Closing Vermont Yankee -- This is Nuts

The Vermont Senate voted to close Vermont Yankee, a nuclear plant that has been pumping out base-load kilowatts for 38 years. The 26-4 Senate vote partly reflected anger at lies about tritium leak risks from the plant's owner.
But this plant is the best hope for the state to produce electricity that is in the ballpark of national competitiveness. And even if skepticism about global warming is growing, switching to coal or even natural gas for base-load power seems like a lousy environmental deal.
The track record of safety by nuclear plants in this country is awfully good, overall. The waste storage issue could be solved if the most powerful man in the Senate wasn't in place to block use of Yucca Mountain. Closing Vermont Yankee seems dumb economically and environmentally.

Are soda and candy food? Taxachusetts wonders

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has proposed raising revenue and combating obesity by ceasing to call soda and candy "foods." That would mean they would be subject to the state sales tax, unlike other food items.
Somewhat to my surprise I like this idea.
While I support a large social role for government, I sympathize with low-tax libertarians who are skeptical of excessive regulation. But this tax action seems like just the right direction for government. It isn't banning soda. It's just sending an economic message to consumers that they might want to consider alternatives.
This is a good thing, because the state will never be able to persuade consumers about the hazards of sweetened foods. Advertising by Coke, Pepsi and Hershey's will always overwhelm any anti-obesity message.
However, if this is really about combating obesity, the tax should only apply to sugar-sweetened soda and candy -- not sugar-free alternatives. In fact, I think the state should levy a specific tax -- maybe ten cents per can or candy bar -- on sugar- sweetened soda and candy. Consumers who saw that kind of price differential might well switch to sugar-free gum and diet soda.
The sugar tax should also apply in restaurants and fast-food joints. I bet McDonalds would have more than one flavor of diet soda available if sugared drinks all cost 20 cents more. Gov. Patrick's proposal won't impact fast food sales, since they're already subject to the restaurant tax.
If the sugar tax works, maybe the state could go after other insidious food threats that consumers aren't aware of. I'm thinking of white bread and rolls. If they cost more than whole wheat, rather than less (white bread doesn't spoil as fast, so it's cheaper for restaurants and markets to stock) consumers would gravitate to healthier bread. Who knows? Maybe a whole-wheat roll would even mitigate the health horrors of a Fenway Park hot dog.

Another sign of the newspaper apocalypse

I was walking to the health club at 6 a.m. this morning.
I saw a truck pull up to DeLuca's market, and a man dumped a bundle of newspapers.
It's a Boston Globe truck. Reassuring. The Globe's Here!
But the truck is blanketed with Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice ads.
I slowly processed this.
The Boston Globe is selling ad space on the sides of its delivery trucks.
It isn't promoting the news.
It's promoting corn-syrup-enhanced, pseudo-healthful, processed food products.
Some ad salesman for the Globe found he got a bigger commission by selling space on the side of a delivery truck than he got for selling space in the paper.
This is bad for the newspaper business model.

Ford and the Twitterati

I just came across something about the shift to digital advertising that struck me as unusually alarming for traditional media.
Ford Motor Co. has publicly announced that 25% of its marketing budget is going to digital and social media. That's more than double the 9% car industry norm, according to J.D. Power. Given how much auto-makers spend on marketing, that suggests hundreds of millions more ad dollars could leave TV, newspapers and radio if Ford's strategy pays off.
I learned this from a help-wanted ad from Advertising Age, which wants a Silicon Valley-based social-media reporter so it can serve its readers better. It was reacting to an October story in Business Week's Auto Beat Blog, which I had missed. http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2009/10/ford_spending_2.html
Business Week's report said that Ford is especially excited by a social-media marketing trial it is conducting for the Ford Fiesta, which is sold in Europe and will come to the U.S. this year. It had a contest to let 100 Europeans drive the car and share their experiences. According to Business Week: "Ford isn’t saying what it’s cost on the program is. But it says that (it) has created 11 million social networking impressions; five million engagements on social networks (people sharing and receiving); 11,000 videos have been posted; 15,000 Tweets (not including re-tweets), 13,000 photos." This let Ford build a mailing list of 50,000 people in the U.S., hardly any of them Ford owners, who want to be informed of the launch.
Ford recently has been the smartest of the U.S. car makers. People hoping that ad dollars will soon back to mainstream media better hope Ford's wrong this time.

Is Scott Brown a man with a plan?

Scott Brown is in the Senate. Does he have a strategy? Or is he still bowled over by the fact that he's there?
I don't usually do purely speculative blogs, because at heart I'm a reporter. But I'm fascinated by the possibilities that Scott Brown represents.
By bizarre circumstance, he's the most powerful man in the Senate. He's been wise enough to say that he plans a bi-partisan approach. That plays well here in Massachusetts -- where he'll be running again in two years. But it also means the Republican troglodytes can't completely depend on him, giving him leverage. And the Democrats can believe that they still have a prayer of getting some fraction of their health agenda through. That means that Scott Brown, the most junior Senator in the minority party has real power.
What should Scott Brown do? He should say that he's committed to responsible fiscal policy. He should say he believes in universal health care and cutting health care costs. He should say he won't get bogged down in Republican social issues.
He probably could shape one or two major national policies. I think he should demand at least one major cost-cutting initiative and one health care initiative. For example, require Medicaid and Medicare recipients to agree they won't participate in medical malpractice suits. And require the government to assume health costs for any family that spends more than one sixth of its income on health insurance.
I know Scott Brown wasn't elected to deal with all these problems. Most of his voters just want him to stop government's dramatic expansion and rein in excesses -- whether that's bank bonuses or government deficits.
He doesn't have a mandate, but he's got a temporary and unprecedented power.
It would be cool to see him use it in a positive way.

Lady Gaga and the digital disaster

Last week the WSJ had a fascinating article explaining why Lady Gaga is the new role model for the music industry.
What fascinated me were the stats showing how the music industry is the model for the rest of media in getting hammered by the digital revolution.
Top selling album of 1999 -- Millennium by the Back Street Boys -- 9.4 million copies. Top selling album of 2009: Fearless by Taylor Swift, 3.2 million copies.
Employment in the music industry? "The upheaval of the last decade has forced the major record companies to cut their work force by 60%, according to a recent report by the Recording Industry Association of America." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704094304575029621644867154.html
In a sense, the music industry has done well. Best-seller sales are down 65% and employment is down only 60%. That means the industry has found new revenue sources. But the big picture is horrible. Despite everything the industry did, it is barely one-third the size it was a decade ago.
I suspect that every industry that crosses the digital divide faces a similar fate -- more than half of the jobs and revenues go away. That's happened in photography. It probably happened in the travel agency business. It will happen in Yellow Pages and newspapers and book publishing.
Nobody designs a business plan to cope with that kind of collapse. Neither Harvard Business School nor McKinsey would craft an industry plan around such a scenario.
But, that's what is happening in large swaths of our economy.