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economic viewpoint
Incoming – Salon.com Political Coverage
For the past decade, my politics and science websites of choice beyond the big influencers [NY Times, Washington Post The Guardian, BBC and CNN] have been an eclectic and everchanging mix. Incoming has been Wired, MIT Technology Review, NPR, and RottenTomatoes. Constants are Politico, TheHill, ChristianScience Monitor, Pixlr/e, TheWeek.com/Cartoons. Outgoing/infrequently visited sites are TheDailyBeast, TheHuffingtonPost and
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How Much Value Has Jeff Bezos Added?
In a Medium essay Tim O’Reilly asks the question “how much value has Jeff Bezos added through his company Amazon?”. Now Tim is a successful publisher through O’Reilly Press of books and tools used in ITdevelopment. So Tim will be very familiar with Jeff’s two major business undertaking – the eCommerce goliath Amazon.com and the
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NYTimes: Meet the Democratic Candidates
NYTimes has taken the initiative and has recently presented defining profiles of 21 of 22 Democratic candidates for President. The profiles come from each cadidate’s answers to the same 18 questions about the upcoming Presidential contest and their reason for participating in it. Despite many requests by the NYTimes, Joe Biden declined to participate given that
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Payback on the Front Burner
Worldwide Inequality Becomes More Pronounced Both Wealth and Income continue to skew in favor of privileged 1% as seen in these reports and charts: First there is the trend of income inequlity shows three disturbing trends: First, the top 10% of the population continues to increase its disproportionate percentage of National Income giving substance to
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How Google Lost Computing Credibility
“Do No Evil” Google has in the past 3 years lost a lot of its technical lustre and credibility as Google+ has been killed. Google was once the goto computing innovator among scandal ridden monopolistic players like Apple, IBM and Microsoft. But now Google is crashing in technical and business stature. And It all seems to
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Its The Economy By The Stupidly Greedy
Make America Great Again has a half-life of about 1-2 years at most. Then disastrous economic decision making will have the Political Fiddler on the Roof calling the End Tune. And nowhere has this become more obvious in the cobbled together, greed and revenge ridden “GOP Tax Plan”. The “Plan” is in quotes because it
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Venezuela: Inequality Precursor
The Venezuelan economy is contracting quickly in part due to the halfing of oil prices [oil is Venezuela’s largest export] . But also social and political unrest as seen in the video is also a cause for the following economic distress: Venezuela Economy [source] GDP growth rate GDP/Capita in 2016 $ Unemployment Rate 2016 -10%
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A WTF Statement from President Obama?!
Its been rare that one would expect to a hear a WTF statement from President Obama; but in the waning days of his Presidency Barack Obama served up just such a message to his good friend and campaign cohort, David Axlerod. We don’t even have to paraphrase it because its all caught on tape.About Hope
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Malaise in the Investment Community
The following post from John Mauldin Economics hit my inbox by way of an MBA buddy. The almost palpable angst and uneasiness of the post is worth examining in more detail. Here is a capsule summary of the article which can be seen in its entirety here. Central Banks and the Rise of Extremism John Mauldin
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How are the US Job Creators Doing?
The US Job Creators are doing critical things very right by many Business standards. First and foremost, US Job Creators are making big , yes record profits. As seen in this chart for 2012. US Job Creators profits reached a new record level as a 11.3% of the total output of the economy: US Corporate
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Apple Abandons Web Designers
Two years ago, Takethe5th did a story on how Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and the Microsoft Minions did a 20 year continuous shafting of Web Developers. Well, in the Web World times change at a Back-to-the-Future pace. Now Apple under CEO Tim Cook has taken over the shit-on-you toilet and is shafting all those Web Designers
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Titanic Split Threatens the GOP
The Grand Old Party is coming apart at the seams. For the past 10 years the Republican party has played loyal supporters to its 1% sponsors [think NRA, Climate Change deniers, Wall Street, etc, etc] while allowing its Tea Party rump of 40-50 House members to dictate policy that is increasingly unpopular with the GOP’s own
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Incoming Jobs Tsunami: WTF! Economy
In the past week, Takethe5th has been describing the incoming Jobs Tsunami in which AI and massive processing capabilities now take over a large chunk of white collar as well as blue collar jobs. Well here is a conference by Silicon Valley Guru Tim O’Reilly called the Next Economy which confirms the pervasive nature of
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Ted on Jobs
This Ted Talk by Andrew Mcafee is supercalifragilisticexpialidociously optimistic about jobs: There are four existential wicked problems of increasing danger facing the World: 1)Man made climate change that demands wrenching alterations in how energy is produced and used worldwide; 2)Income inequality growing at exponential rates in both developed and developing countries. The ever more concentrated wealth concentrated
The Passing of Logic, Science, and Mr. Spock
Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock, passed away at 83 last Friday and captured the collective conscious in unexpected ways. Marketwatch, the blog of Wall Street, published a bulletin reserved for big Bull or Bear market movements on the day. The news captured headlines at the NYTimes, Entertainment Weekly, Toronto Globe and Mail, TheGuardian, Sydney Morning Herald,
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Scene on Google+ – Why Jobs Are Problem One
These are some of the data about the acceptance of article written by robot journalists. The gist of the paper is that Robot Journalists provide more trustworthy, reliable and provoked the following reaction on Google Plus. Ron Miller, a writer on IT trends noted “Am I about to be disrupted by robots? Possibly, but while
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Seen on Google + – More Political Irony
This Monday there was a classic Larry Summers story. It started with an editorial in the Washington Post calling for tax reforms that would redress a fraction of the income inequality that has accumulated over the past 30 years in the US. Larry called it the Downton Abbey economy. He also scuttled the argument that
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Massive Income and Wealth Inequality in the United States
Income and Wealth Inequality is about deserving and fairness. In a democratic society, income and accumulated wealth have to be unequal because effort and captured good fortune are not equally distributed. So by definition income and consequent wealth will not be even – call this expected inequality of earnings and consequent wealth. However this expected
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On Google Plus: Austerity vs Keynesian Economic Policy
Geoff Brandt asked the following question on Google Plus: I was having a discussion with an acquaintance of mine who is somewhat more conservative than I am. He was railing against most gov’t spending (perpetrated of course by “those Liberals in Washington”) and insisted our nation’s top priority other than defense should be to pay
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An Essay for the Coursera Class: Behavioral Economics
In the Coursera class Behavioral Economics taught by Duke Professor Dan Ariely, all the students had to write a mid-term essay in which they described the ideas of Behavioral Economics and how the methods of the discipline could be used to solve an economic problem. Despite the fact, that most of the methods in the
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Another View: Moores Law Slowing
Three weeks ago this blog presented Moores Law is Alive and Well. But reader reaction was mixed because the post emphasized growth in computing power rather than number of transistors per chip. But really Moores Law has two meanings in electronics. The strict original circuit design definition was that the number of transistors on a 2D integrated circuit chip would double
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Where is the David Einhorn for America
David Einhorn, the tiny $7Billion Hedge Fund manager, has tweaked the nose of computing’s Goliath, Apple. Since a week Thursday, David has shocked the US business world with his direct, loud, and “uncivil’ attack on Apple’s huge cash hoard of nearly $130Billion. And Apple’s cash hoard islikely getting bigger on a growth rate of 10%per quarter for the
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The Grand Trickle Down Deception
The constant refrain in the Presidential campaign is to give the Job Creators the money with various unconditional tax breaks, and those adventurous souls will have America up and working in no time flat. But overwhelming current evidence is this is not just a myth but a crass deception. The following articles in the NYTimes Dealbook ,
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Daily Facts: Total Taxes Paid As % of Income USA 2011
Given Mitt Romney’s disdain for 47% of Americans as tax moochers and the GOP mysterious “how are they going to pay for it in the proposed Ryan budget”, today’s daily facts looks at who and how much various income groups pay in total US taxes. But not just the total taxes paid by income group
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Fundamental Problem in US Health Care:The Course
There is a superb free course available from Coursera and the University of Pennsylvania on Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act. Dr Ezekiel Emanuel who is an Onclogist is a great speaker in this free Coursera program and he starts off by providing a clear chart of the fundamental problem facing healthcare in the United
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Free Online College Courses: Deep Impact
The free online courses available from Coursera [Stanford, Princeton, University of California at Berkley, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvannia] have broken the ice on online college courses. Now MIT has had a program for the past 5 years called OpenCourseWare which made course materials from more than 2,000 classes available free online. Typical MIT
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Google: Made In USA
Google is making its new Nexus Q Media Streamer in the USA. Its a medium sized commitment and it could go wrong because the price is on the high end for media devices despite some of the new features – see a review here. But the significance is not small as noted in the NYTimes and
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Two Superb, Free Online University Courses
Free online university courses have really hit their stride this quarter. Courses from Michigan, MIT, Stanford, University of California at Berkley are available now. Free course material has been available from a variety of sources. Near and dear to this blog and web developer are the w3schools set of tutorials on all key coding in web development
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Apple and China
The NYTimes story last week on the iEconomy in China has raised again the issue of working conditions and notably practices in China. By Apple executives own admission this is a sensitive issue which could spoil the Apple Brand. Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms.
Operating Systems as Natural Monopolies: Think Apple iOS
A computer operating system is very close to a natural monopoly. Controlling the dysfunctional effects of such monpolies has proven very difficult. A simple monopoly occurs when one supplier provides 60% or more of the product in a marketplace. Monopolies do not have to be dysfunctional. However, in profit maximizing markets there is a strong
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Wall Street as a High Risk Gambling Den
In options market trading ye Editor has always wondered why Naked Puts are allowed as transactions. Naked Puts mean I don’t own the underlying stock but I am guaranteed being able to sell it at a fixed price up to a fixed date. Why the transaction? If I own the underlying security a Natural Put
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