Scotland's Herald reports that a quiet revolution is sweeping the country. It involves hundreds of schools, community groups and small businesses turning to wind turbines and solar panels to provide their power.
A 52,000-mile superhighway system is under construction in China. Millions of prospering Chinese browse auto showrooms looking for a new lifestyle based on crude.
But recent spikes at gas pumps worldwide hint that, for the first time, oil won't come cheap. Analysts and traders alike suspect we are on the verge of demanding more oil than we can produce.
They graduate four times as many engineers as we do.
They lavish generous tax breaks on tech firms.
They support local manufacturers.
They don't respect intellectual property.
They, of course, refers to China. And the gripes from Silicon Valley business leaders capture in stark and accurate terms the key underpinnings of the growing tech rivalry between the United States and China.
None of these things happened by accident. They happened because China has something that the United States lacks and badly needs: a national technology policy.
By now, it’s pretty clear that defined-benefit pension plans are an endangered species (see this article). Even relatively healthy firms are switching to defined-contribution plans to transfer investment risk to workers.
Is this a good thing? Sure, if the average Joe was equipped to make smart financial decisions. However, there’s a lot of research that suggest the average investor makes plenty of costly mistakes, such as overlooking costs (this piece provides a nice summary). In that regard, traditional company pension funds, which are usually large and managed professionally, may provide better performance.
Shopping-mall titan Robert Congel, one of the world's biggest commercial real-estate developers, is about to begin building a multi-billion-dollar, 800-acre shopping and entertainment complex with all of the above-mentioned amenities, but without -- and here comes the part that strains belief -- so much as a barrel of oil or a kilowatt of fossil-fuel-generated power. That's right, folks, a 100 percent clean-energy mega-mall. He vows that it will be the closest thing to an "Apollo Project" for renewable energy that America has ever seen -- one that grows the economy, strengthens national security by encouraging energy independence, and protects the environment.
We have the Motorola 6412 from Comcast – it has increased our satisfaction with the Comcast service greatly. Time shifting and skipping commercials makes TV viewing enjoyable again.
The number of households subscribing to personal video recording services has grown to 9.2 million, up about 155 percent from a year ago, according to a new study from In-Stat.
In May 2004, only 3.6 million households worldwide had access to a PVR service. This phenomenal increase in PVR households has benefited service providers such as TiVo and EchoStar.
According to the market researcher, hardware vendors had a windfall in 2004, with shipment volume jumping to 11.4 million units, up from 4.6 million pieces sold in the previous year. The phenomenal growth, a result of increasing awareness about time-shifting television programming, resulted in PVR revenue more than doubling to $4.3 billion from $2.1 billion in 2003.
Is there any doubt that Microsoft is not only poised to repeat its successful Windows formula, but that that success will, over the long run, actually dwarf the company’s success with Windows?
No single company has circled its technology wagons around the digital media universe the way Microsoft has. It’s just a question of when the world finally realizes that Microsoft has already gone in for the kill. This week’s announcement from Philips wasn’t just a stake in the ground. It was just another part of a foundation on which Microsoft’s media skyscraper will rest.
U.S. telcos are rolling out IPTV services faster than carriers around the world as a result of the fierce cable battle in the U.S. market, a panel of industry executives said Wednesday.
The competition between U.S. cable companies and telcos to dominate the digital pipeline into homes is driving carriers to roll out IPTV defensively to avoid losing customers to cable. The result is that U.S. carriers are making massive investments in an industry in which too many operators are fighting over too few customers.
There is a good article on Marketwatch about Turkey. If you know nothing about what is going on there, this article will go along way to getting you up to speed.
What is weird is what was left out.
The story talks about Turkey's effort for entrance into the EU, the consequences to that with the votes in France and The Netherlands, how the political news from Germany could also influence this part of the story.
Inflation, as reported by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is understated by roughly 2.7% per year. This is due to recent redefinitions of the series as well as to flawed methodologies, particularly adjustments to price measures for quality changes. The concentration of this installment on the quality of government economic reports will be first on CPI series redefinition and the damages done to those dependent on accurate cost-of-living estimates, and on pending further redefinition and economic damage.
The CPI was designed to help businesses, individuals and the government adjust their financial planning and considerations for the impact of inflation. The CPI worked reasonably well for those purposes into the early-1990s. In recent years, however, the reporting system has succumbed to pressures from miscreant politicians, who were and are intent upon stealing income from social security recipients, without ever taking the issue of reduced entitlement payments before the public or Congress for approval.
