Although O’Donnell laudably tried using to emphasis the audience’s attention onand hopefully final, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen below for decent, I was overtaken, not through the pulling about the thread, in addition to the voracious audience he serves. It didn’t make me unfortunate, it developed me angry.
With regards to celebrities, we are able to be a heartless country, basking in their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Seashore. The impulse is understandable, to some diploma. It can be grating to listen to complaints from consumers who enjoy privileges that most of us can not even imagine. If you ever can not muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who makes far more income for a day’s effort than many of us will make in a decade’s time, I guess I can not blame you.
Along with the fast speed of events on the web as well as information and facts revolution sparked by the Online, it’s pretty uncomplicated for your technological innovation business to imagine it is special: always breaking new ground and executing facts that nobody has actually executed previous to.
But you will find other types of internet business that have previously undergone a few of the identical radical shifts, and also have just as outstanding a stake within the long term.
Consider healthcare, as an illustration.
We sometimes believe that of it as being a huge, lumbering beast, but in truth, medication has undergone a sequence of revolutions inside the previous 200 years that happen to be a minimum of equal to these we see in technological know-how and facts.
Much less understandable, but still inside of the norms of human nature, would be the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and investigate the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but in the blithe interviewer Sheen’s existence as we pass it inside the proper lane of our daily lives. To be sincere, it might be difficult for many people to discern the difference amongst a run-of-the-mill interest whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its personal merits, a quote like “I Am On the Drug. It’s Referred to as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we can not all be expected to get the complete measure of someone’s existence each individual time we listen to some thing funny.
Speedy forward to 2011 and I am seeking to examine usually means of staying a little more business-like about my hobbies (typically new music). Through the finish of January I had manned up and started out to promote my blogs. I had developed several different weblogs, which had been contributed to by buddies and colleagues. I promoted these actions through Facebook and Twitter.
Second: the minor abomination the Gang of 5 about the Supream Court gave us a 12 months or so back (Citizens Inebriated) in reality comprises a little bit bouncing betty of its personal that could especially properly go off with the faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Given that this ruling extended the principle of “personhood” to both corporations and unions, to consider to deny them any correct to run within the legal framework that they had been organized below deprives these “persons” with the freedoms of speech, association and movement. Which means (when again, quoting law college educated family members) that both the courts have to uphold these rights for your unions (as individual “persons” as assured by the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they've to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights ought to use to important corporations, also.
The biggest names in the tech industry seem to have collectively decided it's time to make the billions. Sure Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have sold some ads and Foursquare brokered some promotional deals. But with the second wave of IPOs on the horizon and investors' eyeballs getting as round as the tech bubble, the time is nigh for tech demigods to show that they can make money off all those users they've spent years accumulating. And hopefully not alienate them in the process. Today, Mark Zuckerberg inched closer to that dream of a trillion dollars by offering streaming movies — and tanking Netflix's stock. Meanwhile, YouTube closed a deal on a production company presumably to make its very own content. Intel cast a wide net to examine tech companies' latest money-making ventures. Then we looked into our CrystalBall app to see what they might try next.
Facebook
Moneymaker: Warner Bros. just became the first Hollywood studio to stream movies directly on the social network. Facebook has been making a big move toward e-commerce lately, and the fact that you have to use Facebook Credits to buy movies and TV shows could be the tipping point to get users to hand their credit card info over to Mark Zuckerberg. Plus, studios looking for a way to stop Netflix's growth might not make Facebook suffer the same 28-day waiting period for new content.
Downside: At 30 credits (or $3) for a 48-hour rental for The Dark Knight, it will cost you. Plus, you have to "like" the movie or the director to get the privilege. Do you really want hundreds of your Facebook friends to see you "liked" and watched Valentine's Day on Valentine's Day?
What's next: Why should you use a credit card to buy Facebook Credits when you can use Zuckerbills (coming to a U.S. Treasury in 2020)?
Twitter
Moneymaker: In order to make money off its free iPhone app, this weekend Twitter introduced a number of new features, including Quickbar, a "forced trending topics bar" that includes promoted tweets — negating the idea of a service that quickly shows you what's actually trending.
Downside: Pundit John Gruber quickly dubbed the feature "Dickbar" after Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, but Gruber issued the unfortunate nickname on Twitter and it was widely retweeted. Advantage Costolo.
What's next: Can we pay someone to monitor our Twitter feed for us? It's getting overwhelming. Either that or design personalized lists of the best people to follow based on what's important to us, like updates on Libya and breaking bear-cub news.
Foursquare
Moneymaker: At SXSW this week, Foursquare is set to announce a partnership with American Express that will link users' credit cards with their Foursquare accounts. The incentive to consumers? Deals like "spend $5, save $5" at participating merchants. Although Foursquare said its motivation is to increase membership and loyalty and that it won't charge Amex for the privilege, it's hard to believe that will stay the case if it catches on.
Downside: We don't have an Amex card. And (confession) although we use the app for recommendations, we've never actually checked in anywhere. Sorry, Dennis and Naveen! But if they add other credit cards, we would.
What's next: How about a service that warns you beforehand if you're about to friend one of those compulsive people who check in with handfuls of people at name-dropping locales?
YouTube
Moneymaker: YouTube just closed a deal to buy Internet video company Next New Networks, the producers behind Auto-Tune the News, for less than $50 million. Although rumor had it that Google was trying to get into the video-production business, Business Insider reports that the move is actually designed to help existing YouTube partners make "more and better content." Which then leads to more users and, subsequently, more expensive ads.
Downside: Isn't YouTube's strength either grainy weird viral videos or pirated television, movie, and music content? The second could definitely use better quality, but does it even matter for the former?
What's next: How about veering into Hulu territory?
Skype
Moneymaker: Just regular old advertising on the Windows version of its paid video communications service.
Downside: Although Skype says it won't show ads during the video conferencing yet, this could devolve into a Minority Report-style advertising assault.
What's next: Would it be possible to embed microphone/receiver in our brain so we don't have to use the special headset? Just curious.
Update: TechCrunch makes an important clarification. Facebook hasn't announced its own streaming movie service. Rather the movie offering comes from Warner Brothers app that uses Facebook Credits' payment system. But if it proves successful and other studios follow suit, Zuckberg can still count on more personal credit card info coming his way. Someone better go tell Netflix's shareholders.
Steven Greenhouse has a long article in today’s NYT about an attempt by the states to deal with their “strained” pension funds by moving to defined-contribution pension plans. Here’s the lede:
Lawmakers and governors in many states, faced with huge shortfalls in employee pension funds, are turning to a strategy that a lot of private companies adopted years ago: moving workers away from guaranteed pension plans and toward 401(k)-type retirement savings plans.
What’s a “huge shortfall”? Amazingly, nowhere in the 1,500-word article does Greenhouse actually say. Instead, we get incomprehensible tales like this:
Utah decided to adopt a 401(k)-type plan after the stock market plunge in 2008 caused the shortfall in the state’s pension plan to balloon to $6.5 billion…
Under the new plan, [state senator Dan] Liljenquist said, the state’s retirement contributions for new workers will be roughly half that for current employees, potentially saving $5 million a year for every 1,000 new workers hired.
So, the state of Utah has been putting insufficient money into its pension plan, and now there isn’t enough money there to meet upcoming liabilities. And the solution here is for the state, in future, to contribute “roughly half” of what it’s been spending up until now in pension contributions.
Needless to say, this makes no sense on either front. The liability to existing workers doesn’t go away if a different plan is adopted for new workers, so the problems at the pension plan aren’t being addressed. On top of that, it’s hard to see how contributing much less to new workers’ retirement is going to help them at all, either. From a pensions perspective, there’s no winner at all: the only entity better off is the state, from a cashflow perspective.
On top of that, Greenhouse makes no attempt to put numbers like $6.5 billion or $5 million in any kind of context. Are they big? Who knows.
The only way I could make any sense at all of Greenhouse’s article was to read it in parallel with Dean Baker’s paper on the origins and severity of the public pension crisis. The table he includes, which includes all state public pension funds, is invaluable; here, for instance, is Utah.
What this shows is that the Utah pension fund, at the end of 2009, was about $2.8 billion in the hole. If it rose by 15% in 2010, which is a pretty reasonable assumption given the performance of the stock market, the gap is likely to have been all but eliminated. But even the gap at the end of 2009 was less than one tenth of one percent of Utah’s state income.
All of these numbers are fuzzy, of course. Valuing assets is hard enough; coming up with a present value of future liabilities is much harder, and depends crucially on which discount rate you use. But Baker’s numbers are pretty reasonable, and show that there really isn’t anything to panic about here.
More generally, as Teresa Ghilarducci notes elsewhere on the NYT website (but not in the paper), the idea that moving from defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans is going to help anybody at all is highly problematic.
401(k) plans are bad deal for taxpayers. Dollar for dollar, a traditional pension plan yields more pension benefits than do 401(k) plans because 401(k) management and investment fees are three times higher. And professionals who manage money in pooled pension funds usually get higher returns than workers who manage their own 401(k) accounts. The only clear winners when pensions switch over to the 401(k) plans are brokers and bankers…
The unintended effect of widespread 401(k) plans is more volatility. In contrast to traditional pensions and Social Security, 401(k) plans fuel bubbles and make recessions worse. When the economy is booming, 401(k) plan asset values soar, making people spend more and work less. Not what you want in an expansion.
Worse, when the economy plummets and takes 401(k) assets with it, people do the opposite; they cling to the labor market and rein in spending – again, two things you don’t want in a recession.
On top of that, defined-benefit plans have a mutual-insurance component to them: shorter-lived workers subsidize longer-lived workers, helping to increase everybody’s standard of living.
The fact is that the states’ move to defined-contribution plans is a blatantly political one, born of Republican ideology conflating such plans with individual freedom and choice. For rich professionals who jump from job to job every few years, 401(k) plans do make a certain amount of sense. For public servants spending a lifetime in the police force or in elementary schools, by contrast, they emphatically don’t. As for the state pension plans, the only way that the state governments can help them make up their actuarial liabilities is if they pour more money into them. Not less.
Source: http://removeripoffreports.net/ corporate Reputation Management
The ultimate in repairing a bruised reputation for business
No comments:
Post a Comment