It Seems More People are Trying to #EndQuarterlyCapitalism then just Hillary

I have to agree with this economist 100%

Yet Clinton and many other American critics of “quarterly capitalism” have so far ignored the proverbial elephant in the room — America’s mandate that public companies produce earnings reports every quarter. This is the rule that makes quarterly reporting a necessity in the U.S. and underlies all the problems that go with it. International comparisons show that quarterly reporting requirements not only tend to decrease long-term investment, but also increase manipulation of the numbers to please shareholders.

 It seems Europe gets along pretty well without requiring quarterly numbers. There doesn't seem to be cases of a company having decent profits but still having to lay people off to keep earnings up.

Take Seagate for instance. They are laying off 1050 people but they still made $137 million in profit this past quarter. The quarter before was at $291 million so there was a deceleration in profits but its not like firing those 1050 people will make Seagate roar back into profits any time soon. It is just a trick to save $113 million according to that article. If Seagate never had to report that $137 million number I wonder if they would have cut staff or not? I guess that's something for economists to study.

In any case, companies can still give updates and have investor days and such without having to rush around each quarter and bring out numbers. Sometimes you will have less transparency since you cannot listen to quarterly conference calls and track trends but I think the good things outweigh the bad.

You can have some CEOs make bolder moves because they don't have to worry about losing money in the short term. A company like Amazon would not be penalized so severely for ramping up CAPEX for something like Amazon Apps. People thought Bezos was crazy for spending so much money but now Amazon apps seems to dominate in the SAAS arena.      

Rick Perry the First Man out of the Race

I guess here ends his Presidential aspirations.

The former Texas governor told the Eagle Forum on Friday afternoon that he is suspending his presidential campaign.

“We have a tremendous field – the best in a generation – so I step aside knowing our party is in good hands, and as long as we listen to the grassroots, the cause of conservatism will be too.” 

I guess his gaffs in the past election were just too much for him to bear. I think he would have been a decent enough candidate but it doesn't matter anymore.

Muir Turns into "Anchor Monster" After He is Beaten by Lester Holt in the Ratings #NBCNews

Well I have been watching Lester Holt more often when I do watch the evening news so I guess I'm contributing to Muir's freakout.

An ABC source tells us, “Despite the biggest ‘get’ in the world — the pope — David is still losing to Lester. David feels under pressure and returned to New York from Rome cranky and has been lashing out at the staff. He screams at the crew unless [ABC News President] James Goldston is around. On an open mike he was heard complaining he wanted less of the reporters’ voices and more of his own during the pope town hall. He’s becoming known as ‘Anchor Monster.’”

Yeah I watched ABC news a few times but I then switched to CBS News with Scott Pelley because I think he has more gravitas.Then when Holt got the job full time I started watching more NBC and then switching back to CBS whenever there was a boring story on NBC.

I'm sorry the AppleTV Seems like a Fancy Roku: Hopefully it Isn't the Apple Watch for the Living Room

I just don't see how much better this thing is than a Roku.

There’s a lot of impressive technology happening inside the Apple TV. The search works really well, letting me narrow down from “find me science fiction movies” to the exact Star Trek episode I was looking for. It’s fast, it’s as straightforward as the last one (which is to say, straightforward enough but a little overly spartan), and the remote works well. As it stands, it doesn’t feel like much more than a souped-up Roku.

The article pretty much says the AppleTV has a cool remote and has Siri built in. I'm not sure I want to "narrow down the exact Star Trek episode" because I can just do a Google search and find out the name and episode number that way. I guess you can skip that step with the Apple TV but I have a tablet/smart phone as a second screen for just such occasions.

The article also talks about how sparse the App Store was and says that you can look at dresses on your TV with the Gilt app. That sounds like a huge waste of time but I guess a woman can forget about the shopping networks if they cut the cord using the Apple TV. In any case this thing will live and die by the App Store because my Roku has everything I want right now. Hopefully, someone will create a must have App for the Apple TV but it doesn't seem to be coming out at launch. 

Hmm Global Slowdown Might be Because People Don't want as Much Stuff?

This article makes a lot of sense and if true, it will change quite a few things in the global economy.

Finally, consider the things that people do want to spend their money on. The defining consumer product of our age is the smartphone. A smartphone is a good, and it takes resources to make and transport it. Still, it takes a lot less resources than, say, a car. Most of its value is in the software that is loaded onto it and the people, information and entertainment you can connect to with it. That's a different sort of value creation than 20th-century resource-based value creation. If that's the direction the global economy is headed in, the connections between growth, trade and resource consumption aren't going to be the same as they have been. That is probably a good thing.

Smart phone growth seems to be plateauing as well judging by how badly Samsung seems to be doing.
It is as if nearly everyone that wants a smart phone has one. The new phones are not compelling enough to get people to abandon their old phone for something new. They are slightly bigger with a better camera or something but nothing world changing.

Even mighty Apple seems to be following the trend with their huge iPad which seems to be very much like the Surface. Nothing I saw at their big new products day makes me want to own anything they are selling at the moment. I have an Apple TV already and it is called a Roku. Maybe Apple TV will become a must have device in the future but I don't see it right now. Apple TV seems like the Apple Watch for the living room.

Also from what I can gather people just aren't rushing out to acquire more physical stuff. They do want digital stuff in the form of apps and HD video from Netflix but they don't want a new car or a new refrigerator (unless theirs breaks.) They seem to want clothes but the big ticket item just doesn't seem to fly off the shelves like they did before the Great Recession.

So we keep having tepid growth because it takes far less resources and manpower to make digital stuff. You can pay the actors and the grips and such to produce a TV show but that is nothing compared to all the people that work to produce something like a refrigerator or a car. Compare making an app with making a microwave. Making an app takes much less physical manpower and but more mental and digital effort from far less people. So if people want the app (which is free) and not the microwave the economy will suffer accordingly.

Forget the Coronation: Hillary Might be Going to Federal Prison: North Korean Satellite Photos Could have been on her Server

This is certainly worrisome if I were part of the Clinton camp.

There’s a bigger story hidden inside the New York Times report that “a special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program —  . . .  contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.” The review was undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which presumably originated the material. They concluded that the material had originally been given the U.S. government’s highest secrecy classification. Even if one of Clinton’s aides stripped the markings (a felony), Secretary Clinton surely knew satellite intelligence and North Korean nuclear deployments are the U.S. government’s most highly classified information.

That sounds like there were a few satellite photos of North Korean nuclear sites mixed in with the wedding prep with Chelsea and recipes that were found on that home server. Also if an aide stripped those markings that person gets to join Hillary in federal prison. The article talks about the CIA and others who now have to do a damage assessment to see who stole what and when from that server. That server was a huge security hole and it operated for years. It would be interesting to see who was hacking it and when.

I Can See Why People Cord-cut: Average Cable Bill is $99.10 which is a 39% Increase Since 2010

Wow you can pretty much get all the streaming services for about half that price.

The average cable television bill hit a record $99.10 this year, an increase of 39% from 2010. But with more and more viewers opting out of pay TV -- mainly because of the cost -- something's got to give.

According to the latest annual survey by Leichtman Research Group, 83% of U.S. households subscribe to cable, down from 87% in 2010.  The average cable bill is up 39% over the same period, or more than four times the rate of inflation, the telephone survey of 1,222 people found.

About the only real reason to buy cable is for live sports. If they unbundle sports then that 83% number will seriously look like a bygone era to cable companies.

Typical Clinton Answer by Hillary on Emails. "I Just Didn't Stop and Think"

She was too busy to think about her emails and how they jeopardized national security.

"You know, I was not thinking a lot when I got in. There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world," Clinton said. "I didn't really stop and think what kind of email system will there be?"

But Clinton did not apologize for her decision when asked directly, "Are you sorry?" Instead, she again said she wishes she had "made a different choice" and that she takes responsibility for the decision to use a private email account and server based at her home in suburban New York.

That weasel word answer is typical Clinton-speak. She wasn't sorry but she "should have made a different choice." It depends on "what the meaning of is is" said her husband when he was in office.

It's Over: Iran Deal is Done as Obama Locks Up 34th Vote

Well Iran has just won in playing the Great Game against the US.

The decisive 34th commitment came from Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski, who is retiring next year after three decades in the Senate. In a statement she said "no deal is perfect, especially one negotiated with the Iranian regime." But she called the pact "the best option available to block Iran from having a nuclear bomb."

Supporters now have the votes in hand to uphold Obama's veto, if one becomes necessary, of a resolution of disapproval Republicans are trying to pass this month. GOP lawmakers who control the House and Senate ardently oppose the agreement, which curbs Iran's nuclear program in exchange for hundreds of billions of dollars in relief from international sanctions.

Iran can now start funding proxy armies against the Saudis and do whatever they want with the billions of money they will soon have access to. I think there will be lots of Mullahs driving Ferraris in the next few years. Then in 10 years or sooner their "words will be backed with Nuclear Weapons."

What is PLEKHA7 and How It Might be the Cure for Cancer Wonder at long Last #CancerMicroprocesser

Hmm it seems that doctors have found the "cancer microprocesser"

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Florida have identified the cell’s microprocessor that controls cell growth. Called microRNA, this biological controller instructs the cells to stop dividing the moment they have replicated sufficiently, The Telegraph reports. When that happens, microRNA triggers the production of a protein called PLEKHA7, which then breaks the cell bonds and stops growth. In cancerous cells, that process doesn’t work properly.

The doctors were able to switch on cancer in cells by removing microRNAs and preventing them from producing the protein. Then they found they can reverse the process, stopping tumor growth and potentially changing cancer growth. All a patient would need would be an injections containing microRNAs that would reinforce the existing supply in cancer cells.

I wonder how these microRNAs effect different kinds of cancer? Are these "cancer microprocessors" different in lung cancer for instance. Also I wonder how much microRNAs are needed to create a stopping and reversing of cancer growth. You could certainly prevent cancer from spreading if you target with different kinds of microRNAs. Very interesting stuff.

McDonalds and Tyson's Teams Move Fast on Chicken Cruelty

They must some 24 hour monitoring going on.

Even by the lightning-fast standards of social media and viral videos, it was enough to make your head spin: No sooner had the activist group Mercy for Animals released a sickening undercover video showing abhorrent treatment of chickens at a Tennessee factory farm that supplies poultry for McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets than both McDonald’s and Tyson Foods, which makes the famed nuggets for the fast-food giant, announced they had severed ties with the offender.

“Based on what we currently know, we are terminating the farmer’s contract to grow chickens for us,” a Tyson spokesman said in a statement. For its part, McDonald’s called the video evidence “unacceptable” and said that the company is “committed to working with animal welfare and industry experts to inform our policies that promote better management, strong employee education and verification practices.”

Trump's Advice is Spot in Regards to the Stock Market Correction. Hold

Yeah sometimes Trump does say something that is not offensive or idiotic.

Donald Trump offered his advice Monday for investors taking a pounding in this week’s market tumble : Don’t sell.

“You’re better off holding,” the former reality show host, real estate scion, and Republican presidential candidate told the New York Times , citing the historical behavior of a crashing market to surge back, allowing those who wait out the storm to avoid losses in the long run.

“I’d hate to see it come back and they end up with the short end of both deals,” he said.

If you have cash wait for the smoke to clear and check if the stock has lots of China exposure and if not then you get to buy it at a discount. 

Time to Buy Google err Alphabet?

Well it seems Google is going to separate the cash cow search business from the pie in the sky stuff and add them both to a holding company called Alphabet. I agree with Cramer when he says this could be huge.

"The problem, though, is that Google has lots of forward-looking projects, truly venture-stage efforts that shouldn't be squelched by Porat, because, with a little nurturing, they could pay off gigantically someday," Cramer said.

The solution? Break them out, just like Amazon did with its Web services division.
Cramer thinks this will allow the huge and fast core business to shine within Alphabet. This way, investors can clearly understand what Google is and why it is worth so much more than anyone thought.

So the money loser (at first) projects can have visibility and don't drag down the core business. You also get a look at these projects while they are being developed and nurtured by looking at the other businesses group that contains Nest, Fiber, the Venture Capital arm, etc. I would love to see what smaller apps that Venture Capital arm is bankrolling to see what could take off. Too bad I couldn't get back in at $550 but 10 shares might become a core holding going forward.

For a Tough New Yorker Trump sure has some Thin Skin. #DumpTrump

I have never seen such a powerful billionaire not be able to any sort of criticism.

“She should really be apologizing to me, you want to know the truth,” Trump said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday. “And other candidates have said that.”

During last week’s primetime debate, Kelly, a co-moderator, asked the real estate mogul about his history of sexist comments about women — a question Trump believes was “nasty.”

"It was an inappropriate question,” Trump said on NBC’s “Today” show Monday. “It was a ridiculous question. Even the other candidates came up to me and said that that was absolutely out of line.”

Those are words that came out of his mouth. She used his actual words in context to ask that question. A person who is supposed to be Presidential doesn't call people names and Trump does it all the time. What is funny is that he has to get re-assurances all the time.

On Monday morning, Trump tweeted that he had talked with Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who assured him he would be “treated fairly” by the cable news network.

Oh boo-hoo you haven't been treated "fairl." I guess he just wants a bunch of soft-ball questions and nothing of any substance. Maybe he should run against Hillary instead. I'm sure the Democratic moderators will ask just the questions he wants.

Gasp! I Again Agree With Hillary: Quarterly Capitalism needs to Go: Disney is Case-in-Point

I have to agree with this statement whole-heartedly.

Clinton, the front-running Democratic presidential candidate, said in a speech last month that many important elements of the U.S. economy – publicly traded companies and the executives that run them, shareholders and consumers – are held hostage to the “tyranny of today’s earnings report.”

“Everything is focused on the next earnings report or the short-term share price,” said Clinton. “The result is too little attention on the sources of long-term growth: research and development, physical capital and talent.”

I think one of the big problems with quarterly capitalism is that companies are pressured to buy back shares in order to prop up their stock prices. I'm sure that cash can be plowed back into R&D or simply given as a dividend or a bonus for their employees. Instead that money is used to buy back shares which means a bigger bonus for senior managers with stock options and little else as far as I can see.

You also see big layoffs even though the company has profits because of a bad quarter. The company is still making money but they disappoint Wall Street and 1000s are laid off. Qualcomm comes to mind.

One way of looking at the problem with quarterly capitalism is Disney. I saw an interview with their CEO, Iger which he ticked off like 10 different billion dollar plus movie franchises one after another. Then they will open Shanghai Disneyland which will probably make some of the US Theme parks look like the State Fair. They have all sorts of billion dollar opportunities on the horizon and Iger let us know that.

Instead they have some subscriber slippage at ESPN and the stock drops from $121 to $108 in two days. This doesn't even take into account that Disney will probably offer ESPN as over-the-top service in the coming years and it will still be huge. I would easily pay $20 a month or more in order to watch ESPN on my Roku or Xbox One. It works for HBO so I don't see why it wouldn't work for ESPN which is a channel I watch every day. Quarterly Capitalism thinks that people are cutting the cord and subscribing to Netflix so Disney goes to $0 and Netflix is worth $700 billion. That has to be the most stupid thing ever but the stock market believes that.   

Another View that the Fix is In? Bill Clinton Called Donald Trump before He Decided to Run #DumpTrump

I wonder what Clinton offered him in exchange for putting Hillary in the White House?

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men.

Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

If Trump wins the nomination or runs as a third party then Hillary would win the election handily. Now I would be that in tomorrows debate Trump is going to make a giant ass of himself. A crafty false flag attack the like of which we have never witnessed before.

The Telegram that Made Hitler Kill Himself Nearly Forgotten in South Carolina Safe

Now this is quite a historical find.

A treasonous telegram from No. 2 Nazi Hermann Goering to none other than the führer himself.

A message that, along with the advancing Allied troops, helped drive Adolf Hitler to swallow cyanide and shoot himself inside his underground Berlin bunker.

Despite its influence on World War II, however, the memorandum ended up inside a South Carolina safe, nearly forgotten for more than a decade until a college student made it his senior thesis.

On Tuesday, the itinerant but now infamous telegram sold at auction for $55,000.

Now this is a piece of history like Trotsky's Ice Pick or Martin Luther's (the Nazi Official not the Protestant Reformation guy) Wannsee minutes that doomed millions of Jews. At least this telegram is a good thing though and might have positive karma attached to it.   

Intel and Micron Issuing In a Golden Age of Electronics? 3D XPoint (Cross Point) memory Sounds Awesome

Well this sounds like something that could change quite a few things in the coming years.

Imagine an ultra-small form factor PC, for example, that can instantly power up and start off from the exact point it was shut down, with hundreds of gigabytes of high-speed memory, that’s capable of transferring data at many gigabytes or even terabytes per second.  And that the data can be accessed in Nano-second scales. System memory limitation could essentially be eliminated and there would be no latency associated with copying data from a relatively slow storage device into system memory.

The article mentions Big Data like Tableau Software or Splunk using these chips to mine databases in seconds that it takes hours or days to crunch now. They could even do it in real time depending on how the chips perform. A Tableau or Splunk appliance could sit in front of the data store and constantly mine it for information if need be.

Another thing that it would do is allow streaming to go from the bandwidth intensive to device intensive to allow instant streaming of very high HD movies. Your new version of the Xbox or Roku equipped with these Cross Point chips could download 1000s of movies if you want and store everything and have them all instantly at your fingertips. Imagine if all of Netflixes content was on your Roku ready to be accessed from any device at any time nearly instantly.

You can even have someone curate the movie for you (new job opportunity) so you only watch the funny bits of a comedy or the action scenes or whatever. You might even be able to search the movie (or nearly every movie of a certain genre) for a certain line or scene in real time. Hell, you might be able to do that all on your tablet or iPhone 10 if it has a few of these chips in it.

Now This is How You Do a Review of a Bad Movie: Pixels Edition #WorstMovieoftheYear

I knew the movie looked bad but MovieBob confirms it in this awesome review. In some strange way I think terrible movies like this need to be made so it can justify this kind of review.

Apple Watch Looks like a Dismal Failure after the Early Adoption Rush

It seems Apple Watch is not moving the needle at all.

A slew of recent third-party data has not painted too bright of a picture of Apple Watch sales. One of the most stark is research from Slice Intelligence, which noted Fitbit (FIT) devices outsold the Apple Watch in May, selling 850,000 devices, compared to 777,000 Apple Watches sold. There are multiple Fitbit devices--seven in total--compared to just one Apple Watch (albeit in three versions).

So Fitbit is beating out the Apple Watch? It seems that people who use the Fitbit don't really want to see the weather in Cupertino on their wrist and can just pull their phones out of their pocket. Since people rarely use the cell phone for phone calls talking on your wrist lost its novelty. I think wearing a watch for anything other than a piece of status jewelry is kind of dying. It would be interesting to see how many early Apple Watch owners have the thing sitting on their dresser gathering dust.