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GPS and 3D would tell each plane the prcise location of other planes no need for all the radar towers and all that chattering back and forth. Look at the impact on gas mileage- just from this perspective it appears odd that the US government has not invested in modernization of the nations air traffic system's technology. The USA is today using outdated technology to mange its air traffic. Worst of all its costing a lot in wasted fuel and in extra emissions. GPS allows planes to fly straighter routes. Savings? On a NYCity to Boston flight this straighter route saves about 30% fuel, mileage and flight time. Thats huge savings benefiting airlines, passengers and the environment. These saving increase when you take out all the extra fuel consumed circlingin the skies as the descent is in steps. With NextGen the system the US is adopting will let a plane descend in a straight flight path with minimal engine thrust. A key part of this system is ADS-B for automatic dependent surveillance-brodcast, which gives every plane its own digital brain and voice. ...

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There is deep distrust of the Japanese government on the safety of nuclear reactors and a sense that the regulatory system has failed. In the most recent development, Osaka's mayor Toru Hashimoto, is withholding local approval for starting up 2 nuclear reactors at the Ohi plant, near Osaka. The 2 reactors passed simulated stress tests and were expected to be up and running, but public mistrust of the tests led to Hashimoto holding back on approval. Hashimoto was able to do this because Osaka is the largest shareholder in Kansai Electric Power. Hashimoto says he not against nuclear power, but against the top down regulatory system which works closley with power plant companies to protect their interests, with very little transparency on decisions and methods.

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Prof. Cusumano of MIT, says that with the loss of Apple's Steve Jobs, the company has lost a great visionary, and it will be difficult for Apple's new CEO Time Cook to make up for this loss. Cusumano has talked to many Apple employees in 2013-2014, and is writing a book on innovation. In this piece Chen and Richtel point out the ways Tim Cook is trying to fill the role Jobs filled, by assembling a group of people within the company who can play the pioneering role for new products, and making new acquisitions such as the Beats acquisition to bring in outside talent. Cook pushed for the introduction of the iPad Air, which now accounts for 60% of all iPad sales. The constant push for the magic in new products that Steve Jobs obsessed with down to details, will be missing. Jobs met daily with design chief Jonathan Ive for lunch at the Cupertino headquarters. Cook meets Ive 3 times a week. And Jobs pulled all the pieces of the new product together in a way that others will have difficulty doing. Cook has brought a different dimension to leadership at Apple by talking about Apple in terms of "advancing humanity," talking about his own personal experiences in the South, and seeing racial discrimination barriers for minorities. He was challenged recently to address issues of working conditions at Apple supplier factories in China. Cook is bringing some manufacturing back to the U.S. with building of new plants in Arizona and Texas. These are areas which were gaps in Jobs record, which Cook is filling gradually, and asking shareholders, customers, to be patient....

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Today GM announced that it is eliminating lifetime health coverage for about 100,000 white collar salaried retirees, as it is rapidly running out of cash to run operations. Also white collar salaries of current employees will be cut by 20 percent and the $1 a share dividend eliminated. This with other savings will save $1.5 billion annually GM estimates. Union contracts prevent this from taking effect for former factory workers even as the company is truly running out of cash. In paying the lifetime costs of hospital stays, surgeries, expensive drugs for retirees GM spends$4.6 billion in 2007 on health care for its one million employees and retirees and their dependents. This is larger that GM's entire active work force and a big reason GM has got into trouble. It also skewed management decisions in the wrong way. Management let it affect their strategy in the marketplace, they continued to run the company by emphasizing sales volume with frequent sales and discounting in the belief that the size was needed to support all these retirees goldplated medical care, care which does not exist in other industries and companies, even when GM coud least afford it. By carefully shutting down plants earlier as demand for some of its cars and vehicles was shrinking, and closing down some brands, GM could have focussed its efforts on the areas including smaller passenger cars and midsized cars and other models which were gaining popularity, and shifting ahead of the curve out of pickups and large SUV's in the face of higher gas prices. Its the collapse of the pickup and SUV market that exaggerated the impact even in October 2008, instead of the about 30% decline that the industry faced and GM faced in its cars, GM's dramatic drop in pickups and SUV's gave it an overall loss of 45% October 2008 over same month 2007. Without this aberrration of health care benefits from a previous growth era and a dominant GM - an anachronism in the present when GM was in decline and health care costs had mushroomed and company health care benefits cut back in industry after industry- and without the intransigence of the unions and the failure of management to build credibility, share the pain and convince the unions in good faith that this was unsustainable, GM could have had a much better shot of developing a strategy for renewal. Instead it sealed GM's fate, along with lack of foresight in taking decisive action to shift to higher fuel efficiency cars early in the curve, and closing unneeded plants and brands to focus on this task. In the end the gold plated benefits which were terminated today are lost for salaried retirees, and sooner or later the same is likely to happen inside or outside bankruptcy for union workers. Union workers who might then say what the salaried retirees are saying now, that if the company goes out of business, they would lose everything anyway, and could not blame GM for cutting them off. If only they had understood this earlier and accepted these facts, and if only managment had built the credibility and shared the pain so that company's interests came above union or management interests, as they should be for a company to grow or renew itself and grow. In the end union workers in the auto industry were living beyond their means, just as consumers in the USA were living beyond their means, and the outsized executive compensation also a kind of grab from another era. Renewal starts with getting a grip on reality, and reality slipped away from their hands....

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By shifting production of the Santa Fe SUV model to Kia's West Point, Georgia, plant- which makes the Kia Sorrento- Hyundai plans to free up 100,000 units capacity at it newly opened Montgomery, Alabama, plant. This freed up capacity will be used to meet increasing demand for Hyundai's Sonata sedans. Hyundai owns 34% of Kia Motors. The West Point plant was built to produce 300,000 units and uses the same components for the Santa Fe that it uses for the Sorrento.

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How Gazprom and Shell are changing their partnership to develop Sakhalin II: 1. The vanguard in Russian oil projects is Sakhalin II. In 2005 Shell announced the price tag would double to $20 billion. With forbidding terrain and climate and spread over a vast region in Russia's Far East, this is a really big challenge. Who owns what part of this project- Shell has 55% of the partnership in Sakhalin Energy Investment Company, a stake it picked up from Marathon which exited in 2000. Mitsui and Mitsubishi are other partners. Note the arrangement in the original contract which was signed in 1994. Under the 1994 production sharing contract with Shell Russia does not make much money till Sakhalin Energy recovers its costs. Upto that time Sakhalin Energy would pay 6% royalty on revenues. Following this Sakhalin Energy would get 90% of the profits until the project earned a 17.5% return. Taxes are 32%. Because of this arrangement the cost overruns at Sakhalin present a serious problem for the Russian government, as the returns for Russia depend on Sakhalin Energy first recovering the costs. In 2005 Shell agreed to swap 25% of its controlling stake in Sakhalin Energy with Gazprom for 50% of a field in western Siberia. 2. Shell is adapting its strategy in the changing oil picture. Comments by Malcolm Brinded, Shell's executive director for Exploration and Production indicate strategy in the changing global oil picture. Shell sees the importance of engaging with a Russian partner for the long run to make long-term gains with a first-mover advantage. For Shell the real returns would come from other players using Shell's expensive LNG plants and terminals. ...

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Greek yogurt sales have doubled every year since 2006. It is praised by nutritionists for its flavor and protein content. The market leader is Chobani, founded by Hamdi Ulukaya, of Turkish origin, who has dairy plants in Johnston, New York. Chobani's sales were $196 million, as of Oct 3, 2010, having nearly tripled from the prior year. The irony is hat Chobani bought Kraft's yogurt plant to set up this business. Kraft had decided to exit the yogurt business in 2005. Now with sales climbing rapidly, Kraft is back in the business. Kraft has introduced its new Athenos brand Greek yogurt at Wal-Mart stores. General Mills introduced Greek Yoplait yogurt in March 2010. A change in American eating habits is driving this trend, as more people are substituting yogurt for breakfast instead of cereal. Overall yogurt sales are up 7.8% over the past year, according to UBS analyst Palmer. The CEO of Yoplait, General Mills, says there is room for continued growth, as Americans eat yogurt less per person than people in the U.K., Australia or Canada. The No 2 yogurt maker is brand is Fage, which started in a small dairy shop in Athens. Fage began exporting to the US in the 1990's, and set up a dairy plant in New York state. To reach the main demographic for yogurt- health conscious women- this brand advertised in Women's magazines Vogue and Elle, and ran banner ads on the New York Times website, as well as ads on food and wine sites. Fage's sales were up 50% by Oct 3, 2010, and reached $123 million in the US market....

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Smaller companies are being squeezed by rapidly escalating costs as costs are going up as fast as oil prices, and face tighter emissions rules in Alberta's oil sands projects. Some projects now cost 2 to 3 times the original projections and there is a severe labor shortage. Even the big players will find it difficult and expensive. To meet the stringent emissions rules, as Prime Minister Harper signs on to new international greenhouse emissions targets, Shell may have to use a technology that captures CO2 from the plants that process the oil sands and store the gas underground. This costs $120 a ton, and would cost Shell upwards of $2 billion a year just to capture and store the CO2, for the 15-20 million tons of CO2 that would be emitted when it increases production to 770,000 barrels a day. The cleanup from oil sands processing is costly because processing is very pollution intensive. Production of one barrel from these oil sands is 3 times more polluting than producing conventional oil. Synenco Energy, which had a project in partnership with China's Sinopec for mining and processing the oil sands called Northern Lights for $10.8 billion, called off the project last year because of all these hurdles, slashed its work force, and decided it may sell the company. Currently 1.1 million barrels a day come from the Alberta oil sands. 2020 output was expected to rise to 4.3 million barrels a day. But now this looks too optimistic. CAPP forecests 3.8 million barrels a day, but even this may be on the high side. ...

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Karen Eliott House was a former publisher of the WSJ. Now with WSJ in Murdoch's News Corporation's hands, she is a fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center. Here she points to the diverging situation between the USA and Saudi Arabia. She thinks the US cannot protect the Saudi monarchy (which dates back to Abdul Aziz and his support from President Roosevelt first by recognition of the new state of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and support during the war), from its domestic challenges. One of these domestic challenges is changing demographics as the young or people below 15 years age make up 40% of the population, rising unemployment, and pressures for modernization which the monarchy has done little to respond to, and the lack of democratic forms which would give people a chance to vent their feelings. For the U.S. the frustration is that the Saudis have done little or can do little for the USA in the way of moderating oil prices as they move still higher, because of speculative trends, decline of production in its own maturing oil fields, and needs to finance huge new plants and cities to provide employment to a growing population. In fact Libyan oil officials has been more of a moderating influence recently than the Saudi oil officials. So it appears that what Karen is saying is that the Saudis are pursuing their own interests in their region and the wider region that includes South Asia and Northern Africa, and the US is pursuing its own interests, which at this time are not as clearly defined, except securing oil supplies and protecting Israel. The 2 countries USA and Saudi Arabia are going their diverging and different ways in a way that is irreversible....

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Mercedes plans to introduce its Green Diesels in Japan. The penetration of diesel automobiles is expected to go up to 11%. This is well above the high of 6% achieved in the nineties, which later slipped becuase of strict emissions regulations and the perception that diesels were dirty with poor engine performance. German diesel technology has improved to the point where the performance and emissions have improved significantly. The quality of diesel fuel in Japan has improved and the new cleaner diesels provide an attractive option to Japanese car buyers.

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If Morse's thinking holds and crude prices drop to $90 range per barrel (see the link to Morse) then we have another major problem on our hands as the incentives for conservation diminish and there is less money invested in energy conservation, and investment, effort and enthusiasm for new technologies for conservation also diminishes. This risks the environment and carbon dioxide emissions and keeps sending money on expensive oil imports to Saudis, Russia and the middle east which could be better invested in the US for innovation and R&D or returned tothe public. For energy saving conservation technology investors the drop in incentive through a return to cheap oil or expectations of prices that are below $100 for instance can be the worst of both worlds high prices and low investment says Vinod Khosla. He advocates a floor on the price of oil. Stanford Professor Hillard Huntington, executive director of the Energy Modeling Forum, a group of energy experts, says energy saving initiatives could easily take 4 million to 5 million barrels a day of demand off the market in 10 years from the 20 million barrels a day that the USA uses to heat homes, power industry, and fuel cars, trucks and planes. It would be a huge loss for that not to happen. And this has happened before as the oil crisis in the 1980's became a dim memory once oil prices hit a low of $11 in the mid 1980's after conservation kicked in at the time. The idea then is to have some sort of gasoline tax that would keep a floor on the price of oil that Europe already has. And British Columbia has shown how by having a small tax and returning money to the taxpayers with a $100 check refund and in other ways to small business and other txpayers....

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McInerney takes personal responsibility and puts top priority on the Dreamliner. He says we will be defined by the 787, though not at this moment. This means he is personally walking through Boeing's and Boeing supplier's plants to see things first hand, and have the daily progress reports coming directly to him. This means closer supervision and taking steps to get things right. One step was to get some managers from its Defense unit into the 787 program management to correct things, buying Dallas based Vought Aircraft out of a joint venture with Italy's Alenia Aeronautica in South Carolina where sections ofthe 787 are being joined. He also stepped in taking control of key parts of the 787 program, and insisted on Boeing mangers closely monitoring and getting involved with first hand knowledge on supplier's sites and getting action where needed, and stationing Boeing people at each supplier's plant. His earlier style was a bit hands off in comparison. The 15 month delay in the 787 launch and the rather ill timed gala in Seattle for a plane that was hollow inside, and with managers having no idea that supplier's were already behind in their part of the program or not doing anything about it, may have suggested to investors that Boeing's McInerney and his key people were really not at grips with what was going on in their own company. From its July high of $107 Boeing stock has dropped 27% to $78 and recovered only slightly to $83 still 23% below the highs. Experts feel that McInerney will either lose big or win big. He wasn't there when the 787 program was started. Now he has to show he can get things right. His initial moves look like the right ones, taking personal responsibility, making decisions to fix things, and not hesitant to take corrective action in the midst of difficulties such as getting into suppliers factories first hand to see things on the inside. And gettiing his best people from other parts of the company into a team and putting them on the 787, and so on. See the link to the Airbus experience with their jumbo jet A380 which ran into similiar problems in the WSJ. There the French teams who were the better able to solve the problems were brought into the German plants to help get things right, even though there were cultural issues to be overcome. McInerney has process based experience at GE where quality and manufacturing were important, and he has delivered good results with an 84% increase in income to $4.07 billion, on an 8% increase in revenue to $66.4 billion in 2007. This comes just 2 to 3 years since joining Boeing in July 2005. Boeing may have to pay $4 billion in concessions and penalty payments for late deliveries, and Boeing is going to set aside this cost by booking the first 25 delieveries at zero-profit margin....