Music Downloads: Profit without iTunes

It’s a concensus: Being in the music business sucks, right now.

Despite the music industry’s best attempts to vilify file sharing, the prosecution of 12 year olds for downloading music has only resulted in the vilification of the major labels in the eyes of the public. Even after the music biz managed to gut Napster, online file sharing has continued, though on a smaller, more furtive scale.

And while iTunes may have figured out a way to prevent listeners from playing each other’s downloaded music (if you try, the program will inform you that your computer is not “authorized” to play the…

Alternative Energy Stocks: NGK turns a profit on wind power

My primary weather experience was in a windswept place, where even calm days had an intermittent 30 mph “breeze.”

And maybe that’s why I can’t get excited about storage for wind-turbine energy. The idea that the wind might stop blowing for an extended period of time and you may need to rely on stored power, while evident to me on a daily (or at least weekly) basis out here on the East Coast, is antithetical to deep-seated instinct.

Despite my insistent, if illogical, argument against the idea, I am assured by those in the business that, yes, wind turbines do sometimes stop…

Peak Oil: From Pemex to Petrobras

Oil and Energy

Mexico is struggling with a very important question about its future. Does the country want to be Brazil or Venezuela?

On the one hand, you have authoritarian rule and government-controlled natural resources. On the other, you have a liberalization of state control and a booming economy. Hmm. That’s a tough decision.

Right now, the president of Mexico is fighting to bring more autonomous control to the country’s nationalized oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). But he may have trouble convincing his congress to make the changes.

Pemex is the single largest revenue source for the Mexican government. It produces 40% of the…

Commodities Trading: Aluminum’s Alcoa bribes (maybe) and buys

Despite record-breaking commodities prices, aluminum giant Alcoa (AA: NYSE) is not having the best of times right now.

The U.S. Justice Department just asked a judge in Pittsburgh to hold off on a lawsuit against the company.

The government of Bahrain is suing Alcoa for what it says was a 15-year pattern of bribing government officials and overcharging to Aluminum Bahrain BSC, a long-time Alcoa customer.

But don’t get too excited. The DOJ is asking the civil court to take a break while it investigates a possible criminal case against Alcoa. Ouch.

The news hasn’t had too bad an effect on the company’s stock, but…

Russia vs. the Ukraine: Gazprom always wins

The Ukraine government is a teenage boy, and a rather ungrateful teenage boy, at that. The former Soviet Bloc country wants to be independent and chose its own friends. But at the same time, it still wants an allowance from good old Dad.

And in this case, Dad is Russian natural gas giant Gazprom, which threatened yet again this week to cut off not only the Ukraine’s allowance, but its electricity, too. And those threats aren’t going to end anytime soon.

In the good old days, the USSR subsidized energy to Soviet states. And even after capitalism and Gazprom emerged from the…