Category: Business

Its a Death Trap, It’s a Suicide Rap

No Comments

Rupert Murdoch has decided that Times of London and the Sunday Times will go behind a pay-wall.

I generally think that this is a bad idea since:

  • People haven’t paid for content from news publications for over a century, it’s been advertising supported, with the cover/subscription price covering only a portion of the actual cost of printing.
  • Putting general interest content behind a firewall tends to remove it from the Internet consciousness, which drives subscriptions and ad revenue down. (See the New York Times‘ abortive attempt with their OP/EDs)

That being said, I think that Murdoch’s plans go way beyond a simple pay-wall, and straight into crazy town, because, as the New York Post, a Murdoch publication that I would like to see vanish into pay-wall obscurity notes, observes, the Times of London won’t just be going behind a pay-wall, they will also lock out the search engines almost completely:

The UK’s Times and Sunday Times are putting up search walls in addition to pay walls.

The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned Web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories.

Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google’s Web crawler. Except for their homepages, no stories will show up on Google.

The papers are betting that loyal readers will covet access to scarce content. Critics say the move will make it tougher to attract new readers who discover content by searching the Web.

This isn’t just a misbegotten business plan, it’s an attempt to force payment for links, and it ain’t gonna work, at least not unless Murdoch can convince various legislatures to make linking illegal, a course of action that I find profoundly unlikely, since it essentially bans the web.

OK, Maybe Not Getting the Washington Post Gig Wasn’t So Bad

No Comments

I while back, I applied to, and did not make the cut for, the Washington Post‘s America’s Next Great Pundit contest.

Maybe it was the best outcome, though I could use the money, because it appears that the paper is now going to blogs and asking for links to their blogs post, as well as the authority to give said bloggers their assignments, for the princely sum of $0.00 (€0.00):

Five weeks ago, I received an unsolicited offer from the Washington Post. They asked if they could post my picture and biography on their website and link to every new blog post appearing here if I agreed to produce regular original content for them at their request. I turned them down. Why?

Because they wanted me to work for them for nothing.

The Post is organizing a “local blogging network” linking to selected blogs from their website and asking bloggers to submit original content, which would be edited by them. The Post’s rights to that content would be enforceable under a written agreement. That agreement was written as follows:

…………

The Post is also demanding the, “non-exclusive right to republish the Work (in whole or in part) on the Site in real time simultaneous with Your own publication of the Work, as well as the right to adapt, edit, display, store, and promote the Work in connection with such republication on the Site.”

This deal sucks worse than a coupon for a week of sessions at John Boehner’s favorite tanning salon, though it might not suck worse than a coupon for two weeks at John Boehner’s favorite tanning salon.

Credit Where Credit is Due

No Comments

General Stanley McChrystal is now saying that Dick Cheney’s model for the army,* with contractors galore, simply does not work:

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan said April 16 that the military is wasting money by employing too many private contractors to do jobs better done by soldiers or local Afghans.

“We have created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that is greater than it ought to be,” General Stanley McChrystal told an audience of French officers and military experts at France’s defense university in Paris.
Related Topics

“I think we’ve gone too far. I think that the use of contractors was done with good intentions so that we could limit the number of military. I think in some cases we thought it would save money. I think it doesn’t save money.”

This is the right thing to say, but it’s a tough thing to say, since lucrative consulting gigs follow general officers who play the game, and now McChrystal will have to work for a living after retiring.

Of course, it’s going to take years to rebuild the capabilities that Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II privatized and moved out of the Pentagon.

*In one of his worst miscalculations in a lifetime of abject failure, Cheney did this as Secretary of Defense under Bush I, where he decided to privatize everything in sight that was not a “primary military function.”

Quote of the Day

No Comments

This man should spend the rest of his life digging coal a mile below the earth with his bare hands

Crusiing the innerwebz, a member of the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS discovered the following video of Massey CEO Don Blankenship’s.

It’s short, but you will note that he thinks that agencies attempting to make coal mines safer are as “silly as global warming.”

Well, one of the users, Jolly Reaper, on said the following:

If he doesn’t get whacked by a miner, this nation really is full of pussies.

It’s true.

One of the great tragedies of US culture is that when disgruntled employees go on shooting sprees, they target their coworkers, as opposed to upper management, which should then be followed by a few acquittals.

While any loss of life is tragic, if there was a real fear of death among upper management as to their safety, we would see better management.

It seems that even workers going postal give too much deference to the MBA/Banker types.

Business Lose

No Comments

The New Republic, which has over the past 36 years descended from a well respected liberal voice to a a bastion of white ivy-league entitlement, plagiarism, fabulism (making sh%$ up), Republican talking points, and a cut in its publishing frequency, and its circulation, by nearly ½.

Well, in yet another step towards total irrelevancy, the magazine has decided to start charging for “premium” online content, whatever that means.

It’s a magazine that you could not pay me to read, and now they want us to pay them.

In China, He Would Already Would Be Dead

No Comments

As would be the regulators and judges that Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship has assiduously cultivated over the years.*

They would have been tried, convicted, and had a bullet in the base of their skull.

As it is, the Upper Big Branch Mine, where 25 miners have died and 4 are still missing, has a long history of repeated violations, 1,342 since 2005, and 50 just last month is a case of a wealthy business owner buying off the local Mandarins, and then having a very public disaster.

This is classically a situation where the Chinese legal machinery rolls into action and does a few executions for PR.

They’ve done it to corrupt brokers, and it appears that in this case, the model would be to execute Blankenship, the judge, and a few bureaucrats in the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

All in all it would make the world a better place, particularly in the case of Blankenship, whose company has left a trail of avoidable mining disasters behind it.

And then the meds kick in, and I remember that I oppose the death penalty.

*He quite literally bought a West Virginia Supreme Court justice some years back.

Why the Religious Right Opposes Abortion

No Comments

Because the Talibaptists make good coin selling babies, and so they want to have a good supply of pregnant women, particularly white pregnant women, without options, so that they can cover a few medical bills, and then extracting fees from desperate parents:

American websites currently offer[ ] mouth-watering
incentives to would-be buyers. “Delivery within four months”, “Discounts of up to $19,000”, they proclaim. If it were cars they were selling this would not seem
odd, but it’s babies that are for sale – bright, smiling newborns to tempt the childless into parting with about £20,000.

There is no shame in treating babies like any other purchase in America, where the adoption industry is largely privatized… (“Why adoption is so easy in
America” Telegraph.co.uk 10/31/07)

………

The Brits have also rightly pointed to U.S. restrictions on birth control and abortion as a contributing to “marketable” infants in the U.S. The religious right’s imposed morality is perfectly partnered with those whose livelihoods depend upon the redistribution of children.

In May, 2007 Evangelical Christians organizations such as Focus on the Family and pastors from across the nation held a three-day summit in Colorado. members of to promote adoption via a media blitz.

While there are any number of people who do good work in adoption, there is a lot of money sloshing around, and it’s driving the way that business is done, and the Mega-churches and their ilk are taking their tithes, which keeps the pastors in SUV’s and business jets, I guess.

OK, I’m Depressed

No Comments

Well, the New York Times interviewed Mickey Kaus* on the occasion of his run for Senate, which seems to be driven by his need to cock punch DFH’s, though his primary opponent Barbara Boxer is a woman, which kinds of screws up the metaphor.

In any case, he was asked the following:

NYT: How much do they pay you?

Kaus: I had been making in the mid-90s, and then I had to take a pay cut along with everyone else, and I was making in the 80s. I’m fortunate to make any money as a blogger. There are some who make more. Most of them work for The Atlantic.

Well, Brad Delong runs the numbers, and comes up with the following:

Mickey Kaus has written 54 posts in the past ten weeks–that’s an average of 5.4 posts for each week in which he makes $1,800, or $333 a weblog post. This seems to me to be way out of line–suggesting some major source of labor-market monopoly is preventing Slate from rationalizing its labor costs.

(emphasis original)

Well, remember when I commented that I had made 10,625 Posts over the past 2¾ Years, and the first time that anyone asked to run an ad specifically on my content, it was for that bung dropper video?†

The sum total of my creative value is two checks, each for a bit over $100, and a 3rd one should be coming shortly, probably this month as I am less than a dollar away from the check cutting threshold.

This here is post number 10,710 so let’s figure that I will have gotten $315 for about 10,900 posts, or about 2.9¢ a post.

If I figured it on a per word basis, I think that I’d retire to a monastery in Tibet, and I hate Yak butter.

Still, who reads Kaus? Seriously.

*Who has still not denied that he blows goats.
†I was turned down, because I could not demonstrate ownership, it ain’t mine, and because they were concerned that butchering a carcass was not “family safe”.

Clarence Thomas’s Wife Launches Tea Party Lobbying Org

No Comments

And what’s more, explicitly uses the Citizens United decision to solicit corporate money.

Gee, I wonder if she is going to draw a salary from her 501(c)4, Liberty Central Inc.

My guess is probably yes, and as such, she would be cashing in on the court’s decision.

What a lovely exercise in ethics.

I would be remiss if I did not point you to Oliver Willis’ comment about this:

The brand of faux resentment and self-inflicted paranoia practiced by the tea party should remind her a lot of her husband.

I Like This: Stick it to the Man, and Save Money

No Comments
Click for full size


Not a surprise

There have been a number of initiatives geared toward getting consumers to move their funds from the too big to fail banks.

All in all, this is likely a good thing, but one of the things that people have not generally noted is that moving your money to a smaller bank also personally benefits you, because smaller banks charge lower fees, and generally treat small customers better.

The promise that has always been made with bank deregulation has been that larger banks would be more efficient, and so pass the savings onto consumers.

The reality is the opposite. Large banks use their oligopoly positions to extract more money from consumers.

Too big to fail banks are also banks that do not serve the consumer, so let’s break them up.

H/t James Kwak

Sharon Osbourne Has Something to Get off Her Chest

No Comments

She is selling her breast implants on eBay:

Unsatisfied with the result of her breast augmentation procedure, Sharon Osbourne recently revealed that she plans to sell the breast implants online once they are removed. Talking to Britain’s New! Magazine, the judge of “America’s Got Talent” admitted that she’s thinking of putting them up for sale on eBay.

“I wish I had never had my breasts done. They have put these bloody great bags in that are too ****ing round. It is like [having] a waterbed on your chest. I hate my [breasts],” the wife of Ozzy Osbourne first pointed out why she was left disappointed. She continued to say, “I want to have the bags taken out – then I will put them on eBay.”

Ummm……I got nothing here……Too weird for me to pull out any additional humor……

Another Shoe to Drop in Real Estate

No Comments

The FDIC is planning to auction off some the assets that it has accumulated, and that has the banks worried that this will force many of them into insolvency, because it will set a market price for the sh%$ that is on their books:

A Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. plan to auction more than $1 billion in assets seized from failed banks next month, including a loan to build a W Hotel in Atlanta, may trigger writedowns that weaken lenders nationwide.

Almost half of the loans were originated by Silverton Bank N.A., whose collapse last May was the biggest in Georgia history. Community banks that joined Silverton in providing $80 million for the 237-room hotel and condominium complex, as well as backing for 39 other projects, could be forced to write down their stakes to reflect sale prices.

What is going on here is that because the FDIC will be auctioning off assets, as it is required to do by law, these illiquid assets, and this will assign a fair market value to said assets.

Banks and other institutions who have maintained the illusion of solvency by using some variant of mark to myth model will therefore have to reassess the value of these assets on their books, pushing some, perhaps many, of these institutions into bankruptcy.

Quote of the Day

No Comments

Via Atrios:

I think we’re long past the time when most print newspapers could’ve been saved by simply providing a better product, but I also think there was a window to save, if not the print versions, the institutions which published them. Obviously the WaPo can survive as long as Kaplan Test Prep [The Washington Post] makes enough to keep them afloat, but I do wish more journalists bemoaning the losses in their industry would recognize that at least to some degree ceasing to be relevant and authoritative publications is a part of the problem. Why should people read them when they have to spend a lot of time figuring out when they’re being bullsh%$#ed?

I’ve said it before, many times: One of the problems with newspapers is that their management does not believe that newspapers can survive, so their business plan is to suck the marrow out of these institutions, not to provide good product.

You saw this phenomenon with the American rail industry in the 1970s.

Microsoft Is Outrourcing Legal Work to India

No Comments

I have to admit that this development engenders no small amount of Schadenfreude:

Software giant Microsoft will begin outsourcing general legal work to India after signing a deal with legal process outsourcing (LPO) company CPA Global. The news comes as CPA outlined plans to expand its Indian workforce from 600 to 1,000 by the end of 2011, and hinted at opening another outsourcing centre.

Outsourcing to India: It’s not just for engineers any more.

What I want to see is outsourcing applied to investment bankers and brokers.