The PC market isn’t dying, they’re just lasting longer

Slate: PC sales suffered their steepest decline in history last quarter, plummeting 14 percent worldwide, according to a report from market research firm IDC. As the Statista chart below shows, the malaise hit every major manufacturer except Lenovo, whose sales were flat. HP and Acer had the steepest drops.
Why is this happening? There are two prevailing theories. One is that it’s Microsoft’s fault. Historically, when Redmond releases a new version of Windows, PC sales spike as people upgrade their machines to take advantage of the fresh software. But with Windows 8, that hasn’t happened. That may because the radical redesign is confusing. A year ago, my colleague Farhad Manjoo predicted, “You’ll hate Windows 8.” Some analysts speculate that people may even hate it so much that they’re resisting buying a new machine just to avoid it. There may be some truth to that. We’ll know more once Apple releases its quarterly earnings on April 23.
The second theory for PCs’ sales decline is that, in short, the PC is dead. The media say this at least a couple times a year, and the latest wave of pronouncements includes obituaries from Salon and ReadWriteWeb. The idea is that, with people doing so much computing on their smartphones and tablets these days, they have no need for their old workhorse desktop or laptop anymore.

From what I’ve seen and heard, the second theory is the most popular with the media — probably because it’s the easiest to explain, not because it’s the truest. In fact, it turns out that both theories are wrong:

In the past, you had to replace your computer every few years or else it would become hopelessly bogged down trying to deal with the latest desktop applications, operating systems, and Internet technologies. But thanks to Moore’s Law, your average PC’s processing power now exceeds most people’s daily needs by a healthy margin. Meanwhile, the rise of the cloud has reduced the need for extra memory. And as ZDNet’s Simon Bisson explains in depth, a strategic shift by Microsoft in recent years has meant that you no longer need to buy a new machine in order to take advantage of each new operating system. The result is that PCs have become more durable than smartphones and tablets, which are still puny enough in their powers that you have to upgrade them regularly.

It isn’t that the days of the PC are over, it’s that the days of the disposable PC are over. People aren’t replacing their machines as often, because they don’t need to. The story the press has been repeating for months is BS.
Once again, the buffalo herd mentality of the media steers everyone wrong.

Griper Blade: Zero Sum BS

If you follow politics, you've probably seen the argument. You're reading a blog post or a comment thread or a discussion on an online forum and you see words that go something like "capitalism isn't a zero sum game." What this means is that, when we're talking about wealth, there isn't a limited amount and it isn't possible for one person or one group of people to collect it all. Wealth is created all the time -- if it weren't, a growing population would've ruined capitalism with Malthusian cannibalism long before the system of capitalism even had a name. The "zero sum game" argument is generally used defensively when someone's complaining that such-and-such a gazillionaire is making way too much money. Since wealth creation isn't a "zero sum game," we're told, it's ridiculous to say that this gazillionaire is living high on the hog at the expense of all of the non-gazillionaires among us.

But this "zero sum game" argument is only partially true. At this moment in time, there's only X dollars worth of wealth in the world. It's not an unlimited amount. It is, therefore, most definitely a zero sum game. It won't be eventually, but we live in the now. If you buy something, you're generally not going to get that money back -- eat lunch at a restaurant and someone is cash richer because you've become slightly cash poorer. At any given moment, the contents of your wallet is a fixed sum. It's possible for someone else to take it all.

This reality works both ways and a post by Dean Baker at his American Prospect blog demonstrates that. Baker is a media critic who follows economic reporting (we need a lot more of this, by the way) and his response to a Washington Post article about the market and the economy is much more interesting than the article itself... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Banks Buy Banks, Workers Get Screwed

The signs say it all. At a nondescript industrial building, sided with corrugated metal, workers display signs that read "Respect Federal WARN Act Law," "You got bailed out. We got sold out," and "$Billion$ for Bank of America, $0 for workers."

The building is the Republic Windows & Doors plant in Chicago and the signs are held by former workers, let go after the company lost its line of credit with Bank of America. The company gave them three days' notice and no severance -- federal law requires 60 days notice and severance. That's the WARN act referred to on the signs. The workers, clearly getting screwed illegally, staged a sit-in and effectively took over the building.

What happened next was unexpected, at least for the workers. "We never expected this," factory worker and union VP Melvin Maclin told the New York Daily News. "We expected to go to jail."

What Maclin and the rest of the Republic workers didn't expect was strong political and governmental support. Political realities in America are quickly correcting themselves after years -- perhaps decades -- of wrongheaded top-down economic theory. The economic crisis is making realists of us all... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: The Media Finds a Shiny New Bauble

It's a case study in missing the damned point. During the final presidential debate, Barack Obama and John McCain spent a fairly good amount of time talking about -- and to -- "Joe the Plumber." Yes, Joe Wurzelbacher's a real guy. He came up because he got a very detailed answer to a tax question at an Obama event. So John McCain brought him up. At this point, Joe the Plumber's importance to America probably should've ended. He was an example and could just as well have been hypothetical. But Joe's real, so the press needed to make a minor celebrity of him. I imagine some stereotypical newspaper editor with a cigar, waving his hands at reporters and talking about "big, big news."

"Go out and find out everything you can about this guy!" Editor Stereotype says, "I want to know how much he makes [about $40k last year], how he votes [Republican], what he pays in taxes [he owes $1,183], is he registered to vote [yes, but his registration is misspelled], how's he feel about the occupation of Iraq [he thinks it's the greatest thing ever]... Go, go, go! America wants to know!"

Like I say, totally missing the point. I got most of that info from the Toledo Blade, but it's all over the media. In fact, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher already has his own Wikipedia page.

None of which has a damned thing to do with the context. He was brought in the debate in relation to taxation. Almost none of the "Joe the Plumber" stories have anything to do with that. Wurzelbacher's a freakin' Jeopardy question waiting to happen -- a trivial little sidetrip the media took once. What's important is the context in which he was brought to our attention.

Like I say, he might as well be hypothetical. In fact, given what he told Obama and what the truth is, Wurzelbacher is hypothetical. His situation does not exist...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Wranglin' Mavericks

Something very interesting is going on out there. About a month before election day, Barack Obama is surging in the polls. Atlantic writer Marc Ambinder puts it this way:

You sort of need a ticker to follow it all.... CNN/ORC Florida: Obama at 54% among registered voters (really)...Obama up by four among likely voters in Nevada...up by double digits in Minnesota...tied in Missouri...nine points ahead among likely voters in Virginia...polls from Time...NBC News/WSJ/MySpace......the AP...

Some of Ambinder's readers are getting way ahead of themselves. "I'm getting lots of e-mails speculating about the 2012 frontrunner for Republicans," he writes. He thinks it'll be Huckabee. At this point, I could care less. Predicting the way the hell and gone future is for fools and psychics -- which may be redundant.

Over at Slate, Timothy Noah wonders, "GOP, RIP?" -- asking whether the Republican party is over, at least for the short term. The ideology of the GOP, as retooled by Reagan, looks like a big fat failure at this moment in history, with the recent market crash (or rather crashes) actually being the other shoe dropping.

"It should be remembered that a fundamentalist belief in untrammeled capitalism is not the first but, rather, the second pillar of Reagan-style Republicanism to fall," Noah tells us. "The first was the belief that the United States should extend military power wherever enemies lurk, regardless of what our allies do." It's not the market that's the Republican problem, but a bullheaded foreign policy combined with the market. The failure of deregulation isn't the beginning of the end, the end began the day the first American boot left a footprint in Iraqi sand in 2003. The failure of laissez faire economics was just the final straw...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: A Campaign Adrift

Yesterday at Politico, Hillary Clinton's former campaign strategist Mark Penn told us all that Barack Obama has the edge over John McCain on the economy. You hope this wasn't the sort of insight Hillary was paying the big bucks for, since you can turn on CNN and get the same information for free. Breaking news this is not.

In fact, Penn's piece isn't exactly correct, since he argues that it's the stock market and its ripples through the economy that have lifted Obama's poll numbers. But the fact is that McCain's numbers began to fall before Wall Street went all to crap. It was the the downward trajectory of a post-convention bounce for McCain and the slow revelation that Sarah Palin could be outsmarted by a baked potato that began Obama's rise, not the ongoing events of last week and now this week. Worries over the economy haven't hurt, but they're not the cause...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

McCain's Version of 'Leadership'

clipped from thinkprogress.org Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has said the House GOP proposal would not work. “Democratic leaders questioned McCain’s involvement in the House Republicans’ opposition to the plan.” McCain met with House GOP leaders before heading to the White House, but neither party seemed to know what they were talking about: Boehner and McCain discussed the bailout plan, but Republican leadership aides described the conversation as somewhat surreal. Neither man was familiar with the details of the proposal being pressed by House conservatives, and up to the moment they departed for the White House yesterday afternoon, neither had seen any description beyond news reports. At the bipartisan White House meeting that McCain “didn’t speak until 43 minutes into the meeting.” He “sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood, said people in the meeting.”

So basically, he had to rush off to Washington to keep a chair warm. Nice stunt. The piece goes on:

Sen. Chris Dodd said, “Instead of being a rescue plan for our economy it was a rescue plan for John McCain.” Sen. Chuck Schumer urged Bush to “respectfully tell Sen. McCain to get out of town. He’s not helping.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid added, “We had [Republican] Senator [Bob] Bennett, a high ranking official, who said these are the principles. And then, guess who came to town? And it all fell apart.”

Leadership? I don't think so.

Griper Blade: The Trojan Trust

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Congress isn't authorizing the $700 billion bailout immediately! Good freakin' God, if they don't pass it five minutes ago, we're all doomed! If Wall Street doesn't get all that lousy debt bought up, we'll return to the stone age. We'll be reduced to hunter/gatherers, chasing down white tail deer with rocks and spears. The only thing we'll have to wear will be smocks made from our now useless money. What is the holdup? What is the holdup?!?

Sen. Chris Dodd:

It would do nothing in my view, to help a single family save a home, at least not upfront. It would do nothing to stop even a single CEO from dumping billions of dollars of toxic assets on the backs of American taxpayers. While at the same time do nothing to stop the very authors of this calamity to walk away with bonuses and golden parachutes worth millions of dollars. And it would allow the Secretary and his successors to act with absolute impunity without review of any agency or court of law. After reading this proposal, I can only conclude it is not just our economy that is at risk but our Constitution as well.

OK, so there's that. The bill authorizing the bailout, as written, is freakin' awful. The White House tried to buffalo Congress into passing the bill, trying to whip up panic and using the crisis as cover. They'd managed to pull that off once before, and we got the PATRIOT Act. They thought they could do it again.

But the problem with the Trojan Horse is that you can only use that tactic once, then everyone's on to it. If the Achaeans had shown up at the gates of another city with a big wooden horse a few years later, I doubt anyone would've said, "Cool! Let's bring it in."...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Weathervane McCain

It's a headline that John McCain can't be awfully happy with. MarketWatch tells us "John McCain's Health Care Plan Based on Same Policies That Are Causing Wall Street Meltdown." Ouch. At issue is one sentence, written by McCain, in the obscure actuarial trade magazine Contingencies Magazine:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Obviously, this was written before the market meltdown. In banking, those "innovative products" were subprime mortgages, made possible by deregulation of the market. McCain is now running against the deregulators, despite the unfortunate fact that only moments before he was one of them. In terms of the exact wrong thing to say, that sentence is up there with McCain's assertion that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."

With taxpayers about to be stuck with a $700 billion bailout, the sort of Republican John McCain used to be last week isn't extremely popular this week. But McCain switches positions as easily as changing pants; Weathervane McCain is now a regulator. So McCain, palavering and obfuscating, reinvents himself for the bazillionth time in his campaign. But old habits die hard and McCain still finds it necessary to defend his now discredited ideology from time to time. Asked on CBS Today if he regretted working to deregulate the markets in 1999, McCain hit a sour note. "No," he said. "I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy." He said it with a straight face. No, really. There's video...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: An Adjustment in Strong Fundamentals

Yesterday was not a good day for the economy, the markets, the United States or, for that matter, the rest of the world. As the Dow dropped more than 500 points, we said goodbye to Lehman Brothers. In related news, Merrill Lynch was traded to the Bank of America for a bologna and cheese sandwich, a can of orange Faygo, and a fun-size Snickers bar. The state of the market was not good.

For his part, President Bush handled the crisis as well as he's handled other crises -- poorly, by trying to BS his way through it. Americans, Bush said, "are concerned about the adjustments that are taking place in our financial markets." See, it's an adjustment, a tiny bump in the road, a little minus-500-point tweak.

Associated Press:

...He said that his administration is focusing on the problem and "working to reduce disruptions and minimize the impact of these developments on the broader economy."

Bush also said he was pleased with work done so far by the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and major financial institutions to "promote stability" in financial markets shaken by the bankruptcy declaration by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America.

He acknowledged that such convulsive developments can be "painful for people" directly involved. But Bush also said, "In the long run, I am confident that our capital markets are flexible and resilient and can adjust to these developments."

Of course, as economist John Maynard Keynes so famously pointed out, "In the long run, we're all dead." While it's nice to keep an eye on the future, we live in the present and the present presently sucks. The concerns are immediate, not forecasted...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: Corporate Commies

This is how bad the economy is. Once again, Exxon sets the record for profit this quarter -- $11.7 billion. More than any company has ever earned in history. This is bad news for the oil giant, since they didn't do as well as predicted. So, despite making just giant wheelbarrows full of cash, Exxon closed 3% down on the news. Boy, talk about an undervalued stock -- no one's losing money here.

One reason that Exxon didn't do as well as expected is a decrease in production. And that's why we've got to drill, drill, drill. Got to pump up that production. We need oil... Dear Sweet Jesus, we need oil!

But that urgency isn't really reflected in oil companies' spending practices. While we're told that corporations like Exxon are desperate for oil, they sure as hell aren't acting like it.

Associated Press:

The companies insist they’re trying to find new oil that might help bring down gas prices, but the money they spend on exploration is nothing compared with what they spend on stock buybacks and dividends.

It’s good news for shareholders, including mutual funds and retirement plans for millions of Americans, but no help to drivers already making drastic cutbacks to offset the high cost of fuel.

The five biggest international oil companies plowed about 55 percent of the cash they made from their businesses into stock buybacks and dividends last year, up from 30 percent in 2000 and just 1 percent in 1993, according to Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

The percentage they spend to find new deposits of fossil fuels has remained flat for years, in the mid-single digits.

It strikes me that spending less than 10% on oil exploration doesn't do a lot to increase production.

But that's OK. Oil companies don't need to find oil, they know where some is -- where they're not allowed to drill. The reason they can't find oil anywhere other than offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is because they haven't actually been looking...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Griper Blade: One Foot in the Grave

Yesterday, I wrote about a campaign of BS by the right that may rival the propaganda campaign that led us into Iraq. The goal of that campaign is offshore drilling. Almost nothing that's being said by the right has been true -- offshore drilling isn't environmentally safe, China's not already drilling off Cuba, and it won't bring down gas prices.

When I write a post, I often collect more information than I actually need, which means that some examples aren't used in the posts. Usually, these unused stories turn out to be too insane to be representative. It may be tempting to compare some antigay dumbass to Fred Phelps, for example, but it may not be apt. It's kind of like comparing any old right wing zombie to Hitler -- I guess I believe that Godwin's law should be expanded. Similarities are not equations; bad may be bad, but there are degrees of bad, just as there are degrees of BS.

I bring this up to introduce you to a particular group of phonies known as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Right Wing Watch:

A gathering led by Niger Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality, Bishop Harry Jackson of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, and the new group Americans for American Energy held a press conference yesterday demanding increased “American Energy” production. Their contentions were twofold: that high energy costs disproportionately harm low-income families, and that increased domestic oil drilling would solve the problem. Standing in the way: the “elitist Volvo-driving” environmentalists. Watch:

Although CORE was once a prominent civil rights group, after Niger Innis’s father, Roy, took control in 1968, he led it to the far right, honoring Karl Rove at its Martin Luther King dinner, backing extreme Bush judges, and defending oil companies. According to a Mother Jones article, “Innis has been accused by founder James Farmer and other black leaders of renting out CORE’s historic reputation to corporations like Monsanto and ExxonMobil. (CORE even mounted a counterprotest to environmentalists picketing an ExxonMobil shareholders’ meeting.)”

There's a war on the poor -- by environmentalists. Really? Seems to me that enmity of the poor is a cornerstone of modern Republicanism. After all, it's been the right wing's love of deregulation and hatred of corporate accountability that's screwed the economy. No one's losing their home because some environmentalist is foreclosing on them...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Sixth Straight Month of Job Losses

clipped from www.mcclatchydc.com The economy is likely to keep stumbling at least through the rest of the year, analysts agreed Thursday, after a disappointing government report showed that payroll jobs fell by 62,000 in June, the sixth straight month of job losses. "More job losses are coming through the remainder of the year. The economy has lost just over 400,000 jobs since the start of the year and will lose another 400,000 by year's end," said Mark Zandi, chief economist for forecaster Moody's Economy.com. "Behind this pessimism are the broad-based job declines across most industries and regions of the country."

The piece goes on:

"We had thought that the rate had temporarily overshot in May based on problems seasonally adjusting the summer inflow of students into the work force," Nigel Gault, the chief U.S. economist for forecaster Global Insight in Lexington, Mass., said in a research note to investors. "But the unemployment rate for young workers was little changed this month, suggesting that they are simply facing a much weaker labor market than in previous years."

This shoots Labor Secretary Elaine Chao's argument that the job market reflects teen workers all to hell.

World Enjoying a 'Green Energy Gold Rush'

clipped from www.afp.com The world is enjoying a "green energy gold rush", the UN's environmental agency said Tuesday as it published a report outlining a 60 percent hike in investment in renewable energy in 2007. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) study, published in Nairobi, said more than 148 billion dollars (93 billion euros) of new funds were ploughed into the quest for cleaner energy last year. "Just as thousands were drawn to California and the Klondike in the late 1800s, the green energy gold rush is attracting legions of modern-day prospectors in all parts of the globe," UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a statement. "What is unfolding is nothing less than a fundamental transformation of the world's energy infrastructure."

It turns out that it's "green" as in "environmental" and "green" as in the color of money.

Thar's gold in them thar solar panels...

Griper Blade: A Real Solution to Deforestation

They've been called "the lungs of the world." The Amazon rainforest and other old growth forests pull tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere, slowing global warming. In a 2002 report for one of those BS White House programs that have since gone nowhere, it was estimated that one acre of rainforest can sequester between 6 to 72 tons of carbon.

Last year, the Independent reported, "Scientists say one days' deforestation is equivalent to the carbon footprint of eight million people flying to New York. Reducing those catastrophic emissions can be achieved most quickly and most cheaply by halting the destruction in Brazil, Indonesia, the Congo and elsewhere."

It's always bothered me that people seem to have stopped giving a damn about deforestation somewhere back in the '90s. The Independent piece tells us that deforestation accounts for 25% of all greenhouse gases, "while transport and industry account for 14 per cent each."

And here we are dicking around with emissions on cars. While important, vehicle emissions aren't our biggest problem here. We're losing old growth forests and, as these forests are lost, the carbon sequestered in them is released as the wood rots, burns, or is dried in a kiln for lumber. So deforestation is an environmental double-whammy -- not only are you increasing emissions, but you're losing a method of sequestering future emissions...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]