Showing posts with label Capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Capitalism. Show all posts
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Municipal Violations (HBO)
How municpalities fill coffers from fees on top of fines.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Moms' Day: "A Surprisingly Dark History"
Nevertheless: [But the holiday has more somber roots: It was founded for mourning women to remember fallen soldiers and work for peace. And when the holiday went commercial, its greatest champion, Anna Jarvis, gave everything to fight it, dying penniless and broken in a sanitarium.
It all started in the 1850s, when West Virginia women's organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis—Anna's mother—held Mother's Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions and try to lower infant mortality by fighting disease and curbing milk contamination, according to historian Katharine Antolini of West Virginia Wesleyan College. The groups also tended wounded soldiers from both sides during the U.S. Civil War from 1861 to 1865.
In the postwar years Jarvis and other women organized Mother's Friendship Day picnics and other events as pacifist strategies to unite former foes. Julia Ward Howe, for one—best known as the composer of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"—issued a widely read "Mother's Day Proclamation" in 1870, calling for women to take an active political role in promoting peace.
Around the same time, Jarvis had initiated a Mother's Friendship Day for Union and Confederate loyalists across her state. But it was her daughter Anna who was most responsible for what we call Mother's Day—and who would spend most of her later life fighting what it had become.] emphasis added because the celebration of modern commercial "Mothers' Day" has become a crass capitalist exploitation of the original concept. Imagine that crass commercializing in America!
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140508-mothers-day-nation-gifts-facts-culture-moms
It all started in the 1850s, when West Virginia women's organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis—Anna's mother—held Mother's Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions and try to lower infant mortality by fighting disease and curbing milk contamination, according to historian Katharine Antolini of West Virginia Wesleyan College. The groups also tended wounded soldiers from both sides during the U.S. Civil War from 1861 to 1865.
In the postwar years Jarvis and other women organized Mother's Friendship Day picnics and other events as pacifist strategies to unite former foes. Julia Ward Howe, for one—best known as the composer of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"—issued a widely read "Mother's Day Proclamation" in 1870, calling for women to take an active political role in promoting peace.
Around the same time, Jarvis had initiated a Mother's Friendship Day for Union and Confederate loyalists across her state. But it was her daughter Anna who was most responsible for what we call Mother's Day—and who would spend most of her later life fighting what it had become.] emphasis added because the celebration of modern commercial "Mothers' Day" has become a crass capitalist exploitation of the original concept. Imagine that crass commercializing in America!
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140508-mothers-day-nation-gifts-facts-culture-moms
Thursday, August 21, 2014
'Puter Tablets < $35?
This esplains my refusal to become a latest technology fan boy; things usually get cheaper in price if not actually "better."
"Better" constitutes a value judgment; people who just read email or chat can use bare bones lower price systems. Parents already stretching budgets to feed their childen, pay rent, and utilities may value a lower price gadget rather than a $500 Apple I-thingy.
Chinese factory owners can apparently operate on smaller profit margins, calculating making only a dollar on each adds up to a whole pile of $ if they sell a billion, god bless their price warring ways.
Face it, Steve Jobs jobbed people by creating a need and marketing an over priced product, successful partly due to Windows exorbitant price and general crappiness.
[IDG News Service - Generic Android tablets with 7-inch screens and quad-core chips that deliver decent performance could soon sell for under $35.
Tablets with low-resolution screens are already selling for $45 on Amazon, many of which have single- or dual-core processors from a Chinese chip company called Allwinner.
But the prices could fall under $35 when Allwinner ships its "fully formed" quad-core A33 chip for only $4, said analyst firm Linley Group in a newsletter this week.
The chip's quad-core processors will deliver better performance than older chips, and be capable of supporting 1280 x 800 displays, the analyst group said. The chip is based on ARM's Cortex-A7 design and has a Mali-400MP2 GPU, which is capable of rendering high-definition video.
The cheap tablets will likely come from no-name vendors in China, and won't offer the bells and whistles of Samsung or Apple tablets, but they could increase price pressure on brand names like HP and Acer, which have entry-level tablets priced around $100.
They'll be most suited to first-time buyers or users who aren't picky about hardware or software but certainly not power users, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research. That's because they'll likely have limited memory, storage and fewer ports than more expensive devices.] emphasis added 'cause some days love me some capitalism!
"Better" constitutes a value judgment; people who just read email or chat can use bare bones lower price systems. Parents already stretching budgets to feed their childen, pay rent, and utilities may value a lower price gadget rather than a $500 Apple I-thingy.
Chinese factory owners can apparently operate on smaller profit margins, calculating making only a dollar on each adds up to a whole pile of $ if they sell a billion, god bless their price warring ways.
Face it, Steve Jobs jobbed people by creating a need and marketing an over priced product, successful partly due to Windows exorbitant price and general crappiness.
[IDG News Service - Generic Android tablets with 7-inch screens and quad-core chips that deliver decent performance could soon sell for under $35.
Tablets with low-resolution screens are already selling for $45 on Amazon, many of which have single- or dual-core processors from a Chinese chip company called Allwinner.
But the prices could fall under $35 when Allwinner ships its "fully formed" quad-core A33 chip for only $4, said analyst firm Linley Group in a newsletter this week.
The chip's quad-core processors will deliver better performance than older chips, and be capable of supporting 1280 x 800 displays, the analyst group said. The chip is based on ARM's Cortex-A7 design and has a Mali-400MP2 GPU, which is capable of rendering high-definition video.
The cheap tablets will likely come from no-name vendors in China, and won't offer the bells and whistles of Samsung or Apple tablets, but they could increase price pressure on brand names like HP and Acer, which have entry-level tablets priced around $100.
They'll be most suited to first-time buyers or users who aren't picky about hardware or software but certainly not power users, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research. That's because they'll likely have limited memory, storage and fewer ports than more expensive devices.] emphasis added 'cause some days love me some capitalism!
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Ain't capitalism grand?: Corporate tax avoidance edition
Let's see, Microsoft exists as an American company, headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Nevertheless, they can transfer patents for their intellectual property oversea to notorious tax havens to avoid US taxes. By intellectual property, think software. So Microsoft can benefit from all protections of laws in the us, laws such as against copyright infringement, then keep all the cash oversea and avoid taxes.
Ain't capitalism grand?
[Last week, the investor David Einhorn sued Apple, in which his hedge fund has a large stake, over how the company can issue preferred stock. At the heart of the dispute is the $137 billion pile of cash that Apple has accumulated, and whether it could be used to better reward shareholders....
Such tax-avoidance techniques, while legal, have come under increasing political attack. On Thursday, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced legislation to end deferral and force multinational companies to pay taxes on their foreign-source income.Mr. Einhorn’s action highlights a growing problem: many corporations are holding vast amounts of cash and other liquid assets, using them neither for investment nor to benefit shareholders. These assets are largely earned and held overseas, and not subject to American taxes until the money is brought home.
According to the Federal Reserve, as of the third quarter of 2012 nonfinancial corporations in the United States held $1.7 trillion of liquid assets – cash and securities that could easily be converted to cash.
By any measure, corporate cash holdings appear to be high and rising.The major role of R.&D. in large cash holdings may reflect the greater opportunities for tax avoidance among businesses that can easily transfer intangible property abroad without having to move production operations or jobs to other countries. It is a simple matter for companies holding patents, copyrights or trademarks to transfer them to foreign subsidiaries and realize the profits accruing to them in lower-taxed jurisdictions.
I had an experience with this phenomenon just recently. I needed a copy of Microsoft Word for a new computer and went to www.microsoft.com to buy it. But when I tried to pay for it, my credit card was rejected. When I checked with my credit-card company I was told that the charge appeared suspicious because it went to a company based in Luxembourg – a well-known tax haven.
This technique is used by many technology-based companies. For example, The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 7 that the patent for the hepatitis C medication produced by California-based Gilead Sciences is domiciled in Ireland, another common tax haven. The home company thus pays royalties to its Irish subsidiary on sales of the drug in the United States, transferring profits from the United States to Ireland.
[Last week, the investor David Einhorn sued Apple, in which his hedge fund has a large stake, over how the company can issue preferred stock. At the heart of the dispute is the $137 billion pile of cash that Apple has accumulated, and whether it could be used to better reward shareholders....
Such tax-avoidance techniques, while legal, have come under increasing political attack. On Thursday, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced legislation to end deferral and force multinational companies to pay taxes on their foreign-source income.Mr. Einhorn’s action highlights a growing problem: many corporations are holding vast amounts of cash and other liquid assets, using them neither for investment nor to benefit shareholders. These assets are largely earned and held overseas, and not subject to American taxes until the money is brought home.
According to the Federal Reserve, as of the third quarter of 2012 nonfinancial corporations in the United States held $1.7 trillion of liquid assets – cash and securities that could easily be converted to cash.
By any measure, corporate cash holdings appear to be high and rising.The major role of R.&D. in large cash holdings may reflect the greater opportunities for tax avoidance among businesses that can easily transfer intangible property abroad without having to move production operations or jobs to other countries. It is a simple matter for companies holding patents, copyrights or trademarks to transfer them to foreign subsidiaries and realize the profits accruing to them in lower-taxed jurisdictions.
I had an experience with this phenomenon just recently. I needed a copy of Microsoft Word for a new computer and went to www.microsoft.com to buy it. But when I tried to pay for it, my credit card was rejected. When I checked with my credit-card company I was told that the charge appeared suspicious because it went to a company based in Luxembourg – a well-known tax haven.
This technique is used by many technology-based companies. For example, The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 7 that the patent for the hepatitis C medication produced by California-based Gilead Sciences is domiciled in Ireland, another common tax haven. The home company thus pays royalties to its Irish subsidiary on sales of the drug in the United States, transferring profits from the United States to Ireland.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Capitalism: Worst CEO's of 2012
Gosh, ain't capitalism grand? You get to make multi=millions of dollars to drive companies into the ground, killing tens of thousand of jobs and get to walk away with your ill gotten gains, see Carly Fiorina at HP or recent Hostess brands bankruptcy.
The latter hurts me personally; the Orlando Merita Bakery had a day old store with baked goods, condiments, cookies, and bread at substantial discounts. Boy could get Twinkie fix fixed cheap. Closing this will hurt thousands in neighborhoods, people in group homes, those who ran soup kitchens, many who depended on the savings at the stores.
Plus as for Orlando, there came on a bend on i-4 a wonderful wafting smell of baking bread from the Merita Bakery, and a sign with clock and brand name, an icon of my city.
Bastards.
Take a look at this story: The last sentence reads that Hostess had 900 million in debts, but the story fails to mention these debts came after 2 leveraged buyouts where everyone but the workers made boatloads of money and corporate officers and investors laughed their way to the banks.
[Yes, Hostess Brands was bankrupt before this strike happened. Indeed, it’s been bankrupt twice in the last 8 years, having only emerged from its last bankruptcy 3 years ago. Think about that a second. That means Hostess managed to go bankrupt, restructure, and run itself back into bankruptcy in 3 years. Perhaps this should get more play than “labor strike” when we discuss the demise of the company.
What prompted the company to run itself into the ground again? While the company has publicly placed all its business woes since 2009 on the difficult task of cutting labor costs, the reality is that the company remained behind the times. When America began to seek healthy alternatives to Wonder’s delicious but frightening 1950s deadly chemical feel,Hostess trudged onward losing market share to others. When childhood obesity became a national epidemic, Hostess kept churning out fat-filled cakes that sat uneaten on shelves. As the business faltered, Hostess turned blame on the workers.
But a losing business model with cheap labor can generate higher margins for only so long, and while this strike will provide the basis for closing the doors of the company, it will trigger the event that the company itself has planned for some time — liquidation. Hostess will now sell its famous brand names to other companies who can profit off them with smaller-scale production or by tweaking the product itself to better compete. For those at the top of Hostess, this — and not cutting labor costs while chasing diminishing markets — was the brass ring all along, with the owners of the company likely to become rich on these sales. By the way, who owns Hostess? If you guessed, “Private Equity firms seeking to slowly kill the company while milking its resources” you’d be right!] emphasis added for scorn and derision
The latter hurts me personally; the Orlando Merita Bakery had a day old store with baked goods, condiments, cookies, and bread at substantial discounts. Boy could get Twinkie fix fixed cheap. Closing this will hurt thousands in neighborhoods, people in group homes, those who ran soup kitchens, many who depended on the savings at the stores.
Plus as for Orlando, there came on a bend on i-4 a wonderful wafting smell of baking bread from the Merita Bakery, and a sign with clock and brand name, an icon of my city.
Bastards.
Take a look at this story: The last sentence reads that Hostess had 900 million in debts, but the story fails to mention these debts came after 2 leveraged buyouts where everyone but the workers made boatloads of money and corporate officers and investors laughed their way to the banks.
[Yes, Hostess Brands was bankrupt before this strike happened. Indeed, it’s been bankrupt twice in the last 8 years, having only emerged from its last bankruptcy 3 years ago. Think about that a second. That means Hostess managed to go bankrupt, restructure, and run itself back into bankruptcy in 3 years. Perhaps this should get more play than “labor strike” when we discuss the demise of the company.
What prompted the company to run itself into the ground again? While the company has publicly placed all its business woes since 2009 on the difficult task of cutting labor costs, the reality is that the company remained behind the times. When America began to seek healthy alternatives to Wonder’s delicious but frightening 1950s deadly chemical feel,Hostess trudged onward losing market share to others. When childhood obesity became a national epidemic, Hostess kept churning out fat-filled cakes that sat uneaten on shelves. As the business faltered, Hostess turned blame on the workers.
But a losing business model with cheap labor can generate higher margins for only so long, and while this strike will provide the basis for closing the doors of the company, it will trigger the event that the company itself has planned for some time — liquidation. Hostess will now sell its famous brand names to other companies who can profit off them with smaller-scale production or by tweaking the product itself to better compete. For those at the top of Hostess, this — and not cutting labor costs while chasing diminishing markets — was the brass ring all along, with the owners of the company likely to become rich on these sales. By the way, who owns Hostess? If you guessed, “Private Equity firms seeking to slowly kill the company while milking its resources” you’d be right!] emphasis added for scorn and derision
http://recessappointment.com/2012/11/16/hostess-a-lesson-in-blaming-unions-for-your-failures/
http://www.wftv.com/news/news/merita-bread-orlando-may-shut-its-door-following-h/nS787/
[2. Aubrey McClendon, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy (CHK) who apparently has trouble keeping his company’s finances and his own apart. According to Reuters, McClendon borrowed as much as $1.1 billion over three years in undisclosed loans against his stake in thousands of company wells and ran a $200 million oil-and-gas hedge fund on the side, an “obvious conflict of interest,” Finkelstein says. Use of the company jet (and company employees) for personal purposes and a corporate sponsorship deal for Oklahoma City Thunder while McClendon was an owner of the basketball team also didn’t help. Jim Gipson, a spokesman for Chesapeake Energy, declined to comment.]
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-13/the-worst-ceos-of-2012#r=rss?campaign_id=bw.bs.taboola
http://www.wftv.com/news/news/merita-bread-orlando-may-shut-its-door-following-h/nS787/
[2. Aubrey McClendon, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy (CHK) who apparently has trouble keeping his company’s finances and his own apart. According to Reuters, McClendon borrowed as much as $1.1 billion over three years in undisclosed loans against his stake in thousands of company wells and ran a $200 million oil-and-gas hedge fund on the side, an “obvious conflict of interest,” Finkelstein says. Use of the company jet (and company employees) for personal purposes and a corporate sponsorship deal for Oklahoma City Thunder while McClendon was an owner of the basketball team also didn’t help. Jim Gipson, a spokesman for Chesapeake Energy, declined to comment.]
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-13/the-worst-ceos-of-2012#r=rss?campaign_id=bw.bs.taboola
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