Posts tagged hmmm
How to Travel as a Minority (And Not Look Like a Terrorist)
H/t to reader Scott.
With facial hair, I slightly resemble 11 of the 19 September 11 hijackers. No one aside from my friends has accused me of being a member of al Qaeda, but I do things when traveling to assure skeptics that while I am a minority, I’m not planning a jihad.
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/how-to-travel-as-a-minority-and-not-look-like-a-terrorist/
#readersubmission
iPhone And Android Now Make Up 25 Percent of Smartphone Sales
Google-powered Android phones and iPhones are both gobbling up market share. The combined worldwide market share of both operating systems reached 25 percent in the first quarter, up from 12 percent the year before, according to Gartner
. The iPhone still has a bigger share, at 15.4 percent (up 5 points), but Android is catching up fast with 9.6 percent (up 8 points). All other smartphones lost relative share during the quarter, even RIM Blackberries, although they still grew in absolute numbers (see table below)
I messed around with a Motorola Droid for the first time the other night. It’s awesome. And more important, it works. If the new iPhone isn’t much better at calls, I’ll be making the switch.
Lunchtime Reads: The Global Crisis of Legitimacy and Bees
Sent from reader [redacted because he’s scared]. An interesting piece from Stratfor Global Intelligence. The Global Crisis of Legitimacy
Financial panics are an integral part of capitalism. So are economic recessions. The system generates them and it becomes stronger because of them. Like forest fires, they are painful when they occur, yet without them, the forest could not survive. They impose discipline, punishing the reckless, rewarding the cautious. They do so imperfectly, of course, as at times the reckless are rewarded and the cautious penalized. Political crises — as opposed to normal financial panics — emerge when the reckless appear to be the beneficiaries of the crisis they have caused, while the rest of society bears the burdens of their recklessness. At that point, the crisis ceases to be financial or economic. It becomes political.
Also, bees are dying. Who knew? Apparently, it’s a Joe Biden style BFD.
The Guardian: Fears for crops as shock figures from Ameirca show scale of bee catastrophe
The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter
Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.
The decline of the country’s estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.
The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.
Let’s Talk Taxes- Are 47% of Americans Paying Nothing? In A Word- No.
David Leonhardt (NYTimes economics writer), Ezra Klein (WaPo) and John Stewart (Daily Show) have a fantastic set of self referencing pieces today on a meme that has become a rallying cry for the right. Namely, “47% of Americans aren’t paying any taxes at all!”
As Ronald Reagan taught us, “Facts are stubborn things”.
[47% is] the portion of American households that owe no income tax for 2009. The number is up from 38 percent in 2007, and it has become a popular talking point on cable television and talk radio. With Tax Day coming on Thursday, 47 percent has become shorthand for the notion that the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole.
Neither one of those ideas is true. They rely on a cleverly selective reading of the facts. So does the 47 percent number.
The 47 percent number is not wrong. The stimulus programs of the last two years — the first one signed by President George W. Bush, the second and larger one by President Obama — have increased the number of households that receive enough of a tax credit to wipe out their federal income tax liability.
But the modifiers here — federal and income — are important. Income taxes aren’t the only kind of federal taxes that people pay. There are also payroll taxes and capital gains taxes, among others. And, of course, people pay state and local taxes, too.
Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.
I’m going to be charitable on this and assume that people are biased toward their own experiences rather than playing loose with the data. For upper-income folks — journalists, television executives, congressmen, think tank employees — the big hit is on income taxes, so they get pretty annoyed when they hear that lots of Americans don’t pay any income tax. But their experience is not typical. Most people’s tax burden has a very different composition. As David Leonhardt points out in a typically excellent column today, “about three-quarters of all American households pay more in payroll taxes, which go toward Medicare and Social Security, than in income taxes.” And that doesn’t even mention state and local income taxes.
So let’s mention them. The following graph comes from a report (pdf) by Citizens for Tax Justice. It compares the share of the total tax burden — that means income taxes, payroll taxes, state and local taxes, capital gains taxes, and so forth — with the share of the total income for different groups. It’s the single most important graph to understand our tax system.
John Stewart has a typically hilarious take. Enjoy.
The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cThat’s Tarifficwww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorTea Party
One last thought. What if the right (take that as you will) isn’t just unaware of the truth behind the numbers? What if their cries of “socialism” and “redistribution” aren’t a call to action from the overburdened John Galts of America? What if this talking point is actually a coded dog whistle to the less….enlightened members of their base? Ronald Reagan also brought us folksy (and not fact-based) anecdotes about “Welfare queens driving Cadillacs”. That would mean that underneath all the talk of tea parties and liberty, that they’re actually STILL running on a thinly veiled Southern Strategy. See Also: April- Confederate History Month. Hmmmmm. That could never be. So nothing to worry about!
It’s Spring- That Means Developer Conferences
…and halter top day, and Bay to Breakers. More on those later.
They’re all booked up. But I plan to watch the sites/video feeds. Pretty cool stuff. This is where outside developers and company people hobnob and share ideas for the product and platform. Really exciting time right now, because each of these companies is looking to make big moves right now.
Chirp (Twitter’s conference) is today (4/14) and tomorrow.
Twitter just unveiled its ad platform yesterday, which is big. This is the first public effort they’ve made to explain how they’ll make money. They also recently acquired Tweetie, which may signal a push by Twitter to establish itself as a primary player in its ecosystem of apps.
f8 (Facebook’s Devcon) is on April 21
Facebook is looking to expand connect in a big way. Also, virtual credits and currency will necessarily be a focus for them in 2010. Keep an eye out.
And Google is….the baddest (or merely biggest?) MF in the valley. Eric Schmidt has been in an unusually public spat with Steve Jobs & Apple. They also may be feeling some pressure to unveil something cool, since the iPad has sucked all the air out of the room. Also, the mobile wars rage on. Android/iPhone. How will they more tightly integration location based services. Will Buzz recover from its botched debut? Will I ever find true love????
Infographic- China’s Forecast March Trade Deficit May Reduce Pressure on Yuan
From Bloomberg:
China is forecast to report in coming days that it ran a trade deficit in March for the first time since 2004, underscoring the country’s reduced reliance on exports for growth and giving Chinese leaders a possible argument against concerns that the yuan is undervalued.
They have a really cool Flash time series of the data, check it out.
http://www.bloomberg.com/insight/china-trade-forecast.html
Here’s a screenshot. They also break out percentages of deficit relative to GDP and YOY changes to export growth:
“A Chinese trade deficit would underline the country’s growing reliance on its domestic market rather than exports as its most important source of growth. In 2008, the most recent year for which government figures are available, China’s household consumption accounted for 35% of its GDP compared to 7.9% for net exports, the excess of exports over imports.”
I, like a lot of people, thought China was doing most of their heavy lifting for us (America). I was wrong. While we’re struggling to get our house in order, they are doing big things. Although, Jim Chanos (who famously called the Enron collapse) has been saying for awhile now that China is a huge bubble (“Dubai times 1,000”, he says. Hmm.
The US Treasury leaning on China to allow the Rembini to float
+ plus the internal pressures to sustain growth
+ plus the staggering amount of treasuries the Chinese hold (some $2 trillion)
+ military tensions (Taiwan) and cultural frictions (Google)
+ bring to boil and stir well.
What do you get? Not really clear yet. But closely tracking……..
