The Richter Scales celebrate capitalism Silicon Valley-style in this 2:45 music video

Hat tip to Dominique Poirier.

The Telegraph:

Few hotels can offer their guests a view that boasts a sunrise 18 times in a day, but a new space tourism company is promising just that by building the first hotel in space.

Galactic Suite, a private space tourism company, is planning to build a three-bedroom hotel using pods joined together in orbit. They hope to be open for business by 2012.

But tickets for a trip aboard the Galactic Suite will not be cheap, with a three-day stay costing about £2 million.

For that price, the company claims it will train customers for their space flight on a tropical island before flying them to the hotel. Once there, they will be able to enjoy spectacular views of the Earth and experience life in zero gravity. The hotel is expected to make a complete orbit of the Earth every 80 minutes, so in 24 hours the sun will rise and set behind our planet 18 times.

Xavier Claramunt, a director with the Barcelona-based company, says they have already achieved substantial financial backing for the £3 billion project from a wealthy space enthusiast and a series of other companies.

Hershey, Nestle and some other big companies are up to no good.

Would chocolate containing trans fats and sugar substitutes taste as sweet as the real thing? Hershey Co. and other candy-makers say yes.

The Chocolate Manufacturers Association, whose members include Hershey, Nestle SA and Archer Daniels Midland Co., has a petition before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to redefine what constitutes chocolate.

They want to make it without the required ingredients of cocoa butter and cocoa solids, using instead artificial sweeteners, milk substitutes, and vegetable fats such as hydrogenated and trans fats.

“They are trying to pull one over on us,” said Cybele May, 40, publisher of CandyBlog, on which she has encouraged more than 200 people to write the FDA to protest what she calls “mockolate.” “What they are asking for is permission to confuse the consumer for what we readily accept as chocolate,” she said. …

A pound of chocolate contains roughly 25 percent cocoa butter at a cost of $2.30, while vegetable oils are as little as 70 cents a pound.

Your office could use one of these.

3:42 video

As a much-predicted democrat electoral victory looms, Glenn Reynolds discovers a response by businesses and the media to new priorities is already underway.

Caution: foul language.

video

Lawrence Kudlow points out that Bush’s tax cuts have worked as promised.

Did you know that just over the past 11 quarters, dating back to the June 2003 Bush tax cuts, America has increased the size of its entire economy by 20 percent? In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy, and much larger than the total economic size of nations like India, Mexico, Ireland, and Belgium.

This is an extraordinary fact, although you may be reading it here first. Most in the mainstream media would rather tout the faults of American capitalism than sing its praises. And of course, the media will almost always discuss supply-side tax cuts in negative terms, such as big budget deficits and static revenue losses. But here’s another suppressed fact: Since the 2003 tax cuts, tax-revenue collections from the expanding economy have been surging at double-digit rates while the deficit is constantly being revised downward.

For those who bother to look, the economic power of lower-tax-rate incentives is once again working its magic. While most reporters obsess about a mild slowdown in housing, the big-bang story is a high-sizzle pick-up in private business investment, which is directly traceable to Bush’s tax reform.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
–Adam Smith

Brian Carney interviews Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster in the Weekend Wall Street Journal, and finds a man operating a sensationally successful business operation based on an atypical, casting one’s bread upon the waters, model of customer service.

I put the question to Mr. Buckmaster: Google has turned unobtrusive text ads into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. And posting a Google-type ad or two next to its search results wouldn’t cost Craigslist users one thin dime. So why not cash in?

“In the big Internet boom, thousands of companies were set up,” explains Mr. Buckmaster, who also counts himself as CFO and COO of the company. “With the exception of us, pretty much all of them were set up with the primary objective being to make a lot of money.” And yet, he continues, “Almost all of those businesses went under and never made any money. Even businesses like Amazon still haven’t made any money. They are still, over their entire lifetime, net negative. Here we are, we’ve been in the black since 1999 — six or seven years.”…

Mr. Buckmaster figures that Craigslist employs 21 people, and starts to count them on his fingers. It never brought in venture capitalists with their grand designs and exit strategies. “We didn’t want to have those voices at the table,” he says. So Craigslist has remained beholden to no one — except, as Mr. Buckmaster constantly intones, its “users,” who pay nothing for the privilege of posting or searching the millions of pages of apartment listings, moving sales and personal ads that make up the Craigslist ecosystem. “If it’s not something that users are asking for,” he says, “we don’t consider it.” The money that does come in comes from businesses posting in just two categories of classifieds in three cities — job listings in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and, this week for the first time, brokered apartment rentals in New York…

We’re much more comfortable charging companies than charging individuals,” Mr. Buckmaster says. “Businesses are better equipped to afford a small fee and businesses can pay for fees out of pre-tax dollars where on average users are less able to pay a fee and they have to pay in post-tax dollars.” Giving users something free and denying money to the government at the same time? This man is no commie. What’s more, he runs a lean outfit. “There are big advantages to focusing exclusively on user wants and needs as we do, and blocking out everything else. That’s one of the ways we keep our staff small and our operations simple.”

As for the banner ads, “It’s not something our users have asked us for,” Mr. Buckmaster deadpans, his 6-foot-8-inch frame slumped in a leather chair in his living room and his eyes fixed on some distant point out the window. It turns out this is something of a mantra for Mr. Buckmaster; what Craigslist’s users want, they tend to get. No more and no less…

When asked whether there’s a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: “It’s unrealistic to say, but — imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?”

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. “Now, there’s something wrong in the reasoning there,” he admits. “You can’t run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company” — more points for understatement. “But still, it’s a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible.” As an end-user, I suppose I do, too.

Buckmaster’s approach to capitalism as an exercise in serendipity clearly works for Craigslist. It could be argued that this sort of business model in which adversarial friction is minimized, and the delivery of value is maximixed, is closer to the original free market ideal than today’s more commonly encountered vastly regimented and hierarchical bean-counting organizations.

Byron York on NR’s The Corner posts an ECONOMICS QUIZ:

Q: Was U.S. economic growth higher during the time John Snow was Treasury Secretary, or during the time Robert Rubin was Treasury Secretary?

A: It was the same, 3.8 percent.

Time, Inc. yesterday launched a long-awaited humor web-site aimed at young men. The web site is called Office Pirates. (What is this Gen Y thing about pirates anyway?)

One video featuring an older boss who can’t cope with email was kind of fun. Leland Wire

We live in a country whose citizens contentedly surrender nail clippers and Swiss Army knives to board an airplane, and accept as standard operating procedure body searches of white-haired grannies in the name of flight security. Could anyone have predicted that the sale of Britain’s Peninsular & Orient Steam Navigation Company to Dubai Ports World giving authority over terminals in ports in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia to an Islamic-controlled company might produce alarm?

The democrats astutely recognize an opportunity to score off the Bush Administration again, and even ultra-liberals like Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer are leaping aboard a rapidly accelerating juggernaut of opposition to the commercial surrender of US ports to the paynim.

But suppose the administration had played it the other way. Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, holds a press conference denouncing the sale, and calls for Congressional action to overturn the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) rubberstamp approval of the British sale. The next day’s editorials in the Times and Washington Post denounce the anti-Islamic bigotry of the Bush Administration, noting that Dubai is, in fact, a US ally in the War on Terror, that the port terminals were previously foreign-owned, and that the only other bidder was a Singapore company. Democrat leaders in Congress attack the administration in press conferences held at mosques.

By acquiescing compliantly to the deal, Rove has put Crusading fire into the democrat opposition’s belly, and persuaded prominent leaders of the Congressional left to march in Michelle Malkin’s parade.

Any day now, Karl is going to get Bush to announce his intention to outlaw coercive interrogations of Islamic terrorists, and we are going to see Hillary Clinton acting like Jack Bauer, promising personally to make every single one of the rascals talk.

Samuel F.B. Morse – Yale Class of 1810

The Globe and Mail reports:

WASHINGTON — Word came, ironically enough, in an announcement over Western Union’s website.

Last Friday, 162 years after Samuel Morse sent out his first message over a telegraph line, the legendary U.S. company quietly ended its telegram service in the United States, citing a decline in business that began in the 1920s and hasn’t let up since. “We regret any inconvenience this may cause you and we thank you for your loyal patronage,” the company said.

In the peak year of 1929, when Western Union still operated what has been called “the nervous system of American business,” the company handled 200 million telegrams.

Last year, faced with competition from phone calls, faxes, e-mails and cellphone text messages, it handled barely 20,000. Most of its multibillion-dollar business now comes from money transfers.