According to new CEO Bracken P Darrell, the "disappointing" results will require immediate action to turn around -- action that includes selling off its remote control (read: Harmony) and digital video security divisions. Harmony remote sales fell off by 55 percent based on units, although a focus on higher end devices like the new Touch meant revenue declined only 24 percent.

Via: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/23/logitech-q3-earnings-selling-harmony-remotes/#comments

Of course they fell off, as Logitech is now putting color screens in each they can find (can anyone tell me why?).

And all retailers are flooded by absolutely crappy shit someone by accident is calling "universal remotes" (retailer can have 250% margin on them :-) ).

As user of two Logitech remotes (one cheap and one their top one) I am really upset.
This guys already fucked their internet radios I like, now it is remotes.

Best Buy - 200 to 250

Kmart - 175 to 225

Sears - 100 to 125

J.C. Penney - 300 to 350

Office Depot - 125 to 150

Barnes & Noble - 190 to 240

Gamestop - 500 to 600

OfficeMax - 150 to 175

RadioShack - 450 to 550

Via: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/eight-retailers-that-will-close-the-most-stores-173320796.html?page=1

Back in 1950, corporate taxes accounted for about 30 percent of all federal revenue. In 2012, corporate taxes accounted for less than 7 percent of all federal revenue.

General Electric

• U.S. Profits: $10,460,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$4,737,000,000

PG&E Corp.

• U.S. Profits: $4,855,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$1,027,000,000

Verizon Communications

• U.S. Profits: $32.518.000.000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$951,000,000

Wells Fargo

• U.S. Profits: $49,370,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$681,000,000

American Electric Power

• U.S. Profits : $5,899,000,000
• Taxes Paid : ‐$545,000,000

Pepco Holdings

• U.S. Profits: $882,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$508,000,000

Computer Sciences

• U.S. Profits: $1,666,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$305,000,000

CenterPoint Energy

• U.S. Profits: $1,931,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$284,000,000

NiSource

• U.S. Profits: $1,385,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$227,000,000

Duke Energy

• U.S. Profits: $5,475,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$216,000,000

Boeing

• U.S. Profits: $9,735,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$178,000,000

NextEra Energy

• U.S. Profits: $6,403,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$139,000,000

Consolidated Edison

• U.S. Profits: $4,263,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$127,000,000

Paccar

• U.S. Profits: $365,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$112,000,000

Integrys Energy Group

• U.S. Profits: $818,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$92,000,000

Wisconsin Energy

• U.S. Profits: $1,725,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$85,000,000

DuPont

• U.S. Profits: $2,124,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$72,000,000

Baxter International

• U.S. Profits: $926,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$66,000,000

Tenet Healthcare

• U.S. Profits: $415,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$48,000,000

Ryder System

• U.S. Profits: $627,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$46,000,000

El Paso

• U.S. Profits: $4,105,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$41,000,000

Honeywell International

• U.S. Profits: $4,903,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$34,000,000

CMS Energy

• U.S. Profits: $1,292,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$29,000,000

Con-­way

• U.S. Profits: $286,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$26,000,000

Navistar International

• U.S. Profits: $896,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$18,000,000

DTE Energy

• U.S. Profits: $2,551,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$17,000,000

Interpublic Group

• U.S. Profits: $571,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$15,000,000

Mattel

• U.S. Profits: $1,020,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$9,000,000

Corning

• U.S. Profits: $1,977,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$4,000,000

FedEx

• U.S. Profits: $4,247,000,000
• Taxes Paid: $37,000,000 (a rate of less than 1%)

Total

• U.S. Profits: $163,691,000,000
• Taxes Paid: ‐$10,602,000,000

Earlier this month, the Facebook Inc. released its first “10-K” annual financial report since going public last year. Hidden in the report’s footnotes is an amazing admission: despite $1.1 billion in U.S. profits in 2012, Facebook did not pay even a dime in federal and state income taxes.

Instead, Facebook says it will receive net tax refunds totaling $429 million.

Via: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/abolish-the-income-tax-you-wont-believe-who-is-getting-away-with-paying-zero-taxes-while-the-middle-class-gets-hammered

Lenovo will continue to destroy all advantages of ThinkPad design.

They do it one by one:

• Making construction cheaper and weaker
• Horrible cheap materials now used for most models
• Rock solid, best notebook keyboards first were made quite flimsy
• Secondly keys were replaced to modern cheap ones
• Famous very good IBM layout had been replaced by one used in cheapest IdeaPads
• Now we can see fully removed TrackPoint buttons because some designer figured out that it'll be cheaper to force you press trackpad.

Btw, Ideapad brand will be destroyed as complete failure. And ThinkPad will be widened to try to sell all their crap.

My IBM 600e looks like something made by alients compared to my modern ThinkPad.

Full report: http://www.resolutionfoundation.org/media/media/downloads/Squeezed_Britain.pdf

According to the International Management Facility Association, 70% of American employees work in open-plan offices.

Workers who share an office take more sick days than those who work in their own closed spaces. A study in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health found that open office setups reported 62% more sick days on average than one-occupant layouts.

CK Mak and YP Lui questioned 259 office workers about the importance of sound, temperature, office layout, air quality and lighting for productivity; they found that sound and temperature mattered the most. The most irritating noises were conversations, ringing phones and machines.

Those over 45 were more sensitive to it, and factors like noise and temperature had a bigger effect on their productivity.

Overhearing conversations in the office is very intrusive and distracting for workers.

People work less well when they move from a personal office to an open-plan layout, according to a longitudinal study carried out by Calgary University.

A survey of 7,000 Dutch workers found that they were absent for 2.5 days a year on average because of complaints about their office environment, most commonly related to temperature.

Via: http://qz.com/85400/moving-to-open-plan-offices-makes-employees-less-productive-less-happy-and-more-likely-to-get-sick/#

The Communication Workers Union (CWU) has balloted around 115,000 of its members for industrial action over issues linked to the sell-off, including pay and pensions.

Officials are confident of a yes vote when the result is announced later today, which would threaten disruption to mail deliveries in the run up to the busy Christmas period.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/437021/Royal-Mail-faces-nationwide-strike

"Heirloom tomatoes don't ship very well because they're softer. And frankly, they're all different shapes and sizes." This makes them more difficult to pack.

There's something else you'll notice as these tomatoes start to get ripe — something central to this story. The part of the tomato near the stem — what's called the shoulder of the fruit — stays green longer.

"I think it is an issue for the consumer," says Rice, "because people do buy with their eyes. And green shoulders also mean it's not entirely ripe or not as soft and tasty there."

Those green shoulders turn out to be more significant than you might think. In this week's issue of the journal Science, scientists report that when they disappeared from modern tomatoes, some of the tomato's taste went with them.

Here's how. Sometime before 1930, somewhere in America, a tomato grower noticed a plant that was producing distinctive fruit. These fruit turned red from stem to tip in a uniform way. They didn't have any of those bothersome green shoulders.

It was a new mutation, and plant breeders saw it as the next big thing.

They called it the "uniform ripening" trait. In 1930, the agricultural experiment station in Fargo, N.D., released a new tomato variety containing this mutation. The variety was called All Red.

Ann Powell, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, says it spread through the entire tomato industry. "It's a little hard to find a variety in modern production that doesn't have it," she says.

Powell is one of the scientists who now has discovered the genetic change responsible for "uniform ripening."

She was studying some genetically engineered tomato plants for another reason when she noticed that one of the added genes resulted in green tomatoes that were really dark green. It struck her as odd. "The leaves were not dark green. It was only the fruit that were dark green," she recalls.

Since this foreign gene had interesting effects on the ripening of fruit, Powell and her colleagues started looking for a similar gene that occurs naturally in tomatoes. They found it — and by coincidence, so did another research team on the other side of the country, at Cornell University.

The researchers discovered that this natural tomato gene, when it works properly, produces those green shoulders on tomatoes. The darker green color comes from the chlorophyll in plant structures called chloroplasts, which is what converts sunlight into sugars for the plant. In fact, those dark green shoulders were making those old tomatoes sweeter and creating more flavor.

The uniform-ripening mutation disabled this gene.

"We find out that, oh my goodness, this is one of the factors that led to the deterioration of flavor in the commercial tomato," says Harry Klee, a professor of horticulture at the University of Florida.

Via: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/28/155917345/how-the-taste-of-tomatoes-went-bad-and-kept-on-going

Via: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-18/power-hogs-targeted-by-france-in-big-brother-legislation.html

Olympus Imaging Corporation has been providing Worldwide warranty for digital cameras and accessories since April 1, 2004, except for some countries and regions.

However, the time has come to stop providing Worldwide warranty because of regulation by laws and differences in the infrastructure of the repair facilities in individual countries.

Please kindly be informed that Worldwide warranty will not be provided with most of our Micro Four Thirds System and compact digital camera products shipped after September of 2014.

The Worldwide warranty card you have, is currently still valid as long as it meets the conditions required for warranty repair. Also, the Worldwide warranty card enclosed with the new products which you purchase from now, is also valid. Local warranty card is valid only in the country where you purchase the product and all repairs undertaken in other countries will be a chargeable service.

http://www.olympus.co.jp/en/support/imsg/digicamera/info/info20140828.cfm

• 1.8GHz Core i5 from tablets options
• 12.85" 2,560 x 1,700 shiny as hell screen
• touch capability to bore your hands
• 4GB of cheapest RAM
• 32Gb or 64Gb of slow cheap SSD
• $1,299 price so everyone can get two
• or $1,449 with LTE

The trucks full of paperwork come every day, turning off a country road north of Pittsburgh and descending through a gateway into the earth. Underground, they stop at a metal door decorated with an American flag.

Behind the door, a room opens up as big as a supermarket, full of five-drawer file cabinets and people in business casual. About 230 feet below the surface, there is easy-listening music playing at somebody’s desk.

This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government — both for where it is and for what it does.

Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.

But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.

The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.

During the past 30 years, administrations have spent more than $100 million trying to automate the old-fashioned process in the mine and make it run at the speed of computers.

They couldn’t.

So now the mine continues to run at the speed of human fingers and feet. That failure imposes costs on federal retirees, who have to wait months for their full benefit checks. And it has imposed costs on the taxpayer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole-of-bureaucracy/

Statistics agency Istat reported Tuesday that Italy's poverty levels had almost doubled since the start of the economic crisis and dashed hopes that the country might have already emerged from its current recession. The national statistics agency said there were 2.4 million Italians living in poverty in 2007, compared to 4.8 million last year.

Istat said almost half of the people living in poverty, 2.3 million, were in southern Italy and over one million of them were minors. It said that 65% of Italian households had cut spending. The agency added that Italy is set to post negative growth again for the third quarter.

http://www.lagazzettadelmezzogiorno.it/english/italian-poverty-levels-double-as-recession-drags-on-no665257

If the five other big energy suppliers follow the lead of SSE and raise their gas and electricity prices by a similar amount, it is predicted that the average dual fuel bill would rocket to just under £1,500 a year from £1,353.

Eon, Scottish Power, EDF Energy, nPower and British Gas are expected to announce their new tariffs shortly.

Last week, SSE said that annual dual fuel bills would go up by an average of 8.2 per cent from mid-November.

Ann Robinson, director of consumer policy at uSwitch, said: "This is dangerously close to the tipping point of £1,500, beyond which 59 percent of households will be going without adequate heating and 36 percent will be forced to turn their heating off entirely ."

Via: http://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/436422/Fuel-hikes-to-push-families-over-edge

Just 13% of Likely U.S. Voters now say the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey for the week ending October 13. That's down from 17% the week before and the lowest finding since the week of October 20-26, 2008, when George W. Bush was still president.

Eighty percent (80%) of voters now think the country is heading down the wrong track, up 17 points from two weeks ago and the highest level of pessimism since the week of August 6-11, 2011. From January 2009 until October 2012, belief that the country was on the wrong track ranged from 55% to 80%, but it tracked in the low 50s from just before Election Day until early December.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/top_stories/right_direction_or_wrong_track

Pentax Ricoh Imaging Company Ltd changes its company name to Ricoh Imaging Company Ltd.

The change will be effective from 1 August 2013. Pentax will be brand for all DSLR, interchangable lens cameras and binoculars. Ricoh is brand for compact cameras and new technological innovations.

More and more good news.

The Court of Justice of the European Union handed down a ruling today that paves the way for levies on anything that can print from a computer. Inkjets, laser printers, multifunction devices, you name it — they’re all in line for a price hike.

The complaint? That printers allow people to reproduce copyright-protected works. That being the case, VG Wort believed that a levy should be collected by the companies that sell printers to compensate rightsholders.

Via: http://www.geek.com/news/computer-and-printers-prices-to-rise-in-eu-because-you-can-print-copywritten-stuff-1560406/

Perfect logic. Im this case, I propose to cut balls for VG Wort guys as they potentially can produce criminal offsprings.

Btw, 30 minute limit in EU is the result of similar mentally challenged guys :-)

On June 13, the Polish government eliminated the 8-hour working day, a right which was won in 1919. The government supposedly is trying to make Poland even more "competitive" for capitalists who want to earn more through exploiting the poor worker protection in the country and the scandalously low wages.

This is a major attack to the working class, smuggled by with little notice of the world press and little protest of the collaborationist unions. Poland is the laboratory for the introduction of the worst neoliberal dismantling of workers rights and the working class lived up to their masters' expectations by keeping at work, begging for crumbs from their masters' hands. If it went so smoothly here, one wonders where they will strike next.

The elimination of the 8 hour day is accomplished by increasing accounting periods for calculating the average amount of hours worked for the whole year and by also introducing flexible working hours. In the past, you had to have a certain resting time between your shifts and if your shifts were moved from day to day, it could be considered outside your normal working time. You would then be entitled to overtime pay. The new rules allow bosses to impose much longer working days, so long as if some other time of the year they cut the hours. For workers in some industries and areas, this could mean long days for all their working time, and a few months of idleness, instead of stable working hours. It is also not clear what rights workers who are hired temporarily (for example for 6 months) would have under this scheme. What is clear is that already for many years, Polish employers openly defy whatever rights workers still have and nobody wants to crack down on them.

Via: http://libcom.org/news/poland-does-away-8-hour-day-15062013

Each day 134 shops, restaurants and bars close in recession-hit Italy, retail association Confesercenti said on Wednesday. Confesercenti, which represents small and medium-sized businesses in the retail and tourism sectors, said 224,000 enterprises had closed their shutters since the start of the global economic crisis in 2008.

"It's a massacre," said Confesercenti President Marco Venturi.

"Every day five green grocers, four butchers, 42 clothes shops, 43 restaurants and 40 bars and catering business close down".

Via: http://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/english/2013/06/19/Crisis-closing-134-retail-outlets-day-Italy_8894597.html

United Kingdom now produces only 40% of the energy it did in 2000.

The document reaffirms the government’s pledge to dismiss 4,000 civil servants by the end of this year and put 25,000 into a mobility scheme, which would see workers receiving a reduced salary for a year ahead of possible redundancy, as part of Greece’s pledge to creditors to dismiss some 180,000 people from the civil service between 2012 and 2016.

A scheme for the evaluation of some 450,000 civil servants is also on the cards. This, along with the induction of 12,500 public sector workers into the mobility scheme by the end of the summer are both “prior actions” that have been demanded by troika envoys ahead of their next inspection of Greece’s economic reform program, scheduled for September.

Via: http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite1_1_18/06/2013_504696

IBM announced the job-cutting effort after releasing disappointing first-quarter results in April. The Armonk, New York-based company posted profit of $3 a share in the period, missing the $3.05 predicted by analysts -- the first earnings shortfall since 2005, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The company is probably cutting 6,000 to 8,000 jobs globally.

http://www.endicottalliance.org/jobcutsreports.php

Good comments about last layoff :-)

The Greek government is set to close down the country’s public broadcaster and re-open it with fewer employees, Kathimerini understands.

Sources said that Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has already taken the decision to pull the plug on the broadcaster in its current form and the government has started drawing up the relevant legislation.

ERT currently employees 2,800 people. It is not clear how many employees will remain but sources indicated it would be a fraction of those in work at the moment.

Greece has to fire 2,000 civil servants by the end of the year and 15,000 by the end of 2014.

The broadcaster runs three nationwide TV channels, as well as a satellite channel aimed at Greek expatriates, a HD channel and a channel of Greek parliamentary affairs. `It also broadcasts four national radio stations.

Via: http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite1_1_11/06/2013_503874

Philadelphia is so broke the city is closing 23 public schools, never mind that it has the cash to build a $400 million prison.

Construction on the penitentiary said to be "the second-most expensive state project ever" began just days after the Pennsylvania School Reform. Facing a $304 million debt, the Commission instead approved a measly $2.4 billion budget that would shut down 23 public schools, wiping out roughly 10% of the city's total.

But it's not like Pennsylvania does not have the money to fill the debt. Rather, PA's GOP-controlled Houseof Representatives recently passed a tax break for corporations that will cost the state an estimated $600 million to $800 million annually.

Via: http://www.alternet.org/education/philly-closes-23-public-schools-generously-builds-400-million-prison-where-kids-can-hang

Sweden's parliament has voted in favor of a law that bans taking pictures and filming in a private environment without first getting permission from people in attendance.

Sweden will ban all photography or videography in the private environment, even when the footage is shot in the street, garden, or for example during birthday parties.

The law, which goes into effect July 1, is needed, since photographs or movies secretly shot in private settings can seriously violate an individual's privacy, and protection has been inadequate, said the Swedish Committee on Justice. Also, technical advances have exacerbated the situation because it is possible to shoot in almost any location, at any time and under any conditions, and then immediately publish the images and videos on the Internet, it said.

The Swedish government wants to use this law to prevent that the private life of its citizens is shared with others through for example internetservices such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.

To break the law, photos or videos have to be shot without permission, and the subjects must be in a private environment or place where the expectation of privacy is obvious.

The punishment will range from a fine to a maximum of two years in prison. Preparing to take intrusive pictures will also be criminalized in some cases, such as when someone installs a hidden camera to secretly photograph or film others. Sweden isn't the only country with such a law -- neighboring countries Denmark and Finland have similar regulations, according to a Q&A published by the Swedish Justice Department.

Most fun moment is - the law doesn't specify what constitutes consent or define a private environment.

Things become better and better. Shot your friend at school and shared accidently on twitter - also criminal.

I think proper next move for Sweden is declaring fucking between man and woman to be criminal and unnatural act. As right now laws are pretty incomplete in this regard, as only woman can declare it such if she no longer loves you after few years.

Zynga today announced that it's laying off 520 employees, with the cuts affecting 18 percent of its workforce around the world. The company is also shuttering offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas as part of what it's calling "substantial cost reductions." These reductions are expected to be complete by August

Via: http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/3/4392370/zynga-fires-520-employees-closes-several-offices-in-hopes-of-saving