Posts Tagged CNNMoney.com
Facebook changes default emails to @facebook.com – Jun. 25, 2012
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Facebook on July 4, 2012
Facebook is trying to hijack your email address
By Julianne Pepitone @CNNMoneyTech
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — If you’re a Facebook user, you have a @facebook.com email address, whether you use it or not. Facebook is now automatically posting those addresses to users’ profiles and displaying them as the default email address.
Cue the backlash. Facebook told CNNMoney the change has been rolling out for “a few weeks,” but many users weren’t aware of it until a spate of blog posts and news articles began drawing attention to it on Monday.
“Speaking of hating your users. Facebook forces everyone onto its email system. Really, Facebook?! Really?!” tweeted freelance tech journalist Ron Miller.
Blogger Gervase Markham, one of the first to draw attention to the change, was scathing in his comments on it.
“Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack,” he wrote, referring to a tactic hackers use to intercept electronic messages. “What on earth do they think they are playing at?”
Facebook (FB) seemed surprised by the reaction.
“We basically defaulted to show your Facebook address as we rolled this out, just to keep it consistent for everyone,” said Meredith Chin, Facebook’s manager of product communications.
She repeated the word “consistent” several times in her attempt to explain Facebook’s rationale for the change.
It’s part of a relatively new “Timeline” profile set-up process that lets users change their privacy settings for each post displayed on their Timeline page. The e-mail move “is similar to that. It’s an additional visibility setting,” she said.
Users can change the setting and show whatever email address they like, but by default, the visible address will be @facebook.com.
The change hasn’t hit all accounts yet, but it will roll out eventually to all of Facebook’s 900 million users, Chin confirmed.
That means many users will start getting email messages at an @facebook.com account they might otherwise never use.
That’s the kind of change Facebook users tend to get very angry about when they’re not warned in advance — and it’s something Facebook has a bad habit of doing. The site is notorious for its “mess up and apologize” approach.
Chin couldn’t elaborate on why Facebook didn’t communicate the email change before it happened.
“We as a company know we’re always under a microscope, but sometimes there are certain things…” Chin said, trailing off. “Well, you plan for everything to be as loud as possible. But sometimes things come up that we need to be better about.”
How to fix it: Users who want to stop the @facebook.com address from showing up on their profiles can do so by editing their “Contact Info” sections.
You have two options for any email addresses associated with your Facebook profile: “shown on Timeline” or “hidden from Timeline.” By default, Facebook is setting your @facebook.com address to be “shown on Timeline” and hiding the rest. To change that, switch your @facebook.com email address to be “hidden from Timeline,” and set a different email to be “shown on Timeline.”
Facebook may “write a post about this, if there continues to be some confusion around it,” Chin said.
But an after-the-fact blog post probably won’t calm angry users, and it certainly won’t staunch the ink that’s been devoted to Facebook’s move — or the philosophy behind it.
Many articles characterized the change as a ham-fisted way for Facebook to push its email system, which it first announced in in late 2010. At that time the company said its goal was to integrate conversations across multiple channels of communication — text messages, Facebook chat, email, etc.
Forbes summed up the conventional wisdom on Monday with a simple headline on its post: “Facebook’s Lame Attempt To Force Its Email Service On You.”
Facebook, of course, doesn’t agree with that assessment.
“I’m seeing this whole meme around the idea that it’s us pushing for people only to use facebook.com addresses,” Chin said. “That was not our intention. We want people to use whatever’s easier for them.”
Facebook changes default emails to @facebook.com – Jun. 25, 2012.
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Sequester decision delay: How Congress is hurting jobs – Jun. 15, 2012
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Congress on June 16, 2012
How Congress is hurting jobs
By Jeanne Sahadi @CNNMoney June 15, 2012
Lawmakers are expected to take their time deciding how to replace the sequester of automatic cuts scheduled for next year. Experts say prolonging the uncertainty will hurt hiring this fall.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Everyone in Congress says they want to help create jobs and economic growth.
But federal agencies and government contractors in the private sector, which actually hire people, may find that ironic. They are still in the dark about future funding levels because lawmakers have not said whether they will replace heavy-handed automatic spending cuts set to take effect next year.
The so-called sequester – which no one in Congress likes but can’t agree on how to replace — would total about $110 billion next year alone. Half the cuts would come from defense and the other half from nondefense spending on domestic programs.
Most don’t expect lawmakers will reach a decision until the lame-duck session of Congress after Election Day, and possibly not until early 2013.
The problem is that prolonging the uncertainty is likely to cause serious hiring slowdowns and possible layoffs, experts and businesses said.
Related: Fiscal cliff likely to cause recession
“If the deleterious consequences … are to be averted it must be done before the lame duck. Indeed, since most elected officials will spend most of the fall campaigning, the [cuts] must be dealt with by September,” according to a recent report from the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Businesses and agencies need to plan for the year ahead, and they simply can’t because they don’t know how many contracts will be funded and how many programs they’ll need to cut back on.
The point is not lost on Democrat Carl Levin, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“[T]hat uncertainty which is created by … the specter of sequestration … is a real threat to this economy. So not only must we avoid sequestration … we must do it in time to avoid a severe weakening to this economy,” he said at a National Press luncheon.
Those in the defense industry say the sequester is already having a chilling effect.
“In the past we’d add head count [in summer] to prepare for new work. This year, we’ll clearly take a more conservative approach until we see what’s going to shake out,” said Samuel Strickland, CFO of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH, Fortune 500) during a recent investor call.
At Lockheed Martin (LMT, Fortune 500), the largest U.S. defense contractor, the story is similar. “We are already taking action by not hiringand training new workers, not investing in new plants and equipment and not investing in new R&D,” said company chairman and CEO Robert Stevens during a Senate caucus lunch in March.
But Stevens also warned that if he doesn’t get clarity soon, he may be forced to issue notice this fall of possible layoffs in 2013. The federal WARN Act requires businesses with more than 100 employees to notify workers at least 60 days in advance of a mass layoff or plant closing.
Boehner’s ‘line in the sand’ on debt
Since the sequester takes effect Jan. 2, 2013, the WARN Act requirement could mean layoff notices come out a few days before the Nov. 6 election.
But layoff notices are likely to be a measure of last resort for both federal agencies and private sector contractors, said government contracts expert Dan Gordon, who used to run the White House Office of Procurement.
Instead, he said he is expecting “a dramatic slowdown in hiring” this fall.
“It’s very slow and expensive to cut back on the government’s commitment under an existing contract. For both [federal agencies and private contractors] it’s always easier to stop hiring than to lay off existing employees,” Gordon noted.
Related – Fiscal cliff: Market sting may come sooner
He also expects federal agencies over the next seven months to be very reluctant to enter into new commitments with contractors, even though government has become more heavily reliant on contractors to do everything from guarding office buildings to running IT departments.
“Why make a commitment that might end up being costly to you?” said Joseph Minarik, senior vice president of the Committee for Economic Development.
Like Gordon, he believes hiring freezes are the greatest risk on the jobs front this fall.
But more than anything, Minarik said, for everyone in the public and the private sector “all the time being spent on planning for this situation is pure economic waste.”
Sequester decision delay: How Congress is hurting jobs – Jun. 15, 2012.
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Defense spending to spike by $2.1 trillion under Romney – May. 10, 2012
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Economy, Perspective, Politics on May 12, 2012
Defense spending to spike $2.1 trillion under Romney
By Charles Riley @CNNMoney May 10, 2012
Mitt Romney wants to spend more on ships, planes and troops.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Mitt Romney is campaigning on a platform that emphasizes less spending, smaller deficits and renewed fiscal responsibility.
But in one budget area, Romney is running the opposite direction. The former Massachusetts governor wants to increase defense spending by leaps and bounds. By one estimate, additional spending would exceed $2 trillion over the next decade.
Romney’s plan calls for linking the Pentagon’s base budget to Gross Domestic Product, and allowing the military to spend at least $4 dollars out of every $100 the American economy produces.
With the Pentagon’s base budget — which does not include war costs — forecast to hit 3.5% of GDP in 2013, a jump to 4% would mean an increase of around $100 billion dollars in defense spending in 2013.
The additional spending really piles up in future years.
Compared to the Pentagon’s current budget, Romney’s plan would lead to $2.1 trillion in additional spending over the next ten years, according to an analysis conducted for CNNMoney by Travis Sharp, a budget expert at the Center for a New American Security.
And that number assumes a gradual increase to 4% of GDP. The additional spending would hit $2.3 trillion over a decade if the Pentagon’s budget were to immediately jump to 4% of GDP.
Sharp said the United States could certainly ramp up spending to meet Romney’s target. But the bigger question, he said, is whether the investment would be worth the cost.
“Romney’s plan might reduce military risk in some areas,” Sharp said. “But you can never eliminate all the risk — no matter how much you spend.”
Romney appears willing to foot the bill. “This will not be a cost-free process,” his campaign website says. “We cannot rebuild our military strength without paying for it.”
The fiscal picture
Romney’s plan to spend more at the Pentagon adds yet another layer of complexity to a set of proposals that would remake the fiscal landscape.
Romney has proposed a slew of tax cuts, and plans to cap federal spending at 20% of GDP. But in both cases, the Romney campaign hasn’t fully explained how those provisions will be paid for.
The lack of detail means that Romney’s claim of moving toward a balanced budget requires a great deal of trust.
Defense spending: Slaying the sacred cow
“Romney has listed a few specific cuts he would make in discretionary spending, but they are a fraction of the extra defense spending he proposes,” said Jeffrey Vanke, a senior policy analyst at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Other budget experts expressed similar concerns about Romney’s proposal, including Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who said the plan for additional spending does not “reflect fiscal reality.”
4% for Freedom
The 4% idea is not a new one. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen have endorsed the idea. And conservatives have occasionally used the slogan “4% for Freedom.”
But some analysts questioned the wisdom of tying military spending to economic production.
“GDP rises and falls. Do you really want your defense budget falling in a recession?” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“Spending should be determined by the security environment — not the size of your economy,” he suggested.
Asked if the military needs to spend 4% of GDP, Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who advocates for lower military spending, said “of course not.”
“These artificial ways to decide the defense budget make no sense,” Korb said. “And if you pursue this, how are you going to balance the budget?”
Politics of defense budgeting
On the campaign trail, Romney frequently says that the Navy has fewer ships now than in 1917, and that the Air Force is smaller than any time since 1947. The additional funding would provide funds to bolster the fleets, Romney says.
The anecdote is largely dismissed by military experts as irrelevant, since today’s Navy and Air Force are the most advanced and versatile on the planet. Non-partisan fact checkers have looked on the claim, and its associated insinuations, with scorn.
The $1 million soldier: What’s wrong with how we budget war
But Romney is not alone in his desire to spend more on the military. In Congress, the Republican nominee is likely to find many allies, especially conservative lawmakers from districts with military installations.
But with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, there is an emerging coalition of liberal Democrats and Tea Party Republicans who have other priorities.
A Romney campaign official told CNNMoney that “reversing Obama-era defense cuts” is the “first step toward the 4 percent GDP benchmark.”
It’s true that Obama policies have slowed the rate of growth at the Pentagon. But spending on defense is still projected to grow over the next half decade.
“The Pentagon is in no danger of losing its pre-eminence under the current budget plan,” Sharp said. “Romney’s plan would make the military even more pre-eminent, but you can never eliminate all the risk no matter how much you spend.”
Defense spending to spike by $2.1 trillion under Romney – May. 10, 2012.
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Why Verizon Doesn’t Want You to Buy an iPhone | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Business on May 5, 2012
Why Verizon Doesn’t Want You to Buy an iPhone
May 4, 2012
A pretty hot story is going around, stoked by CNNMoney, that Verizon Wireless sales reps are steering customers away from Apple’s iPhones in favor of 4G LTE-enabled Android devices. I absolutely believe this, Verizon’s official denials notwithstanding.
This has nothing to do with the Apple/Android war. It has little to do with the huge subsidies paid on Apple products, little to do with Apple’s power in the market, and little to do with how much Android manufacturers kowtow to Verizon. Maybe those are minor factors, but they aren’t the primary reason.
Verizon Needs LTE Subscribers
Here’s the problem: Verizon has spent millions of dollars rolling out its massive LTE network to cover 200 million people so far. You could call it billions, if you include the $5 billion spent on the C Block 700-Mhz spectrum licenses. But according to its first-quarter earnings presentation it’s only been able to convert 9.1 percent of its 93 million users to LTE.
Moving over “Internet device” customers on USB modems and iPads won’t help, because according to Verizon’s most recent quarterly report, that’s only 8 percent of the carrier’s postpaid subscriber base. Verizon needs to convert smartphone users, and 72 percent of its postpaid phone sales were smartphones, according to its earnings release.
Verizon customers’ data demands are growing, because more and more are choosing smartphones. But the carrier can’t easily add capacity on its old 3G network. We’ve seen average speeds on the Verizon 3G network creeping down for a while; we got average download speeds of 1.01Mbps in our Fastest Mobile Networks 2010 feature, but the carrier dropped to 700kbps in Fastest Mobile Networks 2011.
The carrier has done a very good job of preventing network crowding from ending up with blocked calls and dropped connections, but it still has a crowded network using a base technology (EVDO) that is slower than AT&T and T-Mobile’s HSPA.
The 4G LTE network, on the other hand, is blazingly fast and has tons of capacity right now. It isn’t overcrowded. There’s plenty of room. And every 4G phone can fall back to 3G just in case.
You Can’t Move an iPhone Customer to 4G
From Verizon’s position, the solution looks simple: move heavy data users in crowded urban areas from 3G to 4G as fast as possible. That would help everyone. The new 4G users get much faster connections, and the 3G users would see better speeds and network quality, too, as that network becomes less crowded.
There’s only one problem. The iPhone isn’t a 4G phone. And according to Verizon CFO Fran Shammo, the carrier sold more iPhones over the last quarter (3.2 million) than it did LTE devices (2.9 million). That means more than half of Verizon’s smartphone buyers are crowding onto the already busy 3G network, while the 4G network has plenty of space.
So you see why Verizon has a strong reason to push buyers away from the iPhone. The iPhone is a great device. But it’s making a crowded network more crowded. Until the LTE iPhone comes along, to rebalance its network, Verizon may quietly push Android phones.
Why Verizon Doesn’t Want You to Buy an iPhone | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.
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Postal Service chief, at hearing: Retirement packages coming – Mar. 27, 2012
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Finance, Government, Jobs on March 28, 2012
Why your mailman could be retiring
By Jennifer Liberto @CNNMoney March 27, 2012: 2:53 PM ET
U.S. Postal Service intends to offer incentive packages to woo eligible postal workers to retire.
WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said Tuesday that incentives will be offered to woo some of the 150,000 eligible employees to retire.
“We’re going to offer incentives as we move from six to five day delivery,” Donahoe told a House hearing on Tuesday. “It’s critical to move the head count down.”
Mass retirement is key to U.S. Postal Service plans to stem its financial bleeding. As the service moves forward on plans to close 223 postal plants, which could mean the loss of 35,000 jobs, it hopes to ease the pain with retirement packages to those who qualify.
More than one out of every four career employees is now able to retire, Donahoe said, and another 100,000 reach retirement eligibility in the next five years.
Donahoe said at the hearing he’d like to winnow down the number of career employees to about 400,000 from a headcount that numbers 551,570, according to the agency.
The recession, declining volume in the type of mail that most Americans use and a congressional mandate to prefund retirement health care benefits have put the service in a bind. The service reported a $5.1 billion loss for the year ended Sept. 30.
The U.S. Postal Service is, by law, an “independent establishment” of the executive branch. The agency doesn’t normally use tax dollars for operations, but it has a $12.1 billion loan from Treasury, as of Jan. 31.
U.S. Postal Service officials have not said how generous the retirement packages would be.
A Senate bill to save the Postal Service would tap an overpayment in the Federal Employees Retirement System to fund some $1 to $2 billion in retirement incentives. The Senate was supposed to start debating the bill this week.
In the bill, the Postal Service could offer buyouts of up to $25,000 or, if an employee is nearing the 30-year threshold for full retirement benefits, as much as two years of service.
House Republicans on the Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee urged Donahoe to “right size” the Postal Service’s work force more quickly.
“The U.S. Postal Service continues to inadequately respond to Americans’ transition to digital communication and the related decline in first-class mail volume, in large part due to an over-sized workforce whose labor costs account for approximately 80% of the Postal Service’s operating expenses,” said Rep. Dennis Ross, a Florida Republican who heads the panel, in his opening statement.
But Democrats on the panel praised the Postal Service for working with unions, urging it to focus on attrition and avoid layoffs.
Donahoe also talked about the Postal Service plan to move employees off the federal health care plan by offering a new company plan. He said the Postal Service would contract with an insurer such as Blue Cross Blue Shield or UnitedHealth (UNH, Fortune 500) to provide health care.
Donahoe said officials have “tested” the idea, and believe they can provide employee health care at a cost that’s $7 billion cheaper a year than the federal government charges.
Postal Service chief, at hearing: Retirement packages coming – Mar. 27, 2012.
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