The EPA’s final Clean Power Plan, released on August 3, financially hammers coal-dependent states, compared to the Obama Administration’s 2014 draft proposal. Nine months after the loss of Kentucky Democrat Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes and the retirement of West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller, the EPA’s attack on coal country is all about going after Republicans.
Blue Shield of California violated Obamacare’s mandated requirement that their medical expenditures be a minimum of 80 percent of healthcare premiums paid. Under the law, Blue Shield will be required to rebate almost $83 million to individuals and small businesses. But by destroying small and regional competition, the supposedly not-for-profit Blue Shield, after its rebate, still made $52 million more profit under Obamacare.
The biggest winner of the Thursday night’s debates was Carly Fiorina, who was on the under-card with the goofy kids. With polls showing she won by between 73 to 87 percent, the Democrats are preparing to attack her with “long knives” for destroying Hewlett-Packard’s “culture.”
3D printing has been around for several decades, but expiring patents are driving costs down and major tech breakthroughs are driving up speed.
A new study from the New York Federal Reserve faults the federal government’s policy of boosting aid to families in recent decades to make college education more affordable, because it enabled institutions to raise tuitions much faster than inflation.
The New York Times refers to the Inland Empire as Southern California’s backlot, because of its vast warehouse complexes and staging areas. But with the Riverside-San Bernardino region as the hottest industrial construction site in the nation, the Inland Empire is the center stage for America’s new industrial boom.
The California Policy Center has just published an exhaustive study regarding the $149.2 billion Californians have borrowed over the last 14 years to finance public school construction. Despite the sob stories about dilapidated facilities, huge amounts of cash has been siphoned off due to union project labor agreements, environmentalist lawsuits, and inadequate planning and public oversight.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL=$115) stock has plunged about $114 billion in market value since the company reported very good quarterly sales and earnings two weeks ago.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) posted a 40-day public comment period late August 3 aimed at transferring the oversight of the Internet to a not-for-profit entity.
Marketing technology is emerging as one of the hottest sectors for business tech investing, according to the PitchBook Blog. Marketing tech companies in the first six months of 2015 raised $1.62 billion in 157 venture capital deals, and 205 companies were acquired for a total of $4.3 billion.
Puerto Rico officially defaulted on part of its $73 billion in debt on Monday afternoon, when the U.S. territory only paid $628,000 toward a $58 million debt due by 5 p.m.
Uber is now valued at almost $51 billion, a valuation that puts the “on-demand mobile service” (ODMS) leader at the level of Facebook in 2011. The company’s fund-raising success has spurred a vast number of “Uber for X” start-ups that are building corporate empires with legions of outsourced contract workers. But the “gig economy” seems to be operating the same money-losing business model as the “Dot-com Bubble.”
Investment in new U.S. factory plant and equipment just hit the highest level since 1958. After 100 years of economic dominance due to cheap and abundant oil, U.S. politicians turned against domestic oil production in the 1970s and the Middle East oil production took off. For the next 40 years, the budget deficit and income inequality soared as high-paying manufacturing jobs went offshore. But with fracking re-establishing America as the planet’s largest energy producer, U.S. manufacturing is back.
Each new California legislative session starts with Republicans yakking about cutting state and local public pension benefits that are over $1 trillion underfunded. But as a minority party and with many of its loudest advocates hypocritically receiving a public pension, reform has just been about yakking. But with CalPERS’ actuaries demanding a pension funding increase from $3.7 billion to $7.25 billion by 2020, the state must either cut payroll by 30 percent or find a massive new tax source, like overturning Prop. 13.
For a company that is regularly scowled at by the tech media, Microsoft’s introduction of Windows 10 over the last 48 hours has been amazingly smooth, and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. In what for Microsoft is a paradigm shift, the
Google’s 60-year lease to co-locate with NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, which was signed in November 2014, appears to be paving the way for the formation of a partnership between NASA, Google and Amazon to develop and roll out an automated national air traffic control system for drone flights.
Obamacare was sold to the American public as an opportunity to save $2,500 a year for a family of four. But each family member enrolled in Covered California for 2016 can look forward to paying another $384 in Northern California and $296 in Southern California.
As Breitbart News reported in “Pot Tax: Sacramento Politicians ‘Jonesing’ for a Spending Fix,” the Democrat-controlled California Legislature is desperate for marijuana taxes, which could arise from a 2016 ballot initiative legalizing marijuana, in hopes of gaining a consistent new tax revenue source. But the California Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates that illegal pot growing is drying up watersheds and causing some at-risk fisheries to approach collapse.
China’s stock market suffered an 8.48% crash on Monday that humiliated the country’s leadership and will almost certainly cause a major Communist Party crisis.
Progressive New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s supposed effort to end social inequality by crushing Uber was curbed last week when his liberal city council allies were blindsided by a viral millennial generation revolt in favor of the ride-sharing app.
Sold to the public as a way to increase competition and save the average American family $2,500 a year, Obamacare actually created monopoly pricing for the insurance industry that allowed premiums to rise by $2,500 and tripled the value of their stocks.
With Sacramento politicians desperate to find a new source of continuous tax revenue, the state’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy has just published a study, “Pathways Report Policy Options for Regulating Marijuana In California,” as a precursor to sponsoring a 2016 ballot initiative to legalize recreational pot use.
In a throwback to the antebellum era, popular photo-sharing services, from Flickr and Google Photos, have publicly come under assault for their software algorithms tagging photos of black people as gorillas and apes. But this just highlights the growing risk that “learning machines” may learn to develop human biases and even criminal tendencies.
The Internal Revenue Service is trying to recover from allegations of obstruction of justice regarding Lois Lerner’s regarding purported biased recommendations that targeted conservative groups for audit and prevented Tea Parties from gaining not-for-profit status. Now, the IRS just appointed three relatively inexperienced managers to serve as the gatekeepers for reviewing 501(c)4 “dark money pools” and their political activity, according to an agency memo leaked to the OpenSecrets Blog.
In its last quarter that will be impacted by innovation on Steve Jobs’ watch, Apple booked strong quarterly revenue and earnings yesterday. But the company had to admit that existing Apple customers were slow to upgrade to new iPhone releases and Apple as a status symbol in China may be coming to an end. The stock plunged by -10 percent, or about $80 billion, before recovering somewhat today. But as Breitbart News warned last month, ‘Apple Products: Without Steve Jobs, the Thrill is Gone.’
