This morning I was chased out of the University of Wisconsin student union by a college student half my age telling me I couldn’t take photographs there. I know, I know…it wasn’t his fault, he was just doing his job. I asked him why I couldn’t take photographs there. He said everything in the Wisconsin Union was copyrighted and no one could take photographs inside the building without a “permit.”
I am begining to find that in Madison, Wisconsin, one of the most liberal cities in America, it is becoming increasingly difficult to take photographs on state owned and/or tax payer financed facilities (i.e. UW, Overture Center, Monona Terrace, etc.). Ironic, isn’t it? What’s worse, I was at a learning institution!
Investing in Ethanol
The current excitement over ethanol derives from research that has cut the cost of converting nonfood plant matter like grasses and wood chips into alcohol. Mr. Khosla says he believes that such ethanol, called cellulosic ethanol, will eventually be cheaper to produce than both gasoline and corn-derived ethanol.
Can investors whose pockets are not as deep jump into the ethanol market? Yes, but they are taking a big risk. Picking long-term winners among the companies that make ethanol — or, for that matter, develop other alternative energy technologies — is a very uncertain business. The few public companies that focus on ethanol are typically unprofitable. Pacific Ethanol, for example, has not yet had a profitable quarter and will not until at least the fourth quarter, when its first plant is scheduled to begin production, Mr. Langley said.
Interesting photo, new Janesville assembled Chevy Tahoe SUV with Vinod – a prominent Silicon Valley VC.
IRS Permits Tax Preparers to Sell Our Data
Would you ever agree to work overtime for free, indefinitely, creating profits for someone else?
I didn’t think so.
But that’s often what we do when we buy a product or service from companies. That’s because they can continue to make money off us by selling whatever personal information we give them in the course of the transaction. Your payback: more junk mail and greater risk of identity theft.
And now it looks very likely that tax preparers will be able to profit off clients in ways having nothing to do with taxes.
Thanks to proposed changes to the IRS’ privacy regulation of tax preparers, everyone from H&R Block to your local tax-prep shop may be allowed to sell their clients’ tax return information to any third party, including marketers and data brokers.
Mind you, they would need to get your consent, according to the proposed regulations.
The Case for a Consumption Tax
The debate over the choice between income and consumption taxation has been ongoing since the beginning of the modern economy, seemingly without end. Those who argue for an income tax usually claim that taxing capital income is central to a fair tax system because those with capital income appear to have a higher ability to pay. Moreover, reducing taxes on investment income would seem to reduce the progressivity of our tax system, a result that is particularly worrisome at a time of growing inequality.
Ligeti and a Madison Speeding Ticket
Flashing lights from an unmarked black sedan; sudden short blare of a siren out of nowhere. I pull over, but the police car doesn’t move on. Those lights, for me? For me?
I’d been tooling along John Nolen Drive, lost in Ligeti’s propulsive first Étude. Is that what it was about the throbbing blue Beetle, swimming along in a sea of cars going just as fast, that asked for special attention?
“Trusting the Marketplace”
Billmon takes on political/business hypocrisy.
UW Grad Carol Bartz Offers Tech CEO Advice
Carol Bartz has outlasted most CEOs of big companies. She has been chief executive of Autodesk for the past 14 years, when the median tenure is just five years. She led the Silicon Valley software company through economic ups and downs. In May, Ms. Bartz will relinquish her CEO post and become executive chairman. But her longevity as CEO gives her a rare perspective on what it takes to weather mistakes and business cycles and to be an agent of change.
Don’t rest on your honeymoon-period laurels.
When she first became CEO, Ms. Bartz joked that her task was “playing Wendy to the Lost Boys of Autodesk.” The company had one product, profits were sagging and employees, who brought their dogs and cats to the office, weren’t used to answering to anyone. Even by Silicon Valley standards, the atmosphere was chaotic, choking creativity.
What’s the Biggest Change Facing Business in the Next 10 Years?
In Fast Company’s first decade, we introduced readers to a lot of amazingly smart people. To launch our second, we asked 10 of our favorite brains what’s next–and how to get ready for it.
I think Malcolm Gladwell nails it, business will become much more active in political issues:
“Business has to find its national voice. It has to be engaged in the politics of this country in a way it’s not accustomed to. Right now, executives are very good at saying, ‘Cut our taxes, cut our regulations.’ And they’re really terrible at making far more important and substantive arguments about social policy. It’s time they stopped banging this one-note drum and started saying that a lot of the things that have been relegated to ideology are, in fact, matters of fundamental international competitiveness for this country.
Take, for example, health care. We are ceding manufacturing jobs to the rest of the world because we can’t get around to providing some kind of basic, uniform health insurance. Because of our strange ideological problem with nationalized health insurance, we’re basically driving Detroit out of business–which strikes me as a very counterintuitive, nonsensical policy. The simple fact is that GM and Ford and Chrysler cannot compete in the world market if they’re asked to bear the pension and health-care costs of their retirees. Can’t be done. It’s that simple.
Grow Your Own Oil, US
Researchers hoping to ease America’s oil addiction are turning sawdust and wood chips into bio-oil, a thick black liquid that could become a green substitute for many petroleum products.
Bio-oil can be made from almost any organic material, including agricultural and forest waste like corn stalks and scraps of bark. Converting the raw biomass into bio-oil yields a product that is easy to transport and can be processed into higher-value fuels and chemicals.
“It is technically feasible to use biomass for the production of all the materials that we currently produce from petroleum,” said professor Robert C. Brown, director of the Office of Biorenewables Programs at Iowa State University.
New Rand Healthcare Study
1. We get only 55 percent of recommended medical attention [TC: hey, didn’t an earlier Rand study show us that more care doesn’t translate into better health care outcomes?]
2. “Those with annual family incomes over $50,000 had quality scores that were just 3.5 percentage points higher than those with incomes less than $15,000….insurance status had no real effect on quality.”
This should make everyone uncomfortable, but most of all those who think that access to health insurance is a panacea. Here is the press release, the piece is in The New England Journal of Medicine. Am I supposed to believe the following?: