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Apple Supplier Foxconn Cuts Working Hours, Workers Ask Why

(Reuters) – When Chinese worker Wu Jun heard that her employer, the giant electronics assembly company Foxconn, had given employees landmark concessions her reaction was worry, not elation.

Wu, 23, is one of tens of thousands of migrants from the poor countryside who staff the production lines of Foxconn’s plant in Longhua, in southern China, which spits out made-to-order products for Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and other multinationals.

Foxconn’s concessions, including cutting overtime for its 1.2 million mainland Chinese workers while promising compensation that protects them against losing income, were backed by Apple, which has faced criticism and media scrutiny for worker safety lapses and for using relatively low-paid employees to make high-cost phones, computers and other gadgets.

But at the Foxconn factory gates, many workers seemed unconvinced that their pay wouldn’t be cut along with their hours. For some Chinese factory workers – who make much of their income from long hours of overtime – the idea of less work for the same pay could take getting used to.

“We are worried we will have less money to spend. Of course, if we work less overtime, it would mean less money,” said Wu, a 23-year-old employee from Hunan province in south China.

Foxconn said it will reduce working hours to 49 per week, including overtime.

“We are here to work and not to play, so our income is very important,” said Chen Yamei, 25, a Foxconn worker from Hunan who said she had worked at the factory for four years.

“We have just been told that we can only work a maximum of 36 hours a month of overtime. I tell you, a lot of us are unhappy with this. We think that 60 hours of overtime a month would be reasonable and that 36 hours would be too little,” she added. Chen said she now earned a bit over 4,000 yuan a month ($634).

Foxconn is one the biggest employers of China’s 153 million rural migrants working outside their hometowns. Compared to smaller, mainland-owned factories, workers said, its vast plants are cleaner and safer, and offer more recreation sites.

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Do Stocks Always Outperform (in the Long Run)?

The equity premium puzzle is one of the longest standing anomalies in finance: the finding that stockmarket investing outperforms other types of investment by a significant amount. Generally you’d expect the price of shares to rise until this advantage was cancelled out, but this hasn’t happened and has made quite a lot of futurologists look rather silly.

It turns out, though, that the equity premium puzzle may be even more puzzling than it first appears. Basically researchers aren’t exactly sure how large it is, or even if it exists at all. So is the idea that stocks always outperform other investments in the long run just another market myth used to cajole unwary investors into parting with their hard-earned cash?

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A Health Law at Risk Gives Insurers Pause

“Many of us did not get the bill we wanted, but I think having to start over is worse than having to fix this,” said Robert Laszewski, a health care industry consultant and former insurance executive who opposed the bill.

Others say, however, the last two years have made it easier for Congress or the states to revisit the issue. The effort was not a waste of time, said Christine Pollack, vice president of government affairs at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a trade group that represents large retailers and opposed the law. “There has been an important dialogue that has happened over the last three and a half years that has been a long time coming,” she said.

The most ambitious provisions would be nearly impossible to salvage, like the requirement that insurers offer coverage even to those with existing medical conditions and the broad expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor. Popular pieces of the legislation might survive in the market, like insuring adult children up to age 26 through their parents’ policies, along with some of the broader changes being made in the health care system in how hospitals and doctors deliver care.

Abandoning the efforts and billions of dollars invested since the law was passed in 2010 would result in turmoil for hospitals, doctors, patients and insurers.

Many insurers would have difficulty changing course. “The risk of repeal and starting from zero frightens them infinitely more” than having to comply with the law as written, said Michael A. Turpin, a former insurance executive who is now a senior executive at USI Insurance Services, a broker.

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Girls Around Me: An App Takes Creepy to a New Level

Nick Bilton

Another day, another creepy mobile app. Here is one that allows you to find women in your area. It definitely wins the prize for too creepy.

Girls Around Me uses Foursquare, the location-based mobile service, to determine your location. It then scans for women in the area who have recently checked-in on the service. Once you identify a woman you’d like to talk to, one that inevitably has no idea you’re snooping on her, you can connect to her through Facebook, see her full name, profile photos and send her a message.

When you sign up for the Girls Around Me application, you are asked to log in to Facebook, giving the service your personal information, too. After connecting to Facebook, the app asks for everything, requiring people to share their basic information, profile information, photos, information people share with them and e-mail address. It will also ask permission to access your data when you are not using the app and post status updates, photos and more on your behalf.

“This would be a very different application if it didn’t link back to Facebook, which is the treasure trove of information. With that link, this app could easily be a “let’s stalk women” app,” said Elizabeth Stark, a lecturer in law at Stanford who teaches about privacy on the Internet.

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Why One Gas Is Cheap and One Isn’t

Floyd Norris

THE price of gas has risen rapidly this year.

The price of gas has fallen to the lowest level in a decade.

Both of those statements are true. The first refers to gasoline, the second to natural gas.

As the accompanying charts indicate, never in the two decades that natural gas and oil futures have traded have their prices diverged as much as they have now. On an energy equivalent basis, oil costs more than eight times as much as natural gas.

This week, the price of a million B.T.U.’s of natural gas fell below $2.20 for the first time since 2002, while oil prices slipped a little but remained above $100 a barrel. The last time natural gas was this inexpensive, oil cost about $20 a barrel.

The diverging prices reflect the fact that while oil and natural gas can substitute for each other in some uses, the markets for the two products are very different.

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Stop Panicking About Bullies

Childhood is safer than ever before, but today’s parents need to worry about something. Nick Gillespie on why busybodies and bureaucrats have zeroed in on bullying.

Despite the rare and tragic cases that rightly command our attention and outrage, the data show that things are, in fact, getting better for kids. When it comes to school violence, the numbers are particularly encouraging. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1995 and 2009, the percentage of students who reported “being afraid of attack or harm at school” declined to 4% from 12%. Over the same period, the victimization rate per 1,000 students declined fivefold.

When it comes to bullying numbers, long-term trends are less clear. The makers of “Bully” say that “over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year,” and estimates of the percentage of students who are bullied in a given year range from 20% to 70%. NCES changed the way it tabulated bullying incidents in 2005 and cautions against using earlier data. Its biennial reports find that 28% of students ages 12-18 reported being bullied in 2005; that percentage rose to 32% in 2007, before dropping back to 28% in 2009 (the most recent year for which data are available). Such numbers strongly suggest that there is no epidemic afoot (though one wonders if the new anti-bullying laws and media campaigns might lead to more reports going forward).

The most common bullying behaviors reported include being “made fun of, called names, or insulted” (reported by about 19% of victims in 2009) and being made the “subject of rumors” (16%). Nine percent of victims reported being “pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on,” and 6% reported being “threatened with harm.” Though it may not be surprising that bullying mostly happens during the school day, it is stunning to learn that the most common locations for bullying are inside classrooms, in hallways and stairwells, and on playgrounds—areas ostensibly patrolled by teachers and administrators.

None of this is to be celebrated, of course, but it hardly paints a picture of contemporary American childhood as an unrestrained Hobbesian nightmare. Before more of our schools’ money, time and personnel are diverted away from education in the name of this supposed crisis, we should make an effort to distinguish between the serious abuse suffered by the kids in “Bully” and the sort of lower-level harassment with which the Aaron Cheeses of the world have to deal.

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Obama Kills Oil Drilling off Atlantic Coast for At Least 5 Years

Devin Dwyer

The Obama administration today endorsed new oil and gas exploration along the Atlantic Coast, setting the stage for possible future drilling lease sales.

The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.

It also comes as President Obama faces mounting pressure over high gas prices and criticism from Republicans that he has opposed more drilling for oil.

“Making decisions based on sound science, public input and the best information available is a critical component to this administration’s all-of-the-above energy strategy,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

But Republicans say the announcement is simply for show. Obama delayed and then cancelled a planned 2011 drilling lease sale for areas off the Virginia coast following the BP oil spill in the Gulf.

There are also no guarantees the administration will approve drilling permits at the end of the environmental review.

“The president’s actions have closed an entire new area to drilling on his watch and cheats Virginians out of thousands of jobs,” said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee.

The announcement “continues the president’s election-year political ploy of giving speeches and talking about drilling after having spent the first three years in office blocking, delaying and driving up the cost of producing energy in America,” he said.

“If President Obama truly wanted to support energy production in the Atlantic, he would immediately reinstate the lease sale that he canceled.”

House Republicans say approving drilling off the Virginia coast would create at least 2,000 jobs and produce 750 million barrels of oil.

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Israelis Suspect Obama Media Leaks to Prevent Strike on Iran

Alexander Marquardt

JERUSALEM – Two reports today about Iran’s nuclear program and the possibility of an Israeli military strike have analysts in Israel accusing the Obama administration leaking information to pressure Israel not to bomb Iran and for Iran to reach a compromise in upcoming nuclear talks.

The first report in Foreign Policy quotes anonymous American officials saying that Israel has been given access to airbases by Iran’s northern neighbor Azerbaijan from which Israel could launch air strikes or at least drones and search and rescue aircraft.

The second report from Bloomberg, based on a leaked congressional report, said that Iran’s nuclear facilities are so dispersed that it is “unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would be…” A strike could delay Iran as little as six months, a former official told the researchers.

“It seems like a big campaign to prevent Israel from attacking,” analyst Yoel Guzansky at the Institute for National Security Studies told ABC News. “I think the [Obama] administration is really worried Jerusalem will attack and attack soon. They’re trying hard to prevent it in so many ways.”

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Critical Race Theory and the Trayvon Martin Case

by Joel B. Pollak

The Trayvon Martin case shows, once again, the effect of Derrick Bell’s radical Critical Race Theory on President Barack Obama and his administration.

Critical Race Theory holds that the law itself is characterized by white supremacy–an idea Obama invoked by insisting that Americans “examine the laws” that supposedly led to Martin’s death. And Bell often promoted his theory with fictional projections about race–just as racial fiction is driving Obama’s response to the case.

Consider the following quote, from Tuesday, March 27 (video below):

I’m not here just for George. I’m here for my kids. I’m here for every other young black man. I understand why everybody is upset. If I didn’t know George, I’d be upset, too. If I didn’t know what I know, I’d be just as outraged. But once this is all over, we still have to address the problem that has brought us to this point in the first place, and that’s the fear that we have of each other, the fear that we have of young black men…We’ve got a black president, and yet we continue to stereotype young black men. I get that. We’ve got to continue this conversation after this is over, because it goes beyond Trayvon and George…This particular incident, this confrontation between Trayvon and George, had nothing to do with race. But because of our racial history, because of Sanford’s racial history, that’s why we’re at where we are now…I’ve got an 18-year-old son. My heart goes out to the Martins. I am a black man. Like my friend George, I’m just trying to do the right thing.

Those were the tearful words of Joe Oliver, who has been defending his good friend Zimmerman in the midst of the media frenzy over Martin’s terrible death. Oliver is pleading with the public to consider, patiently, the facts of this particular case, without letting them be overwhelmed by broader–and valid–issues about race.

He is resisting a version of the Martin case told by the mainstream media, the organized left, and the Obama administration that is filled with fantasy and driven by Critical Race Theory’s assumptions about the law.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that George Zimmerman is guilty of a crime for shooting and killing Trayvon Martin. Let’s further stipulate that young black men are routinely profiled and suspected of crimes, even when completely innocent.

Even with those assumptions in place, it is clear that important elements of the story are being invented, or obscured–the first being that Zimmerman is a “white Hispanic.”

That fabrication–“the police department hasn’t arrested Zimmerman because he is white and [Martin] was black”–allowed the media to set up the story as a racial morality play, a white-versus-black tale that defined the villain and the hero in trite, familiar terms.

Then President Barack Obama waded in, playing up the racial drama (“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”). He suggested that beyond the “specifics of the incident,” we ought to do some “soul-searching” and “examine the laws and the context for what happened,” as if Martin had been killed by the legal system. That further fueled debate over “stand your ground” laws–which happen to protect black defendants as well.

As evidence mounted that the incident “had nothing to do with race,” as Oliver says, the left and its media outlets worked overtime to paint Zimmerman as a racist. MSNBC, for one, used selective editing to reinforce the meme, quoting Zimmerman as having told a 911 dispatcher: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good…he looks black.” The ellipsis hid the fact that it was the dispatcher who had asked Zimmerman about Martin’s race.

As the hysteria grew, Democrats, media commentators, and left-wing celebrities began advocating vigilante justice against Zimmerman–suggesting that he be locked up “for his own safety,” or tweeting what they thought was his home address. The irony that innocent black men were once victimized by similar methods in the not-too-distant past never occurred to the enraged perpetrators of this attempt at new media mob rule.

This was Andrew Breitbart’s “Democrat-media complex” at work–coordinating a false meme about race, ignoring available facts, and making up fake evidence to reinforce a political agenda that relies on division and fear. In the process, the media, the left, and the Obama administration not only made Zimmerman’s life–and other lives–miserable, but also denied Martin any real hope of justice by poisoning the potential jury pool.

Obama–the center of the crisis, and to some extent its intended beneficiary–once warned us about “jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.” That was when the accused was Nidal Hasan, an avowed Islamic terrorist. Obama’s caution in that case was intended to obscure the faith of the killer.

In contrast, Obama’s response in the Martin case has reinforced media distortions about race, and Critical Race Theory’s distortions about the law itself.

Joe Oliver’s emotional words remind us that facts matter, that individuals matter, and that truth matters–and that these must take priority even over the very real racial issues with which our country struggles.

To speculate that Zimmerman is guilty based on the available facts is one thing; to convict him based on his supposed race, and on Martin’s, is the classic definition of “prejudice.”

And Obama, the media, and the left are promoting it.

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Canada Ups Retirement Age in Bid to Balance Budget

Michel Comte

Canada’s center-right government called for the retirement age to be raised and for major public service cuts Thursday, in an austerity budget that aims to balance the books by 2016.

Tackling unpopular measures that many industrialized countries are being forced to consider as their populations age, the Canadian government said its budget would help the country move a step ahead.

“Other Western countries face the risk of long-term economic decline. We have a rare opportunity to position our country for sustainable, long-term growth,” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said in the House of Commons.

“Looking ahead, Canadians have every reason to be confident,” he said presenting what was dubbed a budget for “the next generation.”

Under the plan, Canada will cut its deficit this year through “moderate” spending cuts, as the economy grows by 2.1 percent, Flaherty announced.

Read the rest here.

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Four Numbers Add Up to an American Debt Disaster

Caroline Baum

Consider the following numbers: 2.2, 62.8, 454, 5.9.

Drawing a blank? Not to worry. They don’t mean much on their own.

Now consider them in context:

1) 2.2 percent is the average interest rate on the U.S. Treasury’s marketable and non-marketable debt (February data).

2) 62.8 months is the average maturity of the Treasury’s marketable debt (fourth quarter 2011).

3) $454 billion is the interest expense on publicly held debt in fiscal 2011, which ended Sept. 30.

4) $5.9 trillion is the amount of debt coming due in the next five years.

For the moment, Nos. 1 and 2 are helping No. 3 and creating a big problem for No. 4. Unless Treasury does something about No. 2, Nos. 1 and 3 will become liabilities while No. 4 has the potential to provoke a crisis.

In plain English, the Treasury’s reliance on short-term financing serves a dual purpose, neither of which is beneficial in the long run. First, it helps conceal the depth of the nation’s structural imbalances: the difference between what it spends and what it collects in taxes. Second, it puts the U.S. in the precarious position of having to roll over 71 percent of its privately held marketable debt in the next five years — probably at higher interest rates.

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Ignore GDP: This Is the Obscure Stat That Explains the Hot Recovery

Matthew O’Brien

The recovery is real, even if it’s not spectacular, and Gross Domestic Income explains why.

Something odd has happened the past few months. The job numbers tell us the recovery is accelerating. The GDP numbers say it’s not. This discrepancy has confounded expectations because there’s usually a fairly stable relationship between the GDP and employment — economists call it Okun’s Law. The growth-and-jobs gap has since launched a thousand blog posts.

But it turns out there might not be a gap, after all. Today we received news that GDI grew at a gangbusters rate in the fourth quarter of 2011. Bye-bye, growth-and-jobs gap.

What the heck is GDI?

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BlackBerry to Conduct Strategic Review

By Paul Taylor in New York

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is to conduct a major review of “strategic opportunities”, including the possibility of outsourcing device manufacturing or a sale of the company.

Thorsten Heins, chief executive of the Canadian smartphone maker, detailed a dramatic fall in sales in the latest quarter but emphasised that a disposal of RIM was “not the main direction we are pursuing”.

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LOL: Obama Budget Defeated 414-0

They don’t call him Zero for nothin’…

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President Obama’s budget was defeated 414-0 in the House late Wednesday, in a vote Republicans arranged to try to embarrass him and shelve his plan for the rest of the year.

The vote came as the House worked its way through its own fiscal year 2013 budget proposal, written by Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan. Republicans wrote an amendment that contained Mr. Obama’s budget and offered it on the floor, daring Democrats to back the plan, which calls for major tax increases and yet still adds trillions of dollars to the deficit over the next decade.

“It’s not a charade. It’s not a gimmick — unless what the president sent us is the same,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a freshman Republican from South Carolina who sponsored Mr. Obama’s proposal for purposes of the debate. “I would encourage the Democrats to embrace this landmark Democrat document and support it. Personally, I will be voting against it.”

But no Democrats accepted the challenge.

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New EPA Rule will Block ALL New Coal-Electric Generation

by

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The upcoming rule:

… will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

Can this stand, after Obama’s big energy-policy tour last week included not a single mention CO2, greenhouse gases, climate or global warming?

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The EPA Wrecking Ball: FUCK YOU and Cheap Energy

This is evil writ large.

Shutting down utilities that use coal, an energy source the U.S. has in such abundance that it could provide electricity for the next hundreds of years, and ensuring that no new ones are built fits in perfectly with all the Green pipedreams about “renewable” energy. Solar and wind presently provide about two percent of the nation’s electricity and, without government subsidies and mandates requiring their use, they would not exist at all.

How stupid is it to not build more nuclear power plants when this form of power doesn’t emit anything but energy?

How stupid is it not to use coal when the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal?

How stupid is it to begin to find reasons to regulate and thwart fracking, the technology to access trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that has been in use for decades?

How stupid is it to cover miles of land, far from any urban center, with hundreds of solar panels or huge, ugly wind turbines that kill thousands of birds every year?

The sun does not shine all the time, nor does the wind blow all the time. In the event of overcast skies or a day without wind, traditional plants—those using coal, gas, nuclear or generating hydroelectric power—have to be maintained as a backup. Take away the coal-fired plants and there were be huge gap in the national grid.

Darkness will descend and Americans will begin to live with blackouts and brownouts that will undermine every aspect of our lives. It’s bad enough when a town or even a city briefly loses power because of a storm, but imagine that occurring on a regular basis because there just aren’t enough utilities generating power!

What kind of people stand by idly while its own government conspires to take away the primary source of energy that everything else depends upon? The answer? You. The answer is the many elected politicians that have done little to rein in a rogue government agency intent on undermining the nation by denying it the ability to generate power with the least expensive source of electricity, coal.

The EPA, an unelected bureaucracy, has just ensured that all Americans, industries, small businesses, and individuals will begin [sic] pay far more for electrical power.

Richard J. Trzupek, the author of “Regulators Run Wild” and an environment policy advisor for The Heartland Institute, said of the new rule, “With around 50,000 megawatts of coal-fired power set to be forcibly retired in the next few years—thanks to the draconian policies of Obama’s EPA—this rule ensures that no new modern, efficient coal fired power plants will be built to fill the gap.”

In a triumph of crony capitalism, Trzupek notes that “The big winner will be Obama’s good friend, GE Chairman Jeff Immelt. Since solar and wind cannot fill a 50,000 megawatt baseload gap, the only way to ensure continued reliability of the grid is to build a lot of natural gas-fired plants quickly. And who is the biggest supplier of natural gas-fired combustion engines? GE of course.”

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