EleBlog

12 May, 2008

How to Green Your Supply Chain is a neat, short, bullet-ridden (that's good!) article form Industry Week. The checklists come from Ryder System Inc. Here's the longest paragraph in the thing (it is bullet-free):


EleBlog take: Of course, anyone in the Distribution business "should" read this. But so should all of the rest of us -- assuming we all want to "go green" for reasons other than Public Relations!

12 May, 2008

That's the headline on an Electronic House magazine article -- which details, in brief, HDMI, Firewire (IEEE 1394), S-Video, Cat 5/6, and much more.

12 May, 2008

I wish it were true. An article on SeekingAlpha.com (4/27), Major Corporate Shift to Solar Energy and LEDs, can be found here. It includes the graphic below (and several others). From the promulgators of this (the folks at ChangeWave):

12 May, 2008

From a Wall Street Journal article (5/6) -- The Housing Crisis Is Over:

Most people forget that the current housing bust is nearly three years old. Home sales peaked in July 2005. New home sales are down a staggering 63% from peak levels of 1.4 million. Housing starts have fallen more than 50% and, adjusted for population growth, are back to the trough levels of 1982.

EleBlog take: When the cockeyed optimists -- and I really DO want to stress the word "cockeyed" here -- note that we're not going to return to 2005 prices for 15 years, you might want to take a pass on bullish arguments until, maybe, 2012 or 2015.

12 May, 2008

I've been spending more time on the site of CoStar Realty. There's a lot of interesting stuff there -- not the least of which is a 4/23 article, No Short-Circuit To Data Center Boom. Here's a particularly relevant paragraph:

12 May, 2008

The April/May issue of The CPA Technology Advisor contains 2008 Review of Contractor/Construction Accounting Systems. The article is presented in TWO HTML pages and -- pay attention now -- you need to get to PAGE 2. That's where the article continues, of course, but lists 12 software items -- with links to brief reviews of each of them.

12 May, 2008

I'm eyeing the commercial building market of late, for several reasons. Among them:

a. There's a significant amount of denial in this market right now -- like housing in late 2006 and early 2007.

b. This segment is doing a good job of keeping the construction industry busy, including (and specially) electrical contracting.

I just read an April issue article from National Real Estate Investor, A Price Correction Is Unavoidable, by a guy from the Brookings Institution. It's 1,135 words. I'm not sure this person is correct. Here'd a tiny piece of it -- from deep into the thing -- that woke me up:

How far will commercial property prices fall? No one can be sure, but consider how much those prices rose from 1993 to 2006. If the net income from a commercial property remained the same in dollars from 1993 to 2006, the prices of properties rose an average of 63.9% among industrial properties and 78.3% among office properties.

Those figures are based solely on declines in the cap rates typical of such properties, according to the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries. But if net operating income rose by 20% during the same period, the price increases reached 96.7% and 113%, respectively. There is plenty of room for property prices to decline and still leave owners financially well off, if they owned the properties throughout that period.