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Showing posts from September, 2012

Virtual schmirtual — the virtual wallet wars are a bust so far

The Wall Street Journal today reports what those of us who care about these things already know: There isn't a huge, pent-up demand for virtual wallet technology among consumers. Retailers are fired up and ready to go (in some cases, only half-heartedly), but customers aren't taking advantage of this new tech much yet. Or at all. Consumer use of Near field Communication -- NFC, which beams payment information to a credit-card terminal — still looks very much like a novelty in the wild. Every one of the handful of times I've paid with a virtual wallet it has been then first time the cashier has seen it used. I am talking Home Depot, Radio Shack, Duane Reade. It's not scientific, of course, but it is still extraordinary. These are places that do a lot of transactions. Starbucks is a big exception; they pioneered a rudimentary method which involves scanning barcodes stored on your smartphone. This is the same method Apple has now introduced with its foray into the virtua

Master and Commander

The problem with "The Master," The Paul Thomas Anderson film I really disliked, for those who have asked: The protagonist really should be "The Master," the Paul Seymour Hoffman character. But it's not -- the character at the center of this self-indulgent maelstrom is the Joachin Phoenix character, Freddie Quill. This needed some serious script doctoring.

TaxiCab Confessions

It's too easy, of course, to make too much of those pearls you hear from the mouths of babes (the small child variety, please), the mailman or a cab driver. But I think I heard the rationale that older, blue collar white guys will find to vote for Obama, in sufficient numbers. "I just don't believe him," the driver said today, referring to Romney in a rambling discussion about politics and his charges (black-car drivers LOVE to drop names of the people who've been in the back seat). "I don't like Obama either, but we have him ... so you know ..." And there you have it. +John C Abell

TurboTax Romney

Two things I don't get about Romney's self-defense of his tax situation: 1) A rate of 14% is "fair" because the funds being taxed — capital gains — have already been taxed on the corporate level. Huh? Capital gains are on realized profits from the sale of real property. If I buy a share of stock for $10, and I sell it for $15, my capital gain is $5. And if I held that share for more than a year, I am taxed at a rate of 15% on that $5, not an whatever rate my earned income is subject to. But, who paid a tax on the any of this before I did? Or, looked at in reverse: Every dollar is taxed by the person or entity which owned it at one time. My employer pays taxes on the money his company earns, then pays me from what's left over. I pay tax on that, and spend some at the supermarket. The supermarket pays tax, and its employees ... and so on. The fact that someone pays tax on that dollar upstream is as irrelevant as the fact that someone will pay tax on that dol

Marathon Man

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In this age of moral equivalence, your inner bad guy is relentlessly held against you — until I do the same thing. And then I get to say a) I am no worse than you, and b) You did it first. It's a push. So it is that GOP VP candidate Paul Ryan's fact-challenged convention speech is judged on one set of criteria, and his malapropisms on another. On the former, well, he's Romney's running mate, these are the campaign's talking points, and he's just doing his job — reinforcing the message sanctioned by the top half of the ticket. On the latter, well, those are just "Bidenisms." But then in what seemed like a relaxed moment Ryan inexplicably exaggerated his performance in a marathon some 20 years ago. Yes, one's memory does play tricks, but as these things go (especially for a P90X boot camp guy) claiming you ran a sub three-hour marathon when in fact it took you more than four hours (worse than Sarah Palin's PB, but I digress) takes a little