The Madison Food & Wine Show was held this weekend at the Alliant Energy Center. A first time visitor, I found the event enjoyable. Unsurprisingly, there was no shortage of cheese. One of the more interesting offerings was Swiss Valley's fondue. Whole Foods had an elaborate set of tastings, from Olives to cheeses. The surprise of the show? a knife sharpening service. Photos here. Gail Ambrosius (Dark Chocolate) was also a worthwhile stop. Website with links to vendor's site.
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Not content to just suck advertising dollars from Web search, Google is using its windfall to pay for an eclectic range of ambitious projects that have the potential to radically disrupt other industries. Among other things, it is offering to build a free wireless Internet network in San Francisco, plans to scan nearly every book published and is testing a free classified advertising system it calls Google Base.Interestingly, Google placed a full page color ad, seeking advertising sales people, in today's NY Times Business section. From what I can tell (I subscribe to the fishwrap version of the Times), this is rather rare. John Batelle raises some useful points as well.More quietly, Google is also preparing to disrupt the advertising business itself, by replacing creative salesmanship with cold number-crunching. Its premise so far is that advertising is most effective when seen only by people who are interested in what's for sale, based on what they are searching for or reading about on the Web. Because Google's ad-buying clients pay for ads only when users click on them, they can precisely measure their effectiveness - and are willing to pay more for ads that really sell their products.
Q: Last week, we had as our guest Stanford Professor Michael Boskin, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to the first President Bush. Boskin invoked an image of Europe of high taxes, high spending, overly generous social welfare networks, high unemployment and stagnant growth as something the United States must avoid at all costs. What is the European view of that critique?Bruton was formerly Prime Minister of Ireland in the 1990's.
A: If you took each of the 50 states in the U.S., you would find quite different economic performance as between Mississippi and California or as between Washington state or West Virginia. There are varieties in Europe, just as there are varieties here in the United States.
On average, productivity per hour worked is as high in Europe as it is in the United States, right across the board. In some countries like Ireland and the Netherlands, it is higher. However, Europeans work fewer hours. They work fewer hours per year, per week and per lifetime. They retire earlier.
rganisations also need to select managers with the potential to become good leaders and fulfil the leadership skills required.
They need to give them the right training to help managers to gain skills and become good leaders.
There needs to be a clear career development policy in place, as leadership requirements will vary depending on the task and role.
Leadership development should be integrated closely with career development, it added.
Internet usage increased with education, income and the presence of school-age children at home, the report found. It was lowest among adults who have not graduated from high school.
School-age children are most likely to use home computers to play games or do school work. Adults are most likely to use home computers for e-mail, to search for information about products and services, and to read news, weather and sports information.
The report is based on data from the bureau's October 2003 Current Population Survey, the country's primary source of labor statistics. It is the bureau's latest information on computer and Internet use, though it is two years old and experts say Americans' computer habits are quickly evolving.
"We actually think the (Internet) penetration in households is higher," said Greg Stuart, president and CEO of the Internet Advertising Bureau, which helps online companies increase revenue.
EFF:
Agreeing with a brief submitted by EFF, a federal judge forcefully rejected the government's request to track the location of a mobile phone user without a warrant.Strongly reaffirming an earlier decision, Federal Magistrate James Orenstein in New York comprehensively smacked down every argument made by the government in an extensive, fifty-seven page opinion issued this week. Judge Orenstein decided, as EFF has urged, that tracking cell phone users in real time required a showing of probable cause that a crime was being committed. Judge Orenstein's opinion was decisive, and referred to government arguments variously as "unsupported," "misleading," "contrived," and a "Hail Mary."
nd he might not even be done yet: In July the New York Post reported that NBC Universal is in talks to acquire DreamWorks SKG, a move that would beef up its movie portfolio.So far, sticking with content looks like a smart bet. Even as NBC plummeted to fourth place in viewership, cable and film earnings kept the company, which is 80 percent owned by GE (GE) and 20 percent by Vivendi, growing in the double digits. But Wright has more on his mind than a replacement for Friends. Electronic piracy, the bane of the music industry, is starting to hit movies. Google, TiVo, and Yahoo are threatening to upend the video business. Wright still believes he’s made the right bet -- content, he says, will have value, no matter who distributes it. But he openly admits that the Internet is making things "awkward" for him. Business 2.0 met with Wright to find out how he plans to sort things out.
Anaheim, Calif., will consider franchising EarthLink to operate a municipal network: This is the clearest proposal I've heard to date regarding the franchising and exclusivity aspect of municipal broadband networks. Many requests for proposals (RFPs) hint at or ignore the fact that a winning bidder may ask for or be granted exclusive use of facilities like poles, towers, building tops, and other city resources. This article from Government Technology notes that Anaheim's City Council will consider a 20-year agreement with EarthLink that will award the company an exclusive franchise. Anaheim has some fiber, and EarthLink would gain access to that.
he price won't stay under a dollar, but even at $1.96 a gallon, drivers will be smiling. Cory said the corn-based fuel gives him fewer miles per gallon, but he figures he's still 4 to 5 cents per gallon ahead with the savings at the pump. He also likes the fact that he's helping local farmers. "I think anything we can do to help our own markets and build up our own economy is a lot better off and this is really clean burning fuel," he said.
The battery of the future, if a Berkeley startup gets its way, looks something like a fat stick of butter with metal grills stuck on the sides.
And it isn't a battery, not technically at least. It's a 4-inch-high fuel cell that should last 10 times longer than the batteries it was designed to replace.
Its inventors, founders of a firm called H2Volt, have joined the hunt for one of the technology industry's Holy Grails -- a new power source capable of running the portable electronics products that grow more complex every year
Tom Moon:
If you think American rock bands face long odds chasing success, consider the improbable tale of Sigur Ros. The five-piece band from Iceland makes spacey progressive music, with often-indecipherable lyrics. Despite those apparent handicaps, the band has gone from playing small clubs to headlining large international rock festivals. The band's fourth studio CD is called Takk..., which means "Thanks."
We won't stop until every San Franciscan has broadband access," says Chris Vein, the senior technology advisor to San Francisco's Mayor Gavin Newsom. It's not only rhetoric. His boss is one of the nation's most visible proponents of so-called muni Wi-Fi. Because he runs San Francisco, Newsom probably gets more than his fair share of ink. Some think that he also harbors ambitions to one day run for U.S. president--and nothing would look better on his resume than a line about how the city extended affordable broadband access to all its residents.
But Newsom is only picking up on a theme increasingly sounded by politicians elsewhere. The city of Philadelphia has also announced a high-profile plan to provide Internet access to its citizens. From its point of view, broadband is a necessity, not a luxury. With the United States' ranking for broadband penetration plummeting from third place to 16th in just four years, this is more than an academic concern. The fear is this will translate into massive job losses to other nations.
From Chris Edwards’ new book, Downsizing the Federal Government (which cited CAGW):2005 - 13,997
2004 - 10,656
2003 - 9,362
2002 - 8,341
2001 - 6,333
2000 - 4,326
1999 - 2,838
1998 - 2100
1997 - 1,596
1996 - 958
1995 - 1439
Using 2005 numbers, by voting down the “Bridges” amendment, the Senate let the country know that it was unwilling to defund 2 out of 13,997 pork projects today. That’s 0.0142887762 percent.
What do you get when you mix two parts money, a healthy dose of brains and another three parts money? Why, Silicon Valley, of course. The most opportunistic place in the world.The Madison area has plenty of cash. We simply must be willing to use it. Judy Newman notes that Wisconsin lags in high-tech jobs.
Lawmakers want to spend $3 billion to make sure millions of Americans won't wake up to blank TV screens when the country makes the switch to all-digital broadcasts.Meanwhile, we lag behind the world in deploying the future, broadband internet.
The subsidy was approved Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee as part of legislation that would set April 7, 2009, as the firm date for television broadcasters to end their traditional analog transmissions and send their broadcasts via digital signals.
The Voluntary Milking System (VMS) allows cows to decide when to be milked, and gives dairy farmers a more independent lifestyle, free from regular milkings, the company says.Slashdot has more.
DeLaval was started in 1883 by Swedish inventor Gustaf de Laval. It sells a variety of dairy supply and "cow comfort" products aimed at increasing dairy yields. It claims to lead the automatic milking machine market, with a 53 percent share, and says it has sold more than 1,000 VMSs, in all European countries, Canada, Japan, and Mexico.
Sam Dillon and Stephen Labaton:
The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers.
Toshio Fuji published a gorgeous VR journey: The way to Mt. Fuji. Quicktime VR
All must be corralled in one place and then processed using Allen's core mantra of "Do it, delegate it, defer it". If the action takes less than two minutes, do it there and then. If longer, you either hand off to someone else or defer it into your pending tray. Otherwise it is trashed or filed. The in-tray thereby becomes sacrosanct. You never put stuff back into "In". Never.Getting Things Done by David Allen
On the web, for example, Getting Things Done (GTD) has gone supernova. Web and IT professionals have taken Allen's core ideas and refined them into ever more effective tips called "life hacks". Adherents swap these across a broad network of blogs, wikis and websites such as 43Folders.com - all amid a considerable amount of one-upmanship over who has the biggest and best system.
In his latest informal white paper, Belk takes aim at mobile WiMax, a not-yet-finished standard that’s not expected to appear in base stations for deployment until 2007, although all tea leaves I read look like 2008 for any carrier deployment. (My only quibbles have to do with how he compares Wi-Fi usage to cell data usage, and how he boosts ubiquity over speed—but they’re not worth going into in length as the quibbles are small compared to agreement.)WiMax "could" radically change wireless internet services. On the other hand, it's been just around the corner for awhile....
One of the most popular books among American military officers serving in Iraq is Seven Pillars of Wisdom -- the accounts of T. E. Lawrence, the British colonel who rallied Arab tribal leaders during World War I. Lawrence wrote about unconventional warfare and the people of the region.Fascinating stuff, particularly his map. More photos later.
A new exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum features a long-lost map of the Middle East drafted by Lawrence and presented to the British cabinet in 1918. It provides an alternative to present-day borders in the region, taking into account local Arab sensibilities rather than the European colonial considerations that were dominant at the time.
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Wisconsin State Senate President Alan Lassee on AB 15:
I hope to set the record straight that ethanol is a welcome choice for citizens and taxpayers statewide. As the price of gasoline continues to skyrocket, we need to examine the use of alternative fuels and other means to ease our burden every time we fill up our tanks. One of the main reasons I support Assembly Bill 15 is my belief that we need to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and break the stranglehold of foreign oil sheiks. To me, it is a no-brainer that ethanol, which can be produced in state by the corn grown by our farmers, is a good start to reducing our dependence on foreign oil.The Renew Energy Blog has another perspective on this.
In some quarters of the Internet, the three most hated letters of the alphabet are DRM. They stand for Digital Rights Management, a set of technologies for limiting how people can use the music and video files they've purchased from legal downloading services.
Richard L. Kaplan:
The President of CBS News says: "On most matters there are multiple points of view out there as opposed to a single, discoverable truth."
Norihiko Shirouzo & Jathon Sapsford:
A battle for power and influence is under way in the auto industry, as the basic technology under the hoods of mass-market cars goes up for grabs for the first time in nearly a century.Amid soaring gasoline prices, car makers are rushing to use hybrid engines, which boost fuel efficiency by combining a traditional gasoline motor with an electric one. The result is a race among the world's automotive giants that -- like the VHS vs. Betamax brawl in the early days of videocassettes -- could redraw the industry's hierarchy and system of alliances for years to come.
A EFF led research team recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document. Bruce Schneier has more on the DocuColor scheme.
This past summer's widescale auto discount, or "employee pricing" programs and car manufacturer's attempts to ween themselves from such initiatives are discussed over at Autoweek.
Kristian Knutsen and Marc Eisen provide extensive coverage of Tuesday night's Madison City Council vote to support refinancing the Overture Center. Knutsen live blogs the meeting while Eisen talks with former mayor Paul Soglin and obtains his views on the matter.
Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER.via Xeni
Carolina Braunschweig, 28, worked as a reporter covering the venture-capital industry for Thomson Corp. in San Francisco. During that period, she also began contemplating the direction of her career and considering ways to supplement her modest reporter salary.
Ms. Braunschweig launched cmbsweets in June 2004, selling jams over the Internet at cmbsweets.com. Today her product line, which includes strawberry, boysenberry and olallieberry jams and apple-honey butter, is also sold in stores in New York, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The privately funded $5 million dollar wireless network services a modest 700 square miles and seems to be the only show in town.
Local Activist and all around great person Barbara Golden is starting to rock and roll with her blog. RSS Feed here.
A rather amazing paradox: Harriet Mier's Dallas law firm: Locke, Liddell & Sapp provided legal opinions for Ernst & Young's tax shelters. The firm, unlike KPMG and it's former partners, has not been indicted.
Allen Kenney has more (PDF):
"Ms. Miers was obviously not directly involved in the CDS opinions. Most otherwise sophisticated non-tax lawyers inside law firms wouldn't be able to decipher what is or isn't accurate in a lengthy tax opinion," said Chuck Rettig, a tax litigator in the Beverly Hills, Calif., firm of Hochman, Salkin, Rettig, Toscher & Perez. "If [E&Y] approved something like CDS, it was historically unlikely to be significantly questioned by other professionals."However, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee might be forced to consider whether Locke's involvement with the opinion letters affects Miers's fitness to serve on the country's highest court. President Bush has emphasized her experience managing a major law firm in defending her nomination.
"She had the opportunity to have her ethical antennas tweaked here," said Paul Caron, a tax law professor at the University of Cincinnati and the operator of the popular "TaxProf Blog" Web site. "Those ethical antennas were, perhaps, not as sensitive that they should have been."
One item on the Judiciary Committee's questionnaire for Miers asks her to disclose if her firm has been subject to any investigations: "State whether, to your knowledge, you or any organization of which you were or are an officer, director, or active participant has ever been under federal, state, or local investigation for a possible violation of any civil or criminal statute or administrative agency regulation." Another item asks Miers to provide the committee with any "unfavorable information that may affect your nomination."
Phone and cable companies will never be Internet companies. Never. Nor will Newspapers or TV networks. But the latter don't matter as much, because they don't deliver Internet service to homes and businesses. Phone and cable companies do. The Net depends on them.Locally, TDS, to their credit does offer 4MB symmetrical dsl service (4mbps up and down).
If Phone and cable companies took the trouble to provide unencumbered symmetrical service — same speeds up and down — and stood prepared to help individuals and businesses of every size use the Net in original ways that they see fit — to engage in Free Enterprise in the open marketplace the Net truly is — countless ways of making money on service to those customers would manifest themselves to the providing companies.
For example, I would gladly pay $100 per month for a block of six IP addresses, no port blockages, and 1Mb of symmetrical service to my home. I would also gladly pay more on a tiered basis for higher levels of traffic and higher grades of provisioned service. Also perhaps for hosting. Offsite data backup (a potentially huge business for which high upstream speeds are required). And perhaps much more. And I'm sure there are millions of small businesses out there that would be glad to do the same. But most of us are stuck with a choice between 1) a shitty asymmetrical service from a phone company that wishes it could still charge for time and distance; and 2) and a shitty asymmetrical service from a cable company that wishes it were still just in the TV channel delivery business.
On the ITunes Store, you can buy the latest episode to Lost and some other shows the day after they air on Network TV. in this case ABC, for $1.99. Sounds simple and reasonable. Not anything earth shattering right ?I think this is correct - but - I'm not sure about the pricing. Some of it is not worth much, while other shows/documentaries (PBS?) are quite well done.
With its elegant low-slung copper-clad building in a sophisticated garden setting and gravity-defying, twisting tower, the M.H. de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park will achieve every museum's goal -- to educate the public -- about art as well as architecture.
Not since Frank Lloyd Wright's futuristic Marin Civic Center was completed in 1957 has the Bay Area seen a significant new civic structure that does not affect a classical or postmodern pose. For architecturally conservative San Francisco, it's the equivalent of St. Louis' 1960s stainless steel arch, a gateway to bigger, more exhilarating ideas in a post-Bilbao Guggenheim age.
Why? Because the information society is reversing flow. What began as an experiment among a few software nerds has, thanks to the Internet, expanded into other disciplines, notably media and law. But it won’t stop there. Advertising. Branding. Distribution. Consumer research. Product development. Manufacturing. They will all be turned upside down as the despotism of the executive suite gives way to the will, and wisdom, of the masses in a new commercial and cultural epoch, namely: The Open Source Revolution.
“We’re tired of the 20th-century model of being passive consumers of mass content,” says J.D. Lasica, author of Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation. “We’re transitioning to a new kind of culture. More participatory, more open, more interactive where the locus of control passes.”
Lasica, who believes for example that by now Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain, doesn’t think he’s demanding anything outlandish.
Secondary in my mind (not by much) to the DRM goal vector is the technology vector. This is where Hollywood's need to protect its turf has turned into a gift from heaven for the technology companies that incessantly seek out market control points through the use of proprietary technologies. To you, proprietary generally means one of two things. Lack of compatibility or increased cost to get compatibility. Today, the different DRM technology makers are in a race to drive as much DRMed content (DRMed with their different DRM technologies that is) into market as possible. By doing so, they are securing the future of their playback technologies because you'll always need them to access your content. In this context (driving DRMed content to market), Microsoft is the tortoise and Apple is the hare
Milwaukee working on citywide wireless network - 2005-10-12
The city of Milwaukee is in negotiations with Midwest Fiber Networks, Milwaukee, to have the company install a citywide wireless network at a cost of $20 million to $25 million.
While Bill Gates visited the UW Wednesday (more from the Badger Herald), Steve Jobs introduced new imacs, ipods (with video playback) and the ability to buy and download video online, via the iTunes music store (lookout Netflix). John Markoff and Laura Holson have more on Jobs introductions:
But Mr. Jobs, Apple Computer's co-founder and chief executive, concluded a 90-minute presentation at a theater here by framing his plans in the broadest possible terms. "I think this is the start of something really big," he said. "Sometimes the first step is the hardest one, and we've just taken it."View the presentation here (Wynton Marsalis plays toward the end, which is simply wonderful).Apple is not the first company to enter the market for digital video. A range of efforts are under way by consumer electronics companies and studios looking for ways to make high-quality digital video available on computers and hand-held players.
Richard T. Wilkey (owner of Fisher-Barton), who runs a small Wisconsin company that makes cutting blades for lawn mowers and harvesting equipment, worries that he will soon be vulnerable to competition from China. But he is afraid that by the time he gets help from Washignton, it ma be too late.
The recent indictment of some KPMG partners makes for very interesting reading. In the months leading up to it (and the now-rumored indictment of other tax advisors on similar grounds), numerous news stories suggested the KPMG accountants had somehow knowingly participated in tax fraud by creating fake losses for wealthy clients. Whether or not this proves true, the indictment makes no such allegation. While the accountants and their clients may have done some bad things, the notion that their behavior is criminal, and even sufficiently criminal to threaten the very existence of this major firm and its thousands of jobs, casts doubt on the fairness and judgment with which the federal prosecutors have exercised their discretion.
Why did they do so in this case? Probably for the simple reason that they are -- quite properly -- offended by the proliferation of newfangled and economically questionable tax shelters, yet at the same time exasperated that Congress shows no interest in legislating these shelters out of existence or enacting a clear "business purpose" requirement, in spite of repeated requests from the Internal Revenue Service. The prosecutors seem to be venting their frustration over this failure to act by fashioning felony charges out of ethereal legal material.
Peter DeLorenzo points out the stakes in play with Delphi's bankruptcy:
The Delphi bankruptcy is the latest major crack in the pressure cooker that the U.S. auto industry has become over the last two decades - only this one is definitely the tipping point into a dimension that industry insiders have been dreading. Lower cost competition from around the world has changed the auto manufacturing landscape completely - and Detroit has been operating under a model that has been obsolete for years. Strapped with a crushing wage and benefits structure negotiated in an environment fueled by an optimism that in retrospect had absolutely no right to exist, the American car companies and the United Auto Workers union are now facing a future that revolves around a harsh reality that comes down to this one simple but all-encompassing statement: change or die.
With major companies and nations large and small adopting similar logic, the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even before the polar ice began shrinking more each summer, countries were pushing into the frigid Barents Sea, lured by undersea oil and gas fields and emboldened by advances in technology. But now, as thinning ice stands to simplify construction of drilling rigs, exploration is likely to move even farther north.
Yes … that’s David Ansel, the Soup Peddler, in a lengthy spread from November’s issue of FOOD AND WINE magazine. (Nice to see the Law of Remarkability in action.)
This autumn we find the Soup Peddler in the beginning throes of his fifth soup season. But this year, many things have changed for Brand Autopsy’s favorite jumboSHRIMP Marketing business. Gone is the infamous delivery bike in favor of deliveries by refrigerated trucks. And gone is the single-minded soup menu. In its place is an expanded menu including entrees because as David said in an email to his Soupies,
he Boston Transportation Department, among other duties, hands out parking tickets. If a car has too many unpaid parking tickets, the BTD will lock a Denver Boot to one of the wheels, making the car unmovable. Once the tickets are paid up, the BTD removes th boot.
The white SUV in this photo is owned by the Boston Transportation Department. Its job is to locate cars that need to be booted. The two video cameras on top of the vehicle are hooked up to a laptop computer running license plate scanning software. The vehicle drives around the city scanning plates and comparing them with the database of unpaid parking tickets. When a match is found, the BTD officers jump out and boot the offending car. You can sort of see the boot on the front right wheel of the car behind the SUV in the photo.
"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."
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.More here.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.
The usually excellent (though some of their latest books make me wonder) Lonely Planet has launched travel podcasts. Fabulous!
Contrary to what has been reported in the media, however, the IRS does not "ban" tax shelters. Whether a shelter qualifies as a tax deduction is, like any other point of law, adjudicated in court. But BLIPS, FLIP, OPIS and the other tax shelters in this case have never been brought before a judge, so their legality and legitimacy has never been settled as a point of law.Never. The way tax law has usually developed in this country is that the IRS issues its point of view on a shelter, putting taxpayers who use it on notice. If the IRS then takes the taxpayer to court over the shelter, he has the chance to respond before a judge, who makes a ruling and precedents are thus established. In this case, the IRS has called in the prosecutors first.
This in itself is striking. Despite some recent legal setbacks, the IRS has an excellent track record of obtaining favorable rulings on tax shelters it dislikes. Yet no taxpayer has been brought to court over these shelters, and no judge has ruled on whether they "work," in the jargon of the tax-shelter business. In America, last we checked, the accused are innocent until proven guilty. That gives this KPMG trial an Alice-in-Wonderland quality; the accused are on trial for promoting a fraudulent tax shelter that has never been proved to be fraudulent in the first place.
This is not the first time the Justice Department has taken this route, and recent history suggests it may have a tough road ahead. Last November, Justice froze $500 million in assets at Xelan, a charitable trust set up for doctors in California, alleging that the trust was a vehicle for tax fraud. Six weeks later, the Federal Court for the Southern District of California threw out the case, noting, among other shortcomings, that the prosecutors could not show that any court had ever ruled that Xelan's activities were illegal under the tax code.
The first private space ship took its place Wednesday next to Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, a hoped-for symbol of a new era of space tourism alongside the icon of trans-Atlantic flight.Watch video and photos of SpaceShip One's appearance at the recent Oshkosh EAA AirVenture here.
As mentioned here, I, too, would like the 5.25% tax rate that our good Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported (to repatriate foreign profits via a one year tax break). Timothy Aeppel looks at the results:
But it's far from clear whether the spending has spurred the job growth that backers of the break touted.A law signed by President Bush shortly before the 2004 election allows companies to transfer profit from overseas operations back to the U.S. this year at a special low tax rate of 5.25%. Businesses often keep such funds outside the country in part to avoid paying taxes in the U.S., where the effective rate on repatriated profit for many companies is normally closer to 25%. Backers said the measure would provide an incentive to companies to invest those funds in U.S. operations.
Most companies using the break have offered only broad outlines for how they intend to use their windfall. For the most part, they say they are using the bulk of the money for tasks such as paying down debt and meeting payrolls. Direct job creation rarely appears on the list.
Some companies are even bringing home piles of cash while continuing to downsize. Colgate-Palmolive Co., of New York, said in July that it planned to repatriate $800 million, at a time when the company also is pursuing plans to shut a third of its factories and eliminate roughly 12% of its work force, or 4,450 people, over four years.
Quite useful - great job, Shane.
Outside Vernal, Utah, officials with Oil-Tech Inc. say they have perfected an older technology of baking oil from shale in a furnace and wants government approval to mine 1,600 acres of state land plus access to 30,000 tons of shale left outside an abandoned mine on federal land.
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Living in Denver during the mid 1980's, I learned quite a bit about that era's oil shale collapse. Paul Foy takes a look at the growing interest in this potential 1 trillion barrel reserve (4X Saudi Arabia's holdings):
Shell believes it can make its technique economical as long as crude oil stays above $30 a barrel, but it is five years away from proving the technology or deciding whether to build a commercial-scale operation, said Terry O'Connor, a company vice president for external and regulatory affairs.Outside Vernal, Utah, officials with Oil-Tech Inc. say they have perfected an older technology of baking oil from shale in a furnace and wants government approval to mine 1,600 acres of state land plus access to 30,000 tons of shale left outside an abandoned mine on federal land.
Eric Rougier published a gorgeous night vr scene of the Grand Palais in Paris.
The Violence Against Women Act may be about to do violence to Americans' right to privacy.Senator Kohl is up for re-election in 2006. I think Kathleen Falk would make an excellent candidate!A U.S. Senate committee (Judiciary, which includes both Wisconsin Senators: Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl - contact them on this issue!) has adopted an amendment to the VAWA legislation that would add the DNA of anyone detained by the cops to a federal DNA database called "CODIS."
Note that it doesn't require that you're convicted of a crime or even formally arrested on suspicion of committing one. Mere detention -- might a routine traffic stop eventually qualify? -- will be sufficient for CODISification. (Current law only authorizes blood or saliva swabs and entry into CODIS for people convicted of a crime.)
:Instead of poking around tribal villages in Papua New Guinea or Amazonian rain forests, cultural anthropologists are invading suburbs and cities to find out how people use products while eating meals, working in the office, and even while driving. "We live in a culture where knowing your customers one by one as individuals is more important than ever before," said Ross Goldstein, a researcher with the BRS Group. "Large mass demographic trends are no longer as predictive as they once were because the marketplace is too diversified."
This looks like a useful idea. California only, for now.
At Healthia, we are tremendous believers in the consumer driven healthcare movement sweeping America. Our goal is to provide America's first comparison shopping and research portal for consumer driven healthcare, enabling businesses and their employees to choose health plans and ancillary health benefits objectively and transparently.David Cowan has a useful summary of the movement behind this: "Consumer Directed Healthcare" or CDH. Cowan also references this CDH study.At our beta launch today (2005-Aug-11), we serve the California market with a strong emphasis on HSA compatible plans. We also enable any user across the nation to compare over 50 leading HSA products.
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