Bizzy’s AM Coffee Biz-Econ-Life Links (061606)

Free Links:

• More ho-hum job news — “Rolls-Royce Corp. will add 600 jobs to its plant in the city (of Indianapolis) over the next eight years as part of a $145 million expansion, officials said Wednesday.”
• Even more ho-hum job news — “DirecTV, the nation’s largest satellite-TV provider, announced it will add 1,000 jobs as it moves to make Denver the hub of its sales and service support.”
• Still more jobs news — “Medrad Inc.’s second major expansion announced in the last seven months could add 500 jobs at a Butler County (PA) site over the next five years.”
• The jobs just keep on coming — “About 750 jobs will be added at DaimlerChrysler AG’s assembly plant later this year as production will begin on the Dodge Nitro sport utility vehicle, the Chrysler Group said Thursday.”
• Betcha didn’t know this about the wonders of state-run health care in Germany — Disgruntled German doctors have been engaging in what the BBC euphemistically calls “industrial action” (i.e., not working, or not working as much, thereby shortchanging patient care) for three months. Now up to 20,000 doctors are saying they will go on an indefinite strike.
• Something is serious awry here, and somebody had better get a handle on it (HT Hard to Do Any Worse via Techdirt):
  

  Leon County (FL) Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho doesn’t mind letting the state know when he’s testing voting machines, but he doesn’t think the Secretary of State’s office should tell him how - or whether - he can do it.

  Sancho said he will attend a public hearing in the R.A. Gray Building at 1:30 p.m. Monday to discuss a pending rule change. He said the new rule would require a representative of the Department of State to be present whenever a county runs a test on voting machines.

  “I don’t, for the life of me, understand why they want to do something like this,” Sancho said Saturday. “I have no problem with notifying them, but I don’t think I need their approval.”

  The requirement that someone from Florida’s Department of State be there is not unreasonable, but their ability, if they have it, to quash testing is not.

  The two blog links noted something the Tallahassee newspaper report didn’t –

  Last year, Sancho allowed computer security experts to demonstrate in a test election that election results could be altered undetectably. The demonstration sent shock waves across the country and resulted in many states issuing increased security procedures in an attempt to mitigate the security vulnerabilities it revealed.

  This reeks of heavyhanded tactics from the voting machine vendors. As the Techdirt post noted, this could be a disaster waiting to happen:

  No matter what your political leanings may be, it’s a travesty that so few people seem that concerned about making sure election results are accurate — and that so many politicians seem to be going out of their way to make it even harder to make sure those votes are accurately counted.

  As I said last month about establishing controls over electronic voting: “If touch-screen voting can’t be made to accomplish these (control) objectives as well as a paper-based system can, does, and has, it should be abandoned.”

Links Requiring Free Registration:

• More ho-hum housing news — “Climbing interest rates and cooling speculative demand is putting pressure on the housing boom, but as long as jobs continue to be created and builders curb production, the sector will experience a soft landing, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.”
• Another story on blue state to red state migration — Not labeled as such, of course, in The New York Times, but here’s the giveaway quote in the piece: “When the jobs don’t grow, the people go.” It’s apparently so bad that a Democrat, gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer, is proposing $6 billion in tax cuts and $11 billion in spending cuts — which of course leads to the question of where the heck current alleged Republican Governor George Pataki has been all these years while the brain drain was occurring. It also makes me wonder how Mr. Pataki can possibly, as he does, consider himself presidential material.