National News

The biggest employer in America reports that sales are down, and there were some other less-than thrilling numbers out today.

The reason? The weather, reports Dianne Swonk of Mesirow Financial.

"A lot of retailers had to do a lot of heavy discounting in response to the weather, particularly in March," she said.

Temperatures were down across much of the United States, causing consumers to huddle at home instead of going out.

"No one was really out there buying Easter bonnets," Swonk said.

April proved to be somewhat better, but not by much.

In housing numbers there was also a downward turn, almost entirely in the South, Swonk said. Weather, again, might be to blame. 

All in all? The rose colored glasses of the first quarter may have come off.

"The US economy has moderated after a strong start to the year," she said.

BP wants some help. They're asking the British prime minister to help them stem the rising cost of compensation from the Gulf Oil spill.

What's their beef?

They claim they're being ripped off by an army of lawyers down there in the South.

Claims being made are inflated, BP says and "totally undeserved," even coming from companies that weren't affected at all.

The problem lies in the proof. Businesses only have to show that they made less profit than usual, or less after the spill. 

Malcolm Bracken, oil analyst from Redmayne Bentley, says that move proved BP has been rather dumb.

"The problem is they've written a blank check to Louisiana and not asked them to prove causality," Bracken says.

BP said they were just trying to make it for easier for claimants, but now they're in over their heads. The company has launched an appeal and if that fails, they want the prime minister to intervene with the White House.

BP is getting hammered because it's a foreign company, even though there are certainly more American employees these days.

Insanity. That's how Senator Harry Reid is characterizing yet another attempt by House Republicans to repeal President Barack Obama's healthcare initiative.

In remarks on the senate floor yesterday, Reid used Albert Einstein's definition of insane as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Reid says not only is it not going to go anywhere. All these tries to knock down the law are costing taxpayers big money -- around $52.4 million in Reid's estimation. 

But Daniel Scarpinato disagrees. He is press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee. "With all due respect to Harry Reid, Obamacare is what is creating costs on taxpayers, and we're trying to stop that," Scarpinato says.

Kathryn Pearson teaches political science at the University of Minnesota. She says these repeal attempts are purely symbolic. And yes, they do cost money.

"That said there are a lot of things that both the House and the Senate do that cost money that aren't intended to produce results," Pearson Says.

Call it the cost of doing business on Capital Hill.

While Mexico is by no means the only place on Earth where public corruption runs rampant, the problem continues to plague its citizens in a country where 93 percent of driversthink their traffic cops are corrupt.

Marketplace Morning Report host David Brancaccio talks to León Krauze of Univision News about how social media outlets such as Twitter have sprung up as tools used by the public to battle public corruption.

Today, hundreds of protesters shut down traffic in the Chinese city of Kunming to dramatize their opposition to a proposed petrochemical plant. It's the latest in a series of 'not in my backyard' or NIMBY protests in recent weeks throughout that country.

So why are we seeing more of these environmental protests now?

It could be a sign of growing consumer class in China. Decades ago, when China began to develop, there was an unspoken deal between China's government and it's people -- if you don't challenge our authority, we'll give you a better quality of life. For years, a better quality of life has meant the freedom to make money. But now that many Chinese have accomplished that, they're revisiting the quality of life clause in that deal and saying, we'd also like clean air and water, please.

Lately, when the government ignores these requests, people have been taking to the streets.

But the government isn't giving in so easily. Two weeks ago, officials in one Chinese city suddenly declared that a Saturday would be a work day and a school day for everyone to prevent a protest from happening. And that was in a city with a population of 14 million.

Protesters are making progress though. Today the Mayor of Kunming came out to talk to protesters and apologized for bad communication, telling them there would be a public hearing.

Scientists used a Dutch woman's dirty stocking to learn that mosquitoes infected with malaria find humans hard to resist. Like a fungus that turns ants into zombies, the parasite seems to change the behavior of the mosquitoes for its own benefit.

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There were some tense moments when Doctor Who fans showed up at a Star Wars convention. There was no battle between the two alien nations. But what would happen if the Doctor met Darth Vader?

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David Beckham, who starred for Manchester United, Real Madrid, and England's national team before heading to the United States and Paris, is retiring at age 38. The news was confirmed Thursday by England's Football Association. He appeared for England in 115 games.

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S&P says Berkshire Hathaway has an "excellent business profile," but that its dividend income is too dependent on the insurance companies it owns. The move is not expected to have much, if any, effect on Buffett's company.

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The Denver-based startup Krowds just launched. It got our attention because the app helps strangers at public events share unlimited video.

The man behind the App is Andres Espineira. He says think about friends at a concert shooting from different seats ... or even parents at a school recital.

"Imagine you get to that recital, you create a crowd -- and a crowd are these groups that you can create on the fly and that can have as many people as you want -- so you can start contributing video and other parents start contributing video. And there are no limits on length," Espineira says.

The key, says Espineira, is that you if you missed something or someone else was much closer, you can check out other people's videos to see from their vantage point.

Rutgers University welcomes the arrival of new athletic director Julie Hermann as the beginning of a new era, weeks after turmoil engulfed its athletics department. The school's basketball coach was fired last month after videos showed that he verbally and physically abused players during practice.

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CBS News and CNN say they've been told by sources familiar with what was found that investigators believe marathon bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote on an interior wall of the boat where he was found hiding. He allegedly said the attack was in retaliation for the Afghan and Iraq wars.

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If you thought it was hard to get up this morning, imagine working at the IRS. Even on a good day, you're commonly a source of dread, and the butt of jokes.  Now, in the wake of disclosures that IRS has been targeting conservative groups for scrutiny, your workplace is also the subject of hearings on Capitol Hill and a potential criminal investigation. And the guy who runs everything just resigned.  

“This scandal just adds to the burden,” says Clint Stretch, with the tax policy news service Tax Analysts.   “You're frankly despised by a number of people in the political system, and the recipient of enormous broad-based criticism.  It’s hard to keep up morale.”

Meanwhile, you’ve still got a job to do, namely collecting taxes to keep the U.S. government running.  So, how’s all the chaos of this week going to affect that undertaking? 

Stretch says studies have shown that historically, in moments when tax collection authorities are held with suspicion, the country collects much less tax. He says the same could well be true this time around. “You could well see a dip in tax revenue.  But it won’t be because the government isn’t doing its job.  It’s because citizens won’t be doing their job.”

That’s because in the end collecting taxes is based mostly on trust. It’s a voluntary system. “When you’ve got politicians saying the institution is corrupt,” Stretch says, “that encourages taxpayers to ask themselves ‘If there are a bunch of criminals and thugs at the IRS does it really make sense for me to send them my money?’”

But despite this latest drama, the IRS, which employs hundreds of thousands of people, is “generally very good at what it does,” says  Alice Abreu, a professor of tax policy at Temple University Law School.  “And for that reason congress continues to put more programs and social policy through the tax system,” she says, referring to a growing list of programs administered through the tax code, ranging from the Earned Income Tax Credit to the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction, and, soon, a big chunk of managing the Affordable Care Act.  

Meanwhile, Abreu says, Congress continues to reduce IRS funding.  She thinks that tension, of growing responsibilities coupled with shrinking budgets, is a big part of why the IRS is in this current mess over targeting conservative groups. They're trying to do more with less, she says. That can lead to missteps.   

“It may not be acceptable but it is understandable that somebody is going to look for a short cut that allows them to process the mountains of pieces of paper that they have in an efficient way.  And when you go for efficiency because you’ve got to get the job done, equity and fairness can fall by the wayside,” Abreu says.

Of course, making a case to spend more on a scandal-tainted agency that collects taxes is going to be tough, something Abreu acknowledges. “It’s not politically attractive to say we want to give more money to this agency that everybody loves to hate.”

Still, she says, Congress should “look more deliberately and more closely at what it’s asking human beings to do, without giving them the resources with which to do it.”  

If you thought it was hard to get up this morning, imagine working at the IRS. Even on a good day, you're commonly a source of dread, and the butt of jokes.  But this week, your agency is also the subject of a gauntlet of hearings on Capitol Hill and a potential criminal investigation. And the guy who runs everything just resigned.  

“This scandal just adds to the burden,” says Clint Stretch, with the tax policy news service Tax Analysts.   “You're frankly despised by a number of people in the political system, and the recipient of enormous broad-based criticism.  It’s hard to keep up morale.”

Meanwhile, you’ve still got a job to do, namely collecting taxes to keep the U.S. government running.  So, how’s all the chaos of this week going to affect that project?

Stretch says studies have shown that historically, in moments when tax collection authorities are held with suspicion, the country collects much less tax. He says the same could well be true this time around. “You could well see a dip in tax revenue.  But it won’t be because the government isn’t doing its job.  It’s because citizens won’t be doing their job.”

That’s because in the end collecting taxes is based mostly on trust. It’s a voluntary system. “When you’ve got politicians saying the institution is corrupt,” Stretch says, “that encourages taxpayers to ask themselves ‘If there are a bunch of criminals and thugs at the IRS does it really make sense for me to send them my money?’”

The drama aside, Stretch says in an agency that employs hundreds of thousands of people, most of them are trying to do a good job.  But, a scandal like this one could drive the best employees out. 

The good news: Inflation remains in check. The bad news: Jobless claims are up, and housing starts are down.

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We talked to Kevin Drum for today's Marketplace Tech. He's got a long piece out for Mother Jones on a topic we're familiar with: robots replacing humans in the workforce.

The good news is Drum seems optimistic about this robot utopian future, where highly intelligent machines will do all our work for us while we sip cocktails and play ping pong (or at least that's what I hope to be doing in 2040). There is a caveat: economists, policy makers and the rest of us need to think about using our extreme computing powers of the future to increase equality--not widen the income gap. 

Drum touches on a lot of numbers -- and I thought one particular set was pretty interesting. That set is the computing power of our brains:

Computing power is measured in calculations per second-- a.k.a. floating-point operations per second, or "flops" -- and the best estimates of the human brain suggest that our own processing power is about equivalent to 10 petaflops. ("Peta" comes after giga and tera.)

What does all of this have to do with Lake Michigan? Drum says if you turned 10 petaflops into their equivalent in fluid ounces, you'd get the volume of Lake Michigan. And he thinks that by 2025, your average computer will have that same capacity for computing. 

We talked to Kevin Drum for today's Marketplace Tech. He's got a long piece out for Mother Jones on a topic we're familiar with: robots replacing humans in the workforce.

The good news is Drum seems optimistic about this robot utopian future, where highly intelligent machines will do all our work for us while we sip cocktails and play ping pong (or at least that's what I hope to be doing in 2040). There is a caveat: economists, policy makers and the rest of us need to think about using our extreme computing powers of the future to increase equality--not widen the income gap. 

Drum touches on a lot of numbers -- and I thought one particular set was pretty interesting. That set is the computing power of our brains:

Computing power is measured in calculations per second-- a.k.a. floating-point operations per second, or "flops" -- and the best estimates of the human brain suggest that our own processing power is about equivalent to 10 petaflops. ("Peta" comes after giga and tera.)

What does all of this have to do with Lake Michigan? Drum says if you turned 10 petaflops into their equivalent in fluid ounces, you'd get the volume of Lake Michigan. And he thinks that by 2025, your average computer will have that same capacity for computing. 

Sheikh Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh said anyone using social media sites — and especially Twitter — "has lost this world and his afterlife." Many Saudis have turned to social media sites for news and to discuss issues they might otherwise not be able to bring up.

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Lately it seems like we talk about Moore's law at least once a week on our show. It's the idea that our computing power jumps forward by leaps and bounds every two years -- so fast that soon our computers will be as smart as we are.

Kevin Drum is a writer at the magazine Mother Jones, and he's just written a long piece about intelligent robots and how by the year 2025, they'll be taking ALL of our jobs. Don't worry though -- he says that's a good thing -- as long as we divvy up the computing power fairly.

A man opened fire Sunday on a parade in New Orleans. Nineteen people were injured. After the release of surveillance video and an appeal for help from the public, police brought the suspect into custody early Thursday.

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