2010-09-03: Econolypse: It Was The Regulators!
Regulators fell short in using their powers "forcefully or effectively" to stop risky practices by banks and were slow to identify and address abuses in the U.S. financial system that led to global economic crisis, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told a panel investigating the financial crisis on Thursday.
Fed Chairman "Banana Boat" Ben Benanke finally admits what we've known for years: Financial corporations ran wild because regulators did not force them to stay within the lines, and that caused the great recession. This, by the way, is the reason why the President's new financial reforms will not solve the problem: regulators have had the powers they need since the 1930s, but periodically choose not to use them, whether for philosophical reasons or because of corporate lobbying activities.
Instead of concentrating more power in an easily-corrupted federal regulatory agency, the best solution would have been to require these companies to comply with consumer-protection laws in every state and make it a mandatory ten-year prison term for the CEO if they don't comply. Now, neither my proposal nor the fed's new powers will prevent institutions from loading up with risky financial instruments. We already know that they create "off-the-books-entities" that they secretly own in order to invest in whatever they aren't allowed to own. Collapses at such entities have been key factors in some accounting scandals over the past several years.
We could make things ever more Byzantine, with regulators that regulate the regulators, who are in turn regulated by still more regulators. That still will not prevent the nation's financial regulation agencies from choosing to ignore their missions and allow misconduct to go unpunished. Mr. Bernanke is a very smart man--said to be the world's foremost expert on the Great Depression's causes and cures--but I have to disagree with anyone who thinks that adding a few new regulations is going to fix a problem caused by failure of regulators to do their jobs.
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2010-09-03: What Is Dell's Problem?
... Dell?s shares are down about 70 percent over the last decade. The company has gained a reputation for producing inferior products and offering poor tech support. An accounting scandal recently cost the company $100 million....
Dell has fallen a long way. At one time, the darling of computer buyers everywhere, Dell is facing a sharp backlash over a quality scandal. Dell is behind HP in the PC market, and continuing to lose ground. Dell even launched a line of Linux-powered computers, but those products are typically launched months behind comparable Windows products.
What is wrong with Dell? Quite simply, Dell is a publicly-traded corporation--one which once led the industry--and is therefore absorbed by the flaws common to most such entities:
- Dell cannot focus on the long-term, building its reputation for quality and value by actually offering quality and value, because its shareholders want ever-increasing profits. Dell needs to get back to its roots, selling top-quality products at reasonable prices. That is likely to mean that its products vanish from Wal-Mart stores, but then, knowledgeable computer support technicians usually advise consumers to avoid any brand they see in Wal-Mart or similar chains, because if price is the only driver, quality goes down the toilet.
- Dell's direct-purchase operation and its related finance company cannot focus on helping customers buy Dell products, but instead try to be the high-tech equivalent of the old Fingerhut sales and captive consumer finance business. Instead of the financing arm being a profit center, it should be merely a way to help consumers buy more Dell products, but that will require a complete change in management and direction within that organization.
- In a world where the lowest costs come from laying off domestic employees and hiring overseas workers to perform the work for as close to zero cost as possible, Dell is trying to lower its costs as a way to increase profits. Dell needs to manage its costs, but not to the extent that it hostilizes its workforce or dumps US workers in order to hire lower-cost foreign workers.
- Because Dell's Linux line is always so far behind its Windows lines, sales are likely to be abysmally low. And yet, all most Linux buyers want is out-of-the-box hardware compatibility and no requirement to pay for a Windows license they are not going to use. Dell could very nearly corner the market for Linux buyers by offering that on every product it sells. If they stopped exclusively recommending Windows products and advertised their Linux compatibility, their Linux (and no-OS) market would likely begin to grow, too.
- A big chunk of Dell's sales are to the enterprise market. In that market, organizations are looking to purchase large numbers of identical computers that meet some internal standard at the lowest possible per-unit cost. Dell may need to move more toward semi-customized (and therefore higher margin) products, at the expense of fewer units being sold at a time.
Remember, Dell was once one of those small, can-do companies, the kind you see on the cover of Inc magazine. They thrived, I'm sure, because they were not a big corporation, and they were therefore more willing to offer both quality and value to their customers. I'd like to see the old Dell return and get rid of the Dell that fills its products with crapware applications (trial software, garbage applications, and some that might even be justifiably called 'spyware').
I'd like to call Dell's customer service and speak to a helpful and motivated US citizen who can communicate with me and is willing and able to resolve my problems. I'd like to purchase a computer and not have to spend hours or even days getting rid of crapware. I'd like to buy a computer and find that Firefox and Chrome are preinstalled by default. I'd like to buy any model Dell makes without an operating system (OS), and without paying for a Windows license. I'd even like to stick a Ubuntu or Fedora GNU+Linux install disc into that computer and have everything (sound, video, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc) work just as well as it would under the leading proprietary operating system (i.e., Windows). At least with recent Linux versions, Broadcom WiFi cards have been very iffy. Better to avoid such products entirely, since some competitive products are just as good and have fully functional drivers for Linux.
Not that computers compatible with Linux will solve all of Dell's problems. Dell, like other computer makers is in a very low margin business, computer hardware, where the licensing cost of Windows is too high relative to the price of their products. In order to help defray some of thse costs, they and their competitors install the software we call "crapware" along with hooks into various online services in exchange for payments from the companies behind these products. Linux machines can help with that part, but Dell has more going on.
Dell was late to push its products into retail stores, where many people still go first to purchase computers. And unfortunately, in that environment, Dell's products look and perform like HP's products, which look and perform like Gateway/eMachines' products, and the stores' priority is to push the latest Windows/Microsoft Office software, not Dell's hardware. One thing that I think Dell needs is its own environment, where they can showcase their own distinctive products, rather than being a generic tool to showcase Windows. Maybe developing products that run Android or ChromeOS can help them there.
And of course, Dell has been in the news recently over the way it mishandled customers who purchased computers with defective motherboards. From what I've read, the motherboard issue wasn't even Dell-caused, but they improperly attempted to limit warranty claims and repair / replacement costs that the motherboards were causing. (I don't personally know this. It is just my understanding from the news stories I've been reading.) Whether true or not, the stories are not helping Dell's reputation at all.
Again, these types of problems are not exclusive to Dell. They are common to most larger corporations. Dell is just the one chosen to be in the newspapers and on the radio right now.
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2010-08-31: Double-dipping: Thinking About The Recession
This article may disappear after a while. In essence, it lays out a set of conditions which might indicate that the recession is returning to bite us again. Then it lists eleven areas where it could be expected to show.
The problem with articles like this, of course, is that they quite often only gloss over the surface of the situation. The great bailout was never intended to solve the underlying causes of the recession, but instead, to hide the damage long enough to cause consumers and investors to regain their confidence and therefore revive a rally that shouldn't have happened to begin with. You see, here in California, housing prices began an irrational rise in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Real estate values rose so quickly that the state constitution was amended to limit the growth in property taxes. It is that real estate price growth that joined with other conditions to precipitate the crisis.
But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it wasn't a crisis. At that point, our local governments--cities, towns, and counties--learned that rapidly-increasing real estate prices, especially when accompanied by high turnover, meant more money in their coffers. The state government learned that this also led to higher income tax revenues, which led to an unimaginable growth in the size of the state government, the school system, and local governments. All of this was based on using increasing real estate values as a "magic piggy bank."
It was utterly predictable that this would have to come to an end. What is not yet clear is whether the current period is that end or merely an interruption, similar to (but more intense than) the one in the early 1990s. If this is the end of the irrational increase in real estate prices, look for everything that has been tied to that magic piggy bank to slide with it. People extracting money from their homes were a big part of automobile sales in the 1990s through the 2000s and also:
- electronics and computers
- vacations, travel, and tourism
- investments in stocks and bonds
- second homes, residential rentals, and commercial real estate
They also played a big role in funding the budget growth of schools and colleges. The K-12 schools in California absorb around one-half of the state's budget. That money doesn't reach the classrooms--teachers often buy the supplies that they use out of their own pockets along with some of the supplies their students use--but is consumed by an ever-increasing number of highly-paid administrators. But the ability to fund that growth up to this point has largely come about because of the increased tax revenue which has its roots in the real estate magic piggy bankTM.
That piggy bank may be going away soon (but no one knows for sure when it will happen), as real estate prices that soared far beyond any reasonable value come crashing back to earth. The result of this would be a horrendous time for everyone in the nation, along with many people in other parts of the world.
- Every bank, savings & loan bank, and credit union in the nation would suddenly find themselves "upside-down" as long-term values for nearly every property on their books plummet below the institutions' carrying values.
- Industries devoted to pumping up real estate sales and prices will suddenly be wiped out:
- real estate brokers and real estate agents
- mortgage brokers, mortgage bankers, and others who make loans secured by real estate
- escrow and title companies
- legal professionals (e.g., attorneys) specializing in real estate
- notaries public
- state and local government property tax assessors
- Those whose prosperity depends upon people withdrawing from their magic piggy banks and purchasing products and services will also suffer, including:
- retailers
- investment bankers
- tax-dependent organizations, such as governmental entities
- colleges, trade and vocational schools, and the K-12 school system
Personally, even with all the bailouts meant to camouflage it, I do not believe the recession has ended. What we've shown is that one can temporarily cover it up with great effort. We have not even begun to deal with the underlying issues and causes.
Among the things we haven't dealt with is the financial industries' incentive issues. We know they have very extreme incentives to increase revenue, but there appear to be few incentives for them to act on the behalf of their customers, the investors whose money they are gambling with. Tim Bray wrote a very accurate summary of this issue as part of a book review.
We haven't dealt with the incentives for local governments whose budgets depend upon property tax revenues to encourage gratuitous valuation increases and to channel (through their building permits and business licensing processes) local resources into real estate-related activities and industries. They should be all about making life better for their current and future residents, independently of how that affects real estate values.
We haven't dealt with federal tax policies that encourage people to ignore the true costs of buying and owning property. There are two main reasons why the mortgage interest deduction is a bad idea. First of all, if taxpayers are subsidizing your interest, most people are not going to rigorously examine the terms and rates. When they don't do this, they often miss other potentially-toxic terms in the contract. Secondly, it probably is not such a good idea to use taxes paid by those who do not have mortgages to subsidize those who do. That's totally a reverse Robin Hood situation: making lower income people, who cannot afford to own homes, subsidize the purchase by those who can afford to own homes.
I have to say that I do not own any real estate and currently have no plans to purchase any. Neither do I own any stock or bonds (other than some US government bonds purchased with a payroll deduction) and I have no current plans to buy any. I am not an investment advisor and this is not investment advice. This article is copyright © 2010, Walt Hucks and OTP.
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2010-07-03: Parental Pride: You Are On Your Way
A Personal Message To MJ As He Leaves For College
I remember you as a young child, so full of life and energy. You were a real boy, running and jumping and wrestling and laughing and talking. I am proud to have been a part of raising you. I am proud to have helped you improve your reading and math skills, to have sat you down in front of a computer, to have exposed you to Linux and FreeBSD, and to have enrolled you in college classes years before your peers.
When some of your teachers believed you had no future, I knew better. God made you and placed within you gifts and talents that set you apart. He placed within you the dreams you are now leaving to pursue.
You will face challenges unlike any you've ever known. You'll be tempted to give up, to run back home like a scared puppy. Don't do it. This is a defining moment in your life, and you're going to have to overcome all these challenges in order to build the kind of character that will get you through real life.
As a Christian believer, it is important to understand that real men, real servants of Christ, are not perfect in any way, but we know we have to depend upon him who is perfect for everything we expect to accomplish. I urge you, therefore, to make time for the Bible, for prayer, and for other believers as part of your daily life.
Finally, don't be afraid to prioritize, to pare away things that are unnecessary (even if they are desirable), in order to devote scarce resources to the things that are necessary to accomplishing the mission. Always know that I'm behind you and I'm proud of you.
This is a personal note. Doubtless, you've already experienced the child going away to college. I'm new to this.
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2010-06-05: Privacy and Security Tip
Shredding personal documents may not be enough. If you only shred
sensitive information, your refuse stream will be easy to segregate into
sensitive / non-sensitive.
Instead, shred everything you can, so that dumpster divers will find it
more difficult to reassemble documents.
Good advice. Check it out.
Also, when you're looking for a shredder, look for a "crosscut" or "confetti" shredder. Fewer, longer strips of paper make old-style shredders' output easier to reassemble.
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2010-04-27: Serial Deficits: California's Behavior Examined
It is no secret to anyone that California's financial problems are symptomatic of an underlying pathology of unbalanced budgets. This has been the rule, rather than the exception, for ten to fifteen years or more.
I recall when Pete Wilson was Governor. California was severely impacted by a recession. Rather than cut spending across the board to match revenues, the K-12 schools were sheltered, while other programs suffered financial massacres. The University of California's revenues are partially protected by the state constitution, but the California State University and the California community colleges are not. So the campuses that cater to lower income students, disadvantaged students, and first-generation college students faced deep budget cuts and their students experienced steep increases in "fees". (Note: California's constitution prevents its public colleges from charging tuition, so they use the term "enrollment fee" to describe what everyone else knows as tuition.)
During the Wilson administration, the state also raised taxes, seized revenues that should have been forwarded to local governments, and borrowed from reserved funds. The overall effect was to make an already tough situation tougher for residents and businesses in the state--and to prolong the recession far beyond its end in the rest of the country.
Then came Gray Davis. Davis, a Democrat, came in as revenue surged. The dotcom boom was on, and for some reason, the state seemed to expect it to go on forever. State and local government payrolls grew rapidly, as did education budgets. The state decided to try to reduce class size to no more than twenty students in a classroom for grades K to 3. That was and is an admirable goal. But then came the inevitable crash, the dot-bomb, which caught the state with its pants (emergency fund) down.
After that came another revenue crunch. This one resulted in the recall of the governor, with actor Arnold Schwartzenegger being elected to replace him. "The Governator" soon discovered that the state's chronic and serial deficits were not just a few small miscalculations by the former governor's administration, but were symptoms of a systemic aversion to corraling spending, even in the face of a widespread determination to try and keep taxes from increasing.
Now California is faced with another such crisis. As before, there are games being played in which outgoing payments are delayed and reserved funds are borrowed. Local governments' funds are being held up. This time, however, there are some cuts going on. Teachers are being laid off--or at least warned that they may be--cities and counties are going beyond hiring freezes and Friday furlough days to actually starting to implement reductions in force. And yet, California still refuses to deal with its chronic overspending.
Rather than directly raise taxes, we usually tack fees on top of everything. Then, we give discounts and subsidies to large, out-of-area corporations (LOOACs) to motivate them to come to town. The effect of this is to shift the burden onto families and smaller, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs). This has a secondary effect: since these LOOACs have their highly paid corporate officers elsewhere, the effect is to pump dollars out of the local area and ship them wherever the LOOAC is headquartered.
If anything, our governmental leaders appear to be living in a dream world. California is a beautiful place, full of wonderful (and not so wonderful) people. The California dream has made it the promised land. And yet, we have the idea that through the wonders of government, we can have something for nothing. We need to make sure that taxes (and fees) are tied directly to benefits and costs of government. At least as important, we need to provide all services at the lowest possible level--as close to the receiver of that service as we can--and ensure that the revenue needed to pay for it is also directed to that level of government (and not pulled to Sacramento first for aggregation and dispensing).
Tags: California, taxes, overspending
2010-04-19: Economic Recovery? I Doubt It
I am seeing a lot of crowing that we are in a recovery. I do not believe a word of it. Here's why:
Symptoms
*** Jobs are not a "trailing indicator", but are in fact one of the most accurate measures of how the everyday American experiences life. GDP, unfortunately, is badly skewed by throwing millionaires and billionaires in with thousandaires and hundredaires. So as soon as stock prices start rising, the wealthiest people start spending again, but it is two or three years later before the average Joe on the street is finally able to move out of his mother-in-law's place.
In this case, the jobs we lost were higher-paid. Financial services, automobile manufacturing, recreational vehicle manufacturing, and new/used car dealerships--most of the jobs lost in these industries are gone forever. Retail, fast food restaurants, education, government--in the first two fields, job gains may remain for a while, but people in these industries earn a fraction of what jobs in the now-closed industries above earned. In education and government, deep and lasting cuts are almost guranteed within the next two or three years, simply because there aren't enough private-sector jobs earning enough to pay enough in taxes to support the people working in those fields.
*** Real wages, or inflation-adjusted wages, have not increased in decades, and anecdotal evidence suggests that they have declined over the past fifteen to twenty years. Of course, the government changed the formula it uses to determine this around 1994, so some of the negative trends that the earlier calculation might have shown are muted by the current calculation. See ShadowStats for more information on that.
This means that the average Joe on the street hasn't had a noticeable raise since Bill Clinton was President. The lowest income people in the economy have, in fact, experienced a gradual pay cut, as prices have risen, but their wages have not kept pace.
*** Real estate prices are still insanely high, relative to people's incomes. The government's stabilization program was focused on stopping the price slide, because inflated real estate values are a huge part of many banks' portfolios.
We should also mention the AARP generation, a good number of whom are property owners as well as active voters, as a reason why the Bush and Obama administrations chose to prevent real estate prices from "right-sizing". Whatever the motivation, this will continue to price many families out of the market for owning their own SFDH (single-family detached housing) units, and as long as that remains true, we are all poorer for it.
*** Lack of criminal prosecutions against those in the financial and real estate industries (as well as publicly-traded corporations in other industries) is also an issue. I'm not a lawyer, not a police officer, not an accountant. But I'd be surprised if an energized and motivated DOJ couldn't bring 100 or more prosecutions in 18 months time against managers, officers, directors, advisors, and investors in these firms.
Now, the issue here is that everyone has seen how much cheating benefited these companies and their officers and investors. The rest of us will be spending the next thirty years paying for the resulting bailouts, on top of our already-existing responsibilities. Without aggressive prosecution, confidence in the economy will remain weak. When we see 100 or more corporate officers in orange jumpsuits and leg irons, we will know that we have turned the corner.
*** Corporate lobbying and political schmoozing. When I'm at work, I can easily spend 10, 12, or even more hours each day, six days a week, trying to make a living. I don't have much time or energy afterward to try and persuade a Congress-member to vote a certain way on an issue. Presumably, you don't either. You're more concerned with getting Junior fed, with his homework done and his bath taken, before his bedtime. Corporations have nearly-unlimited resources, and are therefore able to advocate for their points of view while you're trying to put bread on the table.
As long as politicians refuse to write and pass an amendment to our Constitution that eliminates "corporate personhood" and the rights that implies, we all know that the "playing field" is uneven. If you know that the government and the legal system are under the control of someone whose goal is to drain you of all your resources, will you be confident in the economy? No? Why not?
Remedies
What I'd really like to see is a renewed focus on helping people build small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs), and a stern resolution to let LOOACs (large, out-of-area businesses) pay their own way. A resolution that will stop subsidizing the costs of importing goods from low-wage countries and stop ignoring companies right here that employ undocumented labor because it allows them to pay illegally low wages.
But realistically, this isn't likely unless the above-mentioned constitutional amendment passes. As long as corporations are legally persons, the right to petition for redress of grievances will allow them to continue to control Congress and the President--no matter who is in office--and through their control of the elected branches, they'll also control the courts.
Financial overhaul: I haven't read the administration's overhaul bill, but from what I have read about it, it neglects the very things that are necessary:
- Require compliance with state consumer-protection laws in the individual consumer's state. Establish criminal penalties for non-compliance, and allow states to prosecute violations.
- Remove enforcement powers from the Federal Reserve, which is not actually a government agency, and give them to an agency of the Treasury Department.
- Consolidate the seven dwarves, the alphabet soup of financial rule-making and enforcement agencies, excepting the FASB, into this Treasury-based agency.
- Reinstate "mark-to-market", the accounting rule which the FASB repealed under Congressional pressure, and alter other accounting rules to make accounting statements a more transparent, current, and accurate statement of a firm's financial condition in the present and the near future.
- Restore Glass-Steagall restrictions separating commercial, consumer, and investment banking from one another and from insurance (and reinsurance). Restrict financial firms' activities to a home state and its contiguous (touching) states. For example, a California bank would be allowed to expand into Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon, but not Washington or Utah.
- Financial institutions get a maximum of five years to shed holding companies and no-longer-allowed businesses and locations.
- Require "skin in the game". Loans and investments must be partly made from a firm's invested capital. This should put stockholders on the brake pedal. But to further discourage overly risky actions, corporate officers and upper management should also have some of their financial resources on the hook. This is not necessarily direct exposure (which could put their interests in competiton or opposition to the interests of stockholders), but perhaps making some of their assets available for recovery in the event of collapse.
Certainly, bringing goods from more than 500 to 1000 miles away should be expensive enough that local businesses, with local labor and local suppliers have an even shot at landing the sale. By this I'm referring to fuel subsidies, highway subsidies, and other ways that we take tax money and use it to lubricate the export of American workers' jobs.
Indeed, this country needs a profound focus on a common-sense energy policy. I'm not talking about a lunacy-based policy based on fear of carbon dioxide, either. I'm talking about the coming oil shortage, and its effect on transportation, keeping our homes warm, and even our agriculture. I'm talking about homes that are in areas where there is plenty of insolation (incoming solar radiation), but which have no system to capture some of that energy and put it to use. I'm talking about homes that are not highly-insulated , and which therefore require more energy to heat and cool. I'm talking about cities whose building codes forbid wind turbines, not because of safety, but because of aesthetics.
Adam Smith, the father of economics, recognized that the returns on doing business properly belong to those whose labor went into producing the product or service. A portion is rightly diverted to the provider of capital (in most cases, through providing money; capital itself is the land, buildings, equipment, tools, etc which are provided by the money and which are used to produce the product or service for sale, not the money itself) as a reward, and some portion is then paid to the managers and foremen who direct the laborers in their tasks of production. We have it backwards: management first, stockholders and lenders second, workers last.
What do these things have to do with recovery? Simple: the economy has been undergoing a radical transformation for several years. This economic crisis accelerated it, which is why two of the three US auto makers required taxpayer bailouts (and Chrysler is so gravely wounded that it isn't likely to see the end of 2011 in my opinion). There are whole industries that have lost many of the companies that were a part of said industry. Those companies, those jobs, are not coming back. Telling laid-off workers that going to college will help them obtain replacement jobs is false at best, and at its worst, a damnable lie. What we need is to recognize where we are and what our options are for undoing this mess we're in.
Tags: recovery, economy, recession, econolypse
Twenty years ago, when we had Barnes and Noble but no Amazon, there was all kinds of literature, from 2600 to Love & Rockets, from Heather Has Two Mommies to Duplex Planet, that survived mainly in the independent ecosystem, but whose host bookstores also needed to sell enough Stephen King or M. Scott Peck to stay open. Fifteen years ago, when use of the web was still a minority pursuit, online bookselling changed this game, but hadn?t yet ended it. Even ten years ago, when more than half of U.S. adults had already become internet users, there were still many book lovers not online. Though the value of bookstores in supporting variety had shrunk, it was still there.Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization « Clay Shirky
Those days are over. Internet use is as widespread as cable TV, and an internet user in rural Utah has access to more books than a citizen of Greenwich Village had before the web. Millions more books. Like record stores and video rental places, physical bookstores simply can?t compete for breadth of offering and, also like the social changes around music and moving images, the internet is strengthening rather than weakening the ability of niches and sub-cultures to see themselves reflected in long-form writing.
Change is affecting many traditional businesses. In most cases, they are building walls to try and keep change out, rather than going with the flow of time. When American Motors was forced to ally with Renault in an attempt to stay alive, we recognized that it was probably near the end of the road for AMC, but no one thought for a second that people no longer needed to get from point A to point B.
So why do we panic when change comes to other industries? Technological change is what gave us the publishing industry to begin with. Societal (social, educational, and economic) change gave us retail bookstores. If change eventually replaces them with something else, we'll figure out new ways to derive the benefits that we currently obtain from books and bookstores.
There are lots of things that bookstores have tried, and lots more that they need to try. And if the retail model is no longer self-supporting, try to think about what comes after Amazon, because that's where smart sellers want to be.
The most important thing to realize is that a lot of businesses are being disintermediated. That is, the middleman who previously performed a valuable service by collecting and narrowing the selection of choices in a location near you is now increasingly unneeded. When one wants to buy, it is often the online vendor that has the selection and price. Frequently, that online vendor is also the publisher, too.
This is an interesting time for that industry, just as it is for newspapers, magazines, record companies, movie companies, and others who are seeing their business models collapsing.
Out of ashes, value.
Tags: retail, bookstores, economy
2010-04-10: DDR Weekend: Enjoy Yourself
This was a personal favorite for a long time. I'd have bought it tonight if Amazon offered open formats (OGG audio--.oga or .ogg).
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