Bizzy’s AM Coffee Biz-Econ-Life Links (072006)

Free Links:

• It appears that Apple is leaning towards $3-$5 video rentals instead of $10-$20 sales over its iTunes platform. If true, I think that’s a very good choice.
• The Wall Street Journal will start having ads on the front page (link currently free, but may require free registration later) of its print edition sometime in September.
• “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same” Dept. — CNet reports that Symantec, which admittedly has more than a little self-interest at stake in this, claims that the networking technology in Microsoft’s new Vista operating system “will be less stable, at least in the short run, than Windows XP’s…”
• I hope no one from the ACLU is reading this:
  

  Family wallops would-be robber, wraps things up for police Wednesday, July 19, 2006

  WEST PALM BEACH — While covering his head amid the barrage of flying fists and feet, his legs bound with a jump-rope by children half his size, a bruised and bloodied Craig Mack had a sudden realization, police say: He’d picked the wrong family to mess with.

  Mack arrived at the Perez family home at 611 28th St. Monday night just as an exhausted Mateo Perez was getting home from a 12-hour day of landscaping and cleaning buildings. Mack probably figured he could swipe Perez’s wallet and get away without much of a fight, police said.

  But he didn’t count on having to brawl with the rest of the Perez clan: Candelaria, the 4-foot-9 housewife with a wicked right hook she honed as a girl on the streets of Guatemala; daughter Imelta, the mellow 13-year-old who never dreamed she would take a chair to a robber’s head and tie him up; and son Juan, the 10-year-old Miami Heat fanatic who traded his basketball for a stick to whip an attacker.

  When Mack attacked Mateo Perez shortly before 10 p.m., the father of five cried out for help from the family he has supported single-handedly since arriving from Guatemala in 1987. Within seconds, they were fighting at his side. About 20 minutes later, police found Mack lying face down in the back yard, his legs bound in jump-rope, Mateo sitting on top of him.

• This is a Boston story about what I think is a nationwide phenomenon –
  

  Fewer entry-level jobs and greater competition from adults and immigrants for the same jobs have driven teen employment to decline over the past five years.

  A survey prepared by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University for The Commonwealth Corporation in Boston reported that the teen employment rate in Massachusetts declined to 32 percent in 2004 from 40 percent in 2000 — and that the decline in teen employment “considerably” exceeded employment declines in any other age group.

  I think the article misses three other factors. One is that many high school extracurricular activities have become so demanding of summer time that the ability to work at the same time is difficult. Another factor is that states have in various subtle ways increased the age at which a teen is actually able to drive on his or her own. A third is that many parents don’t push kids to work during the summer as much as they used to.