07.04.08
Posted in Economy at 0:31 by lnxwalt
By now, everyone knows that the higher cost of fuel is causing airlines to tack on fees and restrictions, as well as to cut back on flights to smaller cities. The airlines do need to raise prices and reduce some costs in order to stay (or more accurately, become) profitable. However, the fees are like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.
Airlines, like most other businesses, need to operate in such a way that their customers do not mind paying a profitable rate to obtain the company's product or service. Given all the unpleasantness of airports (thanks to security hysteria and airline routes & scheduling that turn a short trip into an all-day ordeal), airlines really should be thinking about making planes a more pleasant place to be.
Personally, I love the flight from point A to point B. I might feel differently if it was a longer flight, but for the few hours I am aloft, I really enjoy it. Yet, I would gladly drive across the nation if it meant I could avoid airports.
I flew from California to Newark, New Jersey last year. It was quite an experience, because I found myself waiting for a few hours at Dallas-Fort Worth airport. The year before that, flying to Albany, New York, I spent a few hours at Atlanta airport. A couple of weeks ago, I spent hours at Minneapolis airport. These may all be pleasant cities, but I really do not desire to go through their airports any more.
And that, to me, suggests a way out for the airlines. You see, the airlines' business model is based upon charging very high prices to those who are most desperate to buy your product, while discounting to attract those who are price-sensitive. Because business fliers are usually absolutely desperate, they pay the highest rates, moderated by frequent flier miles and bulk discount plans. Because many business fliers' flights are paid by their companies, they take the lowest priced from point A to point B, even if that means going through points C and D before arriving.
One thing the airlines might want to look at is going back to direct flights to most destinations, coupled with fixed-price tickets that cover the costs and bring a decent profit. I think this would be the best way to restore the profitability of airlines while giving a more pleasing experience to their customers. One thing is sure: the current model of treating paying customers like cattle to be herded and prodded is failing under the strain of our current economy.
Permalink
06.05.08
Posted in Economy, Society at 2:42 by lnxwalt
PlexNex: Wind Will Power Our Future
According to the report, the DOE expects coastal states to harness 50,000 megawatts of offshore wind in shallow water depths of less than 100 feet. The report notes for some coastal states (like Massachusetts) shallow water offshore wind can provide 100 percent of the electricity supply.
The DOE further states that increasing the use of wind power to supply 20 percent of the nation’s electricity would reduce carbon dioxide emissions (that contribute to climate change) from the electricity generation sector by 25 percent while creating up to a half million new American jobs.
Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I have been harping on the need to act for some time. Being a California resident, I have seen how our state and local leaders are harming our economy by waiting until they are forced to start moving us toward energy independence.
I think of the proposal to build a wind farm in the hills Northeast of Apple Valley. The Town council spoke up against it, fearing that the appearance would keep people from buying homes in the part of the Town nearest that area. We’re talking about a place that has occasionally suffered blackouts because of California’s lack of power capacity. Even the slightest bit of common sense would say that having local generation capacity is a good thing in times of scarcity.
Maybe there is a silver lining in the fuel price increases. If the price increases force our governments and our society (including individuals and families) to seek out alternatives to fossil fuels, then that part, at least, is good.
What we have been doing is unsustainable. Our homes are large, with large expanses of glass, and poorly insulated. We make up for this by turning up the furnace or air conditioner. We live in places that are distant from where we earn our livings, so we spend a lot of time getting to work and back home. Because we are so far from our workplaces, there aren’t many people following exactly the same routes, so we almost have to use private vehicles to commute–sure, we could take the bus or the train, but we’d add an hour or more to our commute time.
We need to change, but not just as individuals. We need change society-wide. We need to have our leaders behind these changes, whether it means public financing or changing regulations and zoning to make sustainable living allowable and in fact preferred. That our state and local governments have ignored this for the past thirty years is tragic. If they continue their present policies, there will be a very painful time when the lights go out and the tanks run dry. At that time, we will all suffer unbearable anguish, although wealthier and better-connected individuals might escape the effects longer or suffer less than their neighbors do.
It’s Time To Change
Sam has found an important editorial in support of these ideas. I am not an East coast resident, and have no opinion as to the desirability of the “Cape Wind” project. However, we can either do something, even if it isn’t a perfect solution, or we can sit on our hindquarters until the lights go out and we are trying to survive a breakdown of society. At the very least, we’ll learn more as we proceed, including whether existing technology is sufficient or we need to develop new technology.
Technorati Tags: alternative energy, economic development
Permalink
05.26.08
Posted in Economy, Political at 1:14 by lnxwalt
Even while the bad economic news continues, we need to continue to invest in our communities. Instead of giving tax breaks to large corporations that move operations into the area (which are paid for by smaller businesses and families), we need to use a two-fold strategy:
- Invest in building small, locally-owned businesses in the community, particularly those whose product or service is sold to buyers outside of the area. They bring funds into the local economy, and are intimately tied to the local area by the residency of their owners.
We should not be afraid to set goals for hiring of local employees, including both number and compensation levels of those employees. Nor should we be afraid to work out a deal to help with job-skills training for the employees that get hired. Remember that during the heyday of aerospace in Southern California, it was said that each job supported five other jobs in the economy. We may not reach that level, but even 1.5 other local jobs is preferable to giving funding to big box retailers paying minimum wage and costing more jobs than they bring.
- Find an area of town with reasonable land costs and build whole communities of “starter homes”. The idea is that people earning the local median income should easily be able to afford these homes. This helps with stabilizing the economy (homeowners have a reason to participate in making things better, where renters do not) and with helping your local construction, real estate, and financial industries to recover from the recession.
It does not have to be solely funded by taxpayers. A cooperative project with a group like Habitat for Humanity can have a wonderful effect on the area. Habitat often has the buyer help with the construction, which gives them some skills and experience they’ll need during the maintenance phase, and which may even open the door to a new career in construction.
In areas where it is possible, these homes should be heavily-insulated (protects occupants from temperature extremes, reduces utility costs) and maybe even utilize solar and wind generators to augment the power grid. Also, make housing areas as close to business areas as possible. Ideally, employees will be able to walk to work (this means that businesses have to follow strict environmental and safety standards, including regular inspections by regulating agencies).
What we know is this: Washington is too “bought and paid for” by large corporations that have too much at stake to truly be concerned about your little community. Instead, your community needs to take the lead and break its dependency upon outside funding, imported goods, and the now-nonexistent loyalty of corporate America. Let me say it again: most of what your community needs will not come from the feds.
Your small business is intimately tied to your community by the fact that you live and work there. This is even more true if your customers live or work there. It is in your best interest to begin promoting these concepts to your town or city council members and staff. Join your local chamber of commerce or other local business alliances and make sure they also understand and work toward this goal.
We already know from past experience that giving subsidies to large companies to come into your town does not work. Your taxpayers pay up front, and before the company’s contribution matches the benefit it received, it closes up shop and moves to the next town. The large discount retailer nicknamed “Big Blue” is well-known for this strategy, leaving empty stores in town after town. It is time to return to something that works: local community investment in local businesses is a key part of a strategy for preserving your community’s economic future.
Permalink
05.04.08
Posted in Economy, Political at 13:54 by lnxwalt
Higher fuel prices are causing pain for most people in our country. As a consequence, Congress-members are talking about temporarily suspending the tax (about 18 cents per gallon on gasoline) for a few months. The problem is, gas prices are likely to briefly drop later this year, and then start rising again, possibly going until they surpass five dollars per gallon.
The gas tax suspension will slightly reduce present pain, but in the process, will also lead to much greater pain in the future. What we need is to make it financially untenable for most people to operate low-mileage vehicles such as pickups and SUVs. Why? Because we need to make some dramatic changes in our economy and infrastructure, but are not willing to do so as long as we continue to have relatively cheap fuel.
How many of us have lots of single-layer glass in our homes? This is a sure-fire way to waste energy, heating and cooling the great outdoors. How many of us have only minimal insulation? How many of us have city governments that balk at energy-conservation efforts that might not match the look of the rest of the town?
All of that must change. But it won’t change unless the cost of change is lower than the cost of keeping things the way they are. Years ago, during California’s power crisis, a resident of my town wanted to put up a windmill to generate some of his family’s electric power. The town told him that he could only have it if it was forty feet tall, surrounded by trees that were sixty feet tall, because it needed to be invisible to the neighbors. This is the same mentality that causes them to require mobile telephone towers to be disguised as hideous false trees or hidden inside of building attics and fat flagpoles. We then complain because we cannot get reliable service on our phones.
If we want to reduce the pain of higher fuel costs, we have to first let the pain get so intense that people refuse to take jobs that involve long commutes or refuse to live long distances from their existing workplaces. I can say this, because where I live, most available jobs are seventy-five miles or more from home. As a result, I do work where I fly outside the area (I’m currently working in Columbus, Ohio). Meanwhile, I’ve got my eyes open for jobs and housing together, preferably outside of California.
In the Inland Empire of California (and the I-15 corridor North of the I.E.), we have made a conscious decision to encourage housing developments and retail developments, without corresponding industrial, mining, and agricultural development. We have lots of homes, we have low-wage retail and service jobs (but even there, not enough to meet the demand), but we sorely lack local jobs that have pay and benefits sufficient to support a family on. Therefore, most of our residents get in their cars and drive fifty, seventy-five, or even one hundred miles one-way to get to work. We could sacrifice and put in high-speed commuter rail systems to make this tenable, or we could refuse to approve housing developments that do not have sufficient employment opportunities within twenty or twenty-five miles. However, hard decisions such as these will never happen until we stop fiddling with the system and let greedy oil companies chase off all their customers.
Permalink
04.10.08
Posted in Economy, Political at 2:40 by lnxwalt
The original article will probably be gone in a couple of weeks.
US water pipelines are breaking - Yahoo! News
Essentially, the article describes some major aqueducts that are reaching the end of their expected lives, either because of their age or because of lack of maintenance and repair.
This is actually an example of where short-term focus is harmful in the long run. One place I lived in this town, we had a water pipe that would break a couple of times each week during the Summer (breaks were discovered less frequently during colder weather). The company would come out and use a metal strap to provide a temporary patch. Then a few days later, the pipe would break somewhere else. In the local case, the pipe is only about four feet deep, so it isn’t infeasible to selectively replace the worst pipes in a desert.
It seems to be an America-wide thing, though. Lack of attention to infrastructure is costing us repair costs elsewhere (damage to homes and vehicles, traffic delays, emergency repairs, maybe even lost lives when some spectacular failure happens). We focus on the short-term instead of acting to prevent failure or to replace already-failing pipes and roads. We even neglect to build needed things like a region-wide high-speed rail system in Southern California, where some commuters travel up to 100 miles one-way to work. Or seeing that our current water imports are going to be reduced in the future (due to sharing Colorado River water and restrictions on other water supplies), we still fail to construct an ocean desalinization plant that can help make up the difference.
While we grumble about almost $4 per gallon fuel, we can’t do something that can help insulate us from the effects when fuel costs rise to $5, $6, $7, or even $10 per gallon? I don’t buy it. When I was spending five hours per day sitting in traffic, I was keenly interested in anything that would be faster and cheaper or even the same time and price but less frustrating.
A few years ago, when California was having its power crisis, our town leaders forbade a resident from putting up a windmill generator. The neighboring city decided to promote a power plant fueled by natural gas and cooled by the very water that is in short supply in the area.
This is nothing less than a failure of leadership. As a citizen, I know that I am not averse to higher taxes if they are spent wisely. Where I begin to put my foot down is when taxes rise, but there is no visible effect. Here in California, this must start in Sacramento and in city hall. There will be no improvement while things stay the same there. Local residents need to make it a big issue that their water pipes are bursting, that their roads are crumbling, that their electric rates continue to rise, that their commutes are taking longer, that their city plan spend more time trying to ensure that everyone’s front yards look alike than actually making the city a better place to live.
We live in a great country, but we’ve gotten so used to enjoying the benefits of it that we never face the fact that there are some costs that need to be borne also. A longer-term perspective helps us think about what we can do to make things better and to maintain what we already have. I hope you will join me in contacting your state and local officials to ask that they invest in the future of your community.
Permalink
04.04.08
Posted in Economy, Political at 22:48 by lnxwalt
Huge job losses set off recession alarms - Yahoo! News
The latest figures, apparently released today, show that experts are starting to realize what everyone else has known for about six months—that we are in a recession period in the U. S. economy. That it took so long to recognize it shows again just how clueless those in the forefront of government and the financial industry are.
It’s no longer a question of recession or not. Now it’s how deep and how long.
Workers’ pink slips stacked ever higher in March as jittery employers slashed 80,000 jobs, the most in five years, and the national unemployment rate climbed to 5.1 percent. Job losses are nearing the staggering level of a quarter-million this year in just three months.
Says one candidate, let’s retrain workers, so they’ll be able to compete for jobs. Says another, let’s boost unemployment benefits and aid to communities, so they can hold on until the recession ends.
Retraining does not hit at the core of the problem: lax oversight of large corporations and financial enterprises has allowed those large enterprises to destabilize the economy. Rather than round up the perpetrators and make them do the perp-walk through phalanxes of TV cameras in their orange jumpsuits, we are trying to bail them out. The result was predictable, even if the timing and the exact sequence of failures was not.
All told, the economy now has lost 232,000 jobs in the first three months of this year.
I would not be surprised if there is a brief recovery in late Summer and early Autumn. We could even get back some of those lost jobs. Make no mistake about it, though. This was not the normal business cycle recession. This was preventable, and since no one is yet dealing with the “wink wink, nudge nudge” regulators who allowed this to happen or the corporate and financial shenanigans that caused it, I would expect that by the end of this year or the beginning of the next, the “double-dip” part of the recession will come, only it is probably going to be much more severe than what we are experiencing today.
I would expect that local communities need to focus on shoring up locally-owned businesses, particularly SLOBs, emphasizing a “buy local” policy. SLOBs, in turn, need to use local sources and locally-produced goods and services as much as possible. If we do this in California’s Victor Valley area, for example, national chains will face the brunt of the effect, while SLOBs will maintain their positions or even grow stronger. Since the area serves primarily as a far-away bedroom community for Los Angeles and Orange counties, this will help to ameliorate the effect of some commuters losing their out-of-area jobs.
Are you a part of your local chamber of commerce? Does your CoC have a “buy local” promotional program? If not, why not? A strong base of SLOBs (small, locally-owned businesses) is the foundation for a strong local economy. Among other things, you need to be involved in advocating that local governments use SLOBs for nearly all of their vendor / supplier and contractor needs. It isn’t just your wallet that is affected—it also affects the wallets of other locally-owned enterprises and the next generation of employees, too.
Permalink
