Pasadena Chamber of Commerce

For the last few years, water wholesalers across Southern California enacted double-digit price increases.

Now retailers say they are slowly turning the spigot on price hikes.

“We’re experiencing increases across the board and these will inevitably trickle down to the customers,” said Daylan Presley, spokesman for Suburban Water Systems that serves a 41-square mile area including Covina, Glendora, Hacienda Heights, La Mirada, La Puente, West Covina, and Whittier.

“None of these increases will make an impact right away,” Presley said. “These adjustments will occur over time.”

The district are facing 39 percent rate increase from Central Basin Municipal Water District, 23 percent from the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster and 11 percent from the Water Replenishment District of Southern California.

All were passed last week. In addition, Metropolitan Water District a month ago raised its rates by 7.5 percent.

All four agencies either sell water or charge for the pumping of underground water in either Southeast Los Angeles County or the San Gabriel Valley.

The drought is the cause of many of the increases from these regional agencies.

Officials from Metropolitan Water District said its higher rates are necessary because of decreasing water sales that has come about in part because of conservation measures.

Of course, there’s no mention of any belt-tightening being done by the behemoth water agency. No surprise there. Look for higher rates from Pasadena Water and Power as they resist trimming costs in favor of raising rates.

From the London Times news about carmakers we should pay attention to here in Pasadena in the USA:

Carmakers accelerate but have long way to catch up

In Case You Missed It

Is Your Cat Normal?

The Euro is losing value against world currencies and some are concerned that sliding economies in Greece and elsewhere on the continent may forewarn more instability and economic challenges across Europe.

Fears Intensify That Euro Crisis Could Snowball

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and ERIC DASH

Published: May 16, 2010

In a sign of the depth of the anxiety, the euro fell Friday to its lowest level since the depth of the financial crisis, as investors abandoned the currency as well as stocks in favor of gold and other assets seen as offering more safety. And in an interview published Saturday, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, warned that Europe was facing “severe tensions” and that the markets were fragile.

Auto dealers are chafing at new financial regulations that may make it more difficult for them to loan money and more costly for borrowers.

Auto Dealers Campaign to Fend Off Regulation

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: May 16, 2010

If President Obama has his way, loans at auto dealers would be put under the purview of a new federal consumer protection authority to guard against fraud and abuse. The prospect of increased regulations, Mr. Berscht said, “could force us out of the financing business,” and it has him so concerned that he traveled to Washington last month to ask Senator Kent Conrad, a Democrat and one of his senators, for quick relief.

The financial reforms being debated in the Senate have prompted resistance from a variety of businesses, but perhaps nowhere more intensely than in the already beleaguered auto industry, where dealers find themselves pitted against Mr. Obama in their aggressive campaign to exempt themselves from the new rules.

For some 18,000 auto dealers in the United States, who historically have made up a potent political force, the debate presents a critical test of their continued influence in Washington, as they push lawmakers to help them hold on to revenue.

Here in Pasadena, we’ve lost two auto dealerships in the past year. For the city, that is some $500,000 of lost sales tax revenue. Right now it also leaves two large parcels along Colorado Boulevard east of Lake Avenue vacant. A lumber company is said to be in escrow for the Team Chevrolet site and a pharmacy is rumored to be going up at the Hill and Colorado corner on the Pasadena Ford site. 

The Gulf oil spill shows us all that more precautions are necessary and stricter oversight of drilling operations and the companies involved:

Editorial

Industry Doesn’t Step Up

Published: May 11, 2010

The Obama administration and Congress are going to have to press a lot harder to figure out what went wrong and what must be changed — including how the industry needs to be regulated — to ensure this never happens again.

There is no question about the scale of the destruction. The blowout on a deep-water drilling rig has already dumped nearly 3.5 million gallons of oil into the gulf, and the companies involved have yet to figure out how to stop it. If left unchecked, the spill will almost certainly inflict terrible damage on Louisiana’s coastline and its fishing industry, and possibly other gulf states.

The hearings produced almost none of the answers needed. The BP America chairman, Lamar McKay, blamed a malfunctioning blowout preventer installed by Transocean, the operator of the drilling rig. Transocean’s boss, Steven Newman, said the problem may have been a mishandling of the cement that is supposed to keep gas from escaping up the well pipe to the surface. Tim Probert, a president of Halliburton, which was responsible for the cement, suggested that his company was only following instructions from BP.

Round and round the blame game went — the “liability chase,” Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey called it.

U.S. News and World Report analyzes mutual funds to come up with their list of the best:

http://money.usnews.com/fundsI’m too chicken to look at the list.

This LA Times story isn’t engendering confidence in me:

Trading firms put their money on poker experts

A new breed of Wall Street recruit gets ahead not through connections or business experience, but through demonstrating a head for numbers, quick thinking and risk-taking – skills from the card table.

Chris Fargis thought his big job interview was over. But when the partners at Wall Street upstart Toro Trading finished with their questions, they broke out a deck of cards and a green-felt card table. Mind playing a few hands of poker?

It was a final test, and Fargis was relieved. The 30-year-old never went to business school or even took a finance class. But he knew poker. He had made a living playing the game online for six years from his Manhattan apartment, betting on up to eight hands at a time.

Within a few days, Fargis — with no Wall Street experience — was offered a position trading stock options, a job that entails making multimillion-dollar gambles. His poker skills sealed the deal.The Atlantic, one of my favorite magazines, considers the future and it may look a lot like Pasadena (if we decide we want to be a city of the future, not a relic of the past):

Here Comes the Neighborhood

Conventional suburbs are overbuilt and out of favor. In cities and suburbs alike, walkable neighborhoods linked by train are the future. Here’s how a new network of privately funded rail lines can make that future come to pass more quickly and cheaply—and help reinvigorate housing and the economy.

By Christopher B. Leinberger

While houses are (mostly) sturdy, the construction industry is as sensitive as a 19th-century debutante. At the first sign of trouble, it swoons, often knocking the economy down with it. In each of the three recessions before the Great Recession, the economy shrank by less than 2 percent—but housing starts, on average, declined by a third. In the years leading up to the 1990 recession, when real estate bankrupted about half of the savings-and-loans, housing starts fell 44 percent. Usually, an economic recession means a depression in the housing industry.

It’s been worse this time around. From their pre-recession peaks, economic output fell 3.3 percent and employment 6.1 percent, but housing starts dropped 73 percent. Last year housing starts were lower by half than in any year since 1959, when the U.S. population stood at 178 million (compared with 309 million today). About a third of all the jobs lost in this recession have been in construction, real-estate finance, architecture, or building services. Housing prices, meanwhile, have fallen 28 percent, adjusted for inflation, since their peak in 2006—that’s far more than they fell during the Great Depression.

But housing hasn’t cratered everywhere. According to Stan Humphries, the chief economist of Zillow, an online housing-research firm, if you plot changes in home values within a typical metro region on a satellite map, the result “looks like an archery target, with the outlying areas having experienced substantially higher total declines in home values” than areas closer to the central city.

Zillow data for metropolitan Washington, D.C., for instance, shows that housing prices on average have declined 33 percent since the peak. But this average masks big differences. In densely built inner suburbs, like Arlington, Virginia, and in the walkable, urban neighborhoods of the District of Columbia, prices typically dropped about 20 percent. Housing on the suburban fringe, on the other hand, lost about half its value. Many exurban homeowners who had purchased or refinanced in the mid-2000s are now well underwater.

And:

Tomorrowland

In the city of the future, bridges will talk to engineers, roads will control cars, and parking spots will find you. In some places, it’s already here.

By Daniel D. Castro

Source: Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

Until recently, humankind has had to rely principally on observation to collect information from a mostly passive world. If we wanted to find out whether a bridge was structurally sound, for example, someone had to go somewhere, measure something, and report back. But today, a convergence of technical successes—low-cost sensors, energy-efficient processors, and advanced wireless networking—is leading to the creation of an active world alive with information.

As this illustration shows, governments around the world are starting to capitalize on these tools to keep us safer, increase mobility, and boost economic growth. Now, instead of engineers inspecting a bridge, the bridge inspects itself and reports continuously to engineers.

These examples are just the start: soon, biochemical detectors in subways and airports will help protect travelers; undersea microphones will warn about offshore hurricanes; and smoke sensors will give firefighters real-time information on the location and path of wildfires. Researchers at Georgia Tech have produced sensors that can differentiate among more than 100 chemicals in the water or air at just one-tenth the price of current models, and Intel has created self-contained, battery-powered computers about the size of a quarter that can form ad hoc wireless networks. Combined, these tools could monitor environmental conditions at hazardous work sites or detect leaks in water and gas pipelines. To handle the huge flow of information all of these systems will generate, computer scientists are developing complex algorithms to improve the efficiency of sensor networks, and innovative programs to analyze and manipulate large data sets.

In the future, a host of applications will give us a better understanding—and more control—of the world around us. And humans will be ever more intricately linked with their environment.

As Pasadena installs intelligent transportation systems to make our drive across town easier, I expect we will be experiencing much more technology that we realize.

And they take an interesting look at the invention of one of our favorite items: the cocktail: Who Invented the Cocktail? That depends on how you define invented. And cocktail. By Wayne Curtis Image credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett Collection Last fall, I visited a new restaurant and lounge in London called Hix. It specializes in revivals and adaptations of early-19th-century British libations, including a rum shrub of the sort one might have sipped during the reign of King George III. (Shrubs typically involved fresh fruits preserved in vinegar, then mixed with spirits.) I thought it was uncommonly delicious, and immediately felt traitorous for thinking so. The early Brits were famous for guzzling sweetened gin in large and harmful quantities, not for producing mixed drinks of sophistication or quality. The Americans were supposedly the ones who did that. The drink catechism has long held that cocktails as we know them were created by “Professor” Jerry Thomas, a pioneering and flamboyant American bartender who published the first bar manual in 1862. David Wondrich, the author of Imbibe!, the most comprehensive account of Thomas’s work, did much to secure this reputation. His book advanced the notion, now commonly repeated, that cocktails are a reflection of our native genius, as American as apple pie and baseball. “And it turns out that’s precisely true,” Wondrich told me recently. “Because they made apple pies in Europe before we did. And they played rounders before we did. Whenever you look into any of these things and poke at the beginning, you’re suddenly earlier.”