Bye-bye Sun
Jan 30th
Sun Microsystems used to be one of my favorite tech companies. Here’s the SEC filing delisting them now that Oracle owns it:
NOTIFICATION OF REMOVAL FROM LISTING AND/OR REGISTRATION UNDER SECTION 12(b) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934. Issuer: SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. Exchange: NASDAQ Stock Market LLC
Netflix Rental Frequency by zip code
Jan 24th
Here’s an interesting, interactive, graphic that shows Netflix rental frequency per neighborhood, per movie.
Supreme court ruling on campaign finance
Jan 23rd
Matthew Yglesias points out at that the Citizens United decision may have some pretty painful consequences to our politics:
Bank of America, for example, dedicates $2.3 billion to marketing in 2008 so it’s clear that they’ve got the budget to mount a $100 million series of scathing attacks on a Senator who pisses them off and basically laugh that off (and note that in 2004 total spending on Senate campaigns was just $400 million).
Federal Estate and Gift Taxes
Jan 23rd
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has a report on Federal Estate and Gift Taxes. One of the interesting things is only 0.7% or 17,400 of estates are actually affected by the estate tax.
In 2000, before EGTRRA was enacted, 51,200 estates were taxable, representing 2.2 percent of adult deaths in that year. EGTRRA reduced the percentage of estates that were taxable. For example, 17,400 taxable estate tax returns were filed in 2007; most were for deaths in 2006, when the effective exemption amount was $2 million, representing about 0.7 percent of adult deaths in that year.
Another concern is how the estate tax affects family farms and small businesses. The report says about 1,100 farms are affected. In 2000, when the exemption was only $675,000 vs the $4 million today, only 138 of farmer’s estates didn’t have enough liquid assets (cash) to pay the estate tax. Liquid assets include trusts which could be used to pay the taxes. Additionally, there are many provisions such as 15 year, low interest rates loans to help minimize the burden.
Rumour Roundup: the Apple Tablet
Jan 16th
A cool mockup/rumour guide about the alledged Apple Tablet:
Top 10 Bear Stearns & Lehman execs made $2.4 billion
Jan 16th
The top five executives at Bear Stearns and the top five at Lehman made $2.4 billion from 2000-2008. The popular imagining was they suffered financially with the collapse of their firms. The reality is they’d already cashed in huge amounts of stock before the collapse.
From Barry Ritholtz:
Unemployment — not if you caused the crisis!
Jan 4th
So if you lost your firm billions of dollars, laid off tens of thousands and indirectly caused millions to lose their jobs and drove the unemployment rate to 10.3% well, the good news is it didn’t cost you your job! 92% of management in TARP funds recipients still have their jobs!
From A Fair Deal for Taxpayer Investments:
The executive leadership of the financial sector remain largely unchanged—92 percent of the management and directors of the top 17 recipients of TARP funds are still in office.
What’s a Bailed-Out Banker Really Worth?
Jan 3rd
Fascinating article on what’s happened with the bankers bailout. One intriguing quote compares executive compensation to the average employee::
Over the last 50 years, the ratio of top pay to average pay at public companies has multiplied roughly 11 times (24:1 to 275:1). That’s more pay in one workday for the chief executive than his average employee makes in a year.
Population of the Five Boroughs
Dec 29th
I saw a graph showing the population of the Five Boroughs: Manhattan, Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens. I tracked the data to: NYC Population and NYC 2008 Population.
What I was surprised about is how the population of Manhattan has actually dropped over the years:
Of course, it’s density that matters! Here’s the population expressed as 1000 people per square mile
Wow! 72,000 people per square mile in Manhattan.
Syncing my iPhone with Snow Leopard Server with Address Book — Not!
Dec 13th
I have some contacts I wanted to share with other people so I figured let’s put them into Address Book Server on my Snow Leopard Server. I moved the group on to the server and everything was great. Contacts show up in Address Book on my macbook.
I synch my iPhone as usual. Next day I get a call from a familiar number but no name (I can’t remember phone numbers if my life dependent on it)! I check the contacts on my iPhone and none of the ones I moved are there!
After much fiddling and googling it turns out it doesn’t work! That doesn’t make any sense. How could Apple fail at something so basic? I imagine they want the iPhone to sync remotely to Address Book Server much like iCal and mail. Reasonable philosophy but it doesn’t do that! In the interim, I’d expect iTunes to be able to sync — after all, it’s in your address book. Not only that, they already handle Google sync using CardDAV, right? So why isn’t it in iTunes until they get it working on the iPhone!
From ForkBombr:
> Sadly, this isn’t the case. Address Book Server works beautifully between Macs. It’s fast and reliable. However, the iPhone OS doesn’t support CardDAV, the technology behind Address Book Server, meaning these contacts cannot be synced over the air to an iPhone like iCal or Mail data.
And the relevant discussion:
> ABS does not sync OTA or have push changes. The iPhone supports LDAP access. This means you can lookup contct info stored in your WGM for users in your company. It does not support CardDAV.
ABS is Address Book Sync; OTA is over-the-air; WGM is Work Group Manager (aka Apple’s LDAP server); CardDAV is how to share contact information.