, Catalog Choice continually updates and customizes retailers’ product selections.

Still, so far there are widgets available for only a few dozen titles. The National Directory of Catalogs, meanwhile, lists 12,524 catalogs, the vast majority of which include a paper version. That directory runs to 1,266 pages.

Occasion All Our Own

Footnotes:
  1. using Catalog Choice, as blogged about here [↩]
  2. allegedly [↩]

Felony Franks

Seth Anderson0 comment

Felony Franks has finally opened [Joe M500 has a photo of the sign, here], and the national news media is noticing:

When James Andrews opened a hot-dog stand on this city’s rough West Side, he thought he was doing a community service by hiring ex-convicts. But some in the neighborhood think the name he chose — Felony Franks — is a crime.

An alderman [Robert Fioretti ]has refused Mr. Andrews permission to hang a new sign or build a drive-through lane. A pastor accused the restaurant owner, who is not an ex-convict, of “pimping out” the community. Members of a neighborhood association have vowed to stay away from Felony Franks until the name is changed and the décor — including paintings of cartoon hot dogs in prison stripes — is removed.

…

He spent more than $160,000 to refurbish a shuttered Polish-sausage stand on a busy corner in an area that’s a mix of new condos and stately old homes, subsidized housing and boarded-up storefronts. Mr. Andrews hired a dozen ex-cons to cook and serve frankfurters, sausages, steak sandwiches and french fries sliced from raw potatoes.

Customers enter a cramped space framed by cinder-block walls, with no tables or chairs. Near the entrance hangs a mock list of Miranda rights: “You have the right to remain hungry. Anything you order can and will be used to feed you here at Felony Franks.”

Servers standing behind bulletproof plastic — standard for stores in the neighborhood — ask customers, “Are you ready to plead your case?” Among other dishes, the menu lists the Misdemeanor Wiener and the Chain Gang Chili Dog. Side orders, such as fries, cole slaw and garlic bread, are dubbed “accomplices.” The restaurant’s slogan is, “Food so good it’s criminal.”

[Click to continue reading Slaw and Order: Hot-Dog Stand in Chicago Triggers a Frank Debate – WSJ.com]

In poor taste? Possibly, but seems like a pretty minor crime against humanity. Life is too short to become incensed over such silly details.

I’m with Kevin Jones, a Felony Franks employee:

Kevin Jones, 42, who works at Felony Franks, says he doesn’t feel exploited. “Working here allows me to provide for myself and my family,” says Mr. Jones, who says he used to sell crack and served two years’ probation for possession of a controlled substance. “I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 15 years and there’s gunfire every other day and you never hear anything about that, but all of a sudden there’s all this hoopla about a hot-dog stand?”

Reading Around on September 30th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading September 30th from 10:40 to 12:32:

  • Roger Ebert’s Journal: My Life and Times Archives – Roger Ebert is becoming more and more endearing to me1. A 21st CE man of the people… “One of my favoring pastimes, especially when I should be doing something else, is moseying around the blogs of my readers”

    I’ve never left a comment there, by the way, and probably wouldn’t – I tend to write responses to other’s posts in this space instead.

    MN King Corn.jpg

  • Total Dick-Head: The Church of Latter Day Dicks – “Why then, is the only going science-fiction author cult of personality devoted to — of all people — L Ron Hubbard?! If Scientology were pretty much exactly the same but centered around Philip K Dick, my god — I’d want in, for his secret scriptures! The lectures on cosmogony! The resonant gnostic insights that made PKD’s work so mythic!”
  • http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4509&print=1 – Specifically, the Global Cities Index ranks cities’ metro areas according to 24 metrics across five dimensions. The first is business activity: including the value of its capital markets, the number of Fortune Global 500 firms headquartered there, and the volume of the goods that pass through the city. The second dimension measures human capital, or how well the city acts as a magnet for diverse groups of people and talent. This includes the size of a city’s immigrant population, the number of international schools, and the percentage of residents with university degrees. The third dimension is information exchange—how well news and information is dispersed about and to the rest of the world. The number of international news bureaus, the amount of international news in the leading local papers, and the number of broadband subscribers round out that dimension.
  • skinless weiners.jpg
Footnotes:
  1. if that’s the right word to use [↩]

The Times Plans Local Edition in Chicago, SF

swanksalot0 comment

Interesting

Three Is the Magic Number
[Three Is the Magic Number]

The New York Times is making plans for editions of the paper tailored to the Chicago area and other metropolitan markets, in addition to the San Francisco edition it plans to launch this fall.

“We’re in conversations with potential news providers in Chicago about adding local content to The Times,” said Diane C. McNulty, a spokeswoman for The Times. “Our intent is to roll out these expanded reports in several key markets around the country, with Chicago following San Francisco. The details are still being discussed. The idea is to provide additional quality local content for our readers.”

Plans for the San Francisco edition call for adding to the paper, twice a week, two additional pages of news about northern California. At first, the added content will be produced by The Times’ own writers and editors. But eventually, the plan, as in Chicago, is to turn the production over to a local partner.

[From The Times Plans Local Edition in Chicago, Too, and Other Markets – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com]

Speaking for myself, I’d probably enhance my NYT subscription to include weekdays when this happens1. The Chicago Tribune has shrunk its news hole so drastically that reading the entire front section takes about 9 minutes, on a good day. Some days there are about 150 words of interest to me in the whole paper. Chicago sports is still multiple pages, of course, but who gives a rats ass about the Bears or the Cubs? Not I. There are much better sports writers on the web anyway, especially for the one sport I follow2. The Tribune brain-trust has decided that the only way for profitability is to fire/retire all of the actual reporters, and make the paper easier to browse while sitting on the bus. Shorter stories, more pictures, more entertainment news. Bleh. The New York Times, on the other hand, is still filled with words in complex sentences, and not just pretty3 graphics. I may disagree with the NYT on various topics, but it is the best newspaper now being published.

Will be very interested to see how this shakes out. Will the Tribune counter this incursion by increasing their news collection? Or just continue fading into irrelevance? My subscription to the Tribune lapsed last week, and I struggled with the decision to renew it or not. I decided I would give them one more year to figure out their audience, so we’ll see.

Newspapers should focus on what they do best: collecting & analyzing data about our society and world, and stop tarting themselves up to attract 19 year old boys who can’t read anyway.

Footnotes:
  1. currently I only get the Saturday/Sunday package [↩]
  2. The NBA if you’ve forgotten [↩]
  3. vacant – oh private joke [↩]

Anti-ACORN Bill Ropes In Defense Contractors Charged With Fraud

Seth Anderson3 Comments

For the fun news of the day – in all the GOP haste to smear ACORN based on the actions of a couple of rogue employees, the language of the bill does the one thing I had suggested in jest as an answer to an unrelated topic. Namely, be more harsh on corporations that break laws. Except in the actual bill as written and voted on, any crime charged to a corporation would bar it from feeding at the public trough. Ooopsie!

Early Morning Meditation

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to “any organization” that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net.

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Gumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who’s Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors.

The language was written by the GOP and filed as a “motion to recommit” in the House, where it passed 345-75. It carried the Senate by an 83-7 margin.

POGO is reaching out to its members to identify other companies who have engaged in the type of misconduct that would make them ineligible for federal funds.

Grayson then intends to file that list in the legislative history that goes along with the bill so that judges can reference it when determining whether a company should be denied federal funds.

[Click to continue reading Whoops: Anti-ACORN Bill Ropes In Defense Contractors, Others Charged With Fraud]

Too funny.

Should We Be Concerned?
[Buzzards circling in a park probably built by Brown and Root, LBJ’s favorite defense contractor, now owned by Halliburton and/or KBR]

The Project On Government Oversight gives a little perspective:

Bear in mind that, since 1994, ACORN has reportedly received a total of $53 million in federal funds, or an average of roughly $3.5 million per year. In contrast, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman respectively received over $35 billion and $18 billion in federal contracts last year. (Their totals since 2000 are $266 billion for Lockheed and $125 billion for Northrop.)

Congress should clamp down on contractor fraud and waste, but it needs to keep a sense of proportion. If ACORN broke the law it, should be punished; however, Congress also needs to crack down just as rigorously on the contractors who take an even larger share of taxpayers’ money and have committed far more, or far more egregious, acts of misconduc

[Click to continue reading The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog]

late update: one of the ACORN employees caught on tape, Juan Carlos Vera, actually reported the incident to the police. The police said they would need more information.

Police say he contacted law enforcement two days later. The detective consulted another police official who served on a federal human smuggling task force, who said he needed more details.

The ACORN employee responded several days later and explained that the information he received was not true and he had been duped.

[Click to continue reading Police: ACORN worker in video reported couple – Yahoo! News]

Still was fired, and made the butt of a thousand jokes on Fox News…

Kiva Loan Number 16

Seth Anderson0 comment

Etuwere Akpokona from Nigeria has fully repaid a Kiva loan

Location: Warri, Delta State, Nigeria

Repayment Term: 10 months (more info) Activity: Grocery Store   Repayment Schedule: Monthly Loan

Use: To purchase more groceries to sell

Etuwere is married with five children and she is 35 years old. She has a grocery store where she sells soap, drinks, etc. she has been in this business for a long time. She requests a loan amount of 140,000 NGN to purchase more groceries to sell. She says thanks to all Kiva lenders.

(click to continue reading Kiva – Etuwere Akpokona from Nigeria has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)

Country: Nigeria Avg Annual Income: $1,188 Currency: Nigeria Nairas (NGN) Exchange Rate: 153.7500 NGN = 1 USD