Category: Business

Billion Dollar Baseball Teams

The remarkable valuation was apparently placed on the Red Sox — and their cable arm, New England Sports Network — in a transaction earlier this year.

A $9.1 million profit on a $5 million purchase implies a $14.1 million sale. The shares sold amounted to 1.2% of the Sox. By that math, the total value of the club would be $1.2 billion.

The Yankees will surely be worth even more than this if George Steinbrenner’s heirs decide to sell. Forbes magazine puts the value of the Yankees at $1.6 billion. Click on the link below to see how they came up with these numbers.

via How the Red Sox beat the Yankees to a billion Brett Arends’ ROI – MarketWatch.

What’s Really Underneath The Oil Spill?

Among oil industry watchers there has been a great deal of information about the size of the field under the big spill. Respected industry watchers have said that there is good reason to expect that the field extends many miles deep underground and horizontally from the site of the spill.

In the past few years, seismic studies and drilling results from deep beneath the Gulf are leading many informed sources to believe the total oil available under the Gulf of Mexico, in the area around BP’s Macondo well (which was originally expected to have about 50 million barrels of recoverable oil) may contain billions of barrels of oil. It is early to make an informed analysis, but the Macondo well blowout may indicate that these Gulf of Mexico fields, located in deep water about 50 miles offshore and under another 20,000 to 35,000 of rock below the seabed, represent a massive oil discovery.

via Guild Global Market Commentary :: Guild Investment Management, Inc. | MyNewsletterBuilder.

Bernie Madoff BMOC

rom the day Bernard Lawrence Madoff, prisoner No. 61727-054, arrived at the softer of Butner’s two medium-security facilities in handcuffs and shackles, his over-the-collar hair shorn close, his rich man’s paunch diminished, he was a celebrity, even if his admirers were now murderers and sex offenders

“People just kept throwing money at me,” Madoff related to a prison consultant who advised him on how to endure prison life. “Some guy wanted to invest, and if I said no, the guy said, ‘What, I’m not good enough?’ ” One day, Shannon Hay, a drug dealer who lived in the same unit in Butner as Madoff, asked about his crimes. “He told me his side. He took money off of people who were rich and greedy and wanted more,” says Hay, who was released in December. People, in other words, who deserved it.

via An Inside Look at Bernie Madoff’s Life in Prison — New York Magazine.

Suicidal iPad Makers

Ask around among the more than 250,000 workers at the Shenzhen complex, and you’ll find explanations. One 21-year-old assembly-line worker, who asked that his name not be used, says conditions at Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, make his life seem meaningless. He says conversation on the production line is forbidden, bathroom breaks are kept to 10 minutes every two hours, and workers get yelled at frequently. . So far this year, 10 Foxconn workers have committed suicide.

No one disputes that Taipei-based Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai, has cultivated a tough culture. The company generates more revenue in a year than Apple, Dell, or Microsoft (MSFT). It has grown in profitable obscurity to become an industry juggernaut for a simple reason, says Pamela Gordon of Technology Forecasters, a supply-chain research firm: “It’s the prices. Their prices are lower for high-quality work.” Foxconn won Apple’s order to make the iPhone after Gou directed the business units that make components to sell parts at zero profit, according to two people familiar with the chairman’s actions. Net income jumped 37 percent in 2009 to $2.3 billion, Foxconn’s second-best year on record. Foxconn’s suicides are a reminder of the human cost that can come with the low-cost manufacturing U.S. tech companies demand.

via Why Apple and Others Are Nervous About Foxconn – BusinessWeek.

Another Blow To The “Green Revolution”

The “Green Revolution” that lifted millions out of hunger is threatened by a fungus re-appearing in wheat and now the emergence Superweeds.

Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.

Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.

via U.S. Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds – NYTimes.com.

The Post-PC Era

The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone’s trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.

This is why there’s a stench of panic hanging over silicon valley. this is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it’s why everyone is terrified of Google:

via The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash – Charlie’s Diary.

Yoga’s Revolt For Affordability

Our local Library had a free Saturday morning  Yoga class that always overflowed into the hallway. When it was threatened by budget cuts an anonymous donor not only saved the class, but was generous enough that a night class during the week has been added. This article delves into the anti-diva yoga movement…the problem wasn’t with the instructor, but with Mr. Gumucio himself. “You are your own teacher,” Mr. Gumucio said he was told. “You are responsible for your own experience.”

It was a revelatory moment for Mr. Gumucio. If the student was more important than the teacher, why was there such an emphasis placed on the individual instructors?

A second revelation occurred in class when he was struggling to keep his body in a difficult position. “I was sweating, my muscles shaking, in triangle pose, and Bikram was talking about how fast he was as a boy in Calcutta. How he could catch this dog.” The situation was almost more than Mr. Gumucio could bear. “In my mind,” he recalled, “I was thinking ‘What is wrong with you. Stop this stupid story!’ ”

Later, Mr. Choudhury again dismissed his complaints, telling Mr. Gumucio that distractions were everywhere: “Candle, incense, music, easy to meditate!” Mr. Gumucio recalls being told. “Try being calm and peaceful in your car when someone cuts you off.

via Yoga’s New Wave – NYTimes.com.

Those Coveted Black Credit Cards

Take American Express’ Centurion Card, for example. There’s an initiation fee on the Black Card of $5,000 — plus an annual fee of $2,500. Considered the cream of the crop, the top of heap and the most exclusive card in the world, this “Black Card” is by invitation only and has been around since 1999.

“Whenever you take a card that gives points, miles, whatever, the more perks a card offers its cardholders the more [the credit card company] charges the merchant for taking that card,” says Sherry Frankel, president of the Worth Avenue Association and owner of Sherry Frankel’s Melangerie.

The charge for using a Centurion Card can be as high as 4 percent but is determined by the amount of business a merchant does within a year. The average rate charged for using it today is reportedly around 3.75 percent.

via Black credit cards come with cachet, price.

How The French Fry Came To India

INDIA is the third-biggest producer of potatoes in the world. The humble spud finds itself stuffed into flatbread, encrusted in cumin seeds or tucked into pancakes. But the truckloads of large, oblong potatoes that arrive at the McCain Foods plant in the Mehsana district of Gujarat face a more exacting ordeal. Ferried by a conveyor belt and propelled by water, they are sized, steam-peeled, sliced, diced, blanched, dried, fried (for precisely 42 seconds in vegetable oil at 199ºC), chilled, frozen, bagged and then boxed.

The 15kg boxes of fries that emerge at the other end of this pipeline supply the growing chain of McDonald’s restaurants in India. When McDonald’s first entered India in 1996, the food-processing industry was confined largely to ice cream and ketchup. Even importing frozen fries was complicated by the fact that such an exotic item did not appear on India’s schedule of tariffs and quotas. It took McDonald’s roughly six years and $100m to weld a reliable supply chain together.

via Agribusiness in India: Green shoots | The Economist.

Pot Growers Bemoan Legalization

A Shelter Cove, Ca. resident, Anna Hamilton said she is “intimately involved” with the marijuana industry and has seen the market get worse over time due to changing marijuana laws. ”I’ve lived here 20 years and every time there’s been a discussion, an open discussion, about marijuana, it has emboldened people to grow more pot with less fear,” she said. “As it’s become more widely grown, the prices dropped. The effect on our local economy is harsh.”

Hamilton believes it will be “devastating” to the North Coast region — or, what is referred to as the Emerald Triangle — and would displace thousands of people who grow, process and distribute marijuana. ”We have to embrace marijuana tourism, marijuana products and services — and marijuana has to become a part of the Humboldt County brand.

In addition to ballot measures aiming to legalize marijuana for recreational use, a bill for legalization is also being promoted as a way to save the state’s ailing economy.

A 2009 analysis from the State Board of Equalization cites a 2006 report that estimates that California produced $13.6 billion in marijuana in 2006.

via ‘What’s after pot?’ Local businesses, community leaders, marijuana industry reps to meet about a post-pot economy – Times-Standard Online.