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If the NHTSA didn't exist Toyota would have had to spend money to fix the problem instead of paying ex-regulators to quash multiple investigations.

Toyota (TM) hired ex-government regulators to kill at least four investigations into problems with its cars in the U.S. That's the conclusion of an investigation by Bloomberg. The news service reports that, "Christopher Tinto, vice president of regulatory affairs in Toyota's Washington office, and Christopher Santucci, who works for Tinto, helped persuade the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to end probes including those of 2002-2003 Toyota Camrys and Solaras, court documents show. Both men joined Toyota directly from NHTSA, Tinto in 1994 and Santucci in 2003. "

The same goes for Wall Street. Most of the financial regulators are former high level executives from Goldman Sachs or strong ties to them and other financial institutions.

I don't understand why we need so many useless regulators who are usually wolves being put in charge of the hen house when the courts could easily handle this. It's going to end up being prosecuted in a court of law anyway and not solved by some magic regulation hand-waving.

China's GDP growth was at 11% last quarter, for year-over-year growth of about 8%, and just now replaced Germany as the world's leading exporter. (Funny, how does a "Socialist" European Free Market(tm) democracy be former world's largest exporter, but the US can't be?

Why would anyone want to be the world's largest exporter?

What everyone wants to be is the largest importer. The richest countries are the ones that get more products (a bigger piece of the pie).

All the developing countries always have been the biggest exporters of everything for the last 50 years. But they also have always had huge external debts to go with that, so the products got out, money got in, and the money got out again to pay interest on those debts (which were made to no benefit of the population during good non-democratic governments. Good because they were helped/sponsored/approved by the developed countries).

What nobody expected was that China would come out of communism to became a huge exporter in 10 years (without debts to balance the cash flow). Nobody expected, because they believed China to be communist like Russia. In fact China never was. China has been an company and run like a company for the last 15 years at least. It has a board of directors and a CEO. It learned the lesson that the western world failed to see: If democracy was the most efficient way to do something, companies would use it. They don't! Employees don't elect the directors. They don't vote for CEO.

I have been in China for a while now and I see their point, even tough they still don't get that people should be represented in any honest form of government, I can't help but think that they got something right that democracy as we know cannot compete with. Its like seem the end of Feudalism.

And this is devastating for the Chinese government. After keeping their populace docile and stupid,

Clearly, you've never met an actual Chinese person. Do you honestly think they don't know what's going on? No, they know. They just don't care. They're lives have been massively transformed for the better. Especially for those on the coast. (The western interior is another story.) They don't want to rock the boat. Everything is going swimingly for them. Why change?

what they want more than anything else is to be taken seriously as an economic player, sit at the big boy's table and rake in some of that fat global trade cash.

As the world's largest exporter, and fastest growing economy, aren't they already?

So, when one of the biggest companies around says China's market is more hassle than it's worth, it shows them up for the bumpkins that they still are.

Yeah, but Google isn't the biggest in China. It's Baidu. Blogging? That's MSN Spaces. I've yet to meet a Chinese student that does not have an MSN Spaces account. Twitter? I'm sorry. Did you mean Plurk?

Seriously, it's a whole other world outside the US, and you don't seem to know its players.

But we knew this was coming (and hopefully Nixon did too). Can't have all the benefits of capitalism without losing some of the "benefits" of totalitarianism. You can have some of one and lots of the other (like most Western democracies), but not lots of both.

Well that's the line Wall Street sold us back in 1989 while the Tianamen Square was still damp wasn't it? It's been 20 years. While some may argue the jury may still be out on that one (I wouldn't.); it's been long enough to get some indication of how its leaning, Let's examine the facts shall we?

China's GDP growth was at 11% last quarter, for year-over-year growth of about 8%, and just now replaced Germany as the world's leading exporter. (Funny, how does a "Socialist" European Free Market(tm) democracy be former world's largest exporter, but the US can't be? The mind reels. Oh wait. No it doesn't.) Now China is luring back it's top talent, by offering them better opportunities. Allow me to quote from that article:

These scientists were not uniformly won over by the virtues of democracy, either. While Dr. Rao said he hoped and believed that China would become a multiparty democracy in his lifetime, Dr. Shi said he doubted that that political system “will ever be appropriate for China.”

As a Tsinghua student, Dr. Shi joined the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. As a registered Democrat in the United States, he participated eagerly in elections. “Multiparty democracy is perfect for the United States,” he said. “But believing that multiparty democracy is right for the United States does not mean it is right for China.”

Such is the sweet taste of liberty, eh?

No, I believe that China has found it's third way. Not only "To be rich is glorious", but "Sometimes when we [Chinese] have the faith we have to take different approaches to realize our beliefs. The ultimate goal is the common prosperity, but we have to let a group of people to get rich first." Or as Slate put it, "How do you say 'trickle down' in Mandarin?"

$60 billion! Chump change! BofA isn't scared and they may get hit for a lot more than that!

I don't think the OP is a Troll. I have the same concern. Hulu is already talking about charging for content. I could see me switching to just internet from my cable company, only to find out my sources of entertainment had dried up or all started charging.

As soon as I saw this, the same thought came to my mind.

A mistake in my above post:

I said Garmin lost $1B in "market share" in a day. I meant "market cap." Big difference, there.

I think it's ironic for MS to complain about "malvertisement" when they just confirmed to do it themselves at Best Buy stores.

I'm really sick of all these attempts to make Google look bad out of something from which they rather should be made heroes, which reminds me a not-too-old / story. The copyright law was completely fucked up by the current opponents to the settlement and their predecessors, and NO, a first grant of the sort doesn't imply monopoly (really, why are these morons talking about "exclusivity", "imperialist ambitions", "monopoly"?), and on the contrary it'll be a major shift for book avaibility and affordability. If Google was another Microsoft, we would be 10 years backward, Internet features-wise.

Above all, why are these morons moaning about the "opt out" issue while they can just opt out ? Ohhh, maybe trying to protect the naive and uninformed, who does not care at all about his old works ?

The critics about OCR and metadata generation quality should really look at what the concurrence does, i.e respectively similar quality and nothing at all.
I've just read a Teleread comment which says he/she wants to bar Google from scanning books because of the OCR quality, we are in the total FUD non-sense here.

That is part of one of M$ screw Google marketing campaigns. Actually, it's a lobbying campaign. M$ has been a political activist movement for a long time now. Time to adjust our treatment of it accordingly.

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-murdoch-sees-eventual-break-with-amazon-over-kindle-active-talks-with-s/
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/05/murdochs-ultimatum-to-amazon-give-us-the-names-or-else/

This is very disappointing...both because of the hyped-up /. summary and the overreaction of some of the media to his statements, made as a response to a question in a telephone news conference largely about News Corps.' financial side.

A former journalism teacher of mine prohibited the use of adjectives and to the word "I" outside quotation marks in news stories. Taking the /. summary as an example, we are left with nothing but a (relatively) reasonable quotation from someone (Murdoch) who has already spoken about this.

This summary is *wrong* on so many levels. It has severely overhyped the event and set up a straw man in that Murdoch speculated about asking Amazon for his subscribers' info but has not yet done so.

And where is /.'s moderation? How in the world did this ever get published on /.? Has /. become Digg?

I know it's hard to RTFA when they didn't even provide a link. I think the story is taking some creative licenses with what Murdoch has said.

"Murdoch acknowledged that the Journal recently negotiated a slightly larger share of the revenues Amazon gets from selling Kindle subscriptions to the paper, "but it's not a big number, and we're not encouraging it at all because we don't get the names of the subscribers," he said. "Kindle treats them as their subscribers, not as ours, and I think that will eventually cause a break with us."

Is what he said and it appears to me that he is using that fact as a bargaining step to get more of the revenue model. It's no secrete that if you subscribe to the WSJ either in print of online directly, they have your names and can used those for marketing research and other ways to profit directly or to maximize their own profit. In this case, I'm thinking they just want a larger share of the profits and brought the lack of names up as a bargaining position.

Actually, the story is misleading. Murdock has stated he wanted more revenue from Amazon and complained that Amazon treat readers of the Wall Street Journal as their customers and not the WSJ's. He said we don't even get their names.

Like it or not, current subscriptions to almost any news site outside of on the Kindle gives them the names of the subscribers which can be a revenue stream from marketing and so on. He didn't exactly say he wanted the names, he was using the lack of getting the names as reasoning to why he wanted more money.

Someone else posted this link but I'm not sure it is what the story submission is about. In that page, Murdoch mentions the names as Amazon is treating subscriptions to the WSJ on the kindle as their customers and not the Wall Street Journals. As for the names, it makes sense in this light because if those customers were to access the Wall street journal by any other subscription method, the WSJ would have their information already.

So I guess the question might be- does Amazon resell the WSJ as a VAR or are they just allowing subscriptions and a conduit to the regular paper.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/05/murdochs-ultimatum-to-amazon-give-us-the-names-or-else/

Hope the old fscker dies soon.

Here's one.
Would have been helpful to include in the original article.

Murdoch's ultimatum to Amazon: Give us Kindle subscriber names or else

Jeff Bercovici
Aug 5th 2009 at 7:00PM

Rupert Murdoch's mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore. High-handed treatment from Amazon, that is.

On News Corp.'s (NWS) fiscal-year-end earnings call with analysts, the notoriously shoot-from-the-hip mogul suggested that The Wall Street Journal will cease to be available on the Kindle e-reader unless Amazon starts offering a more generous revenue split and more publisher-friendly policies.

Murdoch acknowledged that the Journal recently negotiated a slightly larger share of the revenues Amazon gets from selling Kindle subscriptions to the paper, "but it's not a big number, and we're not encouraging it at all because we don't get the names of the subscribers," he said. "Kindle treats them as their subscribers, not as ours, and I think that will eventually cause a break with us."

Jeff Bezos, consider yourself warned.

On the call, News Corp. announced adjusted full-year operating income of $3.6 billion, a 32 percent year-over-year decline largely attributable to the advertising recession afflicting print and broadcast television. Much of the call was devoted to News Corp.'s intensive drive to get consumers to pay directly for digital content of all kinds. Murdoch revealed that the company plans to introduce pay models for all its news websites by the end of the next fiscal year. Moreover, he said that it won't be only the newspaper sites that adopt this change; foxnews.com, he said, will also start charging for content. "It has a huge and loyal and profitable [web] audience already," he said.

"As I've said before, the traditional business model has to change rapidly to ensure that our journalistic businesses can return to their old margins of profitability," Murdoch said. "Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting."

Other highlights from the call:

-Murdoch on this year's television advertising: "We're doing well, or we think we're doing well, on the pricing, but we'll probably keep more back for the spot market than last year....There's money around. I'm not saying there's a vast recovery or anything like that, but we are in the process of reaching understandings with a lot of advertisers."

-On whether News Corp. will develop its own e-reader to compete with the Kindle: "We're not in the hardware business."

-On rumors that Guardian Media Group may close the Observer: "I did read that document that went to the staff of the Guardian that swore allegiance everlastingly to the Guardian but said nothing about the Observer. I think I made the same conclusions as everybody."

-On whether News Corp. would buy the Observer: "Hell no. Why?"

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/05/murdochs-ultimatum-to-amazon-give-us-the-names-or-else/

I think what works for consumers most likely -- and this has to be tested, frankly -- is bundles. I think you have to figure out what are the right bundles that people buy and what's contained in that bundle. For example, you could have -- and I'm making this up entirely -- you could have a New York bundle, and that could consist of various papers or publications that are relevant to the audience in New York, and you could make that all, potentially, a bundle to a consumer at one price.

For what it's worth, he also made this statement:

I went from paying $14 to The Wall Street Journal to paying $10 to Amazon. Now the splits there, and I think this is relatively well known, are very, very much in favor of Amazon. So I became very much less valuable to The Wall Street Journal. That's part one. Part two is they don't know I exist. I went from being someone who's their subscriber to being someone who is an Amazon subscriber, which The Wall Street Journal has no visibility back to and cannot manage that customer relationship. . . . So they've lost both the customer management and, trust me, the lion's share of the economics.

You know I hate to be voice of calm reason, folks but this is all the original source reported:

Asked specifically about the future of online video joint venture Hulu, which is currently advertising-supported, he said it "is an environment for premium content." Pointing to the popularity of iPhone applications, he added: "We're seeing the beginning of a very strong app economy."

From there, you can trace a very hilarious wave of the telephone game from blog to blog of people slowly blowing it out of proportion as it's put together that this guy is talking about paid subscriptions and he's in charge of Hulu therefore Hulu must be becoming a paid subscription service.