With the holiday season in full flower, retailers and marketers are hitting parents and kids hard. In 1983, companies spent about $100 million annually marketing to children in the United States. Now they spend more than $17 billion a year. The paraphernalia of childhood is emblazoned with licensed characters and logos.
Lifestyle News - page 108
There’s a new party in town, the Teapot Party, and they put the “grass” back into grassroots. A small group of local supporters of the new movement met in San Jose’s Calabasas Park to talk about the goals: the taxation, regulation, and legalization of marijuana. City Councilmemers are divided as to their objectives.
At its weekly meeting on Tuesday, City Council rejected a regional broadband system, based on Motorola. That company had received a $51 million grant from the U.S. Commerce Department to initiate and install the system throughout the Bay Area. City Council argued that the San Francisco-based Urban Area Security Initiative failed to follow standard government contracting procedures, which led to Motorola being favored over other service providers.
Inmates at the Elmwood Correctional Facility in Milpitas have made 400 wooden toys for needy children in Santa Clara County. There are 27 low-risk inmates involved in the program to produce toys for needy kids. The toys will be distributed by Toys for Tots.
City Council will vote tonight whether to place a ban on single use plastic bags in the city. The ordinance would restrict the use of plastic bags to restaurants and second hand stores as of 2012, with shops in violation of the new law facing a $1,000 fine.
Faced with dwindling revenues and an inability to compete with Google, Yahoo is preparing to lay off between 600 and 700 workers, possibly before Christmas, possibly as early as today. Most of the cuts will occur in Sunnyvale’s products unit, which creates consumer and advertising services.
At a special meeting Monday night, City Council voted to impose a 7 percent tax on medical marijuana sold in local dispensaries. The decision was made possible after voters passed Measure U, which empowered City Council to impose a tax as high as 10 percent. No other regulations on dispensaries were passed.
There already is an $89 million deal to build a new stadium for the Earthquakes near Coleman Avenue. It’s been there since 2008. Now, however, the city wants to make the deal even more attractive to Earthquakes owner Lew Wolff and two local developers in an effort to keep them from backing out. The proposed terms of the new deal would save the developers $4 million and give them an additional two years to buy it.
More and more people across San Jose are turning trash into cash by bringing aluminum cans and glass and plastic bottles for recycling and a refund. Once considered the income of the indigent, collecting recyclable trash is cutting across all economic sectors and incomes. At Ranch Town Recycling, they are seeing more and more people in expensive cars come to bring in their trash.
At a special meeting today, City Council will discuss new zoning ordinances for medical marijuana dispensaries. The meeting comes in the wake of a series of raids on medical marijuana collective and a protest by card carrying marijuana users on Friday night. It is hoped that the meeting will clear up some of the haze surrounding the dispensaries’ legal limbo.
