Corinthian Colleges is officially shutting down all of its remaining 28 ground campuses, displacing about 16,000 students. The action comes less than two weeks after the U.S. Department of Education announced it had fined the for-profit institution $30 million for misrepresentation. According to the Colleges’ latest SEC filings, their schools generated $1.2 billion in government loans last year.
The liberal California Legislature, having worsened the drought crisis by refusing to build water infrastructure, now is demanding the “opportunity” to expropriate historic water rights.
After a week of vigorous denials, the New York Times just reported President Barack Obama’s email correspondence was captured by Russian cyber-hackers last year in a breach of what the White House is calling its “unclassified computer system.” The breaches
With oil prices falling by 45 percent in the last year, the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) just decided the way utilities priced energy for 100 years is wrong and intend to mandate that 70 percent of Californians pay much more for energy.
Friday marked the beginning of the Apple Watch era, as worldwide pre-order customers received their first official deliveries. Many who ordered on the April 10th launch date expected the Watch would expand those cool little human interface experiences Apple mastered for laptops and phones. But some are complaining that this evolutionary device is just a complicated and annoying wrist-mounted iPhone notification display.
The American Stars and Stripes and the yellow-and-red flag of the Republic of South Vietnam will fly across California this week as many of the 2.7 million Vietnam War veterans join 1.7 million Vietnamese-Americans in remembering the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, which took place on April 30, 1975.
Millions of TurboTax users will be troubled by a lawsuit that was filed Monday in San Francisco against Intuit, Inc. claiming that when the firm knew TurboTax’s lax software security protections were allowing a huge spike in tax refund theft, TurboTax failed to correct weaknesses or notify customers about ongoing risks.
15 years after the Dot-Com Bubble burst, the Nasdaq Composite Index leapt by 20.89 points, or 0.4%, to close at 5056.06 on Thursday, a record high. The strength of the index is being driven by the Silicon Valley 150 tech companies that have provided the juice to lift the NASDAQ by 6.8%, despite U.S. stock performance trailing major world markets.
Federal Election Commission filings show that just announced Presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) unexpectedly raised about $380,000, or 20 percent, of his Victory Fund campaign cash from residents in normally ultra-liberal-voting California.
The U.S. Supreme Court held oral arguments on April 22 regarding the constitutionality of a federal law that requires raisin farmers to transfer a portion of any raisin crop surplus to the federal government at a severe discount, or pay a fine. The law was passed during the Great Depression as a “New Deal” for agriculture to keep prices up. But the farmers call the law an “illegal taking” under the Fifth Amendment–and they appeared to have a very good day in Court, according to the SCOTUSblog.
For California cities and counties, Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) for short-term hotel rentals rose from $1.38 billion in 2010 to $1.67 billion in 2012. Collection of the 13 percent average tax on short-term occupancies would have been much higher, except that Airbnb online rentals has never collected a dime. Now, State Senator Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) os pushing Senate Bill 593 legislation to require “online vacation rental sites” to collect TOT and report big data–such as number of guests or length of stay– to cities and counties. And Airbnb and hosts are warning about consumer privacy.
Going “clear” is in this year. First as a perfect score for horse jumping; then in Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival; and now as the new project of Ethan Czahor, who had to resign as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of the Jeb Bush Presidential campaign over some nasty old offensive tweets. Czahor has just launched a new iOS app called “Clear” to purge offensive “stuff” you may have posted on social media.
The populists are screening a modern Greek Tragedy wherein the noble Greek people are forced to suffer deprivations in return for the villainous German-controlled creditors pretend to loan Greece money that mostly repay existing EU loans used to buy German imports. But with Greece on the brink of running out of cash, and Greece’s creditors running out of patience, a compromise may be coming together to avoid an overt ‘Grexit’ by allowing for a devalued “Greek euro.”
In the past, the Manhattan Institute has effectively highlighted how rising California public pension costs are cutting into “basic infrastructure maintenance, public safety, education, and quality-of-life services such as parks and libraries.” But in the newest report, “Pension Costs are Crowding Out Salaries,” by Senior Fellow Stephen D. Eide, the Manhattan Institute reveals how California public employees themselves are suffering. In a decade where pension costs rose by 135 percent and healthcare premiums by 85 percent, public sector wages grew 4.6 percent slower than private sector workers’ salaries.
Silicon Valley is again “champagne style and caviar wishes” as people around the world paid $18,000 for Apple watches last week. But with Moore’s Law predicting computer power will double annually as prices fall now turning 50 years old, it is helpful to put in perspective that the NASDAQ Index dominated by “Valley” tech stocks that has almost tripled since 2010 to 4931, is a couple of percent short of its Dot-Com Bubble peak of 5132 in March 2000. But adjusted for inflation, the NASDAQ still is still down 34 percent.
Barclay’s Bank estimates that despite a hot stock market, the China suffered $300 billion in capital flight and is facing its first foreign exchange liquidity crisis since 2000. The news follows a report that China’s GDP is experiencing negative growth in real terms, thanks to collapsing domestic demand.
Just as the Dot-com bubble was popping in May 2000, the highly respected MIT Technology Review published an article, “The End of Moore’s Law?”, that claimed computing power could not continue to double each year, because engineers were no longer able to “cram an ever-increasing number of electronic devices onto microchips.” But after 50 years of unabated annual doublings of computer power on chips, there is still no sign that Silicon Valley innovations are slowing or that Moore’s Law will expire.
Despite Mother Jones magazine calling on Governor Jerry Brown to “never let a good crisis go to waste” and use climate change fears to expand the Nanny State’s reach to controlling what crops California farmers are allowed to grow, Brown courageously blasted the idea this week as “Big Brother.”
The first fundraising numbers for Hillary Clinton’s White House bid will not be posted until July, but Wall Street took leadership roles in fundraising for both of her New York Senate campaigns, and nine of Mrs. Clinton’s top 20 donor organizations in her 2008 presidential bid were financial services firms. But after six years of a Wall Street donation boycott in retaliation for passing Dodd-Frank, Clinton is the Democrats’ best hope for reviving access to $100s of millions from Wall Street’s firehose of political donations.
There has been lots of hubbub in the last two weeks about California’s economy drying up and blowing away like sagebrush after four years of drought. But the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), which provides budget advice to state lawmakers, announced that “We currently do not expect the drought to have a significant effect” on the state’s budget or overall economy. The reason: agriculture is only a small piece of the economy.
Lombard Street Research (LSR) has reported that China’s “real” (after-inflation) GDP actually fell -0.2% for the quarter ending March 2015. Despite the official government claim of +1.3 percent growth for the quarter and +7 percent annualized growth. China’s quarterly performance
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) has not commanded much public attention since Hillary Clinton started channeling Warren’s book, Fighting Chance, which claims the “system is rigged” against the middle class because it is controlled by and for the elites who tilt the game in their favor. But in a bold effort to take all the oxygen out of the Clinton campaign, Senator Warren (D-Mass.) laid out a bare-knuckles legislative road map on Wednesday to kick Wall Street in the teeth.
Netflix, Inc. beat its aggressive prediction that it would add 4 million new streaming subscribers in the quarter ending March by adding 4.88 million subscribers. After shares leaped 47% over the past three months, the fabulous numbers sent the stock up about 11 percent to $531 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
In what may be a very bad sign of a deteriorating defense posture for Uber Technologies’ argument that its drivers are independent contractors versus employees, a San Francisco federal judge denied Uber’s summary judgement motion and the case is now
Google thought it had agreed last year with European competition regulators that the company’s 90% dominance of Internet searches was “not an illegal business.” But new European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager sought to put Google in chains on Wednesday by accusing the company of abusing its dominance in web searches to the detriment of competitors.
A university degree was once perceived as the social elevator to a higher net worth. But the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimates that 40 million Americans have racked up an average of four loans with an outstanding net balance of $29,000 to obtain a college education.
The International Association of Machinist (IAM) were cocky on March 17 when they filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board for a vote to organize 3,175 jet assembly workers at the Boeing Company’s nonunion factories in South Carolina. But with a week before the April 22 vote and panicking that they are about to lose, the union is on the verge withdrawing the vote.
Florida Governor Rick Scott flew into Southern California and spent Sunday and Monday trying to lure away shipping and logistics companies from the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego. When Governor Brown was asked by reporters at
China recently flooded American websites with a barrage of Internet traffic known as a “denial of service attack” to block providers that allowed China’s Internet users to circumvent websites blocked by government policies. The action was initially thought to be another example of China’s use of a program called the “Great Wall.” But academic researchers have determined that China appears to have reverse-engineered the capabilities of a powerful National Security Agency (NSA) program that was first described to the public in the leaked Edward Snowden files two years ago.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) just published the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary (JOLTS) report for February. The job openings percent for the workforce hit a 14 year high of 5.1 million, while the layoffs and discharges percentage stayed at a historic low. But despite the job availability rate more than doubling since 2009, the hiring rate only grew by 30 percent in the same period. Adjusted for population growth, the American economy is still down by 5.9 million jobs.
Seven months after a Sacramento Bee investigation revealed how State of California departments play a personnel shell game to pad their budgets with millions in tax dollars earmarked for staffing salaries, an audit released Friday on the Department of Finance’s website confirmed that phantom employees are very widespread, and some of the cash allocated for salaries has been used to pay for raises and other unauthorized spending instead.
On April 9, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officially declared a strong El Niño advisory reflecting substantially above-average surface sea temperatures forming across the equatorial Pacific. This means that there is a 60 to 70 percent probability that America could experience a monster winter like the El Niño that hit in 1997-1998, causing torrential rains in the Southeast, ice storms in the Northeast, tornadoes in Florida, and mass flooding in California.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria denied Walt Disney Company’s effort to strike a copyright lawsuit that a trailer for their multi-billion dollar blockbuster Frozen featuring the character Olaf was “substantially similar” to a Mill Valley, California, animator’s film short called The Snowman.
Despite hot stock market gains over the last three years, California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) actuaries just demanded that public pensions increase funding by a stunning 10 percent next year and make similar annual increases for each of the next 5 years due to an inappropriate “assumption.” That means that CalPERS’ annual payment could leap 61% from $4.5 billion this year to $7.25 billion in five years.
Hollywood moguls and the vast majority of leftist entertainers have joined forces in a last-ditch effort to bully wavering Democratic lawmakers into backing President Obama’s fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as the centerpiece of what he calls his “pro-trade agenda.”
Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett-Packard CEO and possiuble Republican presidential candidate, recently blasted “liberal environmentalists” who are “willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology” during California’s water crisis.” Fiorina’s campaign is specifically targeting Governor Jerry Brown’s difficult political choices in handling the drought–with a possible view to undermining his own potential presidential campaign.
The California Teachers’ Retirement Trust (CalSTRS) board directed its staff and consultants last week to evaluate the risks of investing in thermal coal companies.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which regulates the financial risks posed by the lending activity of American national banks, has officially reported that banks are expanding sub-prime credit by raising borrowing limits for credit card holders. The new concerns follow an OCC report last June that flagged “problematic” recent high-risk corporate takeovers, car loans through auto dealers, and commercial finance lending.
With the Sierra Nevada snowpack at its lowest level since 1950, California Governor Jerry Brown announced last week that he would implement the first mandatory water reductions in state history. But Brown also called on districts to streamline permitting practices for water projects, and to invest in new water infrastructure technologies. Brown’s comments amount to his first vocal support for widespread desalinization.
UPS is probably America’s premier example of how Fred Taylor’s scientific management methods are being applied using “telematics” to break down every worker task to eliminate all un-essential movements–and then use the right tools, training and incentives to achieve optimum workflow productivity and dump excess Teamster members. By giving their employees an Apple i-Watch, managers across almost all industries could soon be using telematics to increase productivity and dump employees.
