• The problem with the apps is that they are much more directly cannibalistic of the print products than the website. People interact with it much more like they do with the traditional product.
• News Corp. Europe and Asia head (and Rupert’s kid) James Murdoch • Explaining why mobile apps are a danger to his company’s business model. Sorry James, but if you don’t like it, deal with it. The two papers that you’ve put behind paywalls so far have lost most of their readership, so clearly you understand your market. Oh, who are we kidding? You have no clue about the online or mobile spaces. source

• Nothing more to add to this, really. Good luck guys. source

• Want some crap from Wal-Mart? Well, based on what it is, you might be able to get it shipped for free over the holidays. This is a big change that could potentially give the retailer a huge leg-up on its competitors. The deal, which runs through December 20, includes giant flat-screen TVs, computers and other electronics. However, it doesn’t include furniture, toys, home appliances, some video games, baby crap (go to Diapers.com), jewelry, iPhones or iPads … wait. No iPhones or iPads? Not interested. Screw you, Wal-Mart. source

• bad Some guy decides publishing an e-book called “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure” is a good idea. (It wasn’t, guys.)
• worse TechCrunch notices the instant classic, creating a huge firestorm and leading to thousands of one-star “reviews” on the book’s Amazon page.
• worser Amazon initially keeps the book online for “free speech” reasons, before finally taking it down after it reached the Top 100 in book sales. source

• $2 billion in profits for GM in the third quarter alone (*golf clap*)

Three reasons why this is good news:

• one It’s shaping up to be their first profitable year since 2004 – long before we heard anything about auto industry bailouts.
• two Most of the profits came from North America, where the company has been fairly weak in recent years. (Too many SUVs.)
• three GM has an IPO coming very soon, and a solid performance like this bodes well for their return to stocks. source

• This is a fairly straightforward case under the National Labor Relations Act — whether it takes place on Facebook or at the water cooler, it was employees talking jointly about working conditions, in this case about their supervisor, and they have a right to do that.
• National Labor Relations Board acting general counsel Lafe Solomon • Explaining why they stepped in after an employee at American Medical Response of Connecticut, an ambulance service, was fired for criticizing her employer on Facebook. (She was upset that she wasn’t allowed counsel with her union, the Teamsters, and ended up ripping on her supervisor.) It’s the first time that a worker has been defended by the board specifically for Facebook-related reasons. While American Medical Response denies the allegations and claims they’re without merit, at least one powerful law firm sent an alert out to its corporate clients informing them that this could be a big problem for them – especially if their workers have unions. source

• Oracle’s Larry Ellison really dislikes HP, apparently. First, he swiped their former chief executive, who was not only good at his job, but was removed for fairly questionable reasons. (HP didn’t like that, by the way.) Now, Ellison’s company has their sights set on their new CEO, Leo Apotheker, the weirdly hired former SAP CEO. See, a subsidiary of SAP, TomorrowNow, reportedly engaged in software theft from Oracle. Oracle thinks SAP owes them billions of dollars; SAP claims it’s closer to tens of millions. Either way, Oracle has hired a private investigator to find Apotheker after HP would not accept Oracle’s subpoena for Apotheker to testify in court about the case (and Apotheker skipped an earlier trial). In other news, Silicon Valley business is pretty cutthroat. (Above: Artist’s depiction of what we think the private investigator looks like.) source

• Call it cause and side effect. The Federal Reserve, concerned about the slow domestic economic recovery, recently announced that they were going to shove $600 billion into circulation, a risky move that could help the economy recover – or put us on the way to Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation. (OK, maybe not that bad.) Anyway, in the wake of all of this, the international market has been freaking out, afraid that the world’s standard-bearer currency will lose value over time. Obama had to defend the Federal Reserve’s announcement in India today, and gold – which is already on a solid upswing of late – topped $1,400 an ounce today. source

• As a culture, our cheese-eating is way higher than it should be. Yeah, it’s tasty, and we know how tough of a habit it is to break (looks down at stomach), but we’ve gotten hooked on it as a culture at large. But the thing you should be really scared about? That, with the help of the government, the dairy industry is pushing us to eat even more of it. Dairy Management, Inc., a government-created industry marketing group, has been pushing for more cheese in foods, even as our culture has slowly been switching to low-fat or even plant-based forms of milk. Some more details:

• 33 number of pounds of cheese the average American eats yearly source

• bad That 33 pounds number is triple what the average American ate back in the 1970s, when the culture was cheesier in general.
• worse Cheese is a key source of saturated fat, that kind of really safe fat that’s linked to heart disease and high calories.
• worser Dairy Management has been promoting eating more cheese as a form of weight-loss, even though that’s not true.

• The government feeds big dairy… Dairy Management is a very powerful group, and has been closely tied to both the Bush and Obama administrations. They have a budget of around $140 million, mostly from fees the government forces on the dairy industry, along with some money directly from the Agriculture Department. This is despite the public get-healthy face that folks like Michelle Obama have pushed in recent years. Not so much.
• … And we just eat it up In recent years, Dairy Management’s efforts have led to new products such as Domino’s pizza relaunch (which had way more cheese), Taco Bell’s quesadillas (which have eight times more cheese than any other item on their menu), and cheesy burgers from Wendy’s and Burger King. In 2007 alone, their efforts led to an increase in cheese sales of 30 million pounds. You feel guilty now, don’t you?

• » Are you a cheese-snacking fanatic? All of this underlines the big problem: The Agriculture Department is both the regulator and the government group that pushes the economic engine of the farming and dairy industries. This is very problematic for a lot of reasons. By the way, one group that Dairy Management is specifically focusing on: Families who eat lots of cheese and don’t really worry about the health qualms. That’s who these crap food products are marketed towards. Perhaps you should consider ordering your next sandwich without cheese.

• $580 million to take diaper duty from this stoic guy source