I’m sure like most of you, I’m watching the movements of the economy – from the daily news to much more local things like Monster searches of jobs in my industry in Rochester. And like most of you, I’m hearing the same whispers, “we’ve gotta have a good Christmas.”
And it is certainly true that many retail companies rely on Christmas for nearly a third of their total yearly income. Not simply down years but every year relies on the Christmas season to keep it afloat; with the economy in as much jeopardy as it is currently, we need some good news from the holidays to keep us from sliding off our tenuous perch at the edge of financial precipice.
But what is strange is the silence in the economic community about what is surely an early-warning bell-weather of our holiday mood, Halloween. Not to put too much of a damper on what is, after all, a pure-entertainment “holiday,” of course. But Halloween’s share of the marketplace has grown exponentially over the last decade. According to this About.com article written in 2006, each of us is likely to spend as much as $60 dollars on Halloween stuff on average. That’s not Christmas territory by any means, but that’s a hell of a lot of money for a single two- to three-hour celebration. Halloween is getting close to Valentine’s Day, where we spend around $122 a person when the economy doesn’t suck.
But as that last link points out, such frivolous expenses can and are easily shed when the economy is bad. Valentine’s and Halloween are even more expendable celebrations than Christmas is. So the question is: what will Halloween sales look like this year and what does that say about the Christmas season?
Kodak has just posted a second-quarter loss which is staggering, relative to this time last year: 20% down from second-quarter 2008. Oh, that’s not good. CEO Antonio Perez says his company predicts a 1 to 3 percent up-tick in sales by the end of the year, which is far from reassuring.
And not quite as crappy, but crappy nonetheless is news that the Rochester Broadway Theater League is bowing to the obvious and looking outside Rochester for it’s new venue. You may recall – a hazy, foggy, far off memory, to be sure – that the Renaissance Square project was originally to include three theaters for use by RBTL, MCC and others. Well, that shit ain’t happenin’, is it?
So once again, those in search of culture must look outside Rochester. Great.
If the problem with the Stimulus package is that the money’s not going out the door fast enough, perhaps the solution is to give the money to KBR and Bechtel? Anyone even know where that 18 billion went to in Iraq?
If the past ten years of growth (at least) have been based on the generation of artificial wealth through financial slight of hand, what will a “full recovery” look like?
Mike Murphy was just on Meet the Press talking about the status of the stimulus and the economy. He said two “kitchen table” numbers are going the wrong direction: the unemployment rate and mortgage rates.
Well, I’ll give him the unemployment rate with the caveat that we’ve not yet reached the 14% that was predicted in the absence of a stimulus. But mortgage rates are not as simple. When mortgage rates go down, it is an indication of the weakness of the market: supply and demand, less people buying houses means lower prices for the mortgage.
Thus while mortgage rate increases do put a pinch on the recovery of the housing market – and with it, the breath of relief for middle class families watching their neighborhoods turn into ghost towns – they are the natural reflection of positive signs in that market. And by the way, more interest income means maybe we tax payers can start getting some of that TARP money back.
If you’ve not had a chance to read it, I highly recommend the book The J-Curve for all of you interested in international politics. The book is a great primer on international politics as a function of state stability, and state stability as a curve tracing from totalitarian stability to democratic stability. The book also details a number of case studies including Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, the education of the populace is the job of the Wahabist religious sects. This is why people living in the heart of the land that gave us modern mathematics and a goodly portion of our alphabet can recite whole passages of the Koran but not read or perform basic algebra.
All of this is to say that, in the absence of government works projects, very few in Saudi Arabia are capable of holding down jobs on their own. Unemployment is rampant and so the government is constantly building new soccer stadiums and monuments to themselves as a means to keep the inevitable revolution of millions of starving, uneducated citizens at bay. These public works serve no useful function and generate no revenue of their own, but merely serve as make-busy jobs until the next useless project can be funded.
Here in Monroe County, we have no Wahabist imams forcing religion down our throats. We have no problem with education, in fact our schools are the envy of a majority of the United States. But when Monroe County insists that the Renaissance Square project is a good “shovel ready” project with which to spend our Federal Stimulus dollars, the only reasonable benefit I see is precisely this make-busy idea that keeps Saudi citizens working.
Because while generating jobs to stimulate the economy is a good thing – and I would submit that blue collar jobs are especially important on this point – focusing on the construction industry for economic growth is ultimately self-defeating. Construction jobs are only really useful to the economy as a whole where those jobs are backed up by genuine economic activity. If we worked to build our manufacturing base in Monroe County, the employees of those manufacturing companies would have permanent jobs and the companies would need construction workers to build or repair facilities. But when we focus on construction jobs, once the project is built, what happens next?
Nothing. Which exactly the problem with every monument built in Saudi Arabia and exactly what’s wrong with Renn Square as an economic project. What new jobs will be created by Renn Square after it’s built? I can only think of minimum wage jobs working in stores and restaurants inside the new terminal. . . and not even that if Bob Duffy gets his scaled-down project. What new revenue will Renn Square generate? Nada, which makes it about as useful as a statue of the Prince of Saud.
Better that we should focus on building a new terminal at the site of the current Amtrak station, if we are to build any new bus terminal at all. We can get more bang for the buck if we create a terminal that both serves the Rochester public and advocates for Rochester to the people who travel through here on rail. Better still that we should use the Stimulus money to pave our streets and fix our roads. These things generate revenue and have intrinsic value. Renn Square’s only intrinsic value is as a campaign fund project.
Jon Greenbaum lets loose on Sandy Parker of the Rochester Business Alliance. It is strange the lack of business and economic resources we have in this town. I say this as a person whose tried to pay close attention to our economy, but if it ain’t reported, I got nothin’ to go on. . .
One ripple in the Time Warner bandwidth cap story I’ve not yet seen discussed is this: what happens to all those people who work from home? Do they get raises? Do they get Time Warner stipends from their employers?
When we discuss data in terms of the number of DVDs or HD Hulu movies we get off the Internet, the discussion almost seems silly: nine DVDs a month does seem like a lot. But consider that medical transcriptionists – many of whom I know for a fact live in the Rochester TW area – download and upload one MP3 and one Word document with every job they do. And they do about twenty or thirty jobs a day on the small side.
It won’t take long before those transcriptionists are paying to work each month. And they’re not alone. Lots of people work from home, some using much bigger files than those mentioned in the above example. Moreover, many of them use Remote Desktop, which means a constant stream of information going back and forth between their home and work PCs.
And while Time Warner uses the straw man of YouTube and Hulu videos, they don’t mention all the other Flash files you download while browsing the Internet: all those rich advertisements, popping up on your screen and hovering over your intended websites. I presume they’ve developed a way to avoid charging you for those, correct? Because every single .jpg, .gif and Flash file that advertises wrinkle creams and new low mortgage rates is a file you have to download.
Time Warner’s recent announcement that it will be switching to a new tiered pricing scheme – meaning that users who go over a cap on their bandwidth will be charged per-gigabyte – is making big headlines this week. But are we discussing the actual issue at hand, or are we being played by a corporate sucker game? Let’s discuss the arguments on their merits.
Time Warner representatives claim that, “We want our customers to download as much data as they want from wherever they want. All we ask is that they pay for whatever they consume.” Are we not already doing that? Time Warner has advertised for years – along with every other High Speed Internet company – that we could “download movies and music” with their service. If we weren’t able to do that, why would any of us ever have paid for a service literally double the price of the standard service ten years ago, dial up?
Time Warner also throttles our bandwidth and has for years. That means that while the pipes connected to your house might be able to handle 20Mbps of service, the company prevents you from getting more than 10Mbps on a good day. So, we’re paying more money for a service designed to download movies and music – which doesn’t even operate at the speed it should – and now they want you to pay for using more of their service? That doesn’t exactly sound like a fair shake.
And in all the years that Time Warner has been in Rochester, their service has never once increased it’s value. If anything, value went down when they opted to throttle bandwidth. Meanwhile, the cost of having a HSI connection has remained the same. Cost stays stead, value goes down, therefore we’re already technically paying more for less. This is exactly the opposite direction we expect technology to go.
What possible justification could there be to pay more for service which is a decade old? If on the other hand, they made capital investments in our infrastructure, raised the throttle cap and made the download cap larger, more expensive service might make sense. And by the way, Road Runner already has a Business Class version of their service, which means they already have a second tier from which to glean more money.
But even more disingenuous is this claim:
When Time Warner Cable introduces a new payment structure for Internet service later this year, it says it will place customers in plans aligned with their current usage.
That means subscribers to the company’s Road Runner service shouldn’t face higher costs, spokesman Alex Dudley said Thursday.
OK, this one’s easy. Why would you open this can of worms with your customers if you didn’t think you were going to get more money? If the majority of users won’t pay more, what is the incentive? Corporations don’t do anything without a motive, so clearly there must be some sort of incentive.
And the incentive is to move the goal posts in the discussion of Net Neutrality. The Time Warner plan will almost certainly fail in Rochester, a city with a heavily technological background where more than a few people know this plan is crap. But that’s OK: the idea is to float the notion of *having* to pay for more service; the idea is to leave the impression that the Internet is getting crowded and someone’s going to have to pay for it.
If this notion becomes a default axiom in the media, then the question becomes: who will pay for this extra bandwidth? Customers won’t want to pay for it, which means that the idea of a two-tiered Internet becomes the only viable alternative.
I’m asking all of you who read this and care about maintaining a viable, healthy Internet to get involved in what ever way you can to put a stop to both the Time Warner service change and the dishonest swindle of Net Neutrality that Time Warner is attempting. Go to StopTWC.info for more information, including the phone number of Colleen Bernard at TWC Customer Care.
For all that Republicans keep pointing to budget projections into the next decade, it perhaps bears mentioning that we write federal budgets once a year. Why would we care about a ten year projection on a budget reflecting a temporary problems? I’m no economist, but that just seems. . . what’s the phrase? Oh, yeah. Fuckin’ stupid.
