]]>]]>“It’s a lot of more of the same,” said Robert Puentes, a metropolitan growth and development expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who is tracking the legislation. “You build a lot of new highways, continue to decentralize” urban and suburban communities and “pull resources away from transit.”
California's public works projects are biting the dust due to financial crisis.
California’s worst budget crisis has held up $3.8 billion in spending on public works, possibly including the courthouse adjacent to Santa Ana City Hall. Sills and his seven fellow jurists had planned to move in before the lease on their temporary offices expires June 30.
“Everyone will have to work from home,” said Sills, 70, “and we’ll have to rent a place for when we hear arguments.”
Many still defend Milton Friedman like Toys R Us defends the existence of Santa Claus.
“When Friedman’s Platonic ideas of free-market virtues are put into practice, they have too often generated a systemic orgy of competitive greed -- whose remedies, ironically, entail countermeasures of nationalization,” Marshall Sahlins, an emeritus professor of anthropology, said during the debate, speaking in a room adorned with murals of female students parading through the campus in medieval gowns.
Sahlins, 77, noted a few weeks later socialist and capitalist countries alike are regulating or nationalizing financial institutions in a rebuff to Friedman.
Economic crisis causes global shipping to grind to a halt.
One 140-acre tract at Long Beach is filled with more than 25,000 new Toyotas that dealers can’t sell. Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s second-largest automaker, yesterday forecast its first operating loss in 71 years on weak demand. Nearby, scrap metal meant for export to Asia piles up behind a fence. From the observation deck, Lytle pointed to piles of empty containers stacked four high and numbering in the thousands. Some of the dockside cranes “haven’t turned a wheel in months,” he said.
Statism. Say it out loud. It's not a word you've used in a decade if ever. Practice saying it over and over again.
Government activism has become a “necessary evil” to help pull the global economy out of recession, says Marco Annunziata, chief economist at UniCredit MIB in London. Even Bush, who ran for the U.S. presidency espousing smaller government, agrees. He told a CNN interviewer last week he has “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”
Rachel Maddow is the up-and-coming Cronkite of the 21st century. Sorry, Wolf.
Yet, Tyson didn't tell viewers that she sits on the board of directors of Morgan Stanley, a bank that has received $10 billion in bailout money. That's right - according to Morgan Stanley's SEC filings, Tyson makes about $350,000 a year from Morgan Stanley in total compensation from that position, and she now owns about 79,000 shares of the company. In other words, she has a direct financial interest in defending the bailout, absolving bailout recipients of wrongdoing, and justifying the use of bailout money for shareholder dividends.
Progressivism vs Conservatism is about to get very, very ugly. "The American Way of Life": Structural or Cyclical?
Right now, Wall Street and Detroit are willing to say whatever they need to say to keep the taxpayer money coming. But when the economy begins turning up, my betting is that their Washington lobbyists will push back hard against any major restructurings the government wants to impose on them. New regulations of Wall Street will be watered down and circumvented; new requirements on the Big Three for green technologies will be resisted.
General Motors has a market valuation about 1/3 of Bed, Bath, and Beyond [via MarginalRevolution)
]]>General Motors [Steyn writes], like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small loss-making auto subsidiary. The UAW is the AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as “workers” (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people
Appealing ideas are often simple: how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink. Free to download, free to use.
Is this innovative or is it pointless?
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From China Car Times:
For too long, the Toyota Prius, and Honda Civic Hybrid have long been out of the reach of the common driver in China. The Prius and the Civic both cost around 250,000rmb, which pretty much makes it a rich persons toy, but the launch of the BYD F3DM makes hybrid automobiles not only affordable, but highly desireable.
The BYD F3DM starts at a mere 149,800rmb (A similar price to the Ford Focus), despite it looking like a previous generation Toyota Corolla, the gasoline version of the BYD F3 has sold extremely well, now it seems that the F3DM sales may well eclipse the gasoline version.
From BBC News:
Cars leave me cold, but not the BYD F3DM. I drove it the other day, and it really is remarkable.
In one way, it is a rather ordinary compact saloon car, though it did have exceptional acceleration when I put my foot down zooming round the factory grounds in Shenzhen, the vast new Chinese city just north of Hong Kong.
This is a plug-in electric car, hence the acceleration, but when the electric battery runs out after 80 miles (128km), the petrol engine switches in seamlessly. [...]
BYD's vast new factory did not exist 15 months ago, and they had to level several hills and fill in several lakes to create the site.
The workers mostly live in vast dormitories close by.
Like most of the Shenzhen workforce, they have migrated into the city from distant country places, moving from poverty in search of the fabled better life, spinning the great wheel of China's modernisation.
The size and scale of what BYD has already achieved is breathtaking, but that is nothing compared to its ambition.
This company has already made public its aim to be the number one car firm in China by the year 2015, and then - deep breath - number one in the whole world in 2025.
And video test drive from BusinessWeek.
And for grins, some comparative graphs of world auto producers (scroll way down for graphs, and waaaaay down to see BYD stat).
Motor Vehicle Production (1000 units):
Total motor vehicle production (1000 units)
I work for the DoD and when the Department of Homeland Security was established,we helped them with many things, not the least of which was contracting. To make a long story short, you cannot juice up a government agency's budget by tens of billions (or in the case of the stimulus package, hundreds of billions) and expect them to be able to process the paperwork to contract it out, much less oversee the projects or even choose them with any kind of hope for success. It's like trying to feed a Pomeranian a 25 lb turkey. It's madness. [...]
It was years before DHS got the situation under control and between the start and when they finally assembled a sufficiently capable team of lawyers, contracting officials, technical experts and resource managers, most of the money was totally wasted. Now take the DHS situation and multiply it by 20 and you've got the Obama stimulus package.
I can really see agencies choking on a trillion dollars worth of chaos.
]]>For instance, Lombardi says, if Gartner sells $5,000 worth of jars to a new client such as a florist, he wouldn't have to buy flowers in return. Instead, he can use that revenue to purchase services from other companies in the exchange, such as payroll services, vehicle maintenance or Web site work.
That way, Gartner can cover some of his expenses without having to use any cash — something that he and others have found attractive amid a national credit crunch.
The International Reciprocal Trade Association, which tracks the barter industry, says barter transactions are up as much as 25 percent. While bartering is taxed the same way as cash, Lombardi says the recession is making converts out of people who had been skeptical about bartering to sustain their business.
And from the Barter Business Unlimited website:
Barter or trade is a powerful tool that represents a solution for companies with available inventory or services. By accepting payment in trade dollars instead of cash, a business maximizes their efficiency by increasing inventory turnover or billable hours. Using the trade dollars earned, that company can purchase goods or services they want – without paying cash.
According to the International Reciprocal Trade Association (IRTA) estimates just in the U.S., over 470,000 companies actively participate in barter for a total of over $12 billion in annual sales. Over 65% of the corporations listed in the New York Stock Exchange are presently using Barter to reduce surplus inventory and bolster sales and to ensure that production facilities run at near capacity. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that 20 to 25% of world trade is now barter, and corporate barter is now a 20 billion dollar industry. Barter continues to carve out an important place in the U.S. and world economy.
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]]>In the early 1970s, one by one, these six railroads entered bankruptcy. Although there were many reasons for the economic difficulties they faced, chief among them was competition from trucks, subsidized by the federally-built Interstate highway system, and an archaic system of economic regulation which prevented railroads from responding to the needs of the market. As freight revenues declined, railroads deferred maintenance, allowing tracks and equipment to fall into poor condition, and as service levels deteriorated, more business went to trucks. Requirements to run money-losing passenger service added to the rails decline.
The federal government, recognizing the national economic importance of the six railroads, responded by creating Conrail and appropriating the funds needed to rebuild tracks, locomotives and freight cars. While Conrail succeeded in rebuilding the railroad, the problem of severe economic regulation remained. With the passage of the Staggers Act in 1980, many of these constraints were loosened, giving railroads more freedom to compete with trucks. Later, other legislation transferred the burden of operating money-losing commuter rail service from Conrail to state agencies. In the 1970s, Congress created Amtrak to take over intercity passenger service from the nation's freight railroads.
By 1981 Conrail began its financial turnaround. After June 1981, Conrail would no longer require federal investment, and finished the year with the first profit in its history.
The problem was not just the U.S economy (which was pretty good when Mr. Leinberger wrote his article) or even the subprime mortgage bust. "The story of vacant suburban homes and declining suburban neighborhoods did not begin with the crisis, and will not end with it," he wrote. "A structural change is under way in the housing market -- a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work." Weary of commuting and high gas prices and longing to be where the action is, people have been migrating back to town.
It was in the spirit of this new urbanism that dense "villages" like Aldea de Santa Fe promised to capture the charm and convenience of a small town, but with one important difference: Instead of locating their project downtown, the developers of Aldea made for the boonies where land was cheap and then tried to recreate an urban environment from scratch. Pack in enough townhouses, condos, and "live/work lofts" and the excitement would follow -- the restaurants, groceries, bakeries, theaters, galleries, bookstores. [...] Living in Aldea would be like living in a flat-roofed Ann Arbor, a sophisticated college town. [...]
That is not what happened. On a recent Sunday morning as I walked Aldea's lifeless streets, counting the empty spec houses and "For Sale" signs, the place had the feel of a newly constructed ghost town. One street, Arroyo Privado, was private indeed -- at least 10 of its townhouses were marked for sale. "Astonishing Low Price" promised a blue-and-yellow sign. I looked up the listing when I got home. Half a million dollars.
Aldea's "neotraditional" town plaza ("all the charm of Santa Fe in a village setting second to none") was as deserted as a set in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western. Nothing was happening in the community center, its Christmas electrolitos rattling in the wind. The website calender of public events ("What's Hot: Latest News") hasn't been updated since October 2007 when there was the First (and presumably last) Aldea Plaza Harvest Festival.
