The morning commute on 9/24/2009
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Morning Fog Over 421
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links for 2009-09-23
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FireDogLake has the story (h/t to Ed Cone for the link): "In a stunning moment during the Senate Finance Committee markup Sen. Tom Carper defended a secret deal that the White House, Baucus, and PhRMA had reached. The White House has long denied the deal. Carper publicly acknowledges that part of the deal was that PhRMA would run millions of dollars worth of campaign ads in support of health care reform.
According to Carper the “golden rule” in Congress is that secret back room deals in exchange for advertising buys must be honored."
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From the press release: "Jason Dolph, Manager of the Chartwell Auctions Charlotte office, stated, "This may be a once in a lifetime opportunity to acquire quality cash flowing commercial real estate in the Greensboro and Charlotte markets at substantially discounted prices." Dolph adds, "Many commercial real estate investors are not finding the bargains they anticipated from bank foreclosures. This auction on October 28th in Greensboro, NC offers an array of office, warehouse, flex, and multi-family real estate with a genuine opportunity to purchase at your own price."
The auction will be held on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 1:00 P.M. at the Clarion Hotel Greensboro Airport, 415 Swing Rd., Greensboro, NC 27409. For a free color brochure on the October 28, 2009 Real Estate Auction with terms of sale for all properties you can call Jason Dolph with Chartwell Auctions at 704-831-8983."
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Interesting idea from Squidoo: "Squidoo has built several hundred pages, each one about a major brand. (Here are some examples). More are on the way. We'll keep going until we have thousands of important brands, each on its own page (and we'll happily add one for you if you like). Each page collects tweets, blog posts, news stories, images, videos and comments about a brand. All of these feeds are algorithmic… the good and the bad show up, all collated and easy to find.
Of course, these comments and conversations are already going on, all over the web. What we've done is bring them together in one place. And then we've made it easy for the brand to chime in.
If your brand wants to be in charge of developing this page, it will cost you $400 a month. And once you take the page over, the left hand column belongs to you."
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"Single-family home sales in the Triad were down 17.2 percent in August.
Data from the N.C. Association of Realtors shows that in August, the Triad had 1,034 sales of new and existing homes, compared to 1,249 in August 2008. It was also a 3.7 percent decline from July, when there were 1,074 sales."
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"The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.
In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops."
links for 2009-09-22
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Fred Wilson writes about new urban architects: "And one of the crowd favorites at TC50 this past week was a company called CitySourced, which built "a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civil issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution". This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in my "public channel" post earlier this year.
These and many others are our new urban architects. I am not suggesting that the traditional roles of urban planning and architecture aren't still important to our cities. They are and will continue to be."
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The FCC's new push to enforce net neutrality is being fought by Republicans. Ironically they are arguing that regulating ISPs will harm competition, but anyone with more than a monkey brain knows the opposite is true. You know it's backwards when Ensign and Brownback are pushing it.
Quote from Ensign: "In this struggling economy, any industry that is able to thrive should be allowed to do so without meddlesome government interference that could stifle innovation," Ensign said in a statement. "We must avoid burdensome government regulations that micromanage private businesses or that limit the ability of companies to provide what their customers want. The Internet has flourished in large part because of a lack of government interference; I see no need to change that now." Reminder to Ensign: The internet exists because of the government and flourishes despite the monopolistic tendencies of the telecomm companies.
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Lex says: "My guess? No way the table gets run — the banksters take too much care of one another for that — but right now Lewis is probably commenting over cocktails about the view from under the bus."
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This is way cool: "We are a group of MIT students seeking to share the artistic aspects of science with others. On Sept. 2, 2009, we launched a digital camera into near-space to take photographs of the earth from high up above. (see “Flight”)
Several groups have accomplished similar feats (see “Other Launches”), but as far we know, we are the first group ever to:
(1) Complete such a launch on a budget of $150 total. All of our supplies (including camera, GPS tracking, weather balloon, and helium) were purchased for less than a grand total of $150."
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The HS football coach who won the state championship without punting or kicking. I always wondered why more coaches didn't try the no-punting thing (never thought about the kicking), especially high school coaches with relatively weak punting that doesn't do much to change field position. I also love stuff that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but is actually backed by some good data/logic.
Sharing
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links for 2009-09-21
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The Economist has a cool graphic display of public debt. Just put your cursor on a country and you can see how much public debt the country has, the per capita debt, the % of GDP that is debt, etc. FYI, the US public debt per capita is $21,973.60. That's bad, but Canada's is $28,347.10, France's is $31,971.90 and Italy's is $41,035.80. On the other hand Zimbabwe is in some sort of parallel universe with $0 per capita debt while their debt as % of GDP is 285.1%.
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The House voted to stop subsidizing bank-based student lending and shifting the money to the federal direct-loan program and grants to community colleges.
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Fec provided this outtake from Rolling Stone: "The campaign to mobilize the town-hall mobs began with a script written by the right’s foremost fearmongerer, Frank Lutz…
Lutz writes: 'Takeovers are like coups – they both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom…
'It is essential that ‘deny’ and ‘denial’ enter the conservative lexicon immediately,' he writes, 'because it is at the core of what scares Americans most about a government takeover of health care.'”
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Don't be distracted by the compensation kerfluffle for the bankers; the real juice is in their equity holdings which were preserved by the big bailout. h/t to Lex for the link.
links for 2009-09-19
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"When blogging first began, several years before I got into it, there was a feeling that individuals would be able to use blogging to build their own little businesses. This proved true in only a very few instances. The most successful blogs now are group efforts — sometimes the group is quite large — and the need for professional management (on the technical and ad sides) means that I am, effectively, what I was 25 years ago, a freelance, an independent contractor, a typist for hire."
links for 2009-09-18
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Mark Cuban: "I thought it was a good idea for media conglomerates to package all their digital assets into subscription offers. Its a far better idea for a marketer like Amazon to package cross company offerings into bigger and better packages."
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"In order to sort through the disaster that is Wells Fargo’s (quote: WFC) commercial loan portfolio, the bank has hired help from outside experts to pour over the books… and they are shocked with what they are seeing. Not only do the bank’s outstanding commercial loans collectively exceed the property values to which they are attached, but derivative trades leftover from its acquisition of Wachovia are creating another set of problems for the already beleaguered San Francisco-based megabank.
Wachovia, which Wells purchased last fall as it teetered on the brink of collapse, was so desperate to increase revenue in the last few years of its existence that it underwrote loans with extremely shoddy standards and paid traders to take them off their books."
h/t to Ed Cone for the link
links for 2009-09-17
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Lex has been writing about the efforts of Florida's US Rep. Alan Grayson to get an audit of the Federal Reserve done, and soon. Apparently Rep. Grayson now has a Senate counterpart in Delaware's Sen. Ted Kaufman. Lex pulls a quote from an interview with Grayson in which he's asked what the Fed's been up to:
"Congressman Grayson: They are performing a truly remarkable, surreptitious transfer of wealth from public to private hands. They are taking their ability to print money and shore up failed banks. They are simply stuffing money into the pockets of private interests."
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"There were 445 sales of existing single-family homes in the Winston-Salem area, compared with 558 in August 2008, according to data compiled from the Triad Multiple Listing Service and released by the Winston-Salem Regional Association of Realtors."
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Lex posts about an item concerning a film on Darwin that can't find a US distributor because the subject would be too divisive for US audiences. Huh? Here's the scariest part to me: "US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution." Can that 39% figure possibly be right? I'm hoping it really is the result of a loaded question like, "Do you believe that Darwin or God was right?" Somehow I doubt it, though.
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"Greensboro home sales in August, at 490, were down 21.7 percent compared to August 2008, when 626 homes were sold, according to data released by the Greensboro Regional Realtors Association. The August total also was down about 4.3 percent from July, when 512 existing homes were sold."
links for 2009-09-16
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According to this article health officials here in Forsyth County, NC are using Wal-Mart and McDonald's gift cards to "bribe" people to submit to syphilis tests. If I'm a brand marketer at either company I'm not sure I'd be happy with this news.
links for 2009-09-15
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From an opinion piece in the Miami Herald written by two former Marines (Charles C. Krulak was commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999. Joseph P. Hoar was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994): "We have seen how ill-conceived policies that ignored military law on the treatment of enemy prisoners hindered our ability to defeat al Qaeda. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Cheney and others who orchestrated America's disastrous trip to “the dark side'' continue to assert — against all evidence — that torture “worked'' and that our country is better off for having gone there."
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How an official crowd estimate of 70,000 for the conservatives' march on Washington turned into a reported 2 million on some media outlets. Keep in mind that rally/protest numbers in DC are ALWAYS disputed and the holder of the rally always questions the estimate of the whoever's in charge. For that reason the National Park Service stopped providing estimates for the number of people on the National Mall during events, and you'll notice that the 70,000 estimate came from the DC Fire Department. Still, 70k to 2m is a little outrageous.
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Fred Wilson nails writes about his right to speak his mind on his own blog: "I am not an expert in everything I write about. But that is not going to stop me from speaking my mind about things other than venture capital and web startups. It might annoy or piss some people off. It could even hurt our business because those people are less likely to do business with me or our firm.
But I've made the decision to put myself out there, speak my mind publicly, and say what I think. And I am going to continue to do it."
What he said.
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"State officials are educating public and private solid waste management facilities to separate the banned items from the waste stream before those items arrive at a disposal facility. If necessary, enforcement of the disposal bans will be applied primarily at disposal facilities such as landfills and transfer stations by the N.C. Division of Waste Management. The law does allow for accidental or occasional disposal of small amounts of banned materials. However, starting a recycling program for the banned materials is the simplest and easiest way to ensure compliance."
Befuddled 