Forbes: Shanghai, Beijing as world’s top emerging business centers

Posted on October 28, 2008 by JoeDuck

It was not surprising to see Forbes suggest that Shanghai and Beijing ranked highest in their recent survey measuring which cities are poised to become major global business capitals.

They used a neat picture from Shanghai’s World Financial Center – under construction when I was there in April and basically the opposite of my picture from below the Jin Mao tower:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeduck/2419944285/in/set-72157604613298418/

http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/23/cities-world-ten-forbeslife-cx_mw_1023cities_slide_11.html?thisSpeed=15000

Jin Mao remains one of the top ten tallest buildings in the world but is still dwarfed by the Shanghai World Trade Center with the massive square opening to stabilize the building in high winds. The opening was originally designed as a huge circle but after initial approval of that spectacular design, Chinese officials decided it looked too much like the symbolism of the flag of Japan and insisted on a new design.

World’s Tallest Buildings from Wikipedia

Robert Rubin on Zakaria GPS

Posted on October 26, 2008 by JoeDuck

Today on Zakaria GPS we have Robert Rubin, Citibank and Wall Street megamoneymeister and Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury.

Rubin is always one of the most impressive observers of the economy, and distinguished as one of the few Secty’s of treasury who presided over a Federal balanced budget. He articulates complexity well and also avoids the partisan nonsense that clouds these debates. For example he was complimentary of Paulson’s efforts

Main point was that we need to do more to address mortgages at home and bank level to stabilize things and that he wanted a *huge* stimulous package – probably not in the form of tax rebates because they don’t tend to hit economy fast enough and are often saved.

Rubin is Obama’s economic advisor (along with Volker, Buffett, Summers). Rubin was very complimentary of Obama’s style and intellect, pointing out that at the meetings Obama is always quick to divorce the campaign considerations from the economic solutions, and to listen to those who agree and disagree.

The bad news is that Rubin sounded like he was not willing to go back to Washington and take the position of Secretary of the Treasury again even though many (certainly I) would like to see him there again.

Shipwreck of Peter Iredale along the Oregon Coast

Posted on October 25, 2008 by JoeDuck

And thither into an infinite ocean
Originally uploaded by Zeb Andrews

Thanks to Zeb Andrews for posting this superb shot of the Peter Iredale, a shipwreck off of the Oregon Coast that has been buried in the sand for 102 years.

Peter Iredale owned his namesake 2000 ton iron framed sailing vessel, part of a shipping fleet based in Liverpool, England.

The ship sailed from Mexico, in September of 1906 headed for Portland, Oregon. Aboard was 1,000 tons of ballast and a crew of 27,which is reported to include two stowaways.

In late October the Captain, named H. Lawrence, noted the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse.

As the ship entered the mouth of the Columbia River it became grounded at Clatsop Spit, and after that the ship was driven ashore.

Nobody was injured but efforts to recover the ship failed as it sunk into the sands off the Oregon shore.

In a final toast to the Peter Iredale, the captain said

“May God bless you, and may your bones bleach in the sands.”

Obama for President

Posted on October 24, 2008 by JoeDuck

641

Although I’m a political junkie I’d hoped to try to stay objective in a race I knew would be clouded with the usual nonsense of our American democratic experience where marketing and the politics of personal destruction *always* trump an intelligent discussion of the issues. However I’ve been especially alarmed by the very personal and deceptive attacks on Obama’s character and personal history. Thanks to some huge comment streams this blog has become mostly political for the past week so I should let readers know where I stand.

Barack Obama for President.

Like Christopher Buckley I’m normally a small government low tax fiscal conservative, but also like Buckley I think more than anything right now the country needs a “first class mind” in the oval office. The world faces the greatest fiscal crisis since the great depression, and global terrorism remains a critical threat around the world. Perhaps the John McCain of the 1990s would be a good man for the job now, but that John McCain is not running for President.

Obama, unlike any other prominent American leader, will send a signal to the world that the USA remains both the shining beacon of prosperity we have always been but also is asserting an entirely new approach to internal affairs – an approach characterized by flexibility, compassion, and intelligent reflection rather than the knee jerk ideological responses that have compromised our reputation and standing in the global community for much of the past 8 years.

Obama is the right choice for these challenging times despite some flaws. I’ll keep hoping that the economic challenges will force Obama into more realistic ideas about how the economy and personal responsibility. I hope Obama will soon come to realize how the national debt and deficit are ticking time bombs that pose a greater than the current looming financial crisis, and work hard towards a balanced federal budget.

But trumping those concerns for me is that the country will benefit from Obama’s ability to galvanize support and bring people together. Some will choose to fight Obama and to continue the smears and personal attacks, but in the same way that approach has failed in the campaign I hope that approach fails with America as we move forward to the great challenges that we all must face together, like it or not.

The future is uncertain and potentially very perilous. Major changes and challenges are coming at us with each passing day. We need inspired new leadership.

Obama for President.

Anyway … the cooler logo should win this thing

Obama and McCain click ads throttled by Google?

Posted on October 24, 2008 by JoeDuck

This just in from the Google click advertising confusion department. It appears Google is severely throttling the number of clicks they allow to publishers for the key terms “Barack Obama” and “John McCain”. I don’t understand why they’d do this unless perhaps it relates to election advertising laws? That does not make sense to me because it seems we would have heard about this, so my second thought was that they might have agreements with the campaigns for exclusivity but … I’m not seeing Obama or McCain PPC ads on Google.

I was playing around with the costs to bid and run keyword campaigns for “Barack Obama” and “John McCain”, surprised to see that Google does not appear to be running those terms or terms like “vote”.

Using a cost per click maximum of $100.00 and a daily budget of $250,000.00 I should get a huge count for those terms, yet the Google predictor only shows I’d get about 102-128 clicks per day for Obama and 118-149 for McCain at an average costs just above a dollar per click.

Not that is not 118 *thousand* which might make sense, that is a paltry hundred and change clicks at a cost of about 100 per day. Why wouldn’t Google allow a bigger campaign?

Debate about Joe the Plumber could not get any dumber

Posted on October 20, 2008 by JoeDuck

Of Plumbers and Presidents

The inane stupidity of the “Joe the Plumber” discussion tells us a lot about how out of touch the campaigns and media are with America, and frankly how little most Americans seem to understand about small business taxes. After listening to CNN’s Lou Dobbs’ take on the situation and hearing McCain say he’s out to help the Joe the Plumbers (implying his tax plan would do more to help plumbers than Obama’s, which is false and almost certainly a campaign lie) I had to challenge the economically senile statements of these two rich guys and chime in with the truth.

My take is that neither left nor right wing seems to be making sense about all this. Joe the Plumber is relevant to the current debate because he is representative of some middle income Americans who make ballpark of 40-80k per year, would actually benefit in the short term from Obama’s tax plans, but don’t share Obama’s sensibilities about how to run country or the idea that even greater levels of deficit spending than McCain is proposing are a good idea. It’s OK for Joe to be for McCain, but if he thinks that is to his tax advantage he is mistaken.

Here’s a better authority than me – Nobel economist Paul Krugman in NYT writing about the plumbing income issues.

So, with average plumbers making about 47k clearly he’s *currently* better off under Obama’s plan if taxes are what we are talking about. But what if he buys the business?

Details are not all that clear but it appears the business Joe wants to buy has 2 plumbers. Let’s assume they also employ one office person and one helper. Even assuming they can bill those plumbers at $100 per hour, the helpers at $50 and everybody works a full 2000 hours per year (this is very unrealistically high work hours for this type of biz – half this would be closer to normal). But even optimistically the biz probably pulls in about 500k per year.

Assuming that employee benefits and payroll taxes are about *half* the billed rate to the two plumbers employees we have 250k labor expense for workers. Add 30k for the office staff and another 50k for advertising, building, insurance, and more (it’s probably twice that, but I’m being very generous to McCain supporters here).

Revenues 500k – Expenses 330k = Taxable income 170k

So even if he buys the joint Joe the Plumber won’t be making 250k. Sure a few plumbing businesses with several workers might be making that, but the small business guys McCain claims he represents would likely be better off under Obama’s tax plans. Most are are mom and pops making far less than 250k.

Lou Dobbs and some McCain folks have *idiotically* asserted that a lot of *plumbers* make 250k. If you believe this there is only one word for you: Stupid. Plumbers rarely bill at over 100 per hour and there are 2000 hours in a year – do the math because even if they have zero expenses they don’t make 250k and those who think they do are really math and business savvy challenged (e.g. Lou Dobbs who has NO business talking business).

Average plumbing salaries in Ohio are under 50k per year – similar to what teachers, police, fireman make.

To me it is sort of pitiful how folks who will pay *more* under McCain are defending his tax plan because they just don’t understand business taxes. It’s fine for a plumber to support McCain but it’s misinformed to think Obama’s the big bad tax man for the middle class.

Joe is not a small business – in fact he’s not even a plumber. He was (probably wrongly) thinking that if he bought the plumbing place he worked for he’d have trouble paying Obama’s taxes, and Obama foolishly just assumed that was true.

Joe may want to vote for McCain if if NON TAX issues like abortion and gun rights are paramount to him and there are many other reasons Joe the Plumber might want to vote for McCain.

Taxes, however, are NOT one of those reasons.

Caveat: There are some capital gains tax issues that complicate a really good analysis of all the details here since they’d come into play much later and it’s not clear to me how either plan would treat sale of small businesses even assuming the plan was still in effect when they were sold.

Caveat 2: Taxes and prosperity are tricky. Some think that taxing the rich inhibits economic development to the degree it reduces *everybody’s* prosperity. e.g. if his job is lost Joe the Plumber makes nothing.

Oregon’s Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge

Posted on October 19, 2008 by JoeDuck

Multnomah Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon

Columbia-Gorge-2008 146
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Hey, I’m kind of temporarily tired of blogging about technology and politics and even blogging about the Oregon Coast, so how about an Oregon waterfall? This shot of Oregon’s iconic falls – Multnomah Falls in the Columbia River Gorge – from our trip last month to Northern Oregon.

Multnomah Falls is under an hour east of Porland on Interstate 84 where the easy access makes this one of Oregon’s most visited attractions and a tourism destination for over 100 years. The area is home to some wonderful hikes and great scenery along the gorge. Portland, charming Hood River, the Bonneville Dam, and The Dalles are all nearby. We had a great stay at the historic Columbia Gorge Hotel atop a waterfall on the cliffs above the Gorge near Hood River.

Sacre Coeur, Paris

Posted on October 18, 2008 by JoeDuck

Sacre Coeur, Paris
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Sacre Coeur is on of Paris’ many splendid Catholic Cathedrals, though this one is much newer than most of the other European landmark Cathedrals like Notre Dame, Chartres, and Winchester Cathedral.

Sacre Coeur sits atop the hill called Montmartre from where you gaze down upon the debauchery of Pigalle, the notorious red light district of Paris which includes the famous nightclub “Le Moulin Rouge”. The metro stop for Sacre Coeur is probably Paris’ most famous, called “Metropolitain” which was the gateway to inspiration for many of the world’s most famous artists such as Van Gogh, Renoir, and Degas who lived – often poorly – in the Montmartre region.

Newsweek’s Zakaria on the Economy

Posted on October 16, 2008 by JoeDuck

Fareed Zakaria, one of the best observers of the global landscape, suggests that if we curb some of our bad borrowing and spending habits we may emerge better and stronger from the current fiscal crisis:

If we wanted a bigger house, a better TV or a faster car, and we didn’t actually have the money to pay for it, no problem. We put it on a credit card, took out a massive mortgage and financed our fantasies. As the fantasies grew, so did household debt, from $680 billion in 1974 to $14 trillion today. The total has doubled in just the past seven years.

I’m not as optimistic as Zakaria that after the current crisis ends we’ll return to the what appeared to be a vibrant economy because of the other issue he discusses – failing to address the herd of elephants in our finanacial room – a 10 Trillion and growing budget deficit with an annual deficit that continues to skyrocket after the disasterous spending recklessness of *every administration* since Reagan with the possible exception of Bill Clinton (when we did not borrow nearly as much as we had been, I think largely thanks to the huge increasee in Tax revenues that came from the positive investment climate.)

My take is that our economy has been challenged for some time, with prosperity manufactured to some extent by simply pushing expenses forward to our kids. McCain’s call for a balanced budget in four years is admirable in this respect, and it is unfortunate that so few truly think that is realistic. It is actually realistic but would require massive cuts in military spending- the sacred cow of fake conservatives who are (correctly) willing to slash entitlements but (stupidly) think that military money is spent wisely (news alert fake conservatives – it is NOT spent wisely and this is *totally* well documented). Not only have we been living on debt as individuals, but we’ve been living on debt as a society. This is not sustainable for the long term, and we may be seeing the early signs of the massive challenge we’ll face if the world starts to lose faith in the US economy.

That won’t happen anytime soon, but unless we bring debt and spending into focus both individually and collectively it’s going to happen eventually. It’s easy to predict we won’t change our habits all that dramatically, but hopefully enough for a soft landing as we come down from our lofty heights as the world’s key economic and power player.

Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek

Joe Duck

Have Blog. Will Travel. Vaccinate!

Monthly Archives: October 2008