Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

  Explosive Report Alleges Extensive Use Of Forced Labor At Apple Suppliers In China   BY TYLER DURDEN TUESDAY, DEC 29, 2020 - 10:50   As Apple continues to lobby against the Uygher Forced Labor Prevention Act, a bill intended to punish Chinese companies that utilize forced labor from the persecuted Muslim minority group,  the Washington Post  has just rolled out a lengthy investigation, conducted in partnership with a human-rights group, exposing Apple suppliers' links to forced labor. Breaking news that threatens to revive the outrage over the fraught ethical status of Apple's supply chain. 10 years ago, when stories about Foxconn's labor abuses first emerged, coverage seemed to focus on macabre stories of long shifts, low pay and suicide nets strung up around manufacturing facilities to stop workers from leaping to their deaths. Over the past ten years, as China's currency has appreciated and its economy has continued the (state-orchestrated) transi...

  These Three Technologies Will Pick Up Where Moore’s Law Leaves Off   By Chris Reilly - RiskHedge Chris’s note:  This week, as part of a special holiday series, we’re sharing our most valuable essays of the year. Over the next few days, you’ll hear from Stephen McBride, Chris Wood, and Justin Spittler on their top moneymaking opportunities. We kick things off today with Chris Wood. If you don’t know, Chris is our microcap tech expert. Today, he’s stepping forward to expose “the biggest lie in all of tech”… You may have heard about this lie. But you probably don’t know the truth behind it… and more important, how to set yourself up for big profits. These Three Technologies Will Pick Up Where Moore’s Law Leaves Off By Chris Wood, editor,  Project 5X There’s a big lie about disruption going around. Folks aren’t spreading it intentionally... Many smart investors I talk to genuinely believe it to be the truth. As a  RiskHedge  reader, you’re...

10 Climate Alarmist Predictions For 2020 That Went Horribly Wrong   BY TYLER DURDEN TUESDAY, DEC 29, 2020 - 19:25 Authored by Tyler O'Neil via PJMedia.com,   Long before Beto O’Rourke claimed the world only had  10 years left  for humans to act against climate change,  alarmists had spent decades predicting one doomsday scenario after another,  each of which stubbornly failed to materialize. It seems climate armageddon has taken a permanent sabbatical. Many of those doomsday predictions specifically mentioned the annus horribilus of 2020. Those predictions also failed, some rather spectacularly. Steve Milloy, a former Trump/Pence EPA transition team member and founder of JunkScience.com, compiled  ten climate predictions  for 2020 that fell far off the mark. 1. Average global temperature up 3 degrees Celsius In 1987, the  Star-Phoenix  in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, quoted James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Spa...

  E-commerce Sales Jump Nearly 50% This Holiday Season   BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, DEC 28, 2020 - 12:05 Submitted by  Market Crumbs,   With the holiday shopping season now officially in the books, Mastercard on Saturday  gave a look into what consumers shopped for this year . Using aggregate sales activity in the Mastercard payments network and survey-based estimates for other payment forms such as cash and check, MasterCard SpendingPulse found that U.S. retail sales excluding automotive and gasoline jumped 3% during this year's holiday shopping season, which ran from October 11 through December 24. With many people continuing to stay at home as a result of Covid-19, it's not surprising that online sales jumped by 49% compared to last year. E-commerce accounted for 19.7% of overall retail sales during this year's holiday shopping season compared to 13.4% in 2019. Given people are spending so much time at home, home furniture and furnishings was the bigge...

Facebook Managers Trash Their Own Ad Targeting in Unsealed Remarks   The internal documents suggest that Facebook should stop positioning itself as a champion of small business. Sam Biddle December 24 2020, 8:00 a.m.   FACEBOOK IS CURRENTLY  waging a  PR campaign  purporting to show that Apple is  seriously injuring American small businesses  through its iOS privacy features. But at the same time, according to allegations in  recently unsealed court documents , Facebook has been selling them ad targeting that is unreliable to the point of being fraudulent. The documents feature internal Facebook communications in which managers appear to admit to major flaws in ad targeting capabilities, including that ads reached the intended audience less than half of the time and that data behind a targeting criterion was “all crap.” Facebook says the material is presented out of context. “More than half the time we’re showing ads to someone oth...