Here’s a video just released by the Kauffman Foundation covering their economic bloggers conference from earlier this year. While I am one of the people in this video, I think it takes a very good look at the emerging role of economic bloggers in both the media and our culture. It’s also a delight to see such high production values, though I sure need a haircut.
Readers have lately been asking me to write about IBM. It seems the BBC has been on the case somewhat over imposed changes to Big Blue’s UK pension scheme. These mirror similar — though more draconian — changes imposed on IBM’s U.S. workers a couple years ago. Alas, this just seems to be a trend we’ll be seeing more and more of. The problem isn’t in IBM per se, it’s in the distorted reward structure perceived by most public companies.
Two years ago when I covered IBM’s yet-to-be-announced layoffs in some detail it sent the company into a tizzy of denial. Why? “Because you were right,” said a source who still works at IBM. […]
This column started out being titled “Is Goldman Sachs Evil?” until I realized the issue is far more broad. It began with a blog post by my old boss Jim Casella, who now runs Asset International, a financial publisher. Jim concludes after a review of some recent and very negative press that Goldman isn’t evil, per se, just cocky. But by comparing the investment bank to sports teams and players I think Jim makes a grave error. Goldman Sachs isn’t evil, just stupid. And that stupidity comes in the form of their witless abuse of technology.
Jim’s sports analogies are misplaced because while sporting events must inevitably have winners and losers economies don’t. TRADING […]
A couple weeks ago you may recall a column I wrote about how Orbitz, the Internet travel service, lost all my personal data including my on-file credit cards. Well most of this lost information is now back and I want to update the story.
I’m a long-time Orbitz user with enough frequent flier miles that they ought to care about keeping me happy. And it turns out a number of Orbitz employees are also my readers, so that helps, too. After that column appeared the company put some real effort into figuring out what had gone wrong and trying to fix it.
What happened, it turns out, is that I had tried to book a […]
I live in Charleston, South Carolina, which is a regional health care center with a local medical school and a lot of doctors, some of them my neighbors. So I hear a lot of doctors bitching about their professional lives. And that bitching generally comes down to a single argument: “I’m bringing home less money than I used to: if this medical system is so out of control, why isn’t my income out of control, too?”
One of my doctor neighbors who does a lot of surgery spends $70,000 per year on medical malpractice insurance premiums. I asked him if an extra $70,000 per year in income would stop his complaining. He said it would.
So let’s […]
This morning Google announced it was spending $106 million in stock to buy On2, a maker of audio and video compression software. The very logical question I don’t hear being asked, though, is why would Google spend money for something it is already getting pretty much for free? It’s to turn yet another partner into a competitor, this time Adobe Systems.
Google already uses On2 codecs in Adobe’s Flash video, which is the very heart of its YouTube video streaming service. On2 powers YouTube’s so-called High Quality or HQ service, which due to competitive pressures on YouTube is likely to soon become YouTube’s standard codec.
It is important to remember that Flash video was not a significant […]
I’ll try to finish all the clips today. Here is the second batch and I went back to Krugman/Smith05 and unlocked it, sorry. That clip is also included here in case you don’t want to go back to the previous post to view it.
