California plans ban on big-screen TVs

Newser reports:

The consumer electronics industry is kicking hard against California’s plans to introduce energy consumption maximums for TV sets. An industry lobby group argues that buyers should be allowed to decide whether they want a power-hungry flat-screen TV set or not, and warns that the move could cost the state jobs by sending TV buyers out of state to pick up their chosen model. The measure looks likely to pass despite the objections, notes the Los Angeles Times.

State regulators say that with televisions now accounting for a tenth of the average power bill, the move will end up saving consumers a combined $1 billion a year. Some TV manufacturers say they won’t have any trouble meeting the proposed standards by the 2011 deadline, although a Panasonic exec calls the regulations cumbersome and unnecessary. A much better idea, he tells the San Jose Mercury News, would be to bring in a “cash-for-clunker TV” program.

California to ban ‘energy-guzzling’ big screen TVs

According to The Daily Mail,

Big screen plasma televisions are to be banned in California because they use too much energy.

In a world first, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has given his backing to the crackdown on sets more than 40 inches wide.

These liquid crystal display and plasma high definition sets can use as much as three times the power of smaller cathode ray models.

Who watches most television?

From the Economist:

Despite an increase in entertainment choices, watching television remains as popular as ever, according to data from the OECD’s Communications Outlook report. American households watch the box for over eight hours a day on average, twice as long as anyone else. Viewing has fallen in some countries. Turks reportedly watched an hour’s less television per day in 2007 than they did only two years earlier, when the country was America’s nearest rival as couch-potato king.

Union: Pay TV Talent Show Contestants

The Guardian reports,

Television talent shows are using contestants as “cheap” labour, thereby undercutting professional performers in the entertainment industry, a union has warned.

The actors’ union Equity has rounded on shows such as Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor, which do not pay contestants a penny for their performances but are watched by millions of viewers on primetime TV.

In a motion tabled for this next week’s annual TUC conference in Liverpool, the union will call for contestants who qualify for the show to be paid the rate for the job amid fears that professionals are losing out.

Seizing on the controversy that surrounded Susan Boyle on the last Britain’s Got Talent contest, the union also calls for a return to “professional drama and light entertainment” rather than shows based on the “exploitation and humiliation of vulnerable people”.

Interesting that a union complained and not the contestants themselves. I doubt contestants label an appearance on television and a shot at stardom “exploitation.”

Outsourcing is good for the economy

Governments do not “ship jobs overseas,” businesses do. Governments can only prevent job movement. Governments that have done this have consistently weakened their own economies as inefficient industries are protected while efficient ones front the cost of protection. Results, rather than intentions, must be the focus in these matters.

The US imports a wide variety of products that are no longer domestically produced because of cheaper foreign labor. The US no longer produces TVs, for instance. What has been the result? Some jobs were shipped overseas, but even more were created at home. TV prices dropped, Americans had more money in their wallets, and they spent more on American products. New, higher-paying  American jobs resulted. Moreover, the dollars that the outsourced workers received in pay were spent on a growing American export industry.

A 2006 study by the McKinsey Global Institute tallied up the costs and benefits associated with outsourcing and found that for every dollar the US sends abroad, its gets back about $1.12, resulting in a net gain of $0.12.

So, outsourcing is good for the economy. Tell your friends.