Eideard

Here’s where Congress’ principled motivation came from

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Thursday to ban insider trading by members of Congress and to impose new ethics requirements on lawmakers and federal agency officials. Doesn’t that look meaningful? Look further for the reality.

The 417-to-2 vote came less than three weeks after President Obama demanded such action in his State of the Union address. The Senate approved a similar bill by a vote of 96 to 3 on Feb. 2, but the lopsided votes concealed deep disagreements over the details of the legislation.

The swift response and the debate in both chambers showed lawmakers defensive and anxious about the low esteem in which Congress is held. The public approval rating of Congress has sunk below 15 percent…

Democrats said that House Republican leaders had weakened the Senate-passed bill by stripping out a provision that would, for the first time, regulate firms that collect “political intelligence” for hedge funds, mutual funds and other investors. Under the Senate bill, such firms would have to register and report their activities, as lobbyists do.

In place of this requirement, the House version of the bill calls for a study…blah, blah, blah.

Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York, who has been pushing ethics legislation since 2006, said that House Republican leaders apparently “could not stomach pressure from the political intelligence community, which is unregulated and unseen and operates in the dark…”

In the Senate, the bill — the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or Stock Act — was written by members of both parties. In the House, it was revised by Republican leaders, without consulting Democrats, and it was considered on the House floor in a way that precluded amendments…

Please, don’t expect too much bona fide work on ethics from a Congress dedicated to achieving little or nothing. Given the lack of concern for the life and economics of ordinary citizens by our elected elite – I wouldn’t expect much more than the odd sound bite’s worth of useful lawmaking to spill from the Congressional maw.

Even this halfway useful bill resulted from media pressure. Congress members who have been introducing such legislation for years have gotten nowhere. Only election year publicity on a couple of TV shows lit a fire under political butts.

Black Friday sales increased 6.6 percent to the largest amount ever as many U.S. consumers unleashed pent-up demand and bought for themselves.

Shoppers spent $11.4 billion yesterday, ShopperTrak said in a statement today. Foot traffic rose 5.1 percent, according to the Chicago-based research firm…

The brisk turnout came as retailers from Gap to Wal-Mart Stores to Toys “R” Us opened their doors earlier than ever.

Many shoppers were rookies who had never before participated in the busiest shopping day of the year, dubbed Black Friday because many retailers are said to become profitable then. As many as 152 million people were expected to shop at stores and websites on Black Friday, up 10 percent from last year, according to the National Retail Federation…

Black Friday arrived with consumer sentiment at levels previously reached during recessions, as a record share of households said this is a bad time to spend, according to the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index. The measure has reached minus 50 or less in nine of the past 10 weeks, an unprecedented performance in its 26-year history.

Even with low confidence, shoppers paid more for goods and unleashed some pent-up demand, said Craig Johnson, president of consulting firm Customer Growth Partners, which is based in New Canaan, Connecticut…

Chains such as Macy’s, Target Corp. and Kohl’s Corp., which all opened at midnight, may have taken revenue from competitors like J.C. Penney that didn’t open until 4 a.m., according Ken Perkins, president of Swampscott, Massachusetts-based Retail Metrics…

The move to turn Black Friday into more than just one day also grew on the Web as online retailers, such as Amazon.com Inc., began advertising “Black Friday” deals well before yesterday. Online sales gained 39 percent on Thanksgiving and 24 percent on Black Friday, according to IBM’s Coremetrics.

Black Friday may illustrate a gap between what consumers tell pollsters and how they actually behave — a trend that has prevailed for much of this year, said Retail Metrics’ Perkins…“A solid Black Friday suggests the rest of the season should be pretty good,” Perkins said. “Those who have jobs have been willing to spend.”

Americans who have jobs have returned to saving in the course of the year. After a couple decades of relying on plastic to close the gap between the quest-for-scarce-goods and declining real income we reached negative savings numbers at the beginning of the recession. Over the course of this year, that number returned to halfway normal – around 5%.

My hopes – not ideological guesswork – is that folks return to increasing those savings amounts once the holiday season is past. We have a ways to go to return to a more traditional 10%. Meanwhile, China’s new middle class sticks to a savings rate around 40%. They even show up to buy a new car with cash instead of credit! You can guess what Wall Street whizbangs think of that?

Despite efforts to limit their availability, public elementary school students in the United States have more outlets to buy unhealthy beverages at school…

Over a three-year period ending in 2009, more students could buy sweetened beverages like sodas, higher-fat milk and sports beverages from vending machines and school stores… Such drinks are a major source of calories, and removing them from schools could help curb the nation’s obesity epidemic.

“Elementary school students are still surrounded by a variety of unhealthy beverages while at school,” said Lindsey Turner of the University of Illinois at Chicago…

Although U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines say schools should not provide sweetened beverages in government supported cafeteria meals, students can buy these items in vending machines or school stores — known as competitive venues because they compete with the government meals…

During the three years of the study, they said the number of vending machines remained stable, but access to stores or snack bars or a la carte cafeteria lines rose significantly.

By 2009, 61 percent of students could buy high-calorie drinks from vending machines or school stores compared with 49 percent just two years prior…

Too much sugar not only makes people fatter, but is also a key culprit in diabetes, heart disease and stroke, according to the American Heart Association…

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit health advocacy group based in Washington, urged Congress to pass the U.S. lawmakers to pass the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act when it returns for the lame duck session.

Sounds way too principled for Congress – lame duck or otherwise.

Faced with a choice between aiding kids to have a healthier diet vs. optimizing profits for crap-drink corporations, which side do you think our politicians will choose, eh?

Intel is aiming for a slice of the smartphone market with a new chip with built-in graphics. The move would put it in direct competition with ARM, who design the majority of smartphone chips…

Intel’s new chip – code named Moorestown – would result in smart phone visuals and remove the need for a separate graphics chip in computers…

Although Intel currently sell single units that can cope with both graphics and processing, the sets comprise two separate chips: a CPU and the GPU.

While power usage is not a major issue for desktop PCs, the problem becomes more significant for laptops and is a key issue for smartphones, where any extra power demand will shorten battery life…

“The vast majority of smartphones use ARM chips…”They only design, rather than make the chips and then license them out. For example, the Apple A4 chip used in its iPad and iPhone 4 is ARM’s design,” added Alex Watson from Custom PC magazine…

ARM is not resting on its laurels. The firm has just launched a new chip called the Cortex-A15 MPCore.

This new chip will run with a clock speed of 2.5 GHz, which could result in far faster processing speeds, with a minimal impact on power usage.

Its thought that it could mean iPads and iPhones could be five times faster, with some analysts saying ARM’s new chip is “as significant to the smartphone market as the Pentium was to the desktop market”…

“There are almost a million smartphones being sold every day and Intel are not in a single one. If the firm is to remain viable, it needs a slice of that market.”

I’m still surprised the competition appears limited to two design/manufacture teams.

So far.

Google’s Nexus One smartphone will start being sold in brick-and-mortar stores, said the company Friday in acknowledging that its experiment with Web-only sales has been a failure.

“As with every innovation, some parts worked better than others,” Andy Rubin, Google’s vice president of engineering, said on the company’sofficial blog. “While the global adoption of [Google's] Android platform has exceeded our expectations, the Web store has not.”

Unveiled in January to much fanfare, the Nexus One offered the choice of “locked” service with T-Mobile or, for a higher price, the freedom to let the user pick their mobile provider. More recently, Verizon was added as a mobile provider for the phone.

The phone got largely positive reviews from tech bloggers, some of whom compared it favorably with Apple’s iPhone. Tech blog Gizmodo called it “the best Android phone” and CNET said it “greatly enhances the Google Android family”.

But sales have been sluggish.

In roughly the same time it took the iPhone and the Droid, which also runs Google’s Android operating system, to sell 1 million phones, Google sold just 135,000 Nexus Ones.

Frankly, I’m surprised. But, then, I’m the sort of geek who finds adequate information, test and eval sites on the Web – make up my mind and purchase online.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Chinese carmaker Zhejiang Geely Holding Group has purchased Volvo cars from U.S. auto giant Ford, the Swedish carmaker announced Sunday.

The $1.8 billion deal represents the biggest ever purchase by a Chinese car manufacturer, but it is considerably less than the $6.4 billion Ford paid for Volvo in 1999.

“We are pleased to have reached this agreement with Ford, enabling us to safeguard and strengthen Volvo’s renowned brand heritage,” said Geely chairman Li Shufu.

“Volvo will be a separate company with its own management team based in Gothenburg, Sweden.”

He added Geely will help Volvo to realize its potential in the Chinese market.

“The agreement provides a solid foundation for Volvo to continue to build its business under Geely’s ownership,” said Alan Mulally, Ford’s president and CEO, in a statement on the company’s Web site. “The sale of Volvo will allow us to further sharpen our focus on building the Ford brand around the world and continue to deliver on our One Ford plan serving our customers with the very best cars and trucks in the world.”

Nice PR lingo which – in fact – I expect to continue along in reality. Geely is in the learning stages of becoming an extra-national brand. Ford is in the learning stages of how to be a global brand in the 21st Century.

British songwriters, composers and music publishers earned $944.8 million in royalties in 2009, up 2.6 percent on 2008 and the first time the growth in digital revenues outperformed the drop in CD and DVD earnings.

The global music business has been shrinking steadily in recent years, hit by online piracy [so they say] and the rapid decline in physical format sales like CDs, which have more than made up for the rapid growth in legal digital revenues.

And people refusing to buy crappy music.

“2009 was the first year in which the growth in revenues from the legal digital market compensated for the decline in revenues from traditional CDs and DVDs, though we remain cautious as to whether this represents a true turning point,” said PRS for Music chief executive Robert Ashcroft.

And despite the growth in digital revenues last year, they still represent a small proportion of the overall market…

The UK music market fell slightly, hit by a drop in advertising revenues and the ringtone market among other factors.

Oh yeah. The ringtone market. I’m forever amazed and amused over the amount of money spent on a reasonably useless bit of programming.

Meanwhile, is the RIAA listening? I doubt it.

Demand for Apple Inc.’s iPhone and Google Inc.’s Nexus One will help propel smartphone sales past those of personal computers in two years, Gartner Inc. forecasts.

The chart of the day shows that smartphone sales will more than triple to 491.9 million units by 2012 from 139.3 million in 2008, according to the Stamford, Connecticut-based research firm. The PC market will expand to 443.1 million units from 290.8 million in the same period, Gartner predicted.

“Smartphones are headed towards that billion-unit category that handsets are in today,” said Jim McGregor, an analyst at research firm In-Stat in Scottsdale, Arizona. “The smartphone is the billion-unit pot of gold that everyone wants.”

The rise of the smartphone has prompted the computer industry to respond with their own products in an attempt to retain control over consumer access to the Internet.

Intel Corp., the largest maker of computer chips, has revived an earlier failed attempt to get its processors into phones. So far, only LG Electronics Inc. has said it will make a phone using an Intel chip. Microsoft Corp., the biggest maker of computer software, unveiled a new version of its Windows mobile phone operating system earlier this month, aiming to hold off gains made by Apple and Google.

Ain’t competition fun?

I still get the biggest laughs from pundits who say they’re libertarian free market competition freaks – and then spend their spare time explaining why no new designs will ever be successful.

So far, 2010 has been a very good year for Audi in the U.S. market and diesel engines are playing a part in the surge. Right now, Audi is only offering two TDI models in this market: the big Q7 SUV and the compact A3. In both cases, diesel market share is far exceeding initial projections. Audi had expected diesels to account for about 18-20 percent of the sales of those models, but the TDI made up 56 percent of all A3 sales in February. The Q7 is now up to 40 percent TDI after several months in the low 30 percent range.

In the first two months of 2010, sales of the A3 have more than doubled compared to the same period a year ago with almost all of the extra sales being diesels. Like most other SUVs, the Q7 is down for the year but the availability of the TDI has definitely cushioned the blow. Perhaps the success of the A3 and Q7 will prompt Audi to expand the diesel lineup here, including their biggest volume model the A4.

One can only hope – including my personal hope that companies that offer a turbo-diesel pickup like Toyota might relent and start letting them into the United States.

Pockets of America are haltingly on the mend, and the Beth Court cul-de-sac here is one of them. A dozen lives unraveled on the block during the recession; now the empty houses are full, and Mr. Winkler and the other fathers are working again.

The remnants of financial disaster linger. Many neighbors have no credit cards. Repossessed family cars have not been replaced. Vacation destinations remain for most the stuff of advertisements in newspapers from which coupons continue to be clipped.

But hanging on has been replaced, in part, by holding steady.

The teacher who got a pink slip last spring has been hired by a new school, and the guy on the corner who had struggled for months with the bank over his mortgage finally got a loan modification. The lawn of an empty house, littered with broken bikes and weeds over the summer, has been made pristine once more by its new owners…

Beginning last January, The New York Times made regular visits to Beth Court, about 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, to chronicle how the foreclosure crisis had reshaped a middle-class neighborhood. Four of the eight houses went through foreclosure, and the others barely escaped the same fate. Beth Court was a microcosm of a nation in deep recession, a block of neighbors whose bad choices — often with the complicity of lending agencies — came crashing into a global economic downturn.

Now, a year later, California’s unemployment rate continues to grow, its housing market remains depressed and the state’s fiscal situation is dire. But the economic and policy shifts that are slowly changing parts of the country are also making a mark here…

RTFA. Interesting, anecdotal tales. Not especially different from my own little community of about a hundred families.

We know who’s still out of work and who isn’t. And the good news is that there is good news. More pickup trucks heading out at the crack of dawn to a jobsite instead of sitting in the driveway.