Fiat Lux

Very interesting article in today's SFGate.com. In a nutshell, here's the issue:

Wal-Mart could save Bay Area grocery shoppers as a whole $382 million to $1.13 billion per year -- roughly 5 to 13 percent of their expected annual spending on groceries -- if the growth forecasts hold true, the report says.

On the flip side, the average Bay Area grocery-store employee can expect to lose $21,000 from his or her current annual wage-and-benefits package of $42,552 per year, the report warns.

From where I sit, this just seems like another example of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Granted, downward pressure on the wages in one segment of the employment market does not translate to downward pressure across the board, but it's indicative of a theme in corporate beliefs these days.

As I've said in these pages before, this ongoing downward pressure in wages and tendency towards outsourcing jobs is one that I consider hugely dangerous to America as a whole. We are sacrificing our future for short-term profits. Because when everyone is making less than $30K a year, who is going to buy all these goods and services?

It's also a good argument for taking your destiny into your own hands, via self-employment and/or starting your own business. If you can.

It's been a few years since my own business venture failed, and I still bear the scars. The biggest one being a loss of confidence that I really can do what I set out to do. That's been ameliorated somewhat over the last year or so by my discovery that I am pretty good at this retail stuff, but it's not entirely gone either. And my credit's still screwed.

I've always said that despite the scars, I'd want to do it again some day. And I still believe that. But I haven't given a lot of thought to how I'm going to make that happen. It's a little late for New Year's resolutions, but perhaps that should be mine for 2004 - to start thinking seriously about what I'm going to do about my career. With the economy and Bay Area job market so screwed, I've basically been in a reactive, not proactive mode. I don't know if the economy has changed all that much, but I'm getting tired of letting the current take me where it will. I need to start doing more of my own choosing, not what others choose for me.

They may be overrun by partisan hacks but at least the Supreme Court got it right with regard to telemarketers:

The Supreme Court let stand a lower-court ruling that telemarketers' rights to free speech are not violated by the government's nationwide do-not-call list.

Without comment, the justices rejected an appeal by commercial telemarketers against the lower-court ruling, which upheld as constitutional the popular program in which consumers can put their names on a list if they do not want to be called by telemarketers.

"We hold that the do-not-call registry is a valid commercial speech regulation because it directly advances the government's important interests in safeguarding personal privacy and reducing the danger of telemarketing abuse without burdening an excessive amount of speech," the appeals court said.

Actually, reading further into the article, maybe I should take back the 'partisan hack' comment. The Justices also:

• let stand a ruling that a Catholic charity in California must include prescription contraceptives in its employee health insurance plan
• rejected an appeal from ousted Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who lost his job after defying a federal order to dismantle a Ten Commandments monument.

My first thought was, Aren't they still bankrupt?" Obviously not.

Not that usually I shop in either store (although our dishwasher did come from Sears). But as a longtime fan of Land's End, which Sears bought last year, I do keep an eye on these things.

It will definitely cost some people their jobs. Layoffs as the back offices are consolidated is a must in situations like these. Probably some store closings as well.

Ah well.

Good luck to the PeopleSoft people about to become jobless. Layoffs are reported to hit as early as this week.

Oracle is expected to cut 80 percent of sales jobs and up to 90 percent of administrative jobs at PeopleSoft, but keep the bulk of its research and development team

Ouch.

Clear Channel Communications Inc. on Wednesday said it converted three stations to a liberal talk format and this year could double to 44 the number of stations carrying such programming.

After offering mostly conservative-leaning talk for the past decade, Clear Channel and other broadcasters are now embracing "progressive" talk to woo a listener base that is growing increasingly fragmented due to satellite, Internet radio and devices like iPods.

The nation's biggest radio operator said it switched underperforming stations in Washington, D.C., Detroit and Cincinnati carrying nostalgic or sports programming with talkers like Jerry Springer, Ed Schultz, Lionel, Phil Hendrie, Randi Rhodes and Al Franken.

[snip]

In other efforts to reinvent itself, Clear Channel is cutting down on commercials and is converting 1,000 stations to high-definition digital broadcasting in the next three years.

HD radio will enable radio broadcasts to achieve "near-CD" quality and allow two or even three digital audio streams to be broadcast using a single carrier frequency.

If Clear Channel sees that there's a market for 'liberal' talk radio, then that is a good sign for the future, in my book. And the digital move is also an interesting one.

So SBC is trying once again to acquire AT&T (or what's left of it). I suspect the deal has a much better chance of being approved today than it did the last time SBC tried this, and if it does go through, I'll be sad. It's extremely rare that a corporation lasts as long and becomes as well known as AT&T, and seeing it finally join the scrapheap of dead brands would be noteworthy. And the final irony, of course, is that the acquirer is a corporation that was spun off from the old AT&T in the first place. In a way I suppose that is appropriate.

As a shareholder, I should be happy. My AT&T stock has gone from being a significant piece of my portfolio to a pile of more or less worthless spinoff stocks. I never sold it off more our of nostaliga than anything else -- a bad reason to make an investment move, I know.

Sorry about the last few days of blog silence. I haven't been feeling very inspired lately. However, Kevin Drum makes a good point about credit reporting.

The problem with credit reports is that they're strictly under the control of one side of the credit transaction: businesses. If a business requests a report, they get it, no questions asked. If a business reports a problem, it goes on the report, no questions asked. The consumer never knows any of this is happening, and that's the way the credit reporting companies like it.

This needs to stop. If a business requests a report, the consumer should be notified � by email, phone, or in writing � and the report should go out only if the consumer authorizes it. If a nonroutine entry is added to a credit report, the consumer should be notified so that she can object immediately if she thinks a mistake has been made. Consumers should be full partners in the creation of credit reports, and any changes or uses of credit reports should be fully transparent to the consumer involved.

These aren't just pieces of paper anymore. Credit reports are minutely detailed resumes of your entire life, and credit reporting companies shouldn't be allowed to arrogantly treat your life as if it's their sole property. After all, an improper use of your credit report can do you tremendous damage. It should fundamentally be considered joint property, as much yours as the credit reporting company's.

One of the many things I'm working on these days is summer internship applications. With that in mind, here's something depressing about job opportunities for women:

Did Stan Shih Really Say that a Woman's Place was in the Home?

Stan Shih is the CEO of Acer.

I hate accounting.

Yes, I recognize that it is the language of business and is extremely important. But I don't care. I hate it. I hate having to memorize all of the arcane terminology. I hate trying to remember when to apply the contra asset account and why you debit the cash account when you're acutally adding to it.

And of course, I have a quiz on the subject tonight, so I'm currently trying to get some of the above to stick in my thick skull.

Bleh.

I was going to blog about this yesterday but I didn't want to follow that upbeat post with something gloomy quite so quickly. Nathan Newman's Labor Blog raises a host of disturbing points about the one-step-forward-two-steps-back Santorum minimum wage bill currently in Congress.

Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum is leading the charge for a GOP bill that would ostensibly raise the minimum wage by $1.10 per hour, but in reality would cut wages for millions of American workers and expand unregulated sweatshops across the country.

As a minimum wage employee myself, I have some strong opinions about how fucked-up the minimum wage laws are. I see up-close and personal exactly how difficult it is for people to make ends meet even on San Francisco's generous $8.62/hr minimum wage.

In short, it's hard as hell to make ends meet when you work for the minimum wage. One of my co-workers has 6 roommates. Another lives in a neighborhood so bad that she's arranged to have her roommate meet her at the store to walk her home after dark. Another shares a one-room efficiency with his wife. That doesn't sound so bad, but in about 2 months' time they'll add a baby into that one room. He has been apartment hunting, but says they simply can't find something bigger that they can afford. Still another co-worker, a father with two young daughters, works 2 jobs and tells me that on a good night he gets 5 hours of sleep. Some of my colleagues are trying to go to school while they work but that presents its own set of challenges: the more classes you take, the less hours you can work, but the fewer classes you take, the longer it takes before you'll finish your degree.

I could go on but I'm getting too depressed. I know I'm lucky because I have a husband with a decent job and thus am not relying on my minimum-wage plus tips income to the same extent that the rest of my co-workers do. That could change at any time, of course. If the last several years have taught me nothing, they've taught me to not make any assumptions about the permamance of any job. Every day Scott and I still have our jobs, it feels like a small victory.

And in related depressing news, the LA Times has put their entire series of articles about why American families are so screwed into a non-registration required special section. It's also worth a read.

Russell Beattie has some interesting thoughts about the Treo, and by extension, the PalmOS world. His point that although Silicon Valley loves the Treo, it's statistically nonexistant in the greater universe of portable devices.

It was empirically obvious, most of the people in the room had a Treo, so it must be a really popular platform, right? Wrong. If you've got a Treo you might be a cutting edge technologist, but you're in the backwater of mobility. Trust me. (Actually, don't trust me, just look at the frigin' numbers.)

Now, I will admit that here in the U.S. Palm is doing better that its competitors. The numbers I've seen show that Palm phones actually outnumber both Symbian and Windows Mobile phones here by a double. But honestly, out of 170 million American subscribers, the total smart phone numbers are still ridiculously low, so I wouldn't pay much attention to this. The fact is that Palm is a niche player in a niche market (there are more cell phone subscribers in China - 300m - than there are *people* in the U.S.) as time goes by they will increasingly become less relevant as a platform, not the opposite.

I think he's being a bit too harsh about the potential future of PalmOS and the Treo, but he's not completely wrong either. Given how much PalmSource is struggling to maintain any kind of relevence in the US consumer market, given the declining number of big-name licencees and the declining number of PalmOS devices available in the market, there's signifcant reason to worry about the future if you're a PalmOS aficionado.

And yet -- people are passionate about their Treos for a reason. They're great devices. My Treo 180 died over a year ago and I still miss it. If I could afford a Treo 600, I'd have one. The power of a small, yet dedicated market -- especially when key sections of that market are VCs and other players -- should not be ignored.

Starbucks Corp. will close all 17 Torrefazione Italia cafes

Two of them are in SF and I really liked them. I guess I was one of the few who did though. Too bad.

And the race to the bottom continues. One inventive company, recognizing that there are timezone, distance, and cultural difficulties involved in outsourcing programming jobs to Southeast Asia, is coming up with a creative solution:

Take a used cruise ship, fill it with programmers, and park it three miles off the US coast so that it is no longer subject to US laws and regulations (like OSHA rules, overtime pay, etc). Pay the programmers less than $22,000 a year and make then work 10 hours a day. And then say that since the ship is so close to America, that it's really a way of keeping American jobs at home.

It sounds to me more like indentured servitude than a decent job opportunity.

• Although the article says that each programmer will have their own room, what about spouses or children? I suspect they won't be welcome.
• They say that the pay is $1,800 a month, they don't mention whether the employees will have to pay for things like laundry service, medical care, entertainment, or other amenities -- it could well be that most of their cash will go right back to the employer.

• The article mentions 'shore leave' for employees, but how often, and how much leave? And what happens if an employee decides to quit, or has a family emergency, or has some other reason for needing to get off the boat?

The telling comment, it seems, is this one: "The pay is about three times what they earn in India today." That will make those jobs highly desirable to Indians if not Americans. And with the ship parked so close to the US/Mexico border, it doesn't take much imagination to cook up a scenario where you import a boatload of programmers through Mexico, put them on the ship in international waters, and bingo, you have a totally unregulated sweatshop where the inhabitants cannot get away without permission unless they're willing to risk a three-mile ocean swim.

It's a situation bursting with the potential for abuse.

Hat tip to Kulam Yachad for the link.

Seen in the SF Chronicle today:

Interest-only loans were the dominant home finance instrument before the Depression. Sharply declining property values, coupled with the fact that the principle was never paid down, contributed to widespread foreclosures in the 1930s. That led to the introduction of the amortizing loan, in which the principle is paid off during the life of the loan.

Interesting. And if you want more details on other things that happened to the mortgage industry in the 20th century, here's a useful link.

Sometimes, when I have a blogging lull, it's because there's not much that I want to talk about. Recently, the opposite has been true. There's a number of things going on that I want to talk about, but I'm not sure what exactly I want to say about them. So rather than sound insipid or downright wrong, I've been keeping my mouth shut.

Here's an example. 11,000 people applied for the 400 jobs at a soon-to-open Wal-Mart in Oakland. It was front-page news in the SF Chronicle yesterday.

I had to run some errands around town last night, so I got to listen to two different KGO talk radio hosts opine on the subject. And since this is the Bay Area, it was pretty easy to predict what people were going to say about the whole thing: "Our economy sucks! Wal-Mart is evil! This is terrible!". All of which happened as expected. Although it was funny listening to one host try to defend the concept that any time you have a willing buyer and a willing seller, the result is a "good job" no matter how crappy the wages and benefits are. I was tempted to call in and ask if that extended to things like murder for hire, but I figured that might not get past the screener.

So here's some of what I think. On the one hand, although those job numbers sound bad at first, when you break it down, that's about 27 applicants per position. Competitive, but from where I sit, not horribly so. Not after hearing stories of hiring managers getting flooded with hundreds of resumes for one job posting on Craigslist. Now, not being a tech hiring manager myself, I don't know if those stories are still true, or if that was only in the immediate post-bust timeframe. Maybe I'm wrong and these days, getting 27 applicants per job is really bad. Or maybe it's not that bad after all. Bottom line is, I don't really know, and therefore have a hard time taking a firm stand either way.

Something else I thought about, but have been hesitate to talk about, is the intersection of race and class and hiring here -- note this photograph of the new Wal-Mart employees. But frankly, as relatively privileged member of society, I don't feel comfortable making a lot of points about race and class and employment. It's not my area of expertise, and I run the risk of sounding clich�d, banal or clueless, or (god forbid) a combination of all three.

And yes, Wal-Mart has some terrible business practices. But that's not exactly news if you've been paying attention.

Perhaps after two years of blogging, I'm coming to a place where I feel less like just venting off my emotions and opinions, and instead trying to have some solid ground under my feet when I post. Perhaps I'm being overly cautious -- it's not like I've got a horde of trolls ready to attack me if I say something wrong; I'm lucky to get any comments at all here. Or maybe I'm just being lazy. *grin*

Next, I'll consider whether or not to say anything about Gaza.

Of the many bits of macroeconomic esoterica I studied this semester, one that particularly caught my interest was the bond yield curve. Normally, long-term bonds pay more interest than short-term ones, because you have to lock your money up longer (this is also known as the time value of money). When you plot these prices out on a chart, you generally get a nice upward curve to the line.

However, in recent months, this hasn't been the case. The yield curve has become virtually flat. A flat yield curve means, among other things, that people believe that the economy will continue to decline.

The Big Picture goes into a great deal more detail of why this has the potential to be a problem. The piece is a bit technical but not horribly so. Here's his bottom line:

While not every inversion leads to a recession, every recession has been preceded by an inverted yield curve.

In other words, it's a sign that as 2006 fast approaches, the American economy is treading on very thin ice indeed. We may get through it unscathed, but getting back on course is going to be damn tricky.

So Intel is revising its branding. OK. I'm not doing cartwheels about the new logo, but it's no better or worse than the old one.

But who on earth thought it was a good idea to ditch the "Intel Inside" tagline for "Leap Ahead"? "Intel Inside" is a good, memorable tagline that adds value to the brand. "Leap Ahead" is one of those eminently forgettable taglines that adds no value to anything other than the bank account of some misbegotten branding consultant.

I have an old text file knocking around on my drive with a collection of quotes that I found interesting. Here's an apt one, although unfortunately I did not save the name ofthe person who wrote it:

It is a great mystery of late-stage capitalism that, in a marketplace of hypothetically unlimited choices, consumers should all want the same things.

Despite my having hung onto this quote, I actually think that the opposite is true. Everyone wants different things. Retail stores, however, try to persuade us
that we all want the same things. Especially the larger ones. Stores, that is.

Case in point: there's a few things I've needed to buy for the apartment. Nothing particularly wild or unusual: More clothes hangers. A new sugar bowl to replace the one I broke. A couple of baking pans to replace ones that have rusted out. In short, standard household items. Here in the SF Bay Area, with stores of all sorts in every direction, getting this stuff should be a matter of a couple hours, tops.

But it's not. Take the sugar bowl I broke a few months ago � an inexpensive bowl from a very mainstream Mikasa china pattern. I've been looking for a new one for months now. I've come to the conclusion that I can't get a replacement for it unless I either spend a lot of money or special-order one off the Internet. I've tried looking in a number of stores for an alternative, and it's amazing how few sugar bowls stores are selling. Teapots, coffee mugs, even full tea sets are all over the place, in both big chain stores and small Mom & Pop shops, but nobody sells sugar bowls. Hell, I'd settle for a 2-piece 'cream and sugar' set, but even those are hard to find. What are stores selling instead? 4 and 5 piece 'completer' sets that cost a bunch more money. Well, screw that. I don't want to buy 3 or 4 pieces of china that I neither want nor need in order to get the one piece I do need.

Target, of all places, actually had three different sugar bowls available for sale yesterday. Unfortunately Target's offerings were: 1 really ugly option, 1 flimsy-looking option, and 1 option that was neither flimsy nor ugly, but it totally and completely did not match anything else in my kitchen. So I didn't buy it.

Now, maybe I'm just being picky here. Sugar bowls are not exactly a daily essential, maybe I shouldn't expect to find lots of options. I should probably just give up on my sugar bowl quest and either store my sugar in a plastic container or special-order the Mikasa piece and be done with it.

But why is it so hard to buy clothes hangers? A significant % of my hangers are the cheapo wire ones that you get from the dry cleaners, and that's fine, but since we don't dry-clean much stuff these days, we need to actually buy hangers. All I want is some simple plastic hangers for the new shirts we got for Scott's new job. What do I see in the stores? Expensive high-end padded and/or wooden hangers, funky suit/skirt hangers, "5 in 1" hangers for space saving � these are all over the place. But standard plastic hangers, you're lucky if a store
carries one kind.

Again, I'm sure if I hunted around on the Internet I could find some specialty web shop that would be happy to sell me exactly what I wanted, in any color. Call me a Luddite if you like, but I don't want to buy clothes hangers on the Internet. I want to drive to a store, buy them, take them home, and put them in my closet.

And don't get me started on how few choices I had when trying to replace our rusted-out 8x8 and 9x9 baking pans.

Now, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm just really, really picky and don't know it. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, or am just being cheap. But what I feel is not picky, nor cheap, but manipulated. I feel like I'm being driven willy-nilly to buy products that have features I don't want or cost a lot more than I want to pay, because those products create a higher profit for the retailer.

So much for late-stage capitalism.

One of the (few) benefits of working in an office that runs the Mac OS is that I've started paying attention to the Apple world beyond that of my iPod. So this morning, I ran across the site Apple Matters via a link from CNet. I read an interesting article about why Microsoft won't be able to successfully take down the iPod (an argument I tend to agree with). It's worth reading, both for the article itself and the thoughtful commentary.

For what it's worth, it seems to me that Apple has decided they are not going to be able to unseat Microsoft in the office, so have decided to focus on 'lifestyle' computing instead. The iPod, building real photo and video manipulation tools into the OS, and a host of other details, all say to me that personal users are the target. And all things considered, that's a smart move.

Whether it's working remains to be seen. My mother told me about two weeks ago that she was thinking about buying an Apple laptop to replace her recently-deceased Windows laptop. When I asked her why, she mentioned the digital camera that she'd recently acquired and said, "Apple is suppsed to be better at that sort of thing."

She ended up buying a Sony Vaio, though.

So I caught a few minutes of the Ford press conference this moring as I was getting ready for work. Job cuts, plant closings, big changes, new ways of designing and building cars, fewer SUVs, yadda yadda. What caught my ear, though was Bill Ford on the TV saying (more or less) "Why didn't we make these changes sooner? We didn't have to."

One of the more memorable things my Systems prof told us last semester was, "Don't boil the ocean." If Ford really thinks they're capable of making sweeping companywide changes in a smooth, adroit manner, they're kidding themselves. A company that sat on its butt doing little more than raking in the profits on oversized low MPG SUVs when their competition was taking them to the cleaners is not going to be able to pull that kind of a move off. Toyota or Honda might, but the whole reason Ford is in this mess is because they are not Toyota or Honda.

One of the CNBC commentators noted that the scope of the plant cuts announced implied that Ford was cutting production capacity by about 1 million automobiles. I wonder what that's going to do to the dealership network. Job losses due to dealership closings will not be counted in the press releases, but surely Ford will not need the same number of dealers if they're producing so many fewer cars.

I don't usually do all-out commercial plugs here, but I make an exception for Cafe Cosa. It's a family-run coffee company in Costa Rica that both grows and roasts the coffee in-country, then ship the finished product to the US in vacuum-sealed bags (which is not generally the case for Central American coffee growers). It's nicely roasted, smooth, rich but not over-bold, and makes excellent coffee.

Coffee purists will object to the shipping time delay (about 2 weeks), and point out that the optimal coffee is achieved by roasting in small batches to maintain freshness, and the longer the beans sit, the worse they get. That's true, but I'm not that much of a coffee geek. Roasted within the last month is fine by me.

Plus, even with the shipping, the price is very reasonable. So if you like coffee, give it a try!

Obligatory disclaimer: No, I do not get anything for pitching this product on my blog. The American agents of the company are friends, but I'm doing this because I want to. I like their coffee. And also because I don't feel like blogging about the dismal political situation this morning.

UPDATE: It must be something in the air today. Digby is blogging about coffee too, and pointed me to a new blog on the subject: Smelling the Coffee.

I have no idea whether or not this is legal. Requiring employees to have what amounts to multiple surgeries in order to perform their jobs? One to put the thing in, one to take it out. Plus possibly others if there's ever a problem with the implant.

Details:

Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company's datacenter.

Cincinnati based surveillance company CityWatcher.com created the policy with the hopes of increasing security in the datacenter where video surveillance tapes are stored. In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.

Although the company does not require the microchips be implanted to maintain employment, anyone without one will not be able to access the datacenter, according to a Register article.

Ironically, the extra security sought may be offset by a recent discovery of Jonathan Westhues, where the security researcher showed the VeriChip can be skimmed and cloned, duplicating an implant�s authentication. When contacted, those at CityWatcher were unaware of the chip's security issue, according to the spychips.com release.

If members of the US law enforcement and security communities can do their jobs without surgical implants, this company ought to be able to do so as well.

I really don't understand how it is supposed to help small businesses to incent them to buy huge gas-guzzlers like Hummers but not more fuel-efficient vehicles for their businesses. Seriously, WTF?

Federal tax rules that took effect last month allow a credit of up to $3,150 for anyone buying a hybrid car. The credit is the same regardless of tax bracket.

However, owners of small businesses who buy a Hummer, Ford Excursion or other SUV weighing more than 3 tons get a deduction of up to $25,000 � depending on tax bracket � if they use the vehicle exclusively for work.

The benefits don't stop there. Once they subtract the $25,000 from the cost of their 3-ton SUV, small business owners can deduct the depreciation on the remaining amount. Someone who bought a $60,000 SUV, for example, can claim the remaining $35,000 over six years.

No such luck for small business owners who buy cars weighing less than 3 tons. No matter how much the vehicles cost, they can claim just $15,535 in depreciation over six years and $1,675 each additional year.

On average, probably not:

The average income of American families, after adjusting for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent in 2004 compared to 2001 while their net worth rose but at a slower pace.

Years ago when we got our first cellular phone, it was with AT&T. We later expanded to two AT&T cell phones. Fast forward a few years, AT&T has split into 4 different companies. I got a Treo and switched to Cingular service because AT&T didn't support the Treo. Eventually, Cingular aquired AT&T Wireless and Scott's AT&T account transitioned over to Cingular. Less than a year ago, we finally merged the two accountss into one "Family Plan' on Cingular.

Now, it seems that we're going to be AT&T customers again.

AT&T Inc. said Sunday it will acquire smaller rival BellSouth Corp. for $67 billion in stock, in an apparent bid for total control of their growing joint venture, Cingular Wireless LLC.

[snip]
Under the deal, the Cingular brand will be phased out in favor of the AT&T brand.

At this stage of the game, cell service is enough of a commodity that the only real differentiators between companies are the phones they support and their crazy billing plans, so I don't expect much will change for us. I just hope the billing doesn't get screwed up when they transition the account over.

It's pretty funny to be going 'back' to AT&T after all this time, though.

Looks like this temporary worker thing is going to happen after all.

Businesses will love it.

Workers, not so much.

UPDATE: Maybe I posted too fast.

Yesterday, I was chatting with a classmate who's graduating in three weeks. She mentioned that even though her MBA is almost done, she really wasn't sure what she's actually learned.

Obligatory snark about a couple of useless classes aside, you actually do learn something in B-school. For example, if I hadn't taken Macroeconomics, I would never have thought this was funny.

I could do without the "We're Columbia, we rule!" verse at the end, and it might be a bit unfair to slam Bernanke when he's only been Fed chair less than 3 months, but still, I laughed and sent the link to my econ prof.

Thinking about mashups this morning, I had an idea for one that I don't think has been done yet.

It would be a three-way mashup of Google Maps, job listings, AND information from local mass transit so that you could pinpoint all jobs in your area that are accessible by public transportation.

In other words, it would help you find a job that you didn't have to drive to.

Perhaps this has already been done -- I need to get to work, or I'd look right now. But if it hasn't, then you read it here first!

Philip Kaplan, who ran the controversial Web site FuckedCompany.com during the dot-com bust, has stepped aside as CEO of a small, profitless start-up he founded in 2004.

Kaplan, 30, told CNET News.com on Wednesday that he made the decision to turn AdBrite, which sells online advertising, over to "professional management." While he said he wasn't forced out, he acknowledged that his board of directors didn't try to dissuade him from stepping down.

Karma? Only a little bit. AdBrite's not fucked -- it is still in business, even if he's not running the show anymore. And given Pud's habit of serial entrepreneurship, I suspect there will be other ventures in his future.

Heh:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Friday it plans to sell its 85 stores in Germany to rival Metro AG, a move that effectively ends a nearly decade-long effort by the world's largest retailer to crack the market in Europe's biggest economy.

Terms were not disclosed, but Wal-Mart said it expects to incur a loss before taxes of about $1 billion related to the deal in its second quarter.\

...

Sy Schlueter, chief executive of investment house Copernicus in Hamburg, said Wal-Mart had trouble winning over German consumers, who tend to be very price-focused and would rather drive to a different store if they know they can buy something cheaper. National discounters such as Lidl GmbH and Aldi Einkauf GmbH put the heat on Wal-Mart's sales, he said, by offering the same products at competitive prices.

Furthermore, Schlueter said consumers rejected some of Wal-Mart's signature features, like stores outside of town centers, employees required to smile and heartily greet customers, or baggers at checkouts.

When I was younger, I would sometimes wonder how it was that some older people would seem to get �stuck� on certain points of time. Relatives who would continue to dress as if it were still 30 years ago. Teachers whose music collection consisted of the same groups they had been listening to since high school. I just didn�t get it. Why didn�t they want to change with the times, try news things, and stay with the flow? Wasn�t the new stuff better?

I might understand it a bit more now, because I just don�t get one of the new Web 2.0 technology trends these days: browser-based software. What exactly makes it so much better than the current solutions?

For example, take Meebo. If you haven�t heard of them, Meebo is a company that has created a website which allows you to log into various IM clients - AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc - all on the same web page. More recently, they�ve added a �Meebo Me� web widget that you can put onto any website, and then have live real-time chats with anyone who visits that web page, no additional software required.

At any rate, I just don�t get what is so hot about this. I can see where if you�re traveling or on a public computer it might occasionally be useful to be able to log into an IM client via a web page, but I do not see how having to keep a web page open all day to use an application is so vastly superior to having a chat client installed on your hard drive. And I definitely don�t see the long-term business model, unless their plan is to have their technology acquired by someone like MySpace and cash out fast.

I can, however, see that if there were a way to connect Meebo into Trillian, or Adium, or even some kind of standalone desktop app or widget, then I�d be really loving MeeboMe. And so would many companies. Being able to do real-time chat on your webpage, without forcing your visitor to have to log into anything or install extra software, is a big plus. If Meebo launches something like this, I�ll be a big fan.

But for now, I feel like I am missing something here. Am I getting old and being left behind? Do I just not �get� the Web 2.0 models? Is it just that Meebo�s still in alpha and hasn�t launched its full set of features yet? Or is this a case of the Emperor�s New Clothes?

This caught my eye while browsing through some blogs with my morning coffee:

If you're not sure what that is, you're looking at no fewer that twenty-five links to different social tagging / bookmarking services gracing the bottom of a blog post.

Can anyone say "lessons of the last boom not learned?" Social bookmarking as a market has not crossed the chasm. It may never do so. Why any entrepreneur (or VC for that matter) would think that yet another "me too!" del.icio.us copycat is the idea that will make them millions is just beyond me.

18 months from now, my bet is that no more than nine of those links will still work, and of those nine, three will be basically ghost sites. Even that sounds more generous than it actually is, because another three of those slots have in all liklihood already been filled -- by Fark, Yahoo, and the Yahoo-owned del.icio.us.

If it sounds like I'm hating on startups, I am not. I've worked for several and even had one of my own back in the Dark Ages. I'm just a little frustrated at the rampant lack of creativity. No matter what Dharmesh Shah says about trendspotting versus trendsetting, only so many people can jump onto any given bandwagon before the wagon is too full.

When I think about startups that I'd like to see, I tend to think more about video than I do geek toys like social bookmarking. Why? Video has long since crossed over into mainstream America, but despite the plethora of video uploading services, the potential of video has not even begun to be fully tapped. As Michael Mace pointed out a month or so ago, home video is very popular, but despite its having gone mainstream well over a decade ago, video still has some significant unsolved issues.

What are some of the possibilities out there? What about the ability to tag not just an entire video, but parts of a video, for more efficient searching? Or the ability to embed text within a video and make the whole thing searchable? How about more / better video editing tools for consumers? Maybe even some kind of online classroom to teach video camera owners how to shoot more interesting home videos so that less editing is actually needed in the first place?

Perhaps some of those startups are out there & I just haven't noticed them, or possibly all of these solutions have been thought up already and they're all off in stealth mode. If I had even half a clue about video technology I might even try to do a startup in the field myself.

At any rate, those are my Saturday morning coffee thoughts.

Here's some perspective on the minimum wage for you, courtesy of the WSJ:

The minimum wage was last raised in 1996, when Congress bumped it up 90 cents to $5.15 an hour. In inflation-adjusted terms, the minimum wage reached its peak in 1968, when it was $1.58, which equals $7.75 in 2006 dollars.

This is just the beginning of more to come, if we're lucky:

[Massachusetts] state yesterday shut down seven mortgage brokers ... and banned a variety of deceptive lending practices in what regulators called a sweeping crackdown on rogue brokers who steer customers in poor urban neighborhoods to loans they cannot afford.

[snip]

Regulators have also gathered evidence of other abuses in the industry, including brokers discouraging homebuyers from hiring lawyers to scrutinize mortgage documents and persuading borrowers to sign blank loan applications. As a result, the division has adopted emergency, and permanent, regulations banning fraudulent practices, particularly scams that target poor consumers with limited English skills.

Here's hoping other states follow suit, and quickly. Like, say, two years ago.

According to Ram Shriram, there's not enough middle managers out there. I also heard this meme from three sales executives in a speaker panel organized by one of my professors the other week.

Memories must be short around the Valley. Remember what happened a few years ago? The big tech bubble bust. Companies cut headcount and went out of business in droves. That cut the guts out of a lot of people's careers. An awful lot of the folks who should have spent 2001-2006 working their way up into those middle-management roles instead struggled to find work, got out of the business altogether, hunkered down in survival jobs, moved out of the area, or stagnated in roles they were overqualified for. Others went into their own startups or have made the leap to the executive level. At any rate, now that things are better, there's a great big hole in a lot of people's careers where the last 5 years should have been.

The real question is, why are any of these executives surprised by this?

Although to be fair, Shriram is not quoted as being surprised, so it might be incorrect to suggest that.

Maybe someone should rewrite that old folk song 'Where have all the flowers gone' and turn it into a YouTube video to help raise awareness of this critical business issue. What do you think?

Whether any of this is true or not, Mark Cuban doesn't know (nor do I) but it does pass the smell test and is an interesting 'behind the scenes' take on the Google-YouTube acquisition:

In the months preceding the sale of YouTube the complaints from copyright owners began to mount at a ferocious pace. Small content owners and big were lodging official takedown notices only to see their works almost immediately reappear. These issues had to be disclosed to the suitors who were sniffing around like Google but Yahoo was deep in the process as well. (News Corp inquired but since Myspace knew they were a big source of Youtube's traffic they quickly choked on the 9 digit price tag.) While the search giants had serious interest, the suitors kept stumbling over the potential enormous copyright infringement claims that were mounting.

[snip]

So the parties (including venture capital firm Sequoia Capital) agreed to earmark a portion of the purchase price to pay for settlements and/or hire attorneys to fight claims. Nearly 500 million of the 1.65 billion purchase price is not being disbursed to shareholders but instead held in escrow.

Thios passes my sanity check because it would be utterly irresponsible to not make some kind of provision for future copyright infringement claims against YouTube. Actually, 500 million might even be a low number, depending on how many lawsuits get filed.

The letter Cuban cites, however, goes on to explain how the whole game will be rigged so that the actual artists whose content has beeen reposted will not see any of the revenue the media companies collect from YouTube. That seems a bit more farfeteched to me, but I don't know the entertainment biz at all, perhaps that is SOP for them.

Who knows, the whole thing could just be sour grapes on Cuban's part, but it's still interesting reading.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a real estate expert. But when browsing through the online WSJ today, I was struck by some of the data in their article about the 'subprime' mortgage market. Here's a few tidbits:

- At least 20 subprime mortgage lending companies have either closed, been sold, and/or filed for bankruptcy.
- Almost 1.2 million foreclosure filings were reported in 2006, a 42% increase from 2005. That is a rate of one per every 92 US households.
- "Creative" subprime loans (such as interest-only and no-doc aka 'liar' loans) accounted for 47% of total loans issued in 2006. At the start of the decade, these types of loans were less than 2% of total mortgage loans.

As I said, I'm not an expert, but none of that looks like particularly good news to me. Even Ben Bernanke is starting to mention it as a possible concern.

One thing does make me wonder, though -- this article seems to be treating the market as if each of these mortgages were acquired by individual households. Yet it's also true that this recent real estate boom included a lot of speculation, and at least some of that speculation was financed via these same exotic subprime mortgages. (Casey Serin is a good example; he used a number of different subprime mortgages to unsuccessfully speculate on at least 6 properties). So -- my question is -- is the impact really going to be as broad as this article suggests, or will it be more localized?

I have no desire at all to ride out another recession so soon after that last one, so my hope is that things don't turn out as badly as they could. Whether I'm indulging in wishful thinking or not ... well, we'll see.

When the Starbucks Gossip blog posted this memo a day or so ago, it was roundly rejected as a fake, but apparently a leaked internal e-mail to Starbucks senior managers was the real thing. And it's fascinating reading. Here's a snippet:

...we desperately need to look into the mirror and realize it's time to get back to the core and make the changes necessary to evoke the heritage, the tradition, and the passion that we all have for the true Starbucks experience.

Hopefully, this will mean less of a focus on selling books and DVDs at Starbucks and more of a focus on good coffee.

I've always thought that it's not so much making mistakes, but whether or not you can learn from them, that's the true sign of a company that's going to succeed. Howard Schultz has done a tremendous job building Starbucks over the years, and this latest report would suggest that, any missteps notwithstanding, he's still on the right track.

Well, that was .... not pretty.

I'm not even remotely qualified to guess what's going to happen next. Go check out Ritholtz's site if you want a prediction.

One of the things I've always wondered about e-mail spam has been -- who is actually making money off this stuff, and how much? Well, an article Yahoo! News today shows that there is, in fact, serious money to be made by spamming. I'd always assumed that there had to be some profit in it, or else spammers would not keep on doing it, but this was the first time I've actually gotten a window into how much.

In one spam campaign involving Apparel Manufacturing Associates (APPM) the SEC said the company's stock closed at 6 cents on trading volume of 3,500 shares on Friday, December 15, 2006.

After a weekend spam campaign distributed e-mails proclaiming "Huge news expected out on APPM, get in before the wire, We're taking it all the way to $1.00," trading volume on Monday, December 18, 2006, soared to 484,568 shares with the price spiking to over 19 cents a share.

Two days later the APPM price climbed to 45 cents. However, by December 27, 2006, the price had slumped to 10 cents on trading volume of 65,350 shares, the agency said.

Fortunately, the SEC is starting to take some steps to try to reign this kind of stock manipulation in, but I suspect as long as spam and penny stocks are around, we won't be completely free from the practice.

A tip of the hat to Discourse.net for this bit of news:

Halliburton, the big energy services company, said today that it would open a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai and move its chairman and chief executive, David J. Lesar, there.

[snip]

The announcement about the Dubai move, which Halliburton made at a regional energy conference in Bahrain, comes at a time when the company is being investigated by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegations of improper dealings in Iraq, Kuwait and Nigeria. Halliburton has also paid out billions in settlements in asbestos litigation.

Halliburton officials did not elaborate today on what the shift of its top executive might mean. The move seemed to raise questions about whether Halliburton might gain tax advantages or other benefits from shifting into a foreign country with pro-business regulations.

One might also wonder what the extradition treaties with Dubai are like.....

It's hardly unusual to read a news item about corporate downsizing. This one caught my eye, though: Circuit City to cut more than 3,500 jobs. Here's why: The company is downsizing by laying off their highest-paid employees. Not the ones with the worst performance ratings, not the ones who've been there the shortest amount of time. They're firing their best-paid retail employees.

I don't know the details of Circuit City's employment practices, but generally speaking, you have to either be good at what you do and/or have been with the company a longer amount of time in order to get better paid. So if that holds true here, then Circuit City is deliberately dumping the cream of their retail workforce in order to save money.

In other words, they are firing the people who actually know where stuff is in the stockroom, or how to get it if it's not there. Laying off the ones who know how to ring in a return on the register without having to ask for help and take 10 minutes doing it. Getting rid of the people who actually know something about their products and can talk intelligently about them.

That sounds like an incredibly boneheaded move to me.

But what do i know? After all, I only managed a retail store. I wouldn't know anything about how much more productive a seasoned employee is than someone who's still learning how to do their job. Nope, I must be completely wrong.

Or maybe not. Even Home Depot seems to know better:

Circuit City's cuts come at a time when other retailers are trying to put more knowledgeable workers on store floors. Home Depot Inc., whose new chief executive is struggling to re-ignite sales growth at its stores, said it has raised pay to attract skilled tradespeople, such as carpenters and electricians.

Good luck with the layoffs, Circuit City. I think you're going to need it.

Here's some of the most sane writing I've seen on the subject:

It is not possible to for an average person to live a reasonably prosperous North American (or even European) lifestyle and reduce their footprint to one planet by themselves.

This point is worth pausing on, because so much of the green marketing BS around us tells us that the planetary crises we face are our fault, that it is our responsibility to fix them and that buying products which are marketed as "green" will fix that problem. The myth of individual lifestyle responsibility is so strong, most of us don't even comment on it anymore. But in many ways, it's a lie. What most needs to be changed in the world are the systems in which we are all enmeshed, and we ourselves, acting alone, are almost powerless to change those systems. To do that, we need better information, stronger connections and new ways of thinking.

Oh so true. Replacing your lightbulbs or recycling your cans is great, truly, but what's really going to turn this planet around is not what individual people do in their own homes, it's what happens in the factories and the oil refineries and in the boardrooms of companies across the world. You want to see real change? That's where it needs to happen. Organizations like Forest Ethics get that. Some others don't.

Go, buy some new CF lightbulbs today if it makes you feel better. Just don't mistake that for an action that's really helping the planet.

Looks like someone is finally going to offer iTunes some real competition. Amazon has a press release out announcing that it:

will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels. EMI Music's digital catalog is the latest addition to the store. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. Amazon's DRM-free MP3s will free customers to play their music on virtually any of their personal devices -- including PCs, Macs(TM), iPods(TM), Zunes(TM), Zens(TM) -- and to burn songs to CDs for personal use.

"Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO.

I've been happily buying music from iTunes because they have most of the music I want, at what I consider a fair price, with DRM that's at least manageable. If I can get all that without any DRM, well, that would be even more awesome.

I'm not surprised Amazon is doing this. They're one of the few companies big enough to stand up to the recoding industry and push back against their ridiculous demands. And if Amazon can get a decent selection of music available, then this will be a major shot across the bow of Apple.

Robert Scoble reads his feeds and notices that Fear of Google / Distrust of Google is growing.

I have no idea if Google is evil or not - I like to think they are not, but I don't have any knowledge one way or the other - but I completely agree that Google's public face is not helping matters.

Scoble's whole piece is good, but the closing comment is particularly apt:

I think Google has to be very transparent, very warm, and very open when it comes to privacy and the data it’s collecting on all of us and to many of us it’s coming across as closed, cold, and opaque. That leads to bad PR. Bad PR — if continued unabated — leads to government action. Just ask my friends at Microsoft.

Indeed.

I've been feeling very much in the minority this week. First off, Google launched their new Street View. By and large, the tech community seems to love it. Me, I feel very, very uncomfortable that someone can sit at their leisure at their desk, call up a highly detailed photo of the outside of my home, and view it from any number of different angles, all without having to be on the scene. But clearly, I'm missing something, because just about everyone else seems to think it's uber-cool, or at the very least, slick.

Now, Google is introducing Google Gears, and I am similarly unimpressed. Off-line access to web-based apps is one of the big issues for web-based computing, and it was only a matter of time before someone filled that rather obvious gap. However, solving that problem only brings another one into focus -- web based apps don't have even a remotely comparable feature set as their desktop-based rivals in some rather vital areas. Sure, it's great that your feed reader will work on an airplane, but Google Docs is not even close to being a good replacement for MS Word.

And this brings me back to some comments I made about Web 2.0 just last month:

What I would really love to see is people spending all that time, talent, and money on solving the problems that have NOT been solved yet. Search technology, for example. We've made some big strides in text-based search (although there is still much to do there too), but searching around graphics, video, or audio is lagging far behind. Or if you want to focus on web-based technology, can someone please come up with a cross-platform web conferencing system that doesn't suck?

Maybe, as with Street View, there's something to Google Gears that I am just not seeing. Maybe all those big honking piles of desktop code really do need to be replaced with slightly less big honking piles of Ajaxifed XML and JavaScript.

Maybe I need an attitude adjustment, or just a vacation.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'm right, and we need new solutions to new problems much more than we need more solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Back about 7 or 8 years ago, I was in the lounge at an industry tradeshow -- I think it was ISPCON, but I'm not sure -- hanging out and shooting the shit with about a dozen assorted techies & entrepreneurs. At one point, someone looked around the circle and said, "gee, we could start a hell of a company with the talent in here." Everyone laughed.

Years later, someone has taken that idea and run with it. And I really wish I'd known about it before it happened, because it sounds like an amazing experience.

Good luck, VoSnap!

An excellent nugget of advice from Seth's Blog this lovely Friday afternoon:

The art of marketing is not finding more money to do more marketing. It's figuring out how to tell a story that spreads with the resources you've got.

Oh so true.

A New York Times article on the millionaires of Silicon Valley is garnering mostly negative feedback today. And it's easy to see why. It's hard to have sympathy for people like this:

“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” [Gary] Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar

I can't say I'm all that sympathetic to people who got themselves onto a money treadmill and now feel that they can't get off it. You always have a choice, and if you think you don't, it's because you're not looking in the right places for options. If your role models are the folks with a net worth of $50 million, then yeah, you're a schlub for only having $5 million. Perhaps you might try spending a little time with people whose net worth is only $500 thousand instead? Is that too demeaning for you? Those people, after all, can't afford a nanny for the toddlers and new Acuras for the teenagers. They might even -- dare I say it? -- rent their homes and join the Y instead of a country club.

Is that too much like "admitting defeat"?

Cry me a freaking river.

Here's where I come from on this: I went to a very exclusive private school when I was growing up, and my family was on the lower end of the income spectrum for the school. Kids didn't have ipods and multi-function cellphones and $200 Gucci sunglasses back then, but some things were the same; many of my classmates had brand-new cars, designer jeans, shopping sprees at Bloomingdales, and spring break skiing trips to Aspen. I didn't. I'd like to say that it didn't matter, but that would be a lie. Of course you're going to feel bad if some people in your peer group have stuff you don't. What's important is how you deal with it.

If you're lucky, you take away the lesson that 'stuff' doesn't necessarily make you happy, that somebody is always going to have more stuff than you, and to be happy with the stuff you do have. If you're less lucky, you walk away with the ambition to get all that stuff, and then some, when it comes time for you to raise your own kids. And thus, a new generation of overworked treadmill-walkers is born.

Any accusations of sour grapes aside, there's also a business lesson to be drawn here. I was interested to see that one of the subjects of the article earned much of her wealth from being an early member of the team at Handspring (and later a senior staffer at Palm). One wonders if that company's ever-increasing inability to deliver products that people wanted might be linked to their own staff's disconnection from what life for "normal" people is like.

... you tend to get burned.

Noted in passing. Thanks, Barry.

Why cat blogging? Because they're a much-needed dose of perspective when Ben Bernanke powers up the helicopters.