Bizzy’s AM Coffee Biz-Econ Links (022406)

Free Links:

• Kevin “Dances with Wolves” Costner, call your office — Every couple of years I see an item similar to this one from The Washington Post, that the “noble savage” image of American Indians is a carefully constructed falsehood. (HT Will Durant in an e-mail). This current piece documents results of archaeological work showing that “Native Americans living in an area where the city of Emeryville (California) is now located hunted several species to local extinction from 600 B.C. to A.D. 1300.” Though it won’t immediately pierce the darkness of Political Correctness on the topic, enough different stories from different times and places documenting the truth eventually will.
• Apple’s iTunes service, which started in April 2003, sold its billionth downloaded song Wednesday evening. At his MacWorld keynote address in January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the audience that iTunes downloads were running at over 3 million a day. That’s over 1 billion songs, and dollars, per year. At that rate the second billionth iTunes song will probably be downloaded before the end of the year. Has there ever been a startup business or business segment that has gone from zero to $1 billion in annual sales in less than 4 years? Jobs also made a good point in his statement celebrating the achievement when he said, certainly aiming at record company executives who are getting greedy about the service, that “Over 1 billion songs have now been legally purchased and downloaded around the globe, representing a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the Internet.”
• Jobless claims fell more than “expected,”, bond prices fell Thursday based on inflation fears. The stock market pulled back a bit too. With the Consumer Price Index excluding food and energy only going up 0.2% as reported earliers this week, I think they’re overreacting.
• The “Nigerian” advance-fee scams just won’t go away (HT Techdirt), because the supply of dupes hasn’t dried up — Another gang that extracted at least $2.4 million, and probably a lot more, was arrested in Amsterdam:
  

  Under the “419″ scam - named after the Nigerian legal code for fraud - criminals send junk e-mail to thousands of unsuspecting people offering them a share in a large fortune if they can only provide a smaller amount of money up front. The criminal takes the money and then disappears.

  “Despite repeated publicity and generally distributed warnings, people still fall for these proposals,” the police statement said.

  So don’t pay the money up front, folks. There’s no free lunch.

• The European Union has decided to impose steep tariffs on most non-sports shoes imported from China and Vietnam (HT EU Rota) — This is a futile exercise in industry protection that will increase the cost of affected shoes roughly 15%-20%.
• A classic example of cherry-picking in business reporting, followed by misdirection — The big news as far as AP was concerned is that average family income fell 2.3% from 2001 to 2004. Ah, but AP downplayed the fact that median family income went up 1.6% in that same period. The logical conclusion from the average and median stats would be that people with above-median incomes saw their incomes go up less than people with below-median incomes. Of course AP didn’t mention that obvious point, because to do so they would have to acknowledge that income inequality actually decreased. Instead, AP did a “clever” misdirection by changing the subject to family net worth, a largely different topic. AP used the net worth stats to make the usual rich-got-richer claim — well of course, sillies, thanks to the boom in real-estate prices, people with more expensive homes saw their wealth go up by more than those in less expensive homes, or those who are renting. AP’s distortions had their desired effect, as the Federal Reserve reports involved were used for political cheap shots by Mr. Bush’s political opposition. Garbage-heap reporting like this explains the need for this blog’s existence.