Buckbean Brewing Company (Nevada) Closing Its Doors

This is not a big story, but it caught my eye because I love a good quality brew and because of the tellingly sad quotes from the article. Here is a local Nevada television station with the details:

After four years of brewing craft canned beers, Buckbean Brewing Company will be closing its doors February 29th.

Owner, Doug Booth, tells News 4 the sluggish economy and higher-than-projected cost eventually forced the Reno business to close.

Buckbean opened in April 2008, and several unique, specialty beers have been served in Northern Nevada bars, restaurants and grocery stores.

Booth says he is devastated, as its been a dream of his for more than twenty years to open a brewery in Reno. He hopes his loyal fans will come in for a last beer.

Damn, that's awful. Sorry about your loss, Mr. Booth. If I lived anywhere near the Reno area, I'd be more than happy to drop by and knock back one last round with you.


Bonus: "B-double E-double R-UN...BEER RUN!"

Mass Layoffs Hammering the Solar Power Industry

Green energy is the wave of the future that is going to save our economy by being a huge driver for employment. Or so says the bullshit propaganda. But despite oil prices hovering in the low triple digits, the solar industry is having huge problems, as reported by Forbes:

Japanese solar company Sanyo plans to lay off about 140 employees in California, or about 40 percent of its manufacturing workforce in the United States, as it shifts its strategy in order to compete with large rivals, particularly those from China.

Sanyo is closing the 30-megawatt factory in Carson that makes silicon ingot and wafers – the materials for making solar cells – after setting up shop there in 2003. Production will stop at the end of March to coincide with the end of the company’s fiscal year, said Aaron Fowles, a Sanyo spokesman, on Friday. The company plans to liquidate the assets and close the factory for good in October.

But wait...there's more:

The planned factory shutdown by Sanyo follows a series of layoffs and solar factory closures in the United States and elsewhere over the past year. Manufacturers have struggled to survive when there is a glut of solar panels and the wholesale prices for them have fallen by 40-50 percent. The glut is partly caused by the lowering of government subsidies in big solar markets such as Germany and Italy in 2011.

Earlier this month, California-based Amonix said it was letting go 200 of the roughly 300 workers at its North Las Vegas factory, which it opened last year with a promise to bring lots of local jobs. Amonix said it needed to cut staff so that it could modify the production equipment and start making a new line of solar energy systems later this year. Some workers there told the Las Vegas Sun that they didn’t know their employment would be so temporary.

Also earlier this month, Boston-based Satcon Technology, which makes power conversion equipment for solar electric systems, said it was laying off 35 percent of its workforce and shutting down a factory in Canada. Two German manufacturers who set up factories in the United States, SolarWorld and Solon, have shuttered some of the production here.

Several manufacturers who didn’t have enough money or unable to reduce their costs quick enough to stay in business have filed for bankruptcies, including Solyndra, SpectraWatt and Evergreen Solar.

So what's the problem?

Some manufacturers blame their Chinese rivals for the pileup of unused solar panels and the big drop in prices. SolarWorld, which runs a solar panel factory in Oregon, joined six other manufacturers in filing a trade complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce last October. The companies contend that Chinese manufactures are selling their products at prices far below the cost of producing them, and they are able to do that because they receive heavy and unfair subsidies from the Chinese government.

The fact that Chinese workers are willing to do the job for a fraction of what Americans are paid is no doubt a factor, as is the fact that China essentially has no environmental regulations. Look, we can argue all day about whether large scale solar power really has the potential to replace fossil fuels (as I've said before, I'm not a subscriber to that theory). Nevertheless, even if it could be part of the answer, I think it is clear from this story that as long as we have unrestricted globalization, what solar power will certainly not be able to do is create a substantial number of new good paying jobs in this country as politicos like President Hopey-Changey would like us to believe.

Addendum: After composing this post, I found another story about an impending solar company bankruptcy, this time in Delaware. Here is Canadian Business with the details:

A Delaware-based solar power company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

New Castle-based Suntricity Power listed estimated assets of between half a million and a million dollars, and estimated liabilities of between $100,000 and $500,000 in its filing Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington.

Suntricity, founded in 2007, designs, sells and installs solar energy systems for residential and commercial customers.

Bonus: "Who loves the sun? Not everyone"

States Doubling Down on Bad Gambling Bets

I've posted several stories here on TDS about recent decline of the gaming gambling industry in the United States as the throngs who used to fill the casinos find themselves unable to come up cash to throw away on the slots or at the Blackjack table. And yet despite all of the evidence that the industry is in deep trouble and no longer the cash cow it used top be, there are still plenty of localities lining up, hoping to boost tax revenues by overcoming their previous resistance to legalizing gambling and opening casinos of their own. MSNBC has the details:

A Malaysian company's plan to build a $4 billion convention center and big-time casino on the outskirts of New York City could be the biggest shot fired yet in a tourism arms race that has seen a growing number of Eastern states embrace gambling as a way to lure visitors and drum up revenue.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last week that he would work with the Genting Group, one of the world's largest and most successful gambling companies, to transform the storied, but sleepy, Aqueduct horse track into a megaplex that would eventually include the nation's largest convention center, 3,000 hotel rooms, and a major expansion of a casino that began operating at the site in October.

The proposal came less than two months after once-puritanical Massachusetts passed a law allowing up to three resort casinos, plus a slot machine parlor, at locations around the state.

Ohio is poised to see its first commercial casinos open this year, after voters approved up to four gambling halls in 2009. Maryland's first casino opened last year, with more on the way. Pennsylvania's first casinos opened in 2006, and already the state is threatening to surpass Atlantic City as the nation's second-largest gambling market.

And in Florida, lawmakers are hotly debating a whopper of a bill that would allow up to three multibillion-dollar casinos, plus additional slot machines at dog and horse tracks. Genting appears confident the law will pass. It has already spent around $450 million to acquire waterfront property in Miami, where it wants to build a $3.8 billion complex that would include a casino, dozens of restaurants and a shopping mall.

States have embraced casinos, after years of trepidation about their societal costs, for two simple reasons: a promise of a rich new revenue source, plus the possibility of stimulating tourism.

The article itself actually does a very good job of raising questions as to whether this latest desperate revenue grab by the state governments is at all advisable:

Some experts, however, have questioned whether revenue bonanzas that large are realistic, and say states should be cautious about giving up too much to lure these projects. Competition for a limited pool of gambling and tourism dollars is already fierce, and recent years haven't been kind to casinos.

Nevada's larger casinos lost $4 billion in 2011, according to a report released this month by the state's Gaming Control Board, as the state continued to feel the effects of the global economic slump.

As gambling options have increased in the East, revenue has slid substantially at the pair of Indian tribe-owned casinos in Connecticut and declined by a dramatic 30 percent in Atlantic City, which has lost customers in droves to the new casinos in nearby Philadelphia, according to David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

So the latest players in the legalized gambling game plan to spend billions of dollars to spread the wealth that much thinner even as the slowly collapsing economy continues to squeeze the mass of players suckers they need to be able to make a profit.

How much more proof do you need that the so-called "leaders" of our society are completely out of ideas and have resorted to merely shuffling the deck chairs on the titanic?


Bonus: Wait a minute, is that music I hear on the promenade deck?