The U.S. cable-TV business, much like telephone and radio, has been consolidating from dozens of regional players to a handful of giants. Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable would unite the nation’s two biggest cable operators, giving Comcast roughly a third of the nation’s cable-TV subscribers. Below is a chart of major acquisitions (both partial and whole) by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter and Cox since the early ’90s.
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In our multidevice world, Amazon’s media store functions as what I like to call a “connector” — it bridges the chasm between otherwise foreign technologies.
This gets to the most important principle for dealing with an uncertain future: Invest your time and money in connectors. For instance, store all your important documents on the cloud-storage service Dropbox, because its business model depends on it working everywhere. And it does: The documents you create on any single machine are replicated on all your other machines, instantly. Similarly, when someone hands you a business card, you can snap a photo of it on the note-taking app Evernote, which also functions as a connector, letting you get at your scribbles regardless of which machine you move to next.
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Paradoxically, however, as state governments increasingly make “medical” marijuana available to parents to give to their children, the federal government continues to label the nonpsychoactive CBD — as well as THC — as Schedule 1 drugs. Such drugs are said to have “no currently accepted medical use in the United States, a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision, and a high potential for abuse.” This designation hamstrings doctors from performing controlled studies. While it is possible to study Schedule 1 drugs in a controlled laboratory setting, it is extremely difficult to study these substances in patients. For our study, we keep the CBD in a 1,200-pound safe in a locked room, in a building with an alarm system.
To foster research, we need to change compounds derived from marijuana from Schedule 1 to a less restrictive category. It is troubling that while few barriers exist for parents to give their children marijuana in Colorado, there are significant federal roadblocks preventing doctors from studying it in a rigorous scientific manner.
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The Pew report found that the wage premium for having a college degree was at a record high. The median annual wage for young college-educated workers now is $45,500, compared to $28,000 for high school graduates — a gap of $17,500. In 1965, the gap was much smaller: $7,400. (All the figures are in 2012 dollars.)
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“Food is the best, the clearest manifestation of ‘a tale of two cities,’ ” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, contrasting brownstone Brooklyn, thick with farm-to-table restaurants and of-the-moment cafes, with the borough’s eastern and central areas, where many can barely afford to eat.
Co-ops could help bridge the gap, advocates maintain. Since they are owned and run by members, a co-op’s labor costs and prices are usually lower than at supermarkets or convenience stores.
It is not easy, however, to persuade people who may not have heard of co-ops — or who regard them with outright hostility — to shop in one. Besides carrying unfamiliar products, many co-ops require shoppers to pay a fee and work at the store for a few hours a month, to become owner-members, and qualify for discounted prices.
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“While I applaud the spirit of the Vinyl Vaults project, the copyright laws of the United States are a significant obstacle to any such effort. Unfortunately for Amoeba and music fans, U.S. copyright laws governing music are antiquated. Basically, unless a music composition was published before 1923, most compositions remain under copyright until 2019 or later. Much of the types of work in the Vinyl Vaults project will likely be protected until 2067. Accordingly, any project such as Vinyl Vaults must give serious consideration to avoiding copyright infringement claims made by copyright owner(s).
Daar adds that the rare nature of the music in Vinyl Vaults provides no defence legally. “The United States copyright laws do not contemplate or provide an exemption for out of print music compositions. In addition, there is no legal excuse for infringement even if it is done in good faith and the money from the infringement is held in trust. Accordingly, unless Amoeba has the express permission of the correct copyright owner(s) it runs the risk of being liable for copyright infringement,” he says.
“U.S. law is far from clear on how to deal with orphaned works, which is music where there is no clear knowledge of ownership. With the Vinyl Vaults project, Amoeba is charging for each download of its digitised and remastered tracks. Amoeba may be acting above board in its claims that it first seeks to track down and obtain the permission of rights holders (assuming who owns the rights is going to be clear) and then hold in trust the money paid for downloads for those it cannot find. However, it would appear that for such tracks, Amoeba may be found guilty of infringement if a copyright owner came forward and brought a copyright infringement lawsuit.”
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A news flash for every straight man out there: You’ve been naked in front of a gay man.
In fact you’ve been naked, over the course of your life, in front of many gay men, at least if you have more than a few years on you. And here you are — uninjured, uncorrupted, intact. The earth still spins. The sun rises and sets.
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It has always been clear that health reform will induce some Americans to work less. Some people will, for example, retire earlier because they no longer need to keep working to keep their health insurance. Others will reduce their hours to spend more time with their children because insurance is no longer contingent on holding a full-time job. More subtly, the incentive to work will be somewhat reduced by health insurance subsidies that fall as your income rises.
The budget office has now increased its estimate of the size of these effects. It believes that health reform will reduce the number of hours worked in the economy by between 1.5 percent and 2 percent, which it unhelpfully noted “represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million.”
Why was this unhelpful? Because politicians and, I’m sorry to say, all too many news organizations immediately seized on the 2 million number and utterly misrepresented its meaning. For example, Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, quickly posted this on his Twitter account: “Under Obamacare, millions of hardworking Americans will lose their jobs and those who keep them will see their hours and wages reduced.”
Not a word of this claim was true. The budget office report didn’t say that people will lose their jobs. It declared explicitly that the predicted fall in hours worked will come “almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor” (emphasis added). And as we’ve already seen, Mr. Elmendorf did his best the next day to explain that voluntary reductions in work hours are nothing like involuntary job loss. Oh, and because labor supply will be reduced, wages will go up, not down.
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“Gig City,” as Chattanooga is sometimes called, has what city officials and analysts say was the first and fastest — and now one of the least expensive — high-speed Internet services in the United States. For less than $70 a month, consumers enjoy an ultrahigh-speed fiber-optic connection that transfers data at one gigabit per second. That is 50 times the average speed for homes in the rest of the country, and just as rapid as service in Hong Kong, which has the fastest Internet in the world.
It takes 33 seconds to download a two-hour, high-definition movie in Chattanooga, compared with 25 minutes for those with an average high-speed broadband connection in the rest of the country.
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shaun james bockert 