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SHOW AUDIO:

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Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 9-10 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My engineer is Bob Gartner.

Listen live on the radio or on the internet from anywhere in the world! When the show is live, we take calls at 713-526-5738. (Long distance charges may apply.)

For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

POSSIBLE TOPICS:

SIGNOFF QUOTE: “If you don’t want to hear it on the radio, DON’T DO IT!” ~ Maxine Mesinger (née Maxine Ethel David (December 19, 1925 – January 19, 2001), longtime celebrity gossip columnist for the Houston Chronicle, used this as her standard report sign-off. (Learn more about her here on Wikipedia

TEXAS:

• REGISTER TO VOTE FOR THE GENERAL ELECTION
• Puerto Rico Aims to Appease Congress With New Debt Proposal, NY Times
• When Motorola was getting ready to spin off their TV division, they first renamed it Quasar. They took off the Motorola brand for a year or two. When they sold the division, there was no ambiguity: It was Quasar. Motorola was no longer associated with it by name.
  • QUICKEN HAS BEEN SOLD BY INTUIT to Private Equity Firm H.I.G.Middle Market (of H.I.G. Capital).
  • Intuit Sheds Its PC Roots and Rises as a Cloud Software Company, By VINDU GOEL (NY Times) APRIL 10, 2016
    • Last month, Intuit said goodbye to that heritage and sold Quicken, which still has loyal fans but weak growth prospects, to a private equity
    • Intuit, a Silicon Valley company, is now focusing on its TurboTax software, which tens of millions of Americans use to file their tax returns, and on QuickBooks Online, an Internet-based version of the company’s flagship bookkeeping software
  • Intuit is a classic case of a onetime disrupter being challenged by an upstart with a new approach and a simpler product. In this case, the newcomer is Xero, a New Zealand company that has wooed small businesses and accountants worldwide with a flexible, online accounting system that can be used from a smartphone and can cost as little as $9 a month.This renews one of the questions I asked last week:
  • Keeps the Quicken name.
  • Is it better to buy software of ‘rent’ it?
  • “Renew Office 365 Personal with Microsoft for $69.99 per year”
  • ADOBE: Single APP $19.99/mo,
  • ALL Apps $49.99/mo (The entire collection of 20+ creative desktop and mobile apps including Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC)

• Key Question: Do you trust having all your financial data in the Cloud??

• What do Brand Names mean anymore when we don’t know who really owns them, makes them, stands behind them, or maintains the original quality of the brand name we’re buying?

 

• FROM JERRY: “Just 250 years ago, the human population of the world was less than one billion people, and two Asian countries -India and China-accounted for two -thirds of the world’s economic output, and they are not European.”
  • Quote from the Introduction of the book:  The Origins of the Modern World, Third edition, 2015, by Robert W. Marks
  • This is a popular college text.
• From Jerry: We’re about to see a mind-blowing demographic shift unprecedented in human history, BY Elena Holodny, (Business Insider) Mar. 31, 2016, 10:41 AM
  • within a few years, just before 2020, people ages 65 and over will begin to outnumber children under the age of 5, according to a recent report by the US Census Bureau
  • according to the Census Bureau, by 2050 those ages 65 and up will make up an estimated 15.6% of the global population — more than double that of children ages 5 and under, who will make up an estimated 7.2%.
  • “This unique demographic phenomenon of the ‘crossing’ is unprecedented,” the report’s authors said.
  • There are and will continue to be differences between regions. Europe will remain the oldest region through 2050, with over 25% of Europeans older than 65 at that time, even though the pace of aging will slow.
  • while the percentage of China’s and India’s populations over age 65 may not be as large as that of various European countries or Japan, their overall populations are enormous, meaning that the total number of older people living in China and India will be much larger than the number living in other countries.
  • By comparison, some of the youngest countries will be located in South/Central Asia (Afghanistan), the Middle East (Kuwait, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia) and Southeast Asia (Laos).
     
• China is trying to make a huge industrial shift that could have disastrous consequences, By Christopher Woody and AFP (Business Insider) April 2016
  • … for China, turmoil in the steel and coal industries could have disastrous consequences for the social cohesion that has been needed to support and advance one of the world’s largest economies.
  • major Chinese steel producers lost more than 100 billion yuan ($15.5 billion) last year, an industry association said Thursday, and Beijing has said it will shed 500,000 steel jobs in coming years.
  • The figure is more than the 328,000 people directly employed by steel companies in the entire EU.
  • Reuters has reported that the government intends to lay off 5 million to 6 million state workers over the next two to three years, “as part of efforts to curb industrial overcapacity and pollution.”
  • Chinese leadership has promised that the 1.8 million workers who will be fired from government-run coal and steel firms (others will be laid off from private companies) will be retrained and rehired.
  • But that retraining may be for naught if the economies in China’s industrial regions — the country’s north and northeast in particular — don’t improve.
  • China’s economy grew 6.9% in 2015, the lowest rate in 25 years. Local economies in parts of Heilongjiang, in far northeast China, fell 10% in 2014. Coal prices in those areas have fallen by half since 2011, and the Chinese pullback from coal and heavy industry has left many workers without work and with few prospects.World export prices for steel have fallen more than 70% from an all-time high of $1,113 a metric ton in July 2008 to just $321 last month…
  • By 2014, China was producing some 820 million metric tons a year — about half the world total
  • Thousands of miners had taken to Shuangyashan’s streets in a “a direct challenge to Beijing’s assertion that it is proceeding smoothly with a sweeping plan to cut capacity in industrial sectors and make the economy more efficient,” according to the Associated Press.
  • Previous bouts of unemployment in China have been cushioned by a large agricultural sector to which migrant workers can return, but breakneck urbanisation has swallowed swathes of farmland over the last decade, and Shao said local workers “have no chance of going back to farming.”
  • As You Suspected, Your Parents Absolutely Do Have a Favorite Child, By Tanya Basu [http://nymag.com] March 31, 2016 2:43 p.m.: Even if moms and dads didn’t admit to kids that they liked one child over another, 70 percent of fathers and 74 percent of mothers confessed to researchers that they definitely showered one child with preferential treatment over others.
  • That said, that no matter if you were the oldest, youngest, or somewhere in between, every child had a sneaking suspicion their parents were favoring the others.
• Treasury Dept. tries again to stop companies from giving up U.S. citizenship for lower taxes, By Renae Merle (Washington Post) April 4 at 6:09 PM Follow @renaemerle: The Treasury Department on Monday took aim at U.S. companies moving their headquarters overseas to lower their tax bills, issuing aggressive new rules intended to make such moves less profitable and throwing a potential wrench into Pfizer’s recent merger plans.
  • This is the third round of rules the Obama administration has issued over the last two years to stop the flow so-called inversions, in which U.S. companies are bought by or merge with foreign firms to reduce U.S. corporate tax burdens.
  • The department’s latest batch of rules would make more difficult a practice known as “earnings stripping” that enables companies to lower their taxable U.S. profits. Using this strategy, the U.S. subsidiary of the inverted company can take on a loan from its foreign parent company. The interest payments on that debt can then be deducted from the U.S. company’s taxable income.
  • Currently, in order to escape some of the restrictions that the Treasury Department has put in place to stop inversions, the shareholders of the U.S. company must own less than 60 percent of the combined company. Pfizer’s shareholders own 56 percent of the combined company, for example. But that is in part because Allergen has completed previous inversions that have increased its size.
  • Under the new rules, it may become more difficult for Pfizer to include Allergen’s previous inversions when calculating whether the deal meets the 60 percent threshold.
• US joins military exercises in Philippines to counter China’s buildup, [USA TODAY] 4-4-2016: TOKYO – More than 5,000 U.S., Philippines and Australian troops will take part in the annual Balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) training exercises, which began Monday and run through April 16. Training includes amphibious warfare drills and disaster relief operations.
• Which Retailer Exclusive Version Of ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ On Blu-ray Is The Best?, By Cameron Koch, Tech Times | April 4, 12:17 PM
  • There will be five different home versions of Star Wars: The Force Awakenson launch day, with four of them being retailer exclusive versions that come with various extras. So what does each version come with, and which is the best deal?
• Massive Document Leak Reveals the Hidden Offshore Wealth of the World’s Elite, By Chas Danner [http://nymag.com]: A massive leak [originally published in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung covering 40 years and current as of December 2015] from one of the world’s top offshore services companies has exposed the hidden wealth of the world’s elite, including world leaders, politicians, business people, and celebrities from more than 200 countries.
  • Includes 72 current or former heads of state, “including dictators accused of looting their own countries” like Syrian president Bashar Assad and former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
    • Russian President Vladimir Putin, who the Guardian has linked to some $2 billion in wealth
    • The “Panama Papers” leak, which includes roughly 11.5 million documents comprising nearly 40 years of day-to-day data, came from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth-largest offshore services company and a top creator of the shell companies used by wealthy to hide their assets. Their clients, whose offshore holdings in 21 tax havens have been revealed by the leak, include 12 current and former world leaders and another 128 politicians and public officials from more than 50 countries. The documents demonstrate how Mossack Fonseca has helped its clients launder money, avoid sanctions, and evade taxes — though it’s worth noting that the company denies any wrongdoing and has never been accused of, or charged with, any crimes. Also, as the Guardian points out, not everyone who uses offshore structures is a criminal, though many are, and having or using an offshore company is sometimes a perfectly ethical and logical way to conduct certain types of international business transactions.
    • The leaked “Panama Papers” cover a period over almost 40 years, from 1977 until as recently as last December, and allegedly show that some companies domiciled in tax havens were being used for suspected money laundering, arms and drug deals, and tax avoidance.
    • “Currently we have identified over 800 individual taxpayers and we have now linked over 120 of them to an associate offshore service provider located in Hong Kong,” the Australian tax office said in a statement emailed to Reuters. It did not name the Hong Kong company.
    • Australian tax office probes hundreds for possible tax evasion after Panama leak, Reuters  |  by SYDNEY/WELLINGTON,  April 4, 2016 Last Updated at 08:32 IST (business-standard.com)

  • o   Panama Papers: China Censoring Social Media Posts as Elite Implicated in Offshore Deals [Newsweek] 4-4-2016: Chinese authorities are censoring social media chatter about the Panama Papers after a number of the Chinese elite were implicated in the major document leak that revealed how the rich and powerful are exploiting offshore tax havens.

    • Panama lawyer at center of data leak denounces attack on privacy, Reuters  |  PANAMA CITY  April 4, 2016 Last Updated at 09:04 IST: The head of a Panama-based law firm at the center of a massive leak of offshore financial data on Sunday denied any wrongdoing, and said his firm has fallen victim to “an international campaign against privacy”
  • The Next Step in Animal Welfare? Breed a Better Chicken, by Maryn McKenna, (nationalgeographic.com) March 24, 2016
    • A … program … announced last week by the Global Animal Partnership, a nonprofit that works with farmers and retailers to improve animal welfare, asks chicken farmers to change the breeds of the birds they are raising to a more hardy, slower-growing breed. …
    • So what the new GAP standard asks producers and retailers to do is to switch to broilers that have been bred to grow more slowly and in a more balanced manner: gaining no more than 50 grams of weight per day, which translates to a bird that lives 56-62 days instead of 35-42.
    • To investigate whether the change was feasible, GAP commissioned a working group of major chicken producers… , and involved Whole Foods, which evaluates all its meat purchases using the 5-step GAP scale. “All of our suppliers were interested…’” [said] Theo Weening, Whole Foods’ global meat buyer… “Some of them had long histories in the chicken industry, and they remembered when chickens were slower-growing and had more flavor. So when GAP came up with the standard, I went back to the suppliers, and they said, let’s work together, instead of having one guy make it to the finish line first.”
• What Are Cats Trying to Tell Us? Science Will Explain, By Carrie Arnold [National Geographic] PUBLISHED March 28, 2016
  • Nearly all New York State pet owners talk to their pets like they’re fellow humans, according to a recent poll.  Many believe their dogs and cats can respond with barks or meows that communicate hunger, fear, or simply the need to pee.  But do the animals tawk back in a Brooklyn accent? That’s the sort of thing Swedish cat lover and phonetics researcher Suzanne Schötz is working to find out. After executing this strategy on every government program except the military and corporate welfare, is it now the turn of the Supreme Court?
• Congress and the Supreme Court: “I simply want to reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. … ~ Grover Norquist – Wikiquote https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist
  • Shrinking from 9 to 8 Justices
• The Science of Meow: Study to Look at How Cats Talk: A new project is underway to decode kitty communication—and figure out if cats really like all that baby talk.
• THE TRUMP REPORT
  • Kerry says Republican campaign rhetoric an ‘embarrassment’ to U.S., by Ros Krasny Bloomberg (Salt Lake Tribune) 3-28-2016
• Done by 2100 CE? “Fukushima Keeps Fighting Radioactive Tide 5 Years After Disaster” http://nyti.ms/1QQuxbn 
  • Fukushima is out of the news media but stil very much an ongoing disaster.
  • Filtered water with reduced radioactivity is still being dumped into the sea.
  • Cleanup is estimated to take 50-100 years
• The Republican Party should have disavowed Trump long ago.
  • The biggest joke – except it’s not funny – is the number of Republicans who say that they don’t like what Trump stands for but they’ll support him if he’s the nominee.

 SOURCES WHICH MAY BE RELEVANT TO OTHER DISCUSSION:

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• The dos and don’ts of open carry, By Robert Arnold – Investigative Reporter (click2houston.com) Posted: 9:37 AM, December 31, 2015 Updated: 10:04 AM, December 31, 2015
• TERMINOLOGIES: Words Matter
  • The term “Conservative” is so inaccurate as currently used by the Media, the Media and all of us really need to rethink their classifications and terminology.
  • There are Liberals/Progressives and there are Conservatives. Both of those ae fine and serve a useful purpose in civil opposition to each other.
  • Today’s “Conservatives” are conservative in name only
• How much influence does the media really have over elections? Digging into the data: “My sense is that what we have here is a feedback loop. Does media attention increase a candidate’s standing in the polls? Yes. Does a candidate’s standing in the polls increase media attention? Also yes.”By Jonathan Stray @jonathanstray [www.niemanlab.org] Jan. 11, 2016, 2:49 p.m
• Poll: Whites and Republicans Rank as Angriest Americans, by Andrew Rafferty (Meet the Press) Jan 3 2016, 11:54 am ET
• Obama’s team says the GOP earned Donald Trump: Loyalists say that after two terms of obstruction, Republicans are getting the anger candidate their rhetoric created. By Edward-Isaac Dovere, 12/27/15 (com, 07:45 AM EST) Updated 12/27/16 11:17 AM EST
  • “’It’s not that the country has changed, it’s that a narrow band of mostly white, low- and middle-income Americans are supporting a candidate who is speaking to their anxiety about being left behind in this economy,’ said Bill Burton, a former deputy White House press secretary.”
  • “Blue collar anxiety” is a real thing with real causes. That’s why so-called “Post-industrial Economies” are a fraud perpetrated against semi-skilled workers, and why industry needs to be re-invigorated in this country. We NEED blue collar jobs. Not everyone is cut out for ‘service’ work.
• Houston Toll Road Authority (HTRA) is slowly going all-electronic. What does this mean to you?
  • Rates – Sam Houston Tollway Counter-Clockwise
• Hillary Clinton targets corporate inversion with new ‘exit tax’ plan: Tax is part of Democratic presidential frontrunner’s strategy to ‘rein in Wall Street’ on the heels of Pfizer’s plan to merge with Allergan and move to Ireland. The proposals are part of Clinton’s larger economic agenda, which includes boosting infrastructure spending by $275bn. Photograph: Jose Luis Magana/AP

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