Archives for April 2021

Small business demand lifts UPS Q1 profit, revenue up 27%

NEW YORK (AP) — Small businesses in the U.S. fueled demand for delivery, helping UPS post better-than-expected earnings and revenue for the first quarter of the year.

That sent the company’s stock to an all-time high Tuesday.

UPS is one of the few companies that benefited from the pandemic as demand for delivery rose as more people stayed home and shopped online. But even with more people getting vaccinated and heading out, the company said it expects delivery demand to continue this year as more businesses open up and need to ship goods. Plus, consumers have more money in their pocket to spend from government stimulus checks. UPS said daily volume jumped more than 14% in the first three months of the year from the same period a year ago.

The Atlanta company reported net income of $4.79 billion, up nearly 400% from the same period last year. But much of those gains came from a $2.5 billion pension benefit related to the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which gives big employers protection against insolvency of their pension plans. That reduced the company’s pension liability by $6.4 billion.

Adjusted earnings, which excludes one-time gains or losses, came to $2.77 per share, far exceeding Wall Street projections of $1.67, according to Zacks Investment Research.

Total revenue soared 27% to $22.91 billion, also beating expectations.

UPS has also been delivering COVID-19 vaccines around the world, many of which need to be kept in deep freezers. So far, the company said it has shipped 196 million COVID-19 vaccines worldwide.

Shares of United Parcel Service Inc., which have nearly doubled in the last year, hit a record high of $197.28 Tuesday morning.

Apple Music launches more than 100 city-focused music charts

NEW YORK (AP) — Apple Music is coming to a city near you — the streaming service has launched daily music charts focused on particular cities around the world, including New York City, Tokyo and Lagos.

The streaming service unveiled City Charts on Monday for more than 100 cities, and the Top 25 songs on each local chart are based on the number of plays in the particular city.

More than 25 of the new City Charts are based in North America, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Miami, San Francisco, Honolulu, Toronto, Vancouver and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

In Europe, City Charts will be available in Paris, Berlin, Dublin, Rome, Madrid, London and more cities.

City Charts will also launch in Africa (Nairobi, Johannesburg); Asia (Seoul, Bangkok, Manila); Latin America (Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá); and the Middle East (Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Dubai).

Apple Music also has music charts that track song and album plays globally.

Biden signs $15 minimum wage for federal contract workers

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden signed an executive order Tuesday to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour for federal contractors, providing a pay bump to hundreds of thousands of workers.

Biden administration officials said that the higher wages would lead to greater worker productivity, offsetting any additional costs to taxpayers.

“This executive order will promote economy and efficiency in federal contracting, providing value for taxpayers by enhancing worker productivity and generating higher-quality work by boosting workers’ health, morale, and effort,” the White House said in a statement.

The liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that as many as 390,000 low-wage federal contractors would receive a raise, with roughly half of the beneficiaries being Black or Hispanic workers. There are an estimated 5 million contract workers in the federal government, according to a posting last year for the Brookings Institution by Paul Light, a public policy professor at New York University.

The increase could be dramatic for workers who earn the current minimum of $10.95 an hour. Those workers would receive a 37% pay hike, though the increase would be rolled out gradually, according to the terms of the order.

The White House said the workers would include cleaning professionals and maintenance workers, nursing assistants who care for veterans, cafeteria workers providing for the military and laborers who build and repair federal infrastructure.

All federal agencies would need to include the higher wage in new contract offerings by Jan. 30 of next year. By March 30, agencies would need to implement the higher wage into new contracts. The increase would also be in existing contracts that are extended.

The wage would be indexed to inflation, so it would automatically increase with each year to reflect changes in prices. The tipped minimum wage of $7.65 an hour for federal contractors would be replaced by the standard minimum by 2024.

Biden has pushed to establish a $15 hourly minimum wage nationwide for all workers, making it a part of his coronavirus relief package. But the Senate parliamentarian said the wage hike did not follow the budgetary rules that allowed the $1.9 trillion plan to pass with a simple majority, so it was not included in the bill that became law in March.

Top off your retirement tank

While it is virtually impossible for a federal or postal retiree to run out of money, it is possible to run dangerously low — even with an annuity indexed in whole, or part to inflation. Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS ) retirees get full COLAs (cost of living adjustments) according to the rise in inflation as measured by the Labor Departments Consumer Price Index (CPI-W). Retirees under the Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS) plan, which includes most current workers, get a diet-COLA that is reduced by one percentage point when the CPI goes over 2%. Social Security is also fully indexed to inflation.

Many, if not most, private sector workers who have company-backed pension plans don’t get any inflation protection. Ever. Thirty years after retirement they are still collecting the same amount they got in their first pension check. Imagine a monthly income in 1980s dollars while trying to live in the 2020s. And retired feds don’t run out of money. They can, even with COLAs, and especially the diet-COLA, run low on money. Even though inflation has gone upward. Sometimes big time. COLA that reduced 1% in times of higher inflation. When you need the protection the most.

Reason:

Good news and bad news — often it happens to be the same thing. Good news is that people are living longer. Bad news is you could be one of them. Your retirement could easily last as long as your federal career. Maybe longer. And that costs money and gets more expensive over time. Earlier this year there was an obituary in The Washington Post. It was about a 99-year old federal worker who retired in 1983. Think about that! Do the numbers! That’s a long time, three plus decades, to keep up with inflation.

In most cases the higher your starting annuity the better off you will be. But still…

If you are one of the 75,000 feds with million dollar TSP accounts and are under the old CSRS), your financial life in retirement should be pretty good. But most people don’t have anywhere near that amount in their federal 401k plan. Also, most will retire under the FERS, which has a diet-COLA formula, meaning that over time their monthly annuity payments can be drastically reduced by inflation.

So what are your options if you are still working?

Work until you drop? Wind up staying 5 years longer than you planned? Leave only to find out later you really couldn’t afford it?

You have to live with your decision. That is a challenging thought! But you can do it, and do it right with a little thought and preparation.

Today’s guest on Your Turn is Tammy Flanagan. She’s a former fed who is an expert on all phases of retirement. And while retirement planning isn’t rocket science, in some ways it is more challenging because ultimately you’ll be riding that rocket until it, or you, run out of gas. And that’s what we’ll talk about beginning at 10 a.m. ET streaming live here or on the radio at 1500 AM in the Washington D.C. area.

She will be talking about eligibility to retire, health and life insurance, and your FEHB plan. What kind of insurance will you need? What about state taxes on your benefits (many don’t tax them)? How much will you need in retirement to maintain, or even improve, your standard of living?

If you have questions, send them to mcausey@federalnewsnetwork.com before showtime.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Adrian Dannhauser

Source: Live Science

Apple’s iPhone privacy clampdown arrives after 7-month delay

SAN RAMON, Calif. (AP) — Apple is following through on its pledge to crack down on Facebook and other snoopy apps that secretly shadow people on their iPhones in order to target more advertising at users.

The new privacy feature, dubbed “App Tracking Transparency,” rolled out Monday as part of an update to the operating system powering the iPhone and iPad. The anti-tracking shield included in iOS 14.5 arrives after a seven-month delay during which Apple and Facebook attacked each other’s business models and motives for decisions that affect billions of people around the world.

“What this feud demonstrates more than anything is that Facebook and Apple have tremendous gatekeeping powers over the market,” said Elizabeth Renieris, founding director of the Technology Ethics Lab at the University of Notre Dame.

But Apple says it is just looking out for the best interests of the more than 1 billion people currently using iPhones.

“Now is a good time to bring this out, both because of because of the increasing amount of data they have on their devices, and their sensitivity (about the privacy risks) is increasing, too,” Erik Neuenschwander, Apple’s chief privacy engineer, told The Associated Press in an interview.

Once the software update is installed — something most iPhone users do — even existing apps already on the device will be required to ask and receive consent to track online activities. That’s a shift Facebook fiercely resisted, most prominently in a series of full-page newspaper ads blasting Apple.

Until now, Facebook and other apps have been able to automatically conduct their surveillance on iPhones unless users took the time and trouble to go into their settings to prevent it — a process that few people bother to navigate.

“This is an important step toward consumers getting the transparency and the controls they have clearly been looking for,” said Daniel Barber, CEO of DataGrail, a firm that helps companies manage personal privacy.

In its attacks on Apple’s anti-tracking controls, Facebook blasted the move as an abuse of power designed to force more apps to charge for their services instead of relying on ads. Apple takes a 15% to 30% cut on most payments processed through an iPhone app.

Online tracking has long helped Facebook and thousands of other apps accumulate information about their user’s interests and habits so they can show customized ads. Although Facebook executives initially acknowledged Apple’s changes would probably reduce its revenue by billions of dollars annually, the social networking company has framed most of its public criticism as a defense of small businesses that rely on online ads to stay alive.

Apple, in turn, has pilloried Facebook and other apps for prying so deeply into people’s lives that it has created a societal crisis.

In a speech given a few weeks after the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out how personal information collected through tracking by Facebook and other social media can sometimes push people toward more misinformation and hate speech as part of the efforts to show more ads.

“What are the consequences of not just tolerating but rewarding content that undermines public trust in life-saving vaccinations?” Cook asked. “What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users join extremist groups and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends more?”

It’s part of Apple’s attempt to use the privacy issue to its competitive advantage, Barber said, a tactic he now expects more major brands to embrace if the new anti-tracking controls prove popular among most consumers.

In a change of tone, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested that Apple’s new privacy controls could actually help his company in the long run. His rationale: The inability to automatically track iPhone users may prod more companies to sell their products directly on Facebook and affiliated services such as Instagram if they can’t collect enough personal information to effectively target ads within their own apps.

“It’s possible that we may even be in a stronger position if Apple’s changes encourage more businesses to conduct more commerce on our platforms by making it harder for them to use their data in order to find the customers that would want to use their products outside of our platforms,” Zuckerberg said last month during a discussion held on the audio chat app Clubhouse.

In the same interview, Zuckerberg also asserted most people realize that advertising is a “time-tested model” that enables them to get more services for free or at extremely low prices.

“People get for the most part that if they are going to see ads, they want them to be relevant ads,” Zuckerberg said. He didn’t say whether he believes most iPhone users will consent to tracking in exchange for ads tailored to their interests.

Google also depends on personal information to fuel a digital ad network even bigger than Facebook’s, but it has said it would be able to adjust to the iPhone’s new privacy controls. Unlike Facebook, Google has close business ties with Apple. Google pays Apple an estimated $9 billion to $12 billion annually to be the preferred search engine on iPhone and iPad. That arrangement is currently one element of an antitrust case filed last year by the U.S. Justice Department.

Facebook is also defending itself against a federal antitrust lawsuit seeking to break the company apart. Meanwhile, Apple is being scrutinized by lawmakers and regulators around the world for the commissions it collects on purchases made through iPhone apps and its ability to shake up markets through new rules that are turning it into a de facto regulator.

“Even if Apple’s business model and side in this battle is more rights protective and better for consumer privacy, there is still a question of whether we want a large corporation like Apple effectively ‘legislating’ through the app store,” Renieris said.

Archives for April 2021

Nearly Useless Factoid

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