Bizzy’s AM Coffee Biz-Econ-Life Links (042606)

Free Links

• In Your Dreams — Philips thinks it’s going to make you use a TV remote that will keep you from changing channels during commercial breaks. Doubtful: first they’ll have to convince people to use that kind of remote. Ain’t, gonna, happen.
• Yeah, it’s Monday morning quarterbacking, but John Dvorak makes pretty good arguments when he say that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and its coupling with Windows “is perhaps the biggest, most costly gaffe ….. the company ever made.”
• No quaking in fear has been noted in Silicon Valley as a result of this — The French want to establish a search engine as popular as Google with (of course) government venture funding.
• As Wal-Mart tries to get permission to run a bank, it gets more obvious that the company is being singled out –
  

  Because of a record response - 2,900 letters - to the application from consumer groups, unions and banks, the FDIC chose to hold public hearings, the first in the 73-year-old institution’s history.

  Community bankers are furious because the request challenges the “mixing” of banking and commerce, although a number of non-financial institutions, such Target Corp., already have industrial loan corporations (ILC) for the purpose of decreasing their transaction costs.

  “It’s not an argument,” said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman Gail Lavielle. “Sixty other non-financial institutions do this. Opening an ILC means the company can cut its costs and sponsor its debit card transactions.”

Subscription Links — Three unpleasant pieces of info I saw in articles in Investment News (links not available without subscription, and therefore not provided):

• “A new survey of 910 registered voters shows that 57% of Americans wanted to keep the estate tax - often dubbed the ‘death tax’ - as is rather than reform it. Just 23% said they favored repealing the tax.” People, the money has been taxed at least twice, if not more.
• “A pair of recent studies confirmed that Americans, described as woefully overconfident and underprepared, are clueless about retirement…. The studies show that nearly half of Americans are counting on Social Security and pensions to support their retirements, but nearly one in four Americans haven’t begun to save for retirement.”
• When it comes to retirement planning, many workers also appeared to be counting on employer-provided benefits that increasingly are unavailable. Just 40% of workers surveyed said they or their spouse had a defined benefit plan, yet nearly two-thirds (61%) said they expected to receive income from such a plan in retirement.