January 2008 Archive
No amount of muscle — political or otherwise — was able to bring about passage of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s health reform plan, which California’s Senate Health Committee rejected Monday in a 7-1 vote. The bill, which had made it through the state’s Assembly late last year, couldn’t get past the jittery Senate committee worried that the ambitious $15 billion proposal was too expensive to enact during a time of fiscal crisis.
The state, hit hard by the housing slump, is facing deficits nearly as large as the bill’s cost, forcing Schwarzenegger to call for closures of state parks and early release of prison inmates, among other cost-cutting measures.
California’s plan would have combined Massachusetts-like mandates requiring uninsured individuals to get coverage with requirements for businesses to spend a certain percentage on their employees’ health care, or to pay into a state program. It proposed a cigarette tax hike to pay for the plan and had been expected to pass the Democratic-controlled legislature before bad economic news made lawmakers reconsider.
Many health reform advocates felt the passage of the bill in the country’s most populous state would have made reform easier on a national scale. But others felt the math never added up and that the program would be underfunded from the start. Whatever the case, the deal is dead, and The Wall Street Journal says it won’t be revived this year, though Schwarzenegger, to paraphrase, vows he’ll “be back” to the health care debate.
Sales of digital TV sets and HDTV equipment traditionally spike in the month before the Super Bowl, and during the year-end holidays. If you’re going to watch the big game on a big-screen TV at home, at a party, or at a sports bar, here’s a look at the markets and technology behind those big displays.
Note: Digital TV (DTV) and HDTV are not interchangeable terms. Not all digital TVs are HDTV-capable. “Digital TV“ denotes TV sets that can receive digital broadcasts and cable programming. Starting next year, American TV stations will entirely switch over to digital broadcasts, ending the analog TV broadcasts they’ve made for decades. If you have an analog TV, you’ll need to get a converter box (purchases of which are being subsidized by the federal government) or buy a digital TV. “High-definition television” is a type of digital TV defined by higher resolution than traditional analog TV sets. Most US TV sets conform to the 512-line analog NTSC standard; HDTV sets have 720 to 1,080 lines of resolution.
There are three basic types of big-screen TVs: Liquid crystal displays, plasma display panels, and rear-projection TVs. For various reasons, LCD TVs are proving the most popular type among consumers. Here’s how they work.
DisplaySearch forecasts LCD TV sales will increase 27% this year to nearly $83B. (In contrast, plasma TV sales will grow 7% to $17B.) Among the leading vendors of LCD TVs are Samsung Electronics, Sharp, Sony, LG Electronics, and Philips. The three biggest manufacturers of thin-film transistor LCD panels are Samsung, LG.Philips LCD, and AU Optronics.
The market for semiconductors going into DTVs is estimated to be worth $8B+ a year. Among the vendors in the field are Analog Devices, Broadcom, MediaTek, Microtune, NXP, Pixelworks, Samsung, STMicroelectronics (which just bought Genesis Microchip, a DTV specialist), Texas Instruments, Trident Microsystems, and Zoran. Many of the same companies also address the HDTV chip market.
No doubt you’ll be more interested in potato chips than microchips while you’re watching the game on Sunday! Still, it takes a lot of sophisticated technology to enable your big-screen TV experience.
I don’t know who’s more excited for the Super Bowl next Sunday between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants — the fans or the retailers.
While you send out your Evites and place those final bets, retailers are betting that you’ll go the extra mile to make your Super Bowl party a blow out — with loads of snacks, beverages, and maybe even a brand new flatscreen HDTV. In fact, the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association (RAMA) expects this year’s Super Bowl to ring up nearly $10 billion in sales.
Even if you’re not a football fan, you can’t miss the signs everywhere that the big game is this weekend. Walk into a supermarket, like I did last night, and bump into can’t-miss displays — like my local market’s chest-high stacks of Miller Light and Heineken cases, a blow-up recliner, and a Tostitos football player balloon floating overhead.
So, what will this year’s planners spend their bucks on?
A new big flat-screen HDTV: Costs anywhere from $1,000 at the low-end on up. RAMA estimates that nearly 4 million consumers plan to buy a new TV before the game. Expect the TV displays at your Best Buys, Wal-Marts, and Costcos to be busy this week. Here are some shopping guides. Upping the stakes, Circuit City guarantees that customers who buy their TV by Wednesday can have the set installed by its firedog technical staff by kickoff. Furniture to seat your guests is also a popular seller, with 2.5 million people planning to buy a piece before Sunday. La-Z-Boy has an “armchair quarterback” promotion going on, pushing discounted recliners and giving away a new media room.
Beer and munchies: You know what you and your friends like — buy lots of it. Grocery stores make big bucks off veggie and deli trays this time of year. So do local and national pizza places — if you don’t feel like messing up the kitchen.
Decorations: From yard signs to megaphones to referee shirt trays, there’s still time to order up before the game. Plus, don’t forget to wear your team colors — RAMA estimates that consumers will spend $60 on Super Bowl-related merchandise. Here’s a site with lots of decorating tips. Readers send in their suggestions here, including the importance of having foam bricks on hand for those inevitable questionable calls. (Don’t want to break that brand new TV!)
Adding up the above, you could spend thousands on a bash if you go all out. Or, you could just skip the new TV, strap on a heart rate monitor, grip the arms of your recliner, and watch the game without the crowd. Whatever your viewing preference, the game looks to be a good one.
The old saying in the business is that when the electronics industry catches a cold, the semiconductor industry gets the flu, and the semiconductor capital equipment industry comes down with pneumonia.
While the stock market had conniptions about the outlooks presented by Apple and Intel — though, curiously, gave AMD hearty pats on the back after the chip maker posted a Q4 net loss of $1.8B — suppliers of semiconductor test equipment have already been in a downturn for a year, due largely to worry about whether the US economy is slipping into a recession. Teradyne’s 2007 sales were down 20% from 2006. Revenues for Credence Systems were off 7% year-to-year, and the company is cutting its workforce by 30%. Advantest had a frightening forecast for the year ahead, and its stock was battered. The small ranks within the chip tester business are getting smaller by the day — Teradyne just acquired Nextest Systems.
In the wider world of semiconductor capital equipment, these are not good times in general. Uncertain about the world economy, many chip makers are slashing their capital spending budgets for 2008. Applied Materials and Nanometrics recently imposed 7% reductions in their workforces; in Applied’s case, that meant 1,000 people losing their jobs. Lam Research is buying SEZ Holding in yet another example of industry consolidation.
The monthly book-to-bill figure put out by Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International, which reflects orders and shipments reported by North American suppliers of semiconductor equipment, pushed up a bit in December, to 0.89, after lingering between 0.79 and 0.83 during the second half of 2007. That figure represents the ratio between orders coming in (bookings) and shipments going out (billings). A figure of 1.00 generally indicates that the industry is in a healthy balance, as new orders are coming in as quickly as equipment is sold and shipped. Going above 1.00 means demand is high; below 1.00, business is slowing or bad.
Despite the economic stimulus package being pushed forward by the US government, tax rebates to American families won’t mean much for the electronics industry, unless those rebates are spent on big flat-screen TVs or other consumer electronics. There’s no magic bullet for fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Yucca Mountain was a hot topic for politicians running for president in the recent Nevada Caucus. But what is it about Yucca Mountain that raises the ire of so many of Nevada’s citizens and gets Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards giving so many speeches opposing it?
Yucca Mountain is short form for the Yucca Mountain Project (Nuclear Waste Repository) and the underlying concern is this: The nightmare scenario of nuclear fuel buried deep beneath Yucca Mountain leeching out through fissures or corroded containers, killing inhabitants across Nevada, and laying waste to the area for thousands of year. A scary picture.
Some background. Yucca Mountain sits on federal land in Nevada, not far from Death Valley, in a remote stretch of desert, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. In 1982, Congress set up a national policy to solve the issue of nuclear waste disposal when it enacted the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The Act authorized the US Department of Energy (DOE) to find a site, build, and operate an underground disposal facility called a geologic repository (seen by the scientific community as the most effective way of disposing of nuclear waste).
In 1984 some 10 sites were being studied. A year later, three were selected for intensive analysis: Deaf Smith County, Texas; Hanford, Washington; and Yucca Mountain. By 1987 Yucca Mountain was the sole site under consideration.
Under the DOE’s original plan, deep tunnels in Yucca Mountain would become the final resting place for more than 70,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste. Transported from all over the country by truck or by rail, the material would be stored under the mountain in tunnels for the next 10,000 years — which is how long the nuclear waste will emit deadly radiation.
The government’s arguments for this storage plan are simple: Consolidation, security, and safety. Nuclear waste is currently being kept in 126 temporary facilities scattered across 39 states, in cooling ponds and in storage buildings near nuclear reactors. Some of this waste sits on sites near rivers or on top of water tables, and some 160 to 170 million Americans live within 75 miles of one of these sites. The prime contractor for digging the tunnels for the Yucca Mountain project is Bechtel SAIC (a consortium of contractors Bechtel and SAIC). Under the original plan, nuclear waste was scheduled to begin arriving in 1998. But fierce opposition by environmentalists, local citizens (including local Native Americans), and politicians has meant that the target date for the first shipment has been pushed back to 2017, or possibly 2020.
According to Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, a national watchdog on nuclear power and radioactive waste issues, Yucca Mountain is located above an earthquake fault line and that rainwater percolates quickly through the proposed burial site, risking fast corrosion of the waste burial containers and release of catastrophic amounts of deadly radioactivity into the drinking water and agricultural irrigation supply.
Local citizens are against it. A Reno Gazette-Journal poll in November 2007 showed that 76% of Nevadans were against the Yucca Mountain plan. Beyond the safety aspects of the site and the uneasiness about having trucks and trains shipping nuclear waste to the mountain, there was a general protest against having Nevada, which has no nuclear power plants, becoming the dumping ground for all of the nation’s spent fuels and retired nuclear weapons material.
The original inhabitants are against it, too. The facility is within the treaty lands of the Western Shoshone Indian Nation, whose members object on cultural and religious grounds to their sacred lands being used for nuclear dumping.
Perhaps most telling, Yucca Mountain is falling out of political favor at a national level. All the Democratic candidates for president have stressed their opposition to the project. Two of its big Republican supporters in Congress are on their way out. Senator Larry Craig will leave office at the end of his term, while Senator Pete Domenici, the ranking member on the Energy Committee, has announced he won’t seek re-election.
As a testimony to the current confusion concerning the project, in late 2007 the DOE announced plans to expand capacity of the Yucca Mountain Project from 72,000 tons to 135,000 tons. But in early 2008 the DOE suddenly announced it was shutting down nearly all activity at the nuclear waste site in response to deep budget cuts.
Conclusion: Future uncertain.