Has blazing a trail in solar energy cost California too much?
May 23, 2012
That ray of light you see peeking through all the clouds darkening California's future? That's the sun. More specifically, solar power, in which California is the hands-down national leader.
-
Facebook shareholders are wedded to the whims of Mark Zuckerberg
May 20, 2012
So, against all odds, you managed to get your hands on a few shares of Facebook stock via one of the most hyped initial public offerings of all time and managed to survive its messy first day of trading.
-
Small investors shut out of Facebook IPO, and that's a good thing
May 16, 2012
If you're a small investor seeking a piece of the Facebook initial public offering, here's the bad news: You're too late and you're too poor.
-
Don't trust JPMorgan chief's spin machine
May 15, 2012
In a rational world, a corporate chairman who presided over a huge unexpected loss would be raked over the coals at his next shareholder meeting and his job would be up for grabs.
-
Google may not be evil, but it's also not trustworthy
May 13, 2012
You've heard all about how banks present a danger to the financial system once they become "too big to fail" (I'm looking at you, JPMorgan Chase). Here's the equivalent question about a much different company: Has Google become too big to trust?
-
Europe's anti-austerity vote offers lessons for U.S. policymakers
May 8, 2012
The European elections have concluded and the results are clear: Voters in France and Greece are a lot smarter than economic policymakers in the United States.
-
Europe's anti-austerity vote offers lessons for U.S. policymakers
May 8, 2012
The European elections have concluded and the results are clear: Voters in France and Greece are a lot smarter than economic policymakers in the United States.
-
Why is safety a divisive issue for Nuclear Regulatory Commission?
April 29, 2012
Reading between the lines, it's probably fair to say that Greg Jaczko may not be someone you'd want to work for.
-
Let's beef up Social Security benefits instead of cutting them
April 25, 2012
Advocates for strengthening Social Security have come to dread the release of the annual report of the program's trustees.
-
Mesothelioma victims deserve better than wasteful legal maneuvers
April 22, 2012
John Johnson died three months ago, his body racked with malignant mesothelioma, a disease that's almost always caused by asbestos exposure. The Marine veteran had sued dozens of companies he believed shared responsibility for his condition, but he never got his day in court.
-
The plot thickens in tax reform theater
April 17, 2012
Our one shared national moment of fiscal soul-searching is behind us for another year — of course I refer to the filing of tax returns — but tax reform theater in Washington, like the melody in the old Irving Berlin song, lingers on.
-
Best Buy can be saved by offering expertise and good service
April 15, 2012
How can Best Buy be saved?
-
Let's bring back the idea of a free UC education
April 11, 2012
The son of a railroad worker, Earl Warren came from a family keeping a desperate finger hold on a working-class existence at the turn of the last century. Yet when he left high school in Bakersfield in 1908, there was no question where he was headed: to Berkeley and a free education at the University of California.
-
Teeing off on Augusta National Golf Club's men-only policy
April 3, 2012
Few institutions revel in the reputation of being a dinosaur like Georgia's Augusta National Golf Club, host of the Masters Tournament.
-
The Dodgers' new chapter won't come cheap
March 31, 2012
The people behind the $2.15-billion bid for the Dodgers haven't been especially forthcoming with details about their plans for the team and Dodger Stadium, but one conclusion is easy to reach: Fans and taxpayers alike will be well advised to keep their eyes on their wallets.
-
Taxation's legality is key to health reform
March 28, 2012
One afternoon in 1934, Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone decided to quietly help Labor Secretary Frances Perkins out of a jam.
-
Book review: 'The Idea Factory' by Jon Gertner
March 25, 2012
For generations of industry research executives, AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories served as an inspiration: a warren of youthful scientists and engineers assigned to go where their intellects took them, not especially concerned about serving the corporate bottom line, picking up cartloads of Nobel Prizes along the way. Bell Labs was the model for, among others, Xerox Corp.'s legendary Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, which spun out the personal computer, Windows-style displays, Ethernet and many other advances that delivered their bounty more to society at large than to the parent company.
-
Are Silicon Valley tech bloggers truly objective?
February 22, 2012
The secret to Silicon Valley's success, we've been told, is its ecosystem: Where else in the world can you find such a large, symbiotic collection of expert visionaries, engineers, marketers, financiers?
-
Mortgage settlement is great — for politicians and banks
February 11, 2012
I hate a parade. And the parade of rosy self-congratulation staged last week by the creators of the $25-billion mortgage fraud settlement with five big banks is the kind of parade I really hate.
-
Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?
February 4, 2012
Something sounded familiar last week when I heard U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski make a huge pitch for infusing digital technology into America's classrooms.
-
Inaction by regulators as weight loss surgery allegations mount
January 22, 2012
Several current or former workers for the people behind those 1-800-GET-THIN ads have made allegations about this weight-loss enterprise that government regulators should have gotten to the bottom of long ago. Taken together, the allegations are that its patients are subjected to life-threatening conditions.
-
Attacks on Social Security, Medicare borrow a strategy from Lenin
January 13, 2012
About the last thing you'd ever expect is for conservatives to draw procedural lessons from the founder of the Soviet state. So it's fascinating to ponder the persistence of an attack on Social Security that was explicitly billed as a "Leninist" strategy three decades ago by analysts at the Heritage Foundation and is still in use today.
-
Presidential campaign needs to get real on salvaging middle class
December 31, 2011
Occupy Wall Street and its coast-to-coast spinoffs captured the headlines in 2011, but the economic debate it helped trigger should reverberate deep into 2012.
-
Lap-Band maker needs to step up
December 16, 2011
Like most big companies, Irvine pharmaceutical giant Allergan Inc. likes to project the image of an upstanding corporate citizen. Indeed, it devotes several pages of its website to its purported good works.
-
It's about time that FDA took action against Lap-Band billboards
December 14, 2011
It has taken almost two years, but government regulators finally woke up to the idea that those 1-800-GET-THIN billboards plastered all over Southland freeways may be dangerous to your health.
-
Corporations need a social conscience
November 6, 2011
American corporations plainly are smarting from the accusation that they've abandoned their sense of social responsibility in pursuit of higher profits.
-
Occupy Wall Street shifts from protest to policy phase
October 12, 2011
How do you know when a protest movement is starting to scare the pants off the establishment?
-
Regional investment bank aims for a reprise
May 18, 2011
Jim Freedman and his partners have been here before.
-
Book review: 'Common as Air' by Lewis Hyde
October 31, 2010
Common as Air
-
Coffeepot maker vents about doing business in California
July 30, 2009
Wilbur D.Curtis invented the globular glass coffeepot, that staple of coffee counters everywhere, in 1940. Since then his son and grandsons have turned Wilbur Curtis Co. into a manufacturing concern that earns revenue approaching $100 million by turning out commercial coffee brewing equipment from a sprawling factory in Montebello.
-
CalPERS appears to be a willing victim
July 27, 2009
Students of the fine art of pointing fingers know that the key thing is to not make yourself look like an idiot in the process.
-
File California tax system revision effort under flawed
July 20, 2009
In these budget-crisis days, when California citizens showing true public spirit are thin on the ground, I propose a tip of the hat to Gerald L. Parsky.
-
It's time to close a big tax loophole for businesses
July 13, 2009
Of all the ways in which California residents have slit their fiscal throats over the last 30 years, surely the most inexplicable is the bestowal of a gaping tax loophole on commercial and industrial property owners.
-
Mercury General using guise of benevolence to assault Prop. 103
July 2, 2009
The art of setting automobile insurance rates is incomprehensible to most of us civilians. Liability coverage, comprehensive insurance, assigned risk pools, discounts, surcharges . . . the list goes on. Just try to figure out how your carrier arrived at the figure at the bottom of your itemized bill -- I know nuclear physicists who can't do that math.
-
A California tax on oil drilling? Why not?
June 15, 2009
The most persistent misconception about Californians is that we hate to raise taxes. The truth is that we adore raising taxes -- as long as someone else is paying, that is.
-
In-N-Out: Can perfection survive?
May 7, 2009
My life as a fast-food consumer pretty much ended the moment my kids became old enough to drive themselves to the nearest hamburger stand.
-
Apple's condition linked to Steve Jobs' health
January 5, 2009
Some important questions can't be asked without sounding crass and insensitive. But there's no way around asking this one that's on everybody's mind, so here goes:
Connect
L.A. for less than the price of sunblock. 
