February 8, 2010
Nationally syndicated columnist Neal Peirce’s column which appears in the Seattle Times today should be taped on bulletin boards, forwarded in chain emails, become a cause of the week on Facebook and tweeted about throughout the land. He talks about the need for local officials to travel on business and study missions overseas. Money paragraph:
Are we ready to retire the old bugaboo that any American mayor better think twice before visiting a foreign city — that the press back home will pillory him or her for “junketeering”? Read the rest of this entry »
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Logistics and International Trade | Tagged: bugaboo, Neil Peirce, trade missions |
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Posted by samkaplan
February 5, 2010
Frank, in a comment on my previous post, Doubling Down on Exports, asks an excellent question: “is there any way to really achieve Obama’s goals of doubling exports other than a massive devaluation of the dollar?” He anticipated my plan to address the currency issue in more detail in another post, mainly this one.
As I noted in my response to Frank, Obama has specifically mentioned the currency issue in relation to his plan to increase U.S. exports. Earlier this week Obama said, “one of the challenges that we’ve got to address internationally is currency rates and how they match up.” Lots of people are complaining about China keeping the Yuan artificially low. But, we should remember that lots of countries over the last 30 years have been doing the same thing. As if Toyota doesn’t have enough problems, they and Read the rest of this entry »
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Logistics and International Trade | Tagged: currency, Mike Tyson, national export initiative, The Hangover, Yen, Yuan |
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Posted by samkaplan
January 21, 2010
In reading the Seattle Times the other day about the signing of Felix I noticed the sidebar listing the largest Mariner contracts in team history (see list below). I noted that half of them went to international ball players, including the top three of Ichiro (Japan), King Felix (Venezuela) and Adrian Beltre (Dominican Republic). This got me to thinking about how important foreign talent is to our economy. Our companies and institutions are full of talented people from abroad. In Major League Baseball, there is no limit on Read the rest of this entry »
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Higher Education, Logistics and International Trade | Tagged: Felix Hernandez, foreign students, Ichiro, Mariners, Royalty, Seattle Times |
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Posted by samkaplan
January 13, 2010
It’s winter, it’s raining, it’s dark. Playing outside is still a feasible option, but if you prefer to stay warm and dry, then why not choose entertainment that supports one of the region’s fastest growing niche industries: electronic games. If you want to sound more professional, say you’re supporting the “interactive media” industry, which is the same, but refers more inclusively to aerospace and medical applications also being developed in this region, referred to as “serious games” (not that your own Xbox efforts aren’t serious). Read the rest of this entry »
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Business Climate, IT, Social Capital & Quality of Life, Tech Commercialization | Tagged: Interactive Media |
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Posted by Chris Mefford
January 12, 2010
Last week, the Obama Administration announced another big expenditure from the Recovery Act – $2.3 billion in clean technology manufacturing tax credits to not only create jobs but actually spur investment in mass producing clean tech products. How much of that manufacturing will be done here? $0.00.
In fact, the only Washington company that got any money was our good friends at Ramgen, but it was to produce their exciting new carbon capture technology in upstate New York. When you see that, it recalls the conventional wisdom you always hear about our business climate being bad for manufacturing. But is that true? Read the rest of this entry »
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Business Climate, Clean Tech, Life Sciences, Tech Commercialization | Tagged: carbon capture, stimulus money |
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Posted by ericschinfeld
January 8, 2010
So this guy thinks that arts organizations should lower ticket prices and rely more on fundraising:
If we want to keep, not to mention rebuild, our audiences, we need to rethink our ticket prices and to find other ways to balance our budgets. ..we need to work actively and aggressively to increase fund raising revenue (by producing exciting work and marketing that work well) and use a portion of this revenue to lower ticket prices.
I’m not actually sure that lower fundraising revenue is due to not producing exciting enough work or marketing it well enough, but let’s put that aside for a moment, because there’s an interesting analogy to what’s going on in higher education in our state (and others). Read the rest of this entry »
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Arts & Culture, Higher Education | Tagged: Cultural Access Fund, tuition prices |
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Posted by ericschinfeld
January 4, 2010
As promised, I’ve been doing some research on how local jurisdictions are using their Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant dollars. We’ve collected info from 30 of the 41 jurisdictions so far, and the results are very interesting. A wide variety of projects, with about two-thirds of the money going to 1) lighting, HVAC and window upgrades to municipal buildings, public facilities and streetlights; 2) loan, grants & loan loss reserves for residential & commercial retrofits; 3) energy audits to help identify the work for #2; and 4) weatherization of low-income housing.
Check out the list of projects here and the breakdown by category here.
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ARRA, Clean Tech | Tagged: energy efficiency, stimulus money |
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Posted by prosperityblog