Business
The US Supreme Court has ruled (.pdf; 139KB) that corporations do not have personal privacy rights accorded to natural individuals. As a result, AT&T can’t prevent embarrassing corporate information submitted to the government under regulation to be kept from the public. In 2004, AT&T discovered it had taken too much money from the federal government under the E-rate program providing broadband access to schools. After the FCC launched an investigation, AT&T turned over lots of documents and eventually settled by paying US$500,000 and promising to not do it any more. Enter a trade association, CompTel, that included AT&T’s competitors who filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the documents AT&T had submitted during the FCC investigation. AT&T, predictably, objected and said that under a key FOIA exemption, the documents “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” AT&T reasoned that since corporations were seen to be persons (under corporate personhood established in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad) it was reasonable to extend rights of personal privacy to the fictional business structures. This is a pretty surprising — and welcome — ruling from this particular Supreme Court.
According to Eric Wieffering, writing for the Star Tribune, the effective tax rate paid by 3M worldwide in 2010 was less than 28 percent. Nonetheless, 3M chief executive George Buckley took to the Financial Times last weekend to complain about President Obama being anti-business and “Robin Hood-esque” resulting in 3M to shift its manufacturing operations offshore. “We’re not indentured servants and we will do business where it’s good and friendly,” Buckley told the Financial Times. And the British ex-patriate who worked for British Rail as a government employee has increased 3M’s move to build foreign manufacturing plants. But he’s also built 10 new manufacturing plants in the US in the last four years. Buckley also used the cover of Obama’s healthcare reform bill to extricate 3M retirees from the company’s health insurance. Wieffering notes that a 3M spokesman told his paper last October that “healthcare options in the market under the healthcare reform law became better.” Wieffering reports that Buckley received nearly US$62 million in total compensation from 3M in the three year period of 2006-09 and “owns 167,000 shares of 3M stock outright, and has options for hundreds of thousands more. When he retires sometime in the next year, he will receive a guaranteed annual pension worth millions a year.” As recently as January, 3M was dumping more than five million gallons of wastewater per day into the Mississippi River. From just a single plant. So, George Buckley should maybe just button it and not let the door hit him on the butt on the way out if he wants to move 3M out of Minnesota. I’m betting his compensation at British Rail was something less than what he’s leached out of 3M, one of Minnesota’s largest polluters. [Disclaimer: I’ve worked as an independent contractor multiple times at 3M.]
I can’t resist passing along this joke: A chief executive, a Tea Party member, and a union representative were sitting at a table. In front of them is a plate with 12 cookies. The chief executive takes 11 cookies, turns to the Tea Party member, and says, “Look out! That union guy wants your cookie!”
Susannah Breslin is writing a blog for Forbes on getting downsized. Her first article is exceptionally well done, offering tips from her experience being laid off as an editor after 2.5 years. In January, I was laid off from an editing job after 4.5 years and my experience is remarkably similar to Breslin’s, although no one has asked me for used underwear.
Censorship
The US Supreme Court, in an 8-to-1 decision (.pdf; 245KB), ruled that the First Amendment to the US Constitution protects even hateful speech. Justice Samuel Alito was the sole dissenting vote, arguing that free-speech “buffer zones” offer insufficient protection and that hateful speech was equal to “fighting words” which are not protected. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, “Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. We cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.” The case involved protests against gays at military funerals. The Roberts court has been strong and consistent in its support of the First Amendment. As Adam Liptak, writing for the New York Times, opines, only national security interests have trumped the First Amendment in the current court. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a separate opinion in which he noted that different treatment might be appropriate for different types of speech.
ESRD
Apparently President Obama is giving up on his already weak healthcare initiative and allow the states to immediately opt-out of its requirements, including the mandate requiring individuals to buy commercial insurance. Without that mandate, the initiative is toast because without everyone in the insurance pool, the insurance companies will drain it with outrageously high rates. The fact is it’s cheaper to insure everyone than only those that actually need health insurance. The only requirement for the states opting-out of the federal healthcare bill is to find other ways to expand coverage without driving up costs. As the bill was passed by the US Congress and signed into law by Obama, the states were prohibited from opting-out, through a waiver system, until 2017. The Congressional Budget Office determined it would take three years to acquire the experience and data necessary to see how much the states should receive if they opted-out of parts of the law. The good news, according to Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Kevin Sack, writing for the New York Times, is that the intelligence-deficient US House Republican leaders “said Monday that they were committed to repealing the law, not amending it.” Good luck with that, you rapturous assholes. Obama, in his mad dash to the right-center, politically claimed the proposal was reasonable, allowing the states more flexibility for innovation. At this rate, Obama will moderate his already tepid changes right out of existence. The only bright light in this morass is Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, who is investigating using an opt-out and waiver to establish a single-payer system for that state.
Within a day of President Obama giving significant ground on his healthcare reform law, Republican governors were begging for federal financial help with Medicaid costs for their states. Obama’s healthcare reform includes an expansion of Medicaid eligibility that takes effect in 2014. The reforms mandate that the federal government initially pay the entire cost of covering the newly eligible for Medicaid but several years later the states will have to pony up to partially cover the costs. Robert Pear, writing for the New York Times, reports that Utah’s Republican Governor Gary R. Herbert told the US House Energy and Commerce Committee, “Medicaid enrollment has skyrocketed. In December 2007, enrollment in Utah stood at 158,267 individuals. In December 2010, enrollment stood at 230,812 individuals, a 46 percent increase in three years.” The Republican Governors want federal money in the form of a block grant combined with freedom to customize the Medicaid programs specifically for their state residents. Obama’s healthcare reform law specifically prohibits states from making Medicaid eligibility requirements more restrictive in any way. The Republican Governors want that prohibition eliminated. Without the prohibition, the states would likely attempt to balance their budgets by eliminating residents from Medicaid rolls. Kevin Sack, also writing for the New York Times, reports that other states are tacking a decidedly different tack, by canceling health insurance coverage for the working poor on state-subsidized insurance programs. Using Pennsylvania as an example, Sack reports that the state’s non-profit Blue Cross/Blue Shield health insurance plans “continue to run substantial surpluses, rising to a cumulative US$5.6 billion in 2009 from US$3.5 billion in 2002…. and that the Republican governor is unwilling to strong-arm them as did the former Democratic governor.
Harvard medical students don’t put hands on patients until their second year. At other schools it’s sometimes three years out. Harvard is rewriting its medical school curriculum to put this absolutely essential part of a medical education to “make this happen right away, in the first year, so the connection quickly becomes natural and ingrained. Blending the mechanics of the physical exam with meaningful conversation is what Dr. Fingold calls ‘the unwritten curriculum,'” reports Madeline Drexler, writing for the New York Times. Fingold tells Drexler that medical schools used to assume that all medical students were compassionate, good listeners — that all they needed was knowledge to be good doctors. “We now know that’s not the case.” Doctors and students would do well to realize that patients can tell — almost instantly — if they give a shit or not. We are, after all, humans with medical problems — not just walking, taking medical problems.
Duke University Medical Center researchers tracked more than 2,800 heart patients, determining — through an 18-item questionnaire — that optimistic patients live longer. “Heart patients who were optimistic about their treatment and recovery were more likely to be alive after 15 years than patients with similar disease but lower expectations,” reports Tara Parker-Pope for the New York Times. According to the study, patients scoring low on the optimism questionnaire were 30 percent more likely to die during the term of the study, even after factors including depression and severity of disease were considered. Suprisingly, patients don’t have to be pollyannnaish or panglosian — just mildly optimistic — to reap the benefits. “It’s not unrealistic, unbridled optimism,” John C. Barefoot, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke and the study’s lead author, tells Parker-Pope. “You’ve got to temper your optimisms with some realism, but you can have both.”
Imagine being able to print replacement organs — kidneys, for example — when our natural organs fail? That’s what Wake Forest University regenerative medicine specialist Anthony Atala is working on. According to Anya Kamenetz, writing for Fast Company, “The basis is a combination of cultured human cells and scaffolding built or woven from organic material.” A kidney is printed by first scanning the patient with a CT scanner, then creating a computerized form the printer can read, and finally printing the kidney, layer by layer, over a period of about six hours.
Intellectual property
After insisting, repeatedly, that he wouldn’t become a lobbyist, former US Senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) has become the head lobbyist for the motion picture industry’s lobbying arm, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Internet
Hong Kong Broadband Network is offering 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home broadband internet connectivity to Hong Kong residents for something less than about US$26 per month. Apparently the service is symmetrical, offering 1Gbps download and 1GBbs upload speeds. By way of comparison, Randall Stross, writing for the New York Times, points out that Verizon’s fiber-to-the-home service in the US tops out at 50Mbps down and 20Mbps up at a price point of US$144.99 per month. As Stross reports, “That’s one-twentieth the speed of Hong Kong Broadband’s service for downloading for more than five times the price.” Oh, and Hong Kong Broadband Network is profitable. Stross reports that a similar system — at similar prices — is eminently workable in the US “… if several companies shared the financial burden of putting fiber into the ground and then competed on the basis of services built on top of the shared assets. That would bring multiple competitors into the picture, pushing down prices. But it would also require regulatory changes that the Federal Communications Commission has yet to show an appetite for.” A Verizon spokesperson told Stross that the company’s current broadband offerings include “speeds that exceed what customers can and do use.” Google is interested in finding out what people would do with 1Gbps of bandwidth. The company plans to select one or more cities for gigabit bandwidth pilot projects.
Law
Sixteen years ago, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the US’s largest banks — including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase — quietly eliminated the manual system of county recorders recording mortgages by longhand and replaced it with a privatized mortgage registry system of dubious legality. The new mortgage recording system, Reston, VA-based Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS), “claims to hold title to roughly half of all the home mortgages in the nation — an astonishing 60 million loans,” according to Michael Powell and Gretchen Morgenson, writing for the New York Times. All while never investing a single dollar in a single mortgage. Powell and Morgenson ask a very disturbing question: “Given the evidence that many banks have cut corners and made colossal foreclosure mistakes, does anyone know who owns what or owes what to whom anymore?” MERS is prohibited from ever filing a foreclosure in Arkansas ever again because it doesn’t actually make or service mortgages. Pretty much the same situation in Long Island, NY. A Utah judge refused to recognize the legal standing of MERS and actually decided to let a homeowner void his mortgage. MERS was clearly an attempt by the mortgage industry to subvert the law. Powell and Morgenson quote an unnamed source as saying the idea behind MERS was, “If we can get everyone on board, no judge will want to upend something that is reasonable and sensible and would screw up 70 percent of loans.” MERS was set up to allow William Hultman, a senior vice president “the rather extraordinary power to deputize an unlimited number of ‘vice presidents’ and ‘assistant secretaries’ drawn from the ranks of the mortgage industry,” report Powell and Morgenson. And Hultman handed out these US$25 deputizations like toy sheriff badges in childrens’ cereal boxes. Each deputy was empowered to file loan transfers and foreclosures on behalf of MERS. Last year, Valparaiso University law professor Alan M. White matched MERS’s records against property ownership records in the public domain, finding that “fewer than 30 percent of the mortgages had an accurate record in MERS.” My wife and I have had our mortgage since December 1996. We’ve never refinanced, although the mortgage was bought and sold several times in the past. For at least the last five years it’s been in the hands of the same mortgage servicer. MERS had no record of the mortgage. At this point, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Politics
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Charles Koch, Koch Industries chief executive, pledges to continue to finance anti-government right-wing front groups like those behind the Wisconsin organized labor strife. Koch writes that the “purpose of business is to efficiently convert resources into products and services that make people’s lives better.” But, as Lee Fang, writing for ThinkProgress, notes, “… the purpose of Koch’s political giving is to avoid any financial responsibility — no matter who gets hurt.” As Fang reports, Koch Industries is involved in some of the most polluting industries on the planet, importing Middle East oil, refining high-carbon crude oil from Canada, lobbying for and maintaining coal-burning electrical generation plants, running one of the largest pipelines in the country, running lumber mills that are environmentally damaging, and producing toxic chemicals and fertilizer. Koch Industries remains one of the top ten worst air polluters in the US. As Fang writes, “Much of the entire Koch political machine is geared towards ensuring that Koch Industries never has to compensate the people and ecosystems damaged by Koch Industries pollution. Koch front groups — from Tea Party groups to think tanks — have diligently promoted Koch Industries’ bottom line by denying global warming, fighting regulations on Koch’s cancer-causing chemicals, and snuffing out investigations into Koch’s environmental crimes….” As Koch writes in his Journal op-ed, “Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market.” Indeed.
Publishing
Eli James, writing at Novelr, profiles 26-year-old Amanda Hocking, an Austin, MN-based novelist who meets every metric of commercial success outside of the traditional publishing arrangements. Hocking has self-published nine books through the Kindle store, netting sales of more than 100,000 copies per month. Given Amazon’s Kindle store cut, she’s grossing more than US$200,000 per month through self publishing. James notes that a traditional publisher on a private mailing list wrote, “there is no traditional publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking terms that are better than what she’s currently getting, right now on the Kindle store, all on her own.” Because ebook costs are much less than that of traditional print publishing, because authors see 70 percent gross returns (instead of the traditional 15 percent returns), and because the ebooks can be priced at points more readers are willing to take a chance on an unknown author, independent authors are able to compete head-on with traditional publishing houses. At least in the context of online ebook sales.
Contrast the independent long-form ebook success seen by Amanda Hocking and others with the tip jar model. All the cool kids currently seem to like Kachingle the best, but there’s really nothing new there. Add a button to your website for your readers to contribute. OK, Kachingle got some notice when it tried to get users to donate to the New York Times against the gray lady’s will. The Times sued and the matter was settled. According to John Hendel, writing for the Atlantic, Kachingle clients earn “very rarely more than US$200 total and usually under US$50.” Sustainable it’s not. At least not for independent publishers; but perhaps more so for Kachingle and Paypal who split a 15 percent take and can make it up on volume. Nonetheless, as Hendel notes, “Readers should always be able to donate money hassle-free. The idea is innocent, harmless.” Just remember: Innocent and harmless doesn’t pay the bills.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Random House has announced that it will abandon the traditional wholesale/retail bookselling model adopt Apple’s agency pricing model for ebooks. Under an agency model, publishers set any retail price they like for their books and the resellers take 30 percent of that sale price. Apple requires an agency model from publishers with which it works. Random House is the last of the six big international traditional publishing houses to adopt the agency model. Random House’s agency model became active on 1 March 2011, the day before Apple introduced the second version of its iPad.
Technology
Apple introduced its iPad 2 with Steve Jobs beginning the event by noting that the company’s 200 million iTunes Store customers have downloaded 100 million ebooks between April and December 2010. And Apple’s App Store has paid out US$2 billion to app developers for its “post-pc products.” The company sold 15 million iPads between April and December 2010, generating US$9.5 billion in revenue. During the event the Chicago public schools technology director, appearing on video, reports seeing 50-60 percent gains in reading, math, and science with the introduction of the iPad. The iPad 2’s 1GHz A5 dual-core processor is two times faster than the A4 in the current iPad and the new iPad sports up to nine times faster graphics performance. Remarkably, the new iPad’s battery performance remains the same at 10 hours. The iPad 2 has the long-rumored front- and back-side cameras (of unstated resolution, but early reports indicate a camera similar to that in the current iPod Touch with resolution of less than 0.7 megapixels; the back-side camera is capable of 720p video at up to 30 frames-per-second), a gyroscope, and at 8.8mm is one-third thinner and two-tenths of a pound lighter (1.3 v. 1.5 pounds) than the existing model. Apple’s iPad 2 ships on 11 March 2011 at the same prices as the current iPad models. An especially interesting accessory is an HDMI cable providing 1080p mirrored video output for US$39. Charlie Sorrel, writing for Wired, reports Apple’s Digital AV Adapter is also compatible with all current iOS devices. Apple continues to refuse to disclose how much RAM is in any of its iOS devices; my guess is 256MB which is simply not enough but likely how Apple continues to keep iOS device prices reasonable. Jobs also announced Apple’s iOS 4.3 bringing a personal Wi-Fi hotspot to the iPhone 4, faster JavaScript in the Safari browser (using Nitro), support for either mute or screen orientation lock on the iPad switch, Photo Booth and FaceTime for the iPad, and improved iTunes Home Sharing from any app (basically turning iOS devices into mobile Apple TVs, as Glenn Fleishman notes.
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The blotter: Week ending 6 March 2011 was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Sunday, 6 March 2011 at 2:46 PM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)