Progressive New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s supposed effort to end social inequality by crushing Uber was curbed last week when his liberal city council allies were blindsided by a viral millennial generation revolt in favor of the ride-sharing app.
Sold to the public as a way to increase competition and save the average American family $2,500 a year, Obamacare actually created monopoly pricing for the insurance industry that allowed premiums to rise by $2,500 and tripled the value of their stocks.
With Sacramento politicians desperate to find a new source of continuous tax revenue, the state’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy has just published a study, “Pathways Report Policy Options for Regulating Marijuana In California,” as a precursor to sponsoring a 2016 ballot initiative to legalize recreational pot use.
In a throwback to the antebellum era, popular photo-sharing services, from Flickr and Google Photos, have publicly come under assault for their software algorithms tagging photos of black people as gorillas and apes. But this just highlights the growing risk that “learning machines” may learn to develop human biases and even criminal tendencies.
The Internal Revenue Service is trying to recover from allegations of obstruction of justice regarding Lois Lerner’s regarding purported biased recommendations that targeted conservative groups for audit and prevented Tea Parties from gaining not-for-profit status. Now, the IRS just appointed three relatively inexperienced managers to serve as the gatekeepers for reviewing 501(c)4 “dark money pools” and their political activity, according to an agency memo leaked to the OpenSecrets Blog.
In its last quarter that will be impacted by innovation on Steve Jobs’ watch, Apple booked strong quarterly revenue and earnings yesterday. But the company had to admit that existing Apple customers were slow to upgrade to new iPhone releases and Apple as a status symbol in China may be coming to an end. The stock plunged by -10 percent, or about $80 billion, before recovering somewhat today. But as Breitbart News warned last month, ‘Apple Products: Without Steve Jobs, the Thrill is Gone.’
On July 4, Two Russian Tu-95 Bear Bombers, which can carry nuclear warheads, flew within 40 miles of the Northern California Coast around the time Russia’s President Putin and America’s President Obama conducted a private telephone call that the Kremlin referred to as an effort to “find solutions” to international issues.
The San Diego County Water Authority not only won $190 million last week from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, but may have also won $2 billion in future costs savings and another 5 percent of all “Met” water that is currently being wholesaled to the other 25 other Southern California water districts.
In an almost unheard-of action for a Wall Street investment banking firm, UBS downgraded Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA-$267.39) to a “sell”, driving the price of the shares down 5.5 percent, or -15.49.
After an 18 year “vacation,” Dunkin’ Donuts is returning to California with a vengeance. The Canton, Massachusetts-based company has already opened ten stores in the state, has just announced nine in the Bay Area, and expects to eventually have 1,000 stores in California.
California Governor Jerry Brown will take his utopian foreign policy to the Vatican to participate this week in an environmental summit hosted by Pope Francis. Despite California’s majority Democrats’ intention to banish celebrations of Catholic missionary Father Junipero Serra’s accomplishments, Brown will carry a state resolution supporting Pope Francis’ recent draft “Encyclical on Climate Change.”
It is not surprising that hackers broke into the UCLA’s health system to try to gain access to some of the 4.5 million patients’ records, given the sheer scale of personal health data that has been compromised. But what is shocking is that those records were never protected with a basic encryption, and lost laptops were not required to be reported. Although UCLA said there was no evidence at this time that any patient files were taken, the investigation is ongoing.
The majority of American teenagers learned valuable life lessons about earning money and taking responsibility from the end of World War II until a series of immigrant amnesties in the late 1990s started replacing them with cheap immigrant labor.
With Greece defaulting on its debt, the press has been full of complaints that the lazy Greeks would like to live off of welfare and government handouts rather than work.
California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) Chief Administrative Law Judge Robert Mason recommended that ride-sharing service Uber be suspended from operating in California for 30 days and fined $7.3 million for wilfully violating its 2013 CPUC settlement by failing to provide data proving that Uber and its California drivers do not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, neighborhood or medical disability in picking up passengers.
When Breitbart News published “Ellen Pao Out As Reddit CEO, Blames Site’s Users” recently, we received kudos from Reddit users for understanding it was Poa’s actions aimed at limiting users’ free speech in order to make the site more advertiser friendly that caused a user rebellion. But the business press continues to blame users, in articles such as the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Ellen Pao’s Ouster Shows Reddit CEO can’t Function under Mob Rule.”
The final version of the California Council on Science & Technology study required under interim approval of hydraulic fracturing in the Golden State just reported that despite public concerns, there is no “science-based evidence” that fracking hurts the environment.
Microsoft’s dumping of 7,800 employees and taking a $7.6 billion write-down related to its purchase of Nokia’s phone manufacturing operation was a cheap price to pay to vanquish the ghost of the Steve Ballmer era.
After Bernie Sanders’ Face the Nation interview lit up the progressives ethosphere this weekend with dreams of a true warrior willing to attack “casino capitalism,” a seemingly sleep-deprived Hillary Clinton gave a passionless economic policy speech on Monday that supposedly highlighted her concerns, such as “The young entrepreneur who’s dream of buying the bowling alley where he worked as a teenager.”
GasBuddy started an emergency petition on Friday calling on Governor Brown to obtain an EPA waiver to prevent gasoline price increases of at least 50-cents a gallon in Southern California and 30-cents in Northern California.
With Los Angeles receiving small amounts of rain on three separate days last week, red crabs washing ashore in Orange County, and three simultaneous typhoons in the western Pacific Ocean in early July, El Niño (“little boy”) is beginning to crank up
California has always had problems with homes being damaged due to earthquakes. But heavy draining of groundwater over the last four years of a persistent drought is magnifying ground subsidence that it is already destroying infrastructure and homes in the Central
Local media is reporting that Chinese nationals are selling homes to cover stock losses after China’s stock market took a 30 percent crash, and 58 percent of the nation’s 2800 issues are suspended from trading for up to six months.
Silicon Valley Business Journal just reported that “Ellen Pao is resigning from Reddit after eight months of drama as interim CEO.” Having kept her Reddit position despite losing America’s highest profile sexual discrimination lawsuits against what she called Silicon Valley’s “boy’s club,”
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone sales appear to be in big trouble, despite iPhone being on track to post a 40 percent year-over-year unit sales gain through the second quarter.
China’s stock market had what traders call a “Dead Kitty” bounce on Thursday as the communist authorities dispatched police and security personnel to “encourage” insider-buying and to arrest short sellers. With the Chinese market still highly inflated even after falling $3 trillion in value, China took action last night to “nationalize” about $6 trillion in losses.
Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) introduced union-backed Assembly Bill 1040 on Tuesday, which aims to reform–or destroy–California’s Proposition 13 by raising taxes on commercial properties.
Despite authorities suspending trading in over 50 percent of domestic stocks, banning large holders from selling, funding state-owned financial institutions’ purchases, and arresting short-sellers, China’s CSI 300 Index crashed in the morning Thursday, before eking out a 2 percent gain by midday.
Despite suspending trading in over 1300 of the 2800 stocks listed in China, the “Shanghai Stock Exchange B Share Index” of growth stocks suffered another 7 percent loss Tuesday and the neighboring Hong Kong ‘S&P Growth Enterprise Market Index’ plunged by 12 percent. With Chinese stock losses now over $3.5 trillion since June 12, contagious fear is sending every major stock exchange around the world tumbling.
With every OPEC member now at a higher break-even cost than the U.S., it is OPEC members that are at risk of being bankrupted in the second wave of the U.S. oil boom.
Despite the Chinese communist government’s efforts to hide the severity of the “Black Tuesday” stock crash by indefinitely suspending trading in over a quarter of the nation’s weakest stocks, the Shanghai B Share Index suffered a 9.1 percent loss, while the Shenzhen Exchange plunged 5.8%.
Given that the world is full of hunger, volatile food prices, and social unrest, a pair of recent MIT Sloan Business School graduates have launched a mobile application called Spoiler Alert to make it quick and easy for companies to sell or donate millions of tons of surplus food.
Oregon Commissioner of Insurance Laura N. Cali has approved premium rate increases of 25 percent for the Moda Health Plan and 33 percent for LifeWise in 2016. Due to Obamacare’s radical plan design and high utilization costs, skyrocketing American healthcare costs are becoming the norm–and will be a top issue in 2016 elections.
Promising to reverse a stock market crash over the last 14 trading days that has been worse than the US crash in October 2008, China’s state-owned banks, stock brokers, and fund managers committed $200 billion to rescue stock prices over the weekend.
Greek voters headed to the polls Sunday to decide their country’s cooperation with the terms of an international bailout. The truth is that Greece has actually been in default of its debt obligations for more than half of the last two centuries.
China’s Shanghai stock market suffered another -6 percent crash on Friday to cap its worst three-week decline since 1992. With Chinese stock down by a third since its June peak, the “Red Dragon” may be facing a weekend similar to
Global venture capitalists invested $56.31 billion in 4,894 deals during the first half of 2015–the lowest number of deals recorded by the Pitchbook blog over a six month period in the last 25 years. The major reason for a smaller number of companies being funded is that venture capitalists are throwing huge amounts of money at a small number of “unicorns.”
China’s Communist Party People’s Congress recently passed a sweeping national-security law that directs the People’s Liberation Army to expand the military’s offshore presence to protect China’s “overseas interests” and to support counterterrorism at home, according to Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency.
When it comes to fighting hydraulic fracking for oil and gas, California’s muscular environmental movement has gone zero-for-five over the last two years against Governor Jerry Brown. The bloodied green leadership on Tuesday again called on Brown to halt plans for new hydraulic fracturing in the waters off Southern California.
Former California State Senator and top gun control advocate Leland Yee pleaded guilty Wednesday to public corruption. Still facing allegations of weapons trafficking, money laundering, murder-for-hire, and drug distribution, Yee’s plea deal seems to indicate that he is ready to “rat out” an even wider group of Bay Area and Sacramento conspirators.
