California farmers are now suing the state over the high-speed rail project, refusing to have their land sold for pennies-on-the-dollar. And with a 12-year estimated project delay, the contractor is threatening to sue the bullet train for delay penalties.
With Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination for President now in shambles, Corporate America seems all of a sudden on the hunt for a viable pro-“Corporate America” alternative.
Ellen Pao, who is suing for $16 million in damages for sexual harassment, was cross-examined over the past two days by attorneys for her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPBC). The defense depicted Pao as belligerent, full of
After a series of spectacular oil-train crashes and accompanying horrific fires. Reuters reported that the United States and Canada are in the finalization stage before announcing that the current safety upgrade for rail-tankers will be suspended and new higher flammability requirement will be adopted railroad oil-tanker safety designs.
The Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) “Spring Forward” event was poorly received by most viewers, and the stock sold off. “The Apple Watch” functionality had already been known to the market and the disappointing eighteen-hour battery life was contradicted by the product page
The Inspector General “confirmed that illegal aliens were using deceased number holders’ names and SSNs to work, but U.S. Attorneys in Arizona, Florida, and South Carolina declined prosecution.”
Great money managers say the secret to success is not the ability to buy good stocks, but the ability to know when to sell them. In a recent post on his blog, Dallas Mavericks owner and serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban said
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued annual letters to the 100 operating U.S. commercial nuclear power plants operating in 2014 regarding annual performance. There were 94 plants in in the two highest performance categories and 75 plants inspected by the NRC fully met all safety and security “Baseline” performance objectives.
Silicon Valley is trying to catch up with Wall Street in staking a much bigger claim to influencing Washington D.C. Tech’s lobbying effort, which has grown by more than $100 million since 1998 and almost 2,000 percent in the last 25
Despite all the prattle about large Silicon Valley Internet-driven companies battling to dominate the shift to autonomous electric vehicles, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg told the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona, Spain, that Facebook won’t build cars. Rather, he said, the company is focused on actively championing mobile advertising, which is shifting how companies approach their brand marketing strategies.
San Diego, which refers to itself as “America’s Finest City,” seems to have the hottest economy in the Western United States. After years of financial and political turmoil that almost resulted in the eighth-largest U.S. city filing for bankruptcy, the San Diego local economy is off to a roaring start in 2015.
Four patients at Cedars-Sinai have contracted the “CRE super-bug.” One has died and 67 are at risk of exposure, according to a hospital spokesman. The latest outbreak follows the death of two patients, near-death of five, and exposure to 179 patients in a similar outbreak from October through early January at UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Medical Center. In both occurrences the culprit seems to have been contaminated body scopes.
Investors celebrated the NASDAQ stock market topping the 5,000 level this week for the first time since March 2000. But there were no celebrations in Sacramento for the anniversary of the last time that California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) were over 100 percent funded.
As the globe’s top venture capitalist, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has funded and mentored tons of start-up Silicon Valley companies that became fantastically successful, including Google, Amazon, Intuit, and Electronic Arts, Twitter, Square and Zynga. But one of his worst bets may turn out to be personally hiring Ellen Pao in 2005. Pao is dragging Doerr into her lawsuit for $16 million for sexual discrimination after 7 years at the firm.
In an exposé entitled “Poor Kids of Silicon Valley,” a CNN reporter seems shocked to uncover a high level of child poverty in the affluent Bay Area. CNN concludes, after consulting with “economists and experts,” that a minimum wage hike to $10.10 would significantly help end child poverty. But if CNN actually talked to the most impoverished families, they would have learned that raising minimum wage, like Oakland just did, results in maximizing single young mothers and their children living in poverty.
As West Coast union dockworkers celebrate a tentative agreement for a five-year contract featuring even higher wages and benefits than the current $1,200-per-day, shipping companies intend to introduce new mega-container-ships and port handling equipment that will help automate away many union jobs.
As Breitbart reported last week in “Teamsters Win Big in Silicon Valley, Target Tech Companies”, after the Teamsters Local 853 organized Facebook contract shuttle bus drivers a week ago, over the weekend they won elections organizing drivers for Yahoo, Apple, Genentech, eBay and Zynga.
China Daily reported that tourism from China to Los Angeles has nearly quadrupled over the past four years. Visitors rose from 158,000 in 2009 to 570,000 in 2013. With over a million Chinese visiting California last year and a projected 2 million by 2020, retailers and restaurants are thrilled at the reported $6,000 spending-per-visit.
The hard-Left publication The Nation and their allies advocated for the FCC’s “Net Neutrality” passage to regulate and tax the Internet as “People Power”. But in politics, it is always best to “follow the money.” For 2014, lobbying expenditures by computer/Internet companies hit $139.5 million. The Left likes to talk about “People Power”, but Silicon Valley lobbying cash is “Corporate Power.”
With the ink hardly dry on Federal District Judge Andrew Hanen’s order slamming the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for trying to grant up to 11.7 million illegal aliens/undocumented workers “green cards,” President Obama just instructed Homeland Security to offer “green cards” to H1-B holder spouses and children under 21 years old.
The City of Stockton emerged from bankruptcy on Wednesday, February 25, after a 31-month ordeal. There were no winners in trying to restructure over $2 billion in debt and obligations. Nearly half of non-safety city employees were dumped, the survivors’ wages were cut by up to 23 percent, and retirees lost $500 million in lifetime medical benefits. Bondholders and creditors are receiving pennies on the dollar. Hopefully the sad lessons about what happened to Stockton might help other California cities to control spending.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has voted to approve a wildly controversial Net Neutrality policy that will regulate and tax the Internet intensely, much like the old AT&T telephone monopoly. To help secure political support, Chairman Tom Wheeler made last-minute revisions at the request of Google, according to Politico’s sources at the Commission.
The left-leaning ‘Electronic Frontier Foundation’ (EFF) came out with “guns-a-blazin’” Wednesday morning at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in an open letter: “Dear FCC: Rethink The Vague “General Conduct” Rule.”
Farmland prices that had been enjoying a 28-year bull market finally turned down in 2014. Despite real estate, stocks, bonds and commodities crashes over the period, farmland had never had a down year since 1986. However, the Wall Street Journal has reported that farmland suffered a loss of 3 percent last year, “reflecting a cooling in the market driven by two years of bumper crops and sharply lower grain prices, according to Federal Reserve.”
Despite all the mainstream media naysayers “dissing” Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) for designing and building a car, I believe the economics are overwhelmingly favorable for Apple to extend its brand to vehicles.
