This must be British invasion day on the Hancock blog. (See John Lennon post below.) Here is Sir Mick Jagger, in an interview with the BBC, on the temporariness of the recorded music bonanza (for the artists) that began in the 1970s.

But I have a take on that — people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

HT Brad DeLong

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Media
        

One of the unanswered questions in the case of Dr. Mark Midei and St. Joseph Medical Center, in which Midei is alleged to have placed more than 500 coronary artery stents in patients who may not have needed them, is: Who initially called attention to Midei?

So far the hospital has said only that it received a complaint from a patient. In gathering documents for a column on stents for this Sunday's paper, however, I received a state report that says the complaint came from "a patient who was also employed by the hospital, which prompted the hospital to initiate a review..."

So the patient was also a St. Joe employee. The way compliance and quality-assurance were set up at St. Joe, maybe the only people who could have been alert to unneeded stents were insiders. Before the hospital made reforms, there was a lack of accountability in its official procedures, at least in terms of identifying successfully implanted but unnecessary hardware. Certainly the patients never could have figured out they had unneeded stents, if that's what happened. (The story hasn't been fully told, and Midei has said he expects to be exonerated.) But docs and hospital officials have told me that, generally in catheterization labs, techs and nurses are often in a position to see the angiogram results and interpret them. And they talk to other employees. (St. Joe hasn't identified the employee/patient who complained about Midei.)

The lack of safeguards against unnecessary implants seems to be widespread. To get a good sense of how inadequate hospital protocols are at catching potential unnecessary stents, check out this post from Wachter's World, the blog of Dr. Bob Wachter, the chief of medicine at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, in which he ruminates on the St. Joe situation.

I quoted Wachter in this March column on likelihood of stent abuse at other hospitals. I'm the "Baltimore reporter," mentioned in his post, who asked him the question that he says "threw me back on my heels."

Posted by Jay Hancock at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Health Care
        

Insufferable smugness from BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg in an interview with the Financial Times.

The US is a big and important market for BP, and BP is also a big and important company for the US, with its contribution to drilling and oil and gas production. So the position goes both ways.

This is not the first time something has gone wrong in this industry, but the industry has moved on.

Dude, they read the FT in the United States. And there is such a thing as "the Internet." Nice analysis of BP's PR and policy botches by Yves Smith, who states, in part:

This is simply stunning. First, the BP chairman essentially puts his company on an equal footing as the United States, implying their relation is not merely reciprocal, but equal. BP doesn’t even approach the importance of Microsoft in its heyday, a-not-very-tamed provider of a near monopoly service. And his posture “this is just one problem like others, no biggie” is an offense to common sense and decency.

Many readers have pointed to signs that BP’s order of battle in combatting the leak is seeking to maximize recovery rather than minimize damage, again a sign of backwards priorities. The widely cited gold standard for crisis management, Johnson & Johnson’s 1982 Tylenol tamperings, had the company immediately doing whatever it took, no matter how uneconomical it seemed, to protect the public. BP instead has been engaging in old school conduct: keep a wrap on information as long as possible, minimize outside input, and (presumably) contain costs.

What is worse is the complete lack of any apology or sign of remorse. Even if BP engaged in more or less the same conduct, it would be far more canny for its top officials to make great shows of empathy for all the people who are suffering as a result of the disaster, remind the public that they lost their own men too, and make great speeches about not resting until the leak is plugged, and then add the caveat” “but we have to proceed in a deliberate manner, rushing could make matters worse. We know this is frustrating, and we wish we could hurry the pace.”

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Environment
        

Why is Judge Ronald Silkworth even bothering to hold hearings on the proposed referendum to block slots parlors at Arundel Mills mall? I thought the litigation was about determining whether the pro-referendum petition signatures were valid. But each time slots developer David Cordish's people profer evidence that some of the accepted signatures are phony, Silkworth disallows it.

First he rejected testimony on handwriting analysis. Now he refuses to hear from signers who said petition canvassers lied to them by saying the petition was pro-slots.

Reports Nicole Fuller in today's paper:

Silkworth also denied requests from Cordish attorneys to allow testimony from several other witnesses — Tom Chuckas, president of the Jockey Club; Heather A. Ford, president of CASM; a representative from FieldWorks; and Joseph Weinberg, a vice president at Cordish.

Judge Silkworth seems to be preparing for a precedent-setting exploration into a new branch of law: The faith-based ruling.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: Slots
        

Hotel Chocolate is a British cocoa grower and chocolatier that started as a catalog seller, began adding stores and now wants to further expand. So it needs financing. So it's issuing bonds in return for capital contributions. But there's a difference: The Hotel Chocolate bonds don't pay cash interest. They pay in chocolate. Buy a bond for 4,000 pounds sterling and you'll get a shipment of 13 boxes of chocolate per year, worth 233.35 pounds, the company says.

That's a 5.83 percent return. Tax free! Hotel Chocolate says it will pay taxes due on the interest to Revenue & Customs for basic-rate taxpayers. (The toffs in the higher brackets will have to look after themselves.)

The company says it wants to "let some of our best customers participate in the business and give them the benefits, rather than handing it over to a big bank." Of course, chocolate bonds should also generate great publicity. And they're real bonds. Although they won't trade on a market, the securities have a real prospectus with fine print generated by genuine lawyers and filed with the British version of the SEC. The bonds are callable anytime, but investors have to commit for three years. From the prospectus:

Chocolate Return which has accrued but has not been dispatched will be available, at the Bondholder's request, for dispatch following the redemption of the Chocolate Bond, for one year following the relevant repayment date.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Finance
        

Thanks as usual to Doug Short for the great comparison of four terrible bear markets. If you can't read the key, the gray line is stocks after the 1929 crash; the red is the 1970s plunge; and the green is the collpase of the tech bubble after March 2000. The blue is now: The S&P 500 down 30 percent from its peak is better than the S&P 500 down almost 60 percent from its peak.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Finance
        

So Facebook is talking about its re-re-re-revised privacy settings and the New York Times' Nick Bilton is liveblogging it. Included was this back & forth:

Question: Are these latest changes all about advertising?

Mr. Zuckerberg: There was a real pivotal moment for me when I was 22 and Yahoo and all these companies, including Viacom, were trying to buy the company, and it was a really crazy time. When we first started the company we started it in a dorm room. We reached a point where me and my friends were 22 years old and we were being offered a billion dollars for the company. It was a really pivotal point for us because it’s not about the money. It might seem weird, we’re not doing this to make more money. For all the people inside the company that could not be more true. It’s such a big disconnect that we’re doing this for the money.

Trust me, it's about the advertising. When they say it's not about the money...

Posted by Jay Hancock at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Technology & Innovation
        

Tribune, which owns The Baltimore Sun, has filed new plans for executive bonuses, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Tribune Co. has unveiled plans for a third round of top executive bonuses, nearly $15 million, bringing to more than $72 million the amount of pay enhancements the media company handed out while operating under bankruptcy protection.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Media
        

Here's an interview with HBS's Joshua Coval about measuring the correlation between congressional power and railroading taxpayer dollars into one's state or district.

Q: One of your findings was that the chairs of powerful congressional committees truly bring home the bacon to their states in the forms of earmark spending. Can you give a sense of how large this effect is?

A: Sure. The average state experiences a 40 to 50 percent increase in earmark spending if its senator becomes chair of one of the top-three committees. In the House, the average is around 20 percent.

HT Marginal Revolution.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 7:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Politics
        

Today's column is about Ray Haysbert, the Parks Sausage executive who died Monday at age 90.

Business "clusters" — a term coined by Harvard Business School's Michael Porter — are local networks of expertise and personalities that create growth beyond what individuals could generate on their own. Haysbert, who died Monday, was a one-man cluster, establishing numerous companies, counseling countless others and serving as a crucial link between Baltimore's earliest black entrepreneurs and today's.

UPDATE: I said Haysbert was 22 when he started with Henry Parks and Parks Sausage, quoting from an old Sun clip. Of course that's impossible, since Haysbert was born in 1920. He would have been closer to 32 when he was hired by Parks. Another reader says, "I wish you had pointed out that Haysbert was a Tuskegee Airman" in Italy World War II. I'm sure he was as proud of that as anything else he did in his life."

I meant to mention it but forgot. And the reader is right. His World War II experience was an important part of who Ray Haysbert was.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Google put out an unusual paper today purporting to quantify the company's economic impact, including state-by-state breakdowns. These are usually the kinds of things you see put out by nonprofits, universities, hospitals and so forth trying to justify their tax-exempt status.

For-profit companies such as Google rarely do this, but then for-profit companies are rarely squarely in the sights of antitrust authorities the way Google is. The text of Google's report says its nationwide impact is $54 billion. The subtext says "Please don't litigate too vigorously against us, Justice Department!"

Posted by Jay Hancock at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Technology & Innovation
        

This is smart. One of the big things keeping newspapers from charging for online content was the fear (and reality) of being cut out of the Web conversation. The New York Times will attempt to get around this by not charging readers lighting upon an article by clinking a blog link. So the paper will get revenue from readers who want the content first-hand, who want the Times as a whole. But it'll still get the bank-shot readers that are so important for online relevance.

Here is a NYT spokesperson, via Peter Kafka:

The pay model will be designed so readers that are referred from third party sites such as blogs will be able to access that content without hitting their limit, enabling NYTimes.com to continue being a part of the open web.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Media
        

Opponents of a big slots operation at Arundel Mills collected 40,408 signatures to put a referendum on the project on the November ballot. The Board of Elections tossed 17,441 signatures. But the 22,967 that remained are still enough to put the measure on the ballot. However, that's only about 4,000 more than the 19,000 required, reports Nicole Fuller in today's Sun -- a relatively thin margin.

Slots developer David Cordish is challenging 9,406 of the signatures, claiming 4,316 were forged and 1,203 don't match the name with which they're paired. Presumably Cordish's people will also be looking for signers who aren't registered voters or who don't live in the county.

It's hard to tell how rigorous the election board's analysis was, but it's probably fair to say that the board didn't analyze the signatures the way Cordish's lawyers are. State law requires the board to "Review all names and accompanying information on each signature page" and "Determine which signers are registered voters who meet the petition criteria and which are not registered voters or do not meet the petition criteria."

That doesn't exactly sound like Sherlock Holmes looks at the sheets. There's also an option for "random sampling" in which as few as 5 percent of the signatures could be examined. The biggest variable in Cordish's challenge may be the extent to which Ronald A. Silkworth agrees to hear a detailed analysis of the signatures in court.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)
Categories: Slots
        

right after I clear out the 1,364 emails in my inbox. Call me a bad digital engager, but I refuse to deal w/ email on vacation. Boundaries.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

I'll be off the Web until May 23 or so. Happy May flowers to you all.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

It's quite remarkable how market instability breeds instability. The stock market plunged yesterday with no real news to drive it, no change in the facts on which investors base their decisions. Indeed there is lots of evidence that the turmoil was caused by price-publication mistakes. But turmoil begets turmoil, apparently. The Hyman Minsky calculus is that stability causes instability. But today's trading also seems to show that instability causes instability, too.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Senior Fox Business Economist Mark Lieberman obviously needs a good talking to from Fox's song and dance commissars. In his advance piece on today's jobs report, he based his conclusions on data and research!

He thinks that Obama's stimulus, passed by Congress a year ago, is not only contributing to job growth but is generating a "multiplier effect," meaning the resulting growth is greater than the cost of the stimulus. He cites the recent NBER paper by Monacelli et. al. estimating a 1.2 percent Keynesian multiplier.

Here's Lieberman:

Another factor likely to contribute to job growth is the 14-month old $787 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, a stimulus package representing about 6% of GDP. According to a recently published National Bureau for Economic Research paper, “an increase in government spending of 1% GDP generates output and unemployment multipliers respectively of about 1.2% (at one year) and 0.6 percentage points (at the peak). Each percentage point increase in GDP produces an increase in employment of about 1.3 million jobs.” The arithmetic from that analysis suggests a 3.6% increase in GDP and 4.7 million jobs. Indeed, first quarter GDP was up 2.5% from first quarter 2009, equating to about four million jobs. Payrolls in March were down about 2.6 million jobs from March 2009 which suggests they are poised for a dramatic increase.

And there was a dramatic increase.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
        

According to the election blog of the Guardian's Andrew Sparrow, convicted IRA sniper Michael Carragher was today working as a poll canvasser to re-elect a Sinn Fein member of Parliament. Swords into campaign buttons.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Politics
        

Barry Ritholtz had accounts in 100 percent cash as of yesterday. One reason: "Ideally, if we get lucky, we will see a rally over the next week, with deteriorating characteristics — that sets up a better entry for shorting new positions," he said on his blog.

A rally is obviously not what's happening. Nevertheless, I highly doubt he's unhappy to be holding cash.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Finance
        

I love this. I got an email yesterday from a Harvard student querying bloggers about blogging. She was doing research on a term paper. The paper was due at 6 p.m. The email came in the morning. As a writer who has been pushing deadlines for 40 years, of course I helped her out.

My name is **** *******, and we haven't met yet, but the reason I'm writing is that I'm wrapping up a master's project here at Harvard University that focuses on the future of blogging. The presentation is due at 6pm EST today (May 5), and I was hoping to get just a bit of insight from bloggers who I haven't met yet.

Why should you help out? You have a lot of things on your plate already, but:
• Your insight would contribute to what we know about the motivations of authors, journalists, and bloggers.
• You would be helping me wrap up my master's degree in "Technology, Innovation, & Education".
• It would take just a couple of minutes.
• There is no personal information involved.
• I would be willing to send you a copy of our findings ( a joint E-Labs MIT/Harvard Project), which you may find relevant.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Check out Ed Gunts' story on Morgan Stanley's move to Thames Street Wharf on the former Allied Signal property on the east side of Baltimore's inner harbor. It's a fairly improbable tale. Morgan Stanley chose Baltimore eight years ago for big brokerage back office, promising to bring hundreds of jobs. Unlike many companies making big pledges to get economic development incentives, Morgan Stanley came through with the jobs. Even more amazingly, they are still here despite the financial meltdown and Morgan Stanley's vicissitudes. The firm has had its problems but has come out of the crisis in much better shape than most of its peers.

Morgan Stanley's presence in Baltimore and move to Thames Street Wharf is a testimony to an often-forgotten Baltimore strength: Its legacy, competence and influence in financial services. Despite the exit of Alex. Brown in the 1990s, Baltimore still punches above its weight in finance. It's a solid No. 3 on the East Coast, behind New York and Boston, with much lower costs. The cluster of talent and local quality of life mean that finance jobs tend to stay here even when the nameplates on the door change. Lots of Alex. Brown talent just moved to other shops. Morgan Stanley's 2009 purchase of Baltimore-based Legg Mason's former brokerage unit (via interim owner Citigroup) gives it even more of a Baltimore focus.

Morgan Stanley knew it could recruit the people it needed in Baltimore. Read the Baltimore Business Journal piece from 2002 to see how Maryland won Morgan Stanley. For those smarting from Maryland's recent failure to win Northrop Grumman's headquarters, it's a good antidote.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Corporate welfare
        

Here is your chance to solve the U.S. fiscal crisis. Below (HT Greg Mankiw) is a schematic of projected federal spending in 2020. As you can see, it's almost all entitlements and defense, with quite a bit of interest from the soaring national debt added in for good measure. So where will you cut spending?

Posted by Jay Hancock at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)
Categories: Slo-mo fiscal train crash
        

Krugman's Monday column was on how insidious pollution such as increasing CO2 concentrations does not get on the public radar screen the way oil spills, smog and burning rivers in Cleveland did in the 1960s.

This decline in concern would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered — but it isn’t, of course. In particular, greenhouse gases pose a greater threat than smog or burning rivers ever did. But it’s hard to get the public focused on a form of pollution that’s invisible, and whose effects unfold over decades rather than days.

I think CO2 emissions are a threat. Something should be done to tax and/or cap greenhouse-gas emissions. But to say baldly that greenhouse gases are a greater threat than carcinogens in rivers and drinking water, or than smoggy clouds of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and ozone, which have killed thousands of people, strikes one as an overstatement.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Environment
        

Good piece by Scott Thurm (pay wall) in today's WSJ on how companies that had huge layoffs last year may be ill-prepared to increase sales during the recovery. "You can't shrink your way to prosperity," Thurm quotes University of Colorado business prof Wayne Mascio as saying. From the piece:

Early in the past decade, when its sales fell 11% in two years, Honeywell International Inc. laid off 31,000 employees, one-fourth of its work force, canceled plans for new products and scaled back its global-expansion goals. Those actions "decimated our industrial base," Honeywell Chief Executive David Cote recently told the company's shareholders.

During the recent recession, Honeywell took a different tack. The company's sales fell 15% last year, and its profits shrank 23%, but the diversified manufacturer used furloughs and benefit cuts to limit layoffs to 6,000 employees, about 5% of its work force.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

The Internal Revenue Service is reminding the charity world that even small nonprofit organizations now have to file a Form 990 990-N or 990-EZ, under a new law. If you normally have less than $25,000 in receipts you can file 990-N, which the agency calls the e-Postcard. says the IRS:

If you do not file your e-Postcard on time, the IRS will send you a reminder notice but you will not be assessed a penalty for late filing the e-Postcard. However, an organization that fails to file required e-Postcards (or information returns – Forms 990 or 990-EZ) for three consecutive years will automatically lose its tax-exempt status. The revocation of the organization’s tax-exempt status will not take place until the filing due date of the third year.

So by all means get those 990s filed. Of course, feel free to put totally bogus information on the returns. There are hardly any penalties for nonprofits that file false information.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Nonprofits
        

Good piece in the WSJ looking at people in Congress who "shorted" stocks and bonds during the financial crisis, thus profiting from mayhem. Shorting stocks or bonds is to bet on their decline. Folks in Congress have been blasting Goldman Sachs and hedge funds for making huge piles on short selling. Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson has said: "We don't need those speculating in the marketplace to take unfair advantage of the values of equities that are owned by Americans all over this country for the sake of making a buck on a short sale," according to the Journal.

But, the Journal said:

On Oct. 8 and 9, 2008—as the Federal Reserve was bailing out American International Group Inc.—an account Sen. Isakson held invested more than $30,000 in ProShares UltraShort 7-10 Year Treasury and UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury, the records show. These are "leveraged short" funds, designed to gain $2 for each $1 drop in the daily value of U.S. Treasury bonds.

Yes, Isakson is a Republican. Yes, Democrats shorted America, too, especially Jonathan Gillibrand, the husband of New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Go read the story. It's not short-selling and put options that are the problem. It's letting firms like Goldman use their own capital to make short bets and rigging specially-designed, toxic time bombs for others to short.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 7:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Finance
        

Good analysis by Andy Rosen about the reprise role that BGE electricity rates will play in this year's Maryland gubernatorial campaign.The nut:

Still, the real question of whether rates would be lower under a fully-regulated system -- or whether more competition would reduce prices – has never really been answered. Nor have questions over which system would be more likely to help Maryland develop more capacity to meet growing future demand.

There is very persuasive evidence that Maryland rates would have been lower the past four years if the state had never deregulated in 1999. But that's not the same as saying rates would be lower now if the state reregulated. Full reregulation would involve large costs to reacquire generation plants that were deregulated, and those costs would be built into rates. Partial deregulation would involve building new plants and passing the cost to customers.

As to the question of whether more competition would reduce prices: Of course it would. But because of environmental laws, red tape and other barriers to entry for new generation plants, there isn't enough competition.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

There seems to be a growing awareness on both sides of the political range that to let the United States' fiscal health go the way of Greece would not be a great thing, and that we're not going to cut our way to a balanced budget because Americans love their Medicare and other entitlements way too much. So that means tax increases. (No, nobody is talking about doing this while the economy is still in the dumps.) The most-talked about tax is a European-style value added tax, which would basically be a federal sales tax levied all along the production chain. Among its attractions, a VAT is easy to administer and difficult to cheat against.

Here's former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, a Democrat, according to Reuters:

Volcker, answering a question from the audience at a New York Historical Society event, said the value-added tax "was not as toxic an idea" as it has been in the past and also said a carbon or other energy-related tax may become necessary.

Though he acknowledged that both were still unpopular ideas, he said getting entitlement costs and the U.S. budget deficit under control may require such moves. "If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes," he said.

And here's Greg Mankiw, who was chairman of President Bush II's Council of Economic Advisors, writing in the NYT:

The bottom line, from both political perspectives, is that a VAT is neither blessed nor evil. It is a tool. We can use it to advance a larger government, a more efficient tax system or some combination of the two.

That will be the key issue in the coming debate.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Taxes
        

From the NYT:

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.

“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.

The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Environment
        

TPM is quoting Nancy Pelosi as saying that, as financial apocalypse approached in 2008, Bush administration officials banned aides from telling Congress about the size of the disaster. Disturbing if true, although perhaps not surprising. But by all means, consider the source.

In little-noticed statements to reporters over the last few weeks, Pelosi has alleged that the Bush administration knew well in advance of its intervention that the financial crisis would hit, and that Congress would need to authorize a historic and unpopular bailout - but that top officials, including then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, told her that they had been barred from briefing Congress about true extent of the crisis.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

This seems wrong. Via Yahoo news comes the report that Huff Post, Vanity Fair and other media outlets are auctioning off internships. Yes, the money supports the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. But it's still adding another layer to Auction America, where everything is available at a price. Once, internships were a way for companies to give back, help bright young people launch into the real world and groom essential talent for the future. Then they became unpaid, a source of cheap labor. Now they seem as if they're morphing into yet another attempted revenue source.

Breaking into the media business is tough, with a seemingly endless supply of bright young college graduates vying for unpaid internships at elite publications. Still, there's another route to getting one's foot in the door, if you have money to burn: Win an auction!

Want to "jump-start your career in the blogosphere" by way of the Huffington Post? That'll cost $9,000. How about spending a couple weeks strolling the rarefied halls at Vanity Fair? Try $2,900. Or maybe you'd rather get some face time with Anna Wintour at Vogue? Well, you'll have to dig $42,500 out of the bottom of your Hermes Birkin bag for that one.

Perhaps to offset the appearance that only wealthy interns would get inside, each publication also created a slot that doesn't cost anything, according to the RFK Center.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Media, Workplace
        

Like Baltimore's Remington section, Brooklyn, New York, is considering a proposal for a local Wal-Mart. As in Baltimore, the store's approach has spawned the usual ant-Wal-Mart spleen. But Marta Mossberg, former editorial page editor for the Baltimore Examiner, has a nice piece in today's New York Daily News on the social good accomplished by Wal-Mart's low prices. To judge from their actions, Wal-Mart's enemies would like the poor to pay more for the everyday things they need. From Mossburg's piece:

If Barron and supporters win, the only people exploited will be his constituents, especially the poorest ones. Food prices in inner cities are the highest in the nation. Many poor people do not have cars, so they do not have options other than convenience stores or the tiny, often dirty supermarkets with wilting produce and high prices.

And it's not just poor people who need help in New York, it's everyone. The cost of living makes New York City the poorest big city in America, according to Eamon Moynihan of the Cost of Living Project. Largely because of expensive housing, someone making $100,000 in New York City has the same standard of living as someone making about $63,000 in Washington, D.C., and $51,000 in Chicago, he wrote in a 2009 issue of City Journal.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
        

In Baltimore, you phone in a report on a pothole or street trash and wait weeks or months for something to be done. In Eindhoven, the Netherlands, from now on, you take a picture of the problem, record the GPS coordinates and send a problem ticket to the authorities via your iPhone BuitenBeter app.

Here is the description, from Springwise:

A combination of GPS and maps lets users pinpoint the exact location of the problem, providing city workers with all the information they need to identify and resolve the problem.

The application covers a wide range of familiar nuisances, from broken sidewalks to loitering youth (who will hopefully respond favourably to having their picture taken by concerned citizens). Compared with lodging a complaint by phone or in writing, BuitenBeter creates a nearly frictionless experience and will no doubt prompt a wider group of people to become active reporters of issues that need the city's attention.

HT Marginal Revolution.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jack of Howard County bicycling advocates for noting the counties use of www.seeclickfix.com to deal with these kinds of problems quickly. Wonder if it works.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
        

The Obama Justice Department ought to look very carefully at the proposed merger of United Airlines and Continental Airlines. Together they would have more than a fifth of the U.S. market -- No. 1 in the country. Delta, which combined with Northwest Airlines in 2008, has 20 percent. So the top two carriers would control 41 percent of the market. Together they overlap on 13 non-stop routes, according to Bloomberg.

But the merger would have little effect on Marshall BWI, which is dominated by discount carrier Southwest Airlines. Continental has only a 3 percent share of BWI, and has a 5 percent piece.

In the end, don't expect the administration to contest the United-Continental combo. After all, these are the guys who allowed the egregious marriage of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. And where is the heralded Justice Department assault against Google?

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Airlines