Brian Gongol
Theft is not free trade
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is on China's case for keeping its currency artificially weak (thus artificially making its goods cheaper for the rest of the world to buy) and for the apparent national policy of not only tolerating intellectual-property theft but encouraging it outright. Both of these methods of cheating a system of free trade are damaging to American companies and workers who play fair. Nobody wants competition when they're the ones sellig, but we all want it when we're the buyers. But even sellers can tolerate fair and honest competition -- it's the cheating that's unacceptable. Romney's right to make this a campaign issue. It has an enormous impact on the macro-scale forces that have left America with 50 million people below the poverty line and 100 million with low incomes. Unfair competition by a nation with 1.3 billion people puts a whole lot of workers on the global market at sub-market rates. There are many things we can and should do as a society to try to get those 150 million Americans to higher living standards, including job-training programs, public education, and encouraging private-sector investment. But having 1.3 billion people in an artificially low-wage country connected to the global economy isn't helping. Our entire population is their two-digit rounding error.
Christopher Hitchens is dead
Free speech makes people like him necessary. When we agree, we're happy to have him on our side since he tears the other side to pieces. Then he turns on us. He was always polemical, and never entirely fair. But that's what argument is often about...getting the blood boiling a bit. People like Hitchens serve the absolutely necessary role of ensuring that we remember why free speech must remain free -- even for those with whom we disagree.
Income at BlackBerry (RIM) falls by 71% from a year ago
Sales are falling and they're having to take a big hit on discounted products. They sold 14 million smartphones in the third quarter, and that number could drop even more in the fourth quarter. Pressure from Android-based phones and the iPhone is enormous.
Wresting control of the Facebook timeline back from the company
"It must have been neat being America's smartest toddler!" Facebook's revisions to how they display user data are encouraging people to tell an entire life story through the site. But that much information doesn't need to be concentrated on one website. Interestingly, one of the early partners in Facebook is starting a new project, hoping to make a home base for distributing left-wing political content.
Fiscal problems in the EU are building friction between France and the UK
The UK is trying to stay as far outside the problems of the Euro zone as it can, and France seems to resent that avoidance. There are a lot of people who are talking about getting the United States back on a gold standard for the dollar who apparently aren't able to see across the Atlantic, where the UK's relative freedom to adjust its currency is giving it a major advantage over the countries using the Euro. Monetary policy is a very powerful tool that must be used with exceptional caution -- but it's extremely valuable to have, and a gold standard makes it go away. Meanwhile, the managing director of the IMF is begging the nations of the world not to close their economies to one another, since she thinks that would just push us straight into a global depression.
Teen babysitters are being pushed out by adult professionals
Sweden's Twitter account becomes a mouthpiece for the people
The account @sweden, being run by the country's tourism people, is to be "curated" one week at a time by individuals from the country, where they are free to say whatever they want. As a means of making the account more interesting and of building interest: It's genius. As a means of making sure the right message about the country gets out: All bets are off.
Midwest price update: Everything's rising slowly, except gasoline and food
Food prices are up more than most other things over the past year, but gas prices are the category where costs have risen the most
