“The basic newspaper, when you take out the Internet and all the other targeted publications that people are starting, is just not growing,” said P. Anthony Ridder, chairman and chief executive of Knight Ridder, which owns The Inquirer. “Newsprint costs are up significantly. Wages and health benefits are up. So you have the cost pressure on the one hand and the lack of revenue growth on the other. That’s really the problem, and everyone is having essentially the same problem.”
Yearly Archives: 2005
RFID & Privacy
If this sounds paranoid, take it up with IBM. The company filed a patent application in 2001 which contemplates using this wireless snooping technology to track people as they roam through ”shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, rest rooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, museums, etc.” An IBM spokeswoman insisted the company isn’t really prepared to go this far. Patent applications are routinely written to include every possible use of a technology, even some the company doesn’t intend to pursue. Still, it’s clear somebody at IBM has a pretty creepy imagination.
Wading Toward Home
Michael Lewis (with his better half, Tabitha Soren riding shotgun taking pictures) visits post flood New Orleans:
Immediately he had a problem: a small generator that powered one tiny window air-conditioning unit. It cooled just one small room, his office. But the thing made such a racket that, as he put it, “they could have busted down the front door and be storming inside and I wouldn’t have heard them. There could have been 20 natives outside screaming, ‘I’m gonna burn your house down,’ and I’d a never heard it.” Fearing he might nod off and be taken in his sleep, he jammed a rack filled with insurance-industry magazines against the door. (Haywood sells life insurance.) In his little office, he sat all night – as far as he knew, the last white person left in New Orleans. He tried to sleep, he said, but “I kept dreaming all night long someone was coming through the door.” He didn’t leave his air-conditioned office until first light, when he crept out and squinted through his mail slot. In that moment, he was what Uptown New Orleans had become, even before the storm: a white man, alone, peering out through a slot in search of what might kill him. All he needed was the answer.
Long Now Foundation Seminars – Online
Fascinating stuff.
Konkel on Madison’s Open Government
When you combine all of the above with other disturbing trends I’m seeing in City Hall of removing or threatening to remove people from committees if they don’t vote how the Mayor wants them to or even worse, the Mayor recently, in his own words, “holding a gun” to the TPC to get them to vote to increase the bus fares, one begins to wonder about how open and transparent our government is and if the public opinion matters.
Hut to Hut Ride
Hut System’s seven-day, 206-mile route from Telluride to Moab, Utah, is almost completely on USDA Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management roads, unpaved but well-maintained. Each segment averages about 35 miles a day. The route is not technically difficult (there are a few glorious stretches of single track available as optional routes), but you must be in decent shape to handle more than 16,000 feet of ascents at an average altitude of 9,000 feet. (The company offers a Durango-to-Moab route that is even more challenging.
Fight Rising Home Heating Costs
Natural gas prices have more than doubled since last year. Homeowners can expect to see, on average, a 50-percent increase in their bills this winter.
Renee Montagne talks to Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, about what homeowners can do to save on their heating bills.
WiFi America
How does free wireless broadband access and phone service everywhere sound to you? Google has a plan for San Francisco — it’s got telecom and cable companies worried.
Bogle’s New Book: The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Time magazine called him one of the world’s 100 most powerful and influential people. Now John Bogle weighs in on the current direction of America with his new book, The Battle for The Soul of Capitalism.
Bogle, who founded the Vanguard Group of mutual funds in 1974, was the company’s chairman until 2000. Vanguard, one of the largest fund groups in the world, holds accounts totaling more than $800 billion.
Tax Shelters: KPMG and Legal Issues
Jonathan D. Glater takes a fascinating look at the “Wonderworld” of the Tax Law, the US DOJ and the KPMG Tax Shelter Cases:
Eight former executives of the accounting firm KPMG and one outside lawyer have been indicted on charges stemming from their role in designing and selling questionable tax shelters. Yet so far, no court has decided that the shelters were improper.
One tax shelter promoter has asked a federal judge in San Francisco to tackle that very question: the legality of the shelters. And federal prosecutors in Manhattan appear to be worried that the judge might do that. Lawyers for the government have twice argued that the judge should wait for the criminal case to conclude.
More here.