Despite a continuing backlog of freight following the nine months of bitter labor strife between the Pacific Maritime Association and members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union(ILWU), who settled their disputes two months ago, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has started a
Over 4,600 people are reportedly presumed dead in the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal Saturday and the numbers continue to rise, but nine Californians in various stages of rescue or distress remain alive at this point.
Apple’s earnings vaulted by 27.5% for the first three months of 2015 compared to the same period last year, on the phenomenal Chinese sales driving profit margins for the iPhone 6. The virtuous smartphone tailwind and buzz about the Apple Watch spiked store traffic that also goosed Mac sales. With an operating margin of over 30 percent and $194 billion in the bank, Apple deserves to be the world’s most valuable company.
Henry Ford is credited as saying “I knew that only half my advertising worked, but the trouble is that I do not know which half.” Today, with 30 percent of advertising already going digital, Silicon Valley geeks commanding databases are terrorizing Madison Avenue’s Mad Men.
Corinthian Colleges is officially shutting down all of its remaining 28 ground campuses, displacing about 16,000 students. The action comes less than two weeks after the U.S. Department of Education announced it had fined the for-profit institution $30 million for misrepresentation. According to the Colleges’ latest SEC filings, their schools generated $1.2 billion in government loans last year.
The liberal California Legislature, having worsened the drought crisis by refusing to build water infrastructure, now is demanding the “opportunity” to expropriate historic water rights.
After a week of vigorous denials, the New York Times just reported President Barack Obama’s email correspondence was captured by Russian cyber-hackers last year in a breach of what the White House is calling its “unclassified computer system.” The breaches
With oil prices falling by 45 percent in the last year, the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) just decided the way utilities priced energy for 100 years is wrong and intend to mandate that 70 percent of Californians pay much more for energy.
Friday marked the beginning of the Apple Watch era, as worldwide pre-order customers received their first official deliveries. Many who ordered on the April 10th launch date expected the Watch would expand those cool little human interface experiences Apple mastered for laptops and phones. But some are complaining that this evolutionary device is just a complicated and annoying wrist-mounted iPhone notification display.
The American Stars and Stripes and the yellow-and-red flag of the Republic of South Vietnam will fly across California this week as many of the 2.7 million Vietnam War veterans join 1.7 million Vietnamese-Americans in remembering the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, which took place on April 30, 1975.
Millions of TurboTax users will be troubled by a lawsuit that was filed Monday in San Francisco against Intuit, Inc. claiming that when the firm knew TurboTax’s lax software security protections were allowing a huge spike in tax refund theft, TurboTax failed to correct weaknesses or notify customers about ongoing risks.
15 years after the Dot-Com Bubble burst, the Nasdaq Composite Index leapt by 20.89 points, or 0.4%, to close at 5056.06 on Thursday, a record high. The strength of the index is being driven by the Silicon Valley 150 tech companies that have provided the juice to lift the NASDAQ by 6.8%, despite U.S. stock performance trailing major world markets.
Federal Election Commission filings show that just announced Presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) unexpectedly raised about $380,000, or 20 percent, of his Victory Fund campaign cash from residents in normally ultra-liberal-voting California.
The U.S. Supreme Court held oral arguments on April 22 regarding the constitutionality of a federal law that requires raisin farmers to transfer a portion of any raisin crop surplus to the federal government at a severe discount, or pay a fine. The law was passed during the Great Depression as a “New Deal” for agriculture to keep prices up. But the farmers call the law an “illegal taking” under the Fifth Amendment–and they appeared to have a very good day in Court, according to the SCOTUSblog.
For California cities and counties, Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) for short-term hotel rentals rose from $1.38 billion in 2010 to $1.67 billion in 2012. Collection of the 13 percent average tax on short-term occupancies would have been much higher, except that Airbnb online rentals has never collected a dime. Now, State Senator Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) os pushing Senate Bill 593 legislation to require “online vacation rental sites” to collect TOT and report big data–such as number of guests or length of stay– to cities and counties. And Airbnb and hosts are warning about consumer privacy.
Going “clear” is in this year. First as a perfect score for horse jumping; then in Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; and now as the new project of Ethan Czahor, who had to resign as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of the Jeb Bush Presidential campaign over some nasty old offensive tweets. Czahor has just launched a new iOS app called “Clear” to purge offensive “stuff” you may have posted on social media.
The populists are screening a modern Greek Tragedy wherein the noble Greek people are forced to suffer deprivations in return for the villainous German-controlled creditors pretend to loan Greece money that mostly repay existing EU loans used to buy German imports. But with Greece on the brink of running out of cash, and Greece’s creditors running out of patience, a compromise may be coming together to avoid an overt ‘Grexit’ by allowing for a devalued “Greek euro.”
In the past, the Manhattan Institute has effectively highlighted how rising California public pension costs are cutting into “basic infrastructure maintenance, public safety, education, and quality-of-life services such as parks and libraries.” But in the newest report, “Pension Costs are Crowding Out Salaries,” by Senior Fellow Stephen D. Eide, the Manhattan Institute reveals how California public employees themselves are suffering. In a decade where pension costs rose by 135 percent and healthcare premiums by 85 percent, public sector wages grew 4.6 percent slower than private sector workers’ salaries.
Silicon Valley is again “champagne style and caviar wishes” as people around the world paid $18,000 for Apple watches last week. But with Moore’s Law predicting computer power will double annually as prices fall now turning 50 years old, it is helpful to put in perspective that the NASDAQ Index dominated by “Valley” tech stocks that has almost tripled since 2010 to 4931, is a couple of percent short of its Dot-Com Bubble peak of 5132 in March 2000. But adjusted for inflation, the NASDAQ still is still down 34 percent.
Barclay’s Bank estimates that despite a hot stock market, the China suffered $300 billion in capital flight and is facing its first foreign exchange liquidity crisis since 2000. The news follows a report that China’s GDP is experiencing negative growth in real terms, thanks to collapsing domestic demand.
Just as the Dot-com bubble was popping in May 2000, the highly respected MIT Technology Review published an article, “The End of Moore’s Law?”, that claimed computing power could not continue to double each year, because engineers were no longer able to “cram an ever-increasing number of electronic devices onto microchips.” But after 50 years of unabated annual doublings of computer power on chips, there is still no sign that Silicon Valley innovations are slowing or that Moore’s Law will expire.
Despite Mother Jones magazine calling on Governor Jerry Brown to “never let a good crisis go to waste” and use climate change fears to expand the Nanny State’s reach to controlling what crops California farmers are allowed to grow, Brown courageously blasted the idea this week as “Big Brother.”
The first fundraising numbers for Hillary Clinton’s White House bid will not be posted until July, but Wall Street took leadership roles in fundraising for both of her New York Senate campaigns, and nine of Mrs. Clinton’s top 20 donor organizations in her 2008 presidential bid were financial services firms. But after six years of a Wall Street donation boycott in retaliation for passing Dodd-Frank, Clinton is the Democrats’ best hope for reviving access to $100s of millions from Wall Street’s firehose of political donations.
There has been lots of hubbub in the last two weeks about California’s economy drying up and blowing away like sagebrush after four years of drought. But the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), which provides budget advice to state lawmakers, announced that “We currently do not expect the drought to have a significant effect” on the state’s budget or overall economy. The reason: agriculture is only a small piece of the economy.
Lombard Street Research (LSR) has reported that China’s “real” (after-inflation) GDP actually fell -0.2% for the quarter ending March 2015. Despite the official government claim of +1.3 percent growth for the quarter and +7 percent annualized growth. China’s quarterly performance
