Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

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Paywalls are a real turnoff

July 21, 2010

Over the last few weeks I find I am just not visiting The Times site any more. Clearly I am not the only one as Business Week reports. After 42 years of reading The Times regularly, I find I don’t miss it much either, which I thought I might. In fact there is not a single reporter or columnist at The Times who can any longerbe classified as a “must read” . Their speed of reporting has been insufficient to lead to any scoops and their biases are not insignificant. Lately they have shown little editorial courage either. Perhaps their time has now gone.

Visits to the website of The Times newspaper have fallen to a third since Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. started asking users to pay for online access. Traffic in the week ended July 10 declined to 33 percent of that before the company demanded users register, according to data compiled by Experian Hitwise. The Times’ share of traffic to news and media websites from the U.K. fell to 1.43 percent from 4.46 percent, Experian said in an e-mailed statement.

In fact blogs even with their blatant partisanship are getting more of my visits than the Mainstream media sites. The known political slant of the blogs can be easily discounted but the MSM which claims impartiality is becoming less reliable because they are all actually quite biased but their bias is not visible.

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Posted in Business, Media | Comments Off on Paywalls are a real turnoff

Alarmist WHO for sure .. but why and for whom?

June 29, 2010

Handling of the H1N1 pandemic

The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) today endorsed the conclusions of its Health Committee regarding the Swine flu pandemic and the actions of the WHO.

According to the Assembly, the handling of the pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), EU health agencies and national governments led to a “waste of large sums of public money, and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public”. The report finds that there was “overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by WHO”, resulting in a distortion of public health priorities.

The WHO has been “highly defensive”, the adopted text underlines, and unwilling to accept that a change in the definition of a pandemic was made, or to revise its prognosis of the Swine Flu outbreak. The WHO and European health institutions were not willing to publish the names and declarations of interest of the members of the WHO Emergency Committee and relevant European advisory bodies directly involved in recommendations concerning the pandemic.

The obvious beneficiaries are the pharmaceutical manufacturers of vaccines and Tamiflu and their supporters.

But is anybody at the WHO accountable to anybody?

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Posted in Business, Medicine | Comments Off on Alarmist WHO for sure .. but why and for whom?

EU Idiocy: My “3 egg” omelette is to be banned

June 27, 2010

One would hope that idiots in Brussels would have better things to do.

Sorry — My mistake. They are only idiots after all…….

photo credit

“Shoppers are to be banned from buying eggs by the dozen under new regulations approved by the European Parliament. For the first time, eggs and other products such as oranges and bread rolls will be sold by weight instead of by the number contained in a packet. The new rules will mean that instead of packaging telling shoppers a box contains six eggs, it will show the weight in grams of the eggs inside, for example 372g. Or that a bag of white rolls has 322g inside instead of half a dozen. The rules will not allow both the weight and the quantity to be displayed”.


Breakfast in future will have to be a 106g omelette with a 52g bread roll!!!! But perhaps if we can get all hens to be the EU standard they can all begin producing eggs of a constant weight.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1289882/EU-ban-selling-eggs-dozen-Shopkeepers-fury-told-food-weighed-sold-kilo.html#ixzz0s26berUz

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Posted in Bureaucracy, Business, Philosophy | 1 Comment »

High probability of La Nina: Good news for the Indian monsoon

June 26, 2010

Good news for the Indian monsoon

The Indian Meteorological Department has increased their rainfall forecast from being 98% of normal to being 102% of normal because of the La Nina conditions developing from the cooling of  the Central Pacific. The monsoon is expected to be “on time” and Northern India will get some relief from the sweltering temperatures they have been suffering.

Development of La Nina will also lead to global temperatures continuing to show the decline which has been apparent for the last decade.

The monsoon is formally defined to last for the 4 months of June to September every year and the onset and progress of the northern front of the monsoon is closely watched and can have a major impact. Even though the Indian economy is not as vulnerable to bad monsoons as it used to be, the importance of the monsoon to agriculture (and therefore also to related industries such as fertilisers, pesticides,pumps and even tractors) means that the difference between a “good” monsoon and a “bad” monsoon can be as much as 2% of annual GDP.

‘‘The latest forecasts from a majority of the dynamical and statistical models indicate continued and rapid cooling of the equatorial Pacific to below La Nina threshholds. There is a very high probablity (about 60%) for the La Nina conditions to develop during the monsoon season, which favours stronger than normal monsoon,’’ said IMD Director General Ajit Tyagi.

(photo credit: worldslatestnews.com/…/)

La Nina is also expected to bring more rain to Australia.

While La Nina will be welcomed in India and may disrupt the Ashes Tests in Australia it is not good news for the soya bean crops in Brazil.

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Posted in Business, Environment, India, Science | 1 Comment »

Cartels and Hypocrisy. But what happened to ethics?

June 24, 2010

Firms and private cartels get fined but when OPEC countries fix prices it’s OK and when the International Diamond Cartel operates it is found to be beneficial!!!

But ethics don’t get a mention.

EU fines bathroom cartel 622m euros

Seventeen bathroom equipment makers have been fined a total of 622m euros ($760; £510m) by the European Commission for price-fixing. The companies, including Ideal Standard of the US, which was fined 326m euros, formed a cartel for 12 years covering ceramics such as sinks, baths and taps.

The fines of five companies were reduced to a level they could afford. The Commission described the firms’ practices as “very serious infringements of the EU competition rules”.

However, it said its objective was not to force companies in difficulties out of business, and so reduced the fines on five companies. One, Masco of Italy, received full immunity as it was the first to provide information on the cartel.

Public cartels were also permitted in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s and continued to exist for some time after World War II in industries such as coal mining and oil production. Cartels have also played an extensive role in the German economy during the inter-war period. International commodity agreements covering products such as coffee, sugar, tin and more recently oil (OPEC) are examples of international cartels with publicly entailed agreements between different national governments.

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Posted in Business, Philosophy | Comments Off on Cartels and Hypocrisy. But what happened to ethics?

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