A new study from the Pew Research Center shockingly reveals that the percentage of Americans logging on to Twitter each day has flatlined for the last two years. As company’s stock led tech shares down this week, analysts are beginning to question if Twitter can survive.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has released new research revealing that huge swaths of the Central Valley are sinking at the rate of up to two inches per month due to accelerating groundwater pumping in the fourth year of the California drought.
The strong dollar, low interest rates and pent-up demand should drive after-tax growth in real consumer spending and a doubling of the rate of housing growth, according to Lombard Street Research.
The raging El Niño Southern Oscillation, a band of warm ocean water in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, is about to cause droughts in southern Asia–and to bring enough rain to boost California almond production after years of drought-induced decline.
NBCUniversal continues its big-bucks leap to catch up to millennial “cord-cutters” and “cord-nevers” by spending another $200 million to buy a bigger stake in BuzzFeed. The move comes less than a week after NBCUniversal invested $200 million in Vox Media.
To every country in Europe, except Russia, August is the month when everyone goes on vacation. But Russians refer to the “Black August Syndrome” as a time for political coups, erratic events, economic crashes, and military catastrophes.
A stunning 6,200 American subscribers per day became “cord-cutters,” and maybe even “cord-never,” as millennials canned their pay-TV cable and satellite subscriptions in the second quarter of 2015.
TechCrunch reports that Google is working in the Gaza Strip–a 6.8-mile-by-32-mile territory controlled by terrorists–to develop a local tech start-up culture in one of the world’s most challenging business environments.
Kirk Bostrom at Strategic Preservation Partners LP warns that a global government bond crash is finally under way.
Chinese tourism and its robust spending could evaporate quickly, hurting California’s economy in mid-recovery.
NBC announced last week that it will straighten-up MSNBC’s left-wing slant and make a $200 million investment in in Vox Media.
With China’s economic crash driving U.S. oil prices down to $42 a barrel, Saudi Arabia is the oil-exporting nation suffering the worst economic decline.
China’s official foreign capital flight was $300 billion for the year ending June 2015, and it could reach $1 trillion–assuming the People’s Bank of China is even providing reliable numbers.
The communist Chinese regime fears the risk of a rebellion if tens of millions of rural migrants lose their jobs, with the export-driven economy crumbling.
Intel is about to drive a new wave of Moore’s Law, as personal computing converges with mobile technology due to the development of smaller processors, increased power efficiency, non-volatile memory, flexible/agnostic software, wireless peripherals and cloud access.
The People’s Bank of China has devalued the yuan 2.9 percent since Monday–the biggest plunge in the currency’s value since the mid-1990s. China’s currency devaluation is a classic predatory trade war action to save up to 60 million Chinese factory jobs at the expense of millions of American and European workers.
The Russian economy started stagnating in 2013, but the nation was never actually able to recover from the 2008-2009 recession, according to Stratfor Global Intelligence. The combination of the 2014 sanctions over the Ukraine and collapsing oil prices is a perfect economic storm that is grinding Russia to a halt.
California Democrats wants to create a mileage tax–a new tax on every mile driven in the state–despite already having the highest gas taxes in the nation. State officials say they need the tax increase, because gas tax collections to pay
Teenage jobs are about to suffer as Mexico’s looming financial crisis is about to accelerate illegal immigration.
Thieves employing debit card “skimmers” at the pump find August–peak driving season nationwide–lucrative for fraud, ripping off distracted drivers. Skimmers have been around since about 2002. Sociopathic thieves are constantly improving the sophistication and effectiveness of their devices. Some of the
The Facebook/Fox News partnership for the first GOP debate of the 2016 presidential campaign season resulted in the both the highest audience for any non-sports cable program, and most-watched cable news program in history. The artful coalescing of TV, cable and social media strengths has just revolutionized media economics.
The EPA’s final Clean Power Plan, released on August 3, financially hammers coal-dependent states, compared to the Obama Administration’s 2014 draft proposal. Nine months after the loss of Kentucky Democrat Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes and the retirement of West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller, the EPA’s attack on coal country is all about going after Republicans.
Blue Shield of California violated Obamacare’s mandated requirement that their medical expenditures be a minimum of 80 percent of healthcare premiums paid. Under the law, Blue Shield will be required to rebate almost $83 million to individuals and small businesses. But by destroying small and regional competition, the supposedly not-for-profit Blue Shield, after its rebate, still made $52 million more profit under Obamacare.
The biggest winner of the Thursday night’s debates was Carly Fiorina, who was on the under-card with the goofy kids. With polls showing she won by between 73 to 87 percent, the Democrats are preparing to attack her with “long knives” for destroying Hewlett-Packard’s “culture.”
3D printing has been around for several decades, but expiring patents are driving costs down and major tech breakthroughs are driving up speed.
A new study from the New York Federal Reserve faults the federal government’s policy of boosting aid to families in recent decades to make college education more affordable, because it enabled institutions to raise tuitions much faster than inflation.
The New York Times refers to the Inland Empire as Southern California’s backlot, because of its vast warehouse complexes and staging areas. But with the Riverside-San Bernardino region as the hottest industrial construction site in the nation, the Inland Empire is the center stage for America’s new industrial boom.
The California Policy Center has just published an exhaustive study regarding the $149.2 billion Californians have borrowed over the last 14 years to finance public school construction. Despite the sob stories about dilapidated facilities, huge amounts of cash has been siphoned off due to union project labor agreements, environmentalist lawsuits, and inadequate planning and public oversight.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL=$115) stock has plunged about $114 billion in market value since the company reported very good quarterly sales and earnings two weeks ago.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) posted a 40-day public comment period late August 3 aimed at transferring the oversight of the Internet to a not-for-profit entity.
Marketing technology is emerging as one of the hottest sectors for business tech investing, according to the PitchBook Blog. Marketing tech companies in the first six months of 2015 raised $1.62 billion in 157 venture capital deals, and 205 companies were acquired for a total of $4.3 billion.
Puerto Rico officially defaulted on part of its $73 billion in debt on Monday afternoon, when the U.S. territory only paid $628,000 toward a $58 million debt due by 5 p.m.
Uber is now valued at almost $51 billion, a valuation that puts the “on-demand mobile service” (ODMS) leader at the level of Facebook in 2011. The company’s fund-raising success has spurred a vast number of “Uber for X” start-ups that are building corporate empires with legions of outsourced contract workers. But the “gig economy” seems to be operating the same money-losing business model as the “Dot-com Bubble.”
Investment in new U.S. factory plant and equipment just hit the highest level since 1958. After 100 years of economic dominance due to cheap and abundant oil, U.S. politicians turned against domestic oil production in the 1970s and the Middle East oil production took off. For the next 40 years, the budget deficit and income inequality soared as high-paying manufacturing jobs went offshore. But with fracking re-establishing America as the planet’s largest energy producer, U.S. manufacturing is back.
Each new California legislative session starts with Republicans yakking about cutting state and local public pension benefits that are over $1 trillion underfunded. But as a minority party and with many of its loudest advocates hypocritically receiving a public pension, reform has just been about yakking. But with CalPERS’ actuaries demanding a pension funding increase from $3.7 billion to $7.25 billion by 2020, the state must either cut payroll by 30 percent or find a massive new tax source, like overturning Prop. 13.
For a company that is regularly scowled at by the tech media, Microsoft’s introduction of Windows 10 over the last 48 hours has been amazingly smooth, and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. In what for Microsoft is a paradigm shift, the
Google’s 60-year lease to co-locate with NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, which was signed in November 2014, appears to be paving the way for the formation of a partnership between NASA, Google and Amazon to develop and roll out an automated national air traffic control system for drone flights.
Obamacare was sold to the American public as an opportunity to save $2,500 a year for a family of four. But each family member enrolled in Covered California for 2016 can look forward to paying another $384 in Northern California and $296 in Southern California.
As Breitbart News reported in “Pot Tax: Sacramento Politicians ‘Jonesing’ for a Spending Fix,” the Democrat-controlled California Legislature is desperate for marijuana taxes, which could arise from a 2016 ballot initiative legalizing marijuana, in hopes of gaining a consistent new tax revenue source. But the California Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates that illegal pot growing is drying up watersheds and causing some at-risk fisheries to approach collapse.
China’s stock market suffered an 8.48% crash on Monday that humiliated the country’s leadership and will almost certainly cause a major Communist Party crisis.