There is no business like ... the news business?

Our local newspaper is practically dead.  When I first came to town, it was one of those old-style large sheets, with plenty of local, national, and international news.  It was an excellent family-owned newspaper, just like the one that I was used to in my previous hometown.

The death of this newspaper has been swift.  It is now an unrecognizable shrunk version of its former self, with overlords from far away.  I have decided to let the subscription expire when Movember ends.

But, the news business itself has been highly profitable for those who have tapped into the zeitgeist.  Like the New York Times, for instance.  trump has made the NYT great again! "More than three million paid digital-only subscribers."

Perhaps more important to shareholders, the company reported that it continued to be profitable. Net income reached $24.9 million ... Operating profits, the company’s preferred measure, rose 30 percent to $41.4 million in the period.

Including this sucker!

The more trump pisses off the media, the more profitable these big time media companies get.  The more the media piss off trump, the more popular he gets with his base.  It is a twisted relationship that they have.

What worries me is the wider question of how Trump and the media interact.
When you watch the US morning shows - and evening shows come to that - what you notice is how things have changed.
Even those who were not originally taking sides are now nailing their colours to the mast. Fox and MSNBC have always played to their own bases. But now CNN, too, has editorialised its evening slot with Chris Cuomo - who gives us an essay, a comment piece, on whatever is getting him fired up.
It's a good watch actually. And makes you engaged.
But make no mistake - it's the same game that Trump is playing. The one they pretend to despise. If DJT can rally his base - then - goes the logic - why shouldn't TV do it too.
It works for viewing figures in the same way it works for electoral success. It works, in other words, for those who like their chambers echoed - but it's an odd place for news to sit.

So, is the US media doing its job?

I leave it to the critic-extraordinaire, Noam Chomsky, to answer that question:

It depends on what we think their job is. They are businesses, so by accepted standards their job is profit. By other standards, they have a duty to the public to provide “all the news that’s fit to print,” under a concept of “fitness” that is as free as possible from submission to power interests or other distorting factors. About this there is a great deal to say – I’ve devoted many words to the topic elsewhere, as have many others. But in today’s strange climate of Trumpian “alternative facts” and “false reality,” it is useful to recognize that with all their flaws, which are many, the mainstream media remain an indispensable source of information about the world.

An apple a day ... will keep the profits away?

Mirror, mirror, mirror on the wall
Which is the evilest company of all?

It depends.

It depends on how one defines "evil."  You think it is easy?  Think again.

Seriously, you think you have defined "evil" in a way that everybody can agree with?  Let me give you a simpler task.  We eat sandwiches, right?  Go ahead, define a "sandwich."

If you think there is something tricky about me asking you to define a sandwich, yes, you are correct.  Click here to find out more about that problem.  If defining a sandwich will be that difficult, now do you agree with me that defining "evil" is not going to be easy?

I find Apple to be a creepy and evil corporation.

Yes, for a few years I have had an iPhone.  But, that does not change my opinion that there is something creepy and evil about Apple. Its profits are the main reason why I think that way about Apple.

How profitable is Apple?  You want to know how much cash the company has sitting around?  You ready for this?  Are you seated?  Are you holding on to something so that you won't easily keel over?  Ok, here it is:

 As of last month, Apple had $203 billion in cash reserves.

Yes, it is two hundred and three billion dollars.  Of cash reserves.  BTW, a billion is a thousand million, right?  Which means the cash reserves are 203,000 million dollars.  Here, let me put it this way; it is $203,000,000,000.  And you thought zero has no value! ;)

Of course, this is not the first time (like here) that I am beating up on the company that liberals love; the same liberals who otherwise hate corporations!

It gets even more interesting:

keep in mind that $181 billion of that total (roughly 89%) is held outside the U.S.

Yep, Apple has enough lawyers and accountants who know every hole in the taxation Swiss cheese to keep the money far, far away from taxpayers in the country in which the corporation is headquartered.  If there aren't enough holes, then the corporation's hired hands create them, of course.

You still think Apple is a saintly entity?  Well then, how about this comment:

But one thing Apple absolutely shouldn't do is bring that cash back to the United States -- at least not yet. Because in doing so, Apple would incur a massive repatriation tax bill at a rate of 35%, or more than $63 billion.
Thankfully for Apple shareholders, management has promised that this isn't an option as long as America's repatriation tax remains at such a high rate.

I know, some of you readers are so pro-corporations and are finance wizards that you will want to interject here that America's tax policies are why Apple plays these offshore shell games.  Tell you what. it all depends on your definitions, like what Bill Clinton famously said!  Using my definition, Apple is one heck of an evil corporation.

Source

Pulling up the ladder does not help the young down below :(

Funding ran out when I was in graduate school.  I then did what many graduate students did--I looked for an internship.  It was an internship that paid a little bit more than the minimum wage back then.  I was not the only intern at that agency; there were, as I recall now, at least ten to twelve others, one of whom was the Jewish fellow whom I mentioned in this post from a few weeks ago.

Later, when I started working full-time, even at the much smaller outfit that it was, we routinely had one or two interns throughout the year.  They were paid, of course.  One of those interns, Robert, asked me whether I would like to guest-lecture in one of the classes that was taking at the local university.  That then led to part-time teaching and the rest unfolded on its own--I became a university faculty member. 

The department where I taught had a bulletin board where we routinely posted announcements about internships--rare was the unpaid internship.  One of those students, Chris, whom I helped land an internship, emailed me a few months after I had quit that university and moved to Oregon:

I just started an internship at Kern Cog in the GIS department, thank you for emailing the job opportunities you came across. I was wondering if you come across any good job openings if you could email them to me since I will be graduating in June. Hope things in Oregon are going good. Thank you.

Despite the recessionary times when I moved in 2002, in Oregon too we routinely received information about internships.  In one of those classes, I casually announced to students about an internship.  I told them about the hourly wage.  Nobody seemed interested.  A day later, a female student, Lisa, asked me for details.  She applied.  She started working there.  The internship helped her understand what it would mean to have a career in that field.  She then went on to graduate school in that professional program and returned to a full-time job in that very place where she had worked as an intern. 

Society apparently never likes it when things go well.  Because of worries over abuse of interns--and many of those concerns were for real--the law came down with a heavy hand on working conditions for interns.  Meanwhile, funding for public agencies rapidly diminished thanks to nutcases who wanted to drown the government in a bathtub.  And the private sector honchos couldn't care for paid interns even as their compensation kept increasing by dizzying amounts.  Thus, the richest country that the planet has ever known no longer has the kind of paid-internship opportunities that once existed even for "aliens" like me.

I am not exaggerating when I write that for the past few years students and I have had enormous difficulty finding paid internships.  Slamming the door shut on paid internships in the public and private sectors, even as corporate executives fatten themselves up, is one of the many ways in which we are screwing our own collective futures.

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future

Yes, that was one of the classics from the one and only Yogi Berra.  If only many important aspects of life can be so easily articulated (even if it fails a formal grammar test.)

For years, I have heard enough and more left-leaning people, especially within academia, beat up on oil companies and their profits.  (Meanwhile, I was beating up on the company that makes the computers that the left-leaning people love to use--for the sheer audacity with which it earns gazillions while portraying a saintly image!)  The evil oil corporations, the story went, did everything possible to increase their profits.  Even launched wars, with the government as their proxies.  The bad oil companies did their best to stifle innovation with the development of the electric car, they argued, because the electric cars will not need oil (gasoline.)

I wonder what they will complain about now, with oil prices tumbling to levels that nobody predicted.  "Peak oil" and the evil corporations together means soon we will be looking at $200 per barrel, they warned us.  The cold, hard, news of today is this:

Brace for $40-a-barrel oil.

So, whatever happened to that framework of the evil oil corporations that want to earn those huge profits?  Why are they now practically giving away gasoline at the pump?

Meanwhile, the company that I love to beat up on is as busy as ever storing its gazillions at tax havens, far away from the taxman and gets a free pass from the left-leaning folks who continue to target the oil companies.  Oh well, a strange world this is!

So, about that oil price.  How come from the experts to the conspiracy nutcases, everybody got it so wrong?  Well, re-read the Yogi Berra quote in the subject line!

Of, if you want an oil-specific quote:

When contemplating the future of oil prices, one should always keep in mind U.S. foreign service officer James Akins’ observation, “Oil experts, economists, and government officials who have attempted in recent years to predict the future demand and the prices of oil have had only marginally better success than those who foretell the advent of earthquakes or the second coming of the Messiah.” Akins wrote that in 1973.

Isn't that a lot more words than the simple Yogism? ;)

Ron Bailey, whose note in Reason is where that quote is from, includes another quote there from a Saudi billionaire who claims that oil will never go back up above $100 a barrel.  Say what?

In a commentary at Project Syndicate, is another interesting question:

should we expect $50 to be the floor or the ceiling of the new trading range for oil?

Say what?  This commentator expects oil prices to go well below $50?  Whatever happened to greedy oil companies and their profits?

economics and history suggest that today’s price should be viewed as a probable ceiling for a much lower trading range, which may stretch all the way down toward $20. 

Are you kidding me?

the marginal cost of US shale oil would become a ceiling for global oil prices, whereas the costs of relatively remote and marginal conventional oilfields in OPEC and Russia would set a floor. As it happens, estimates of shale-oil production costs are mostly around $50, while marginal conventional oilfields generally break even at around $20. Thus, the trading range in the brave new world of competitive oil should be roughly $20 to $50. 

Don't bet your farm on this, as they say.  Why?  I refer you to the Yogi Berra quote in the title.

A couple of years ago, I received a snarky email from a former student.  In the email, she referred to the stepped up production in the US thanks to fracking up the Bakken oil as evidence that I was bullshitting in the class.  (Ok, she didn't use the BS word.)  I wrote back to her that my worry has never been about exhausting the oil supplies or the price, but about the continued and expanded use of carbon as the source of energy and its impacts on global climate.  Even now, though it is awesome to fill up a tank at a remarkably low price, I do worry about the long-term consequences of a delay in energiewende.

Maybe I should not worry about tomorrow and, instead, seek consolation in the Yogism, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

The best public relations company in the world: Apple!

Way back in graduate school, one of my first year apartment-mates was a doctoral student in marketing.  One of his favorite humorous takes on convincing people, which I later came to understand is a staple in the marketing and public relations realms, was about the wonderful job that Austrians did in making sure that the world knew Hitler as a German and Beethoven as an Austrian.

Over the years, it has been fascinating to observe the many, many variations of this Austrian job.  This post adds one more to that list!

There is a growing sense of anger and frustration, and rightfully so, at the inequality gap between those to whom a larger and larger share of income and wealth are accruing versus the millions who feel like they are working longer and longer hours that do not translate into wages that assure them of that "American Dream."

This frustration quickly reaches a bottom-line of "those greedy corporations and their CEOs."

In the populist narrative with the bottom-line of greedy corporations and their CEOs, rotten eggs are thrown at the likes of fast food restaurant chains like McDonald's, big box retailers like Walmart, oil corporations like Exxon.

One company is pretty much never, ever attacked. It is a multinational corporation that is the largest in the world.  This multinational corporation has profit margins like you won't believe.  This corporation employs very few people in its "home" country of the United States.  Stories abound about its shoddy treatment of workers and the environmental impacts of its factories.

Yet, this multinational corporation is rarely ever attacked compared to the daily assaults on WalMart or McDonald's or Exxon.

A masterful Austrian job of public relations, right?

Of course, the corporation that I speak of is Apple.

Here is a succinct comparison of the employment and profit aspects of the "good guy" Apple and the "bad guys":

Walmart and Target earn between three and four cents on the dollar; a typical McDonald’s franchise restaurant earns around six cents on the dollar before taxes, according to an analysis from Janney Capital Markets. In fact, the combined profits of all the major retailers, restaurant chains, and supermarkets in the Fortune 500 are smaller than the profits of Apple alone. Yet Apple employs just seventy-six thousand people, while the retailers, supermarkets, and restaurant chains employ 5.6 million.

 Did you get that? Let me repeat:

the combined profits of all the major retailers, restaurant chains, and supermarkets in the Fortune 500 are smaller than the profits of Apple alone

Yet, the assault is on McDonald's and WalMart?  Aren't you convinced by now that Apple has done one heck of a Austrian-style PR job to market itself as the angelic corporation?

People protest outside fast-food establishment. Outside WalMart.  But not outside Apple.  For a simple reason: those working for Apple at Cupertino have nothing to complain about, when their work is handsomely rewarded.  (Apple's productions are offshore--but then, when did we Americans start caring for factory workers employed by American corporations in the rest of the world anyway!)

Those working at a McDonald's restaurant or at a WalMart, on the other hand, know all too well that they are barely earning the minimum wage.  Thus, the corporations that employ 5.6 million people and with paper-thin profit margins are attacked day in and day out, whereas very little is said about Apple.

What you see is not always what you see.

How to keep alive newspapers, which are dying fast

I like this idea:

we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. American newspapers shoulder the burden of considerable indebtedness with little cash on hand, as their profit margins have diminished or disappeared. Readers turn increasingly to the Internet for information — even though the Internet has the potential to be, in the words of the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, “a cesspool” of false information. If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.

Although the problems that the newspaper industry faces are well known, no one has offered a satisfactory solution. But there is an option that might not only save newspapers but also make them stronger: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities. Endowments would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down.