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Constructing a skyscraper once took months if not years to build. But not anymore, and certainly not in China . In this recently released time-lapse video, a 30-story hotel is built in just 15 days, or 360 hours. Constructed in Dongting Lake in Hunan province , the hotel is 170,000 square feet and can withstand a 9.0 earthquake reports Treehugger . According to the International Business Times , the prefabricated modules were put together in a factory and then placed on steel structures at the construction site. The Chinese company behind the speedy design and building is Broad Group , a firm which previously built the 15-story Ark Hotel in Changsha, China, in just six days .

Citigroup is not alone. But it has become a primal example of what our vaunted system of American capitalism, once a meritocracy open to all, that has now been diminished, if not erased, into a cesspool of self dealing and outright unfairness. In May of this year Vikram Pandit received a retention award that could reach a pay package of $42 million dollar (“Pandit May Get a $42 Million Retention Award If Citigroup Meets Estimates” Bloomberg 05.19.11 ) which would make him one of the highest paid banking executives in a field littered with banking institutions who would not exist today were it not for bailouts, TARP programs, and on, paid for and at the risk of the threadbare pockets of the federal government (for those who have forgotten or believe stratospheric compensation falls in line with the responsibilities at hand, please recall the President of the United States earns a $400,000 annual salary, along with $50,000 annual expense account , a $100,000 nontaxable travel account and $19,000 for entertainment). Of these, Citigroup has led the pack with $45 billion alone of government succor, reimbursed in whole or in part to the nation’s Treasury, but without the government’s largesse and assumption of enormous risk at a critical moment, Citigroup and many of the other institutions would have gone under. Vikram Pandit’s payout will be spread over four years and are subject to meeting certain performance goals. And how do these benighted executives achieve these dollar and cent performance goals? Well, that’s just the rub. The New York Times has just reported “Citigroup to lay Off 4500 Over Coming Months” 12.07.11 Well, it’s the new American way. You get paid more for hiring fewer people (and Pandit is not alone here), or putting those already employed on the unemployment roles. Wall Street banks in general are laying off more and more people given the headwinds to the financial sector. But that is the point. How many of the laid off could have been kept on the payroll with just a portion of Pandit’s paycheck. And for society to countenance an ethos where the more people you lay off, the more you get paid, is madness. And this not the first time at Citigroup or with Vikram Pandit. In 2007/2008 just before becoming a tin cup institution, Vikram Pandit, after just six weeks on the job was awarded $26.7 million stock bonus and 3 million in stock options while almost concurrently announcing that Citigroup’s work force would be cut by 4200 employees (please see “Citigroup’s Self -Immolation And The Beginning of the Eclipse of American Style Capitalism” 01.2808) from which the following is quoted hereby: “While all these ‘executives’ (i.e. Pandit together with past Chairman Chuck Prince and eminence grise board member Robert Rubin) were wallowing in gravy, Citigroup had the effrontery to announce almost simultaneously that it was cutting 4200 jobs! 4200 jobs lost, 4200 families in distress. Shameless is hardly too strong an adjective. By proceeding with such unfairness, in such a one sided callous manner, Citigroup has become the poster child of so much that is wrong, and much of what is happening throughout corporate America.” And that was in January 2008, before the meltdown in September that same year, and before it took $45 billion in government funds to bail out Citigroup alone. This, only to revisit much of the same distortions near four years later. A transliteration from a popular French proverb “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” would not be out of place. “The more it changes, the more it stays the same”.

It would seem to be impossible — or at least quite a challenge — to drive revenue and sales in a down economy, particularly in one as tenacious as this one. But one company has an especially fitting way to make sure sales rise in an economic downturn: sell a product everybody wants to get at a discount; a commodity product that is well-made and will last for years; a second-hand product. Network Hardware Resale ( NHR ) a family-owned company based in Santa Barbara, CA has built a significant and long-term business out of selling routers, servers, IP telephony, security, optical networking products… you name it, if it’s mission critical networking gear, NHR probably has it — at a steep discount. NHR loves selling products made by Cisco principally because Cisco is a top-dog brand in this space so it’s products are asked for by name; their gear is well-made; and last for years after a high-tech startup may be forced to fold. This too-regular scenario would be NHR’s cue to swoop in, make the purchase and pass on the savings to another startup, an ISP or Fortune 1000 corporation. In 2001, Mike Sheldon was a trader in derivatives and decided to go back to the company his father started in 1986. Chuck Sheldon originally re-sold IBM midrange computers and was, interestingly, the former Mayor of Hermosa Beach, CA. “This is the second downturn our company has been through,” Mike Sheldon said, “the first was the dot-com bubble. ’01 was a tricky year for us, and my contribution right after coming back to NHR was getting some systems installed in the company, IT systems mainly.” At the time, NHR revenues were $20 million which doubled every year to 2004 when revenue hit $80 million. 2010 NHR revenues were $230 million… impressive for a family business. With offices in California, the Netherlands and Singapore, NHR is the world’s largest reseller of pre-owned network equipment. Sheldon says one reason is because of NHR’s 1 year advance warranty and what he calls “great customer service.” I get that; when businesspeople buy mission-critical but second-hand equipment, a warranty is crucial, as is the response time of the vendor service. In addition to selling Cisco products about 75 percent of the time, NHR also carries Force10 (now Dell), Juniper, Brocade/Foundry and Extreme gear, amongst others. “Cisco and the others make a great product,” Sheldon said, “a customer can get a couple of hundred thousand hours out of this hardware or 25 years. There’s a long usable life to these products.” “All parts of your network are not equal,” said Sheldon, “security and VOIP have got to be current.” NHR sales are approximately 50 percent servers, 30 percent routers, 10 percent VOIP and 10 percent security, Sheldon estimated. Some of NHR’s customers come to them when they have a meltdown or are in emergency-status. All of them come looking to reduce costs when buying a key bit of hardware. To illustrate the good service Sheldon described above, he told a brief story. Apparently a customer prospect in Arizona had been receiving regular calls from an NHR salesman and always managed to fend him off handily. The salesman tried everything. Finally he gave up. Well, one day at 5 p.m., the salesman receives a call from the same prospect he’d always been trying to get to buy, and things were not good on the prospect side. “I’m down,” the desperate prospect moaned, “my whole network is down. I need it.” Sheldon finished, “I have to hand it to ‘im,” he recalled, “my sales guy threw four routers into the trunk of his car and drove them from Santa Barbara to Arizona to the near-insane customer.” Of course, after that valiant effort, the salesman, Sheldon and NHR had a customer for life.

The iPhone maker spends lavishly on all stages of the manufacturing process, giving it a huge operations advantage

By Mitch Lipka (Reuters) – If you are looking for a way to rebel against big banks, you could just sit on your couch and scan a few checks. How is that making a statement? Once you can easily scan a check and deposit it, do you really need to stick with a bank just because it has a branch in your neighborhood? The technological advance of smartphone scanning breaks down one of the last barriers to easy bank switching. As the practice spreads, there may be no stopping upstarts from cutting into the deposits of major banks. The idea of switching out of big banks to smaller ones has morphed into its very own day: November 5 is Bank Transfer Day (see www.facebook.com/NovemberFifth). It was launched by Los Angeles art gallery owner Kristen Christian to encourage folks to pull their money from big banks in protest of their policies, from mortgage lending practices to the repayment of TARP funds to a constant array of new fees. “Seriously, who likes going to branches? It’s much more convenient to either mail checks or use cutting-edge mobile deposit technology,” asks former Capital One executive Dan O’Malley, who is now CEO of PerkStreet Financial, one such small financial institution. Mailing checks for deposit to operations like PerkStreet, State Farm Bank, ING Direct or a distant credit union has long been an option, but the growth and acceptance of deposit by phone could be a game-changer for many consumers, O’Malley and others say. USAA Bank has been accepting scanned check deposits for years. It caters to mobile military families but also offers banking services to the general public, “In addition to reducing costs associated with mailing checks, mobile-based remote deposit makes it infinitely more convenient for customers to get money into their online-only accounts at branchless banks,” O’Malley says. Security experts say there is no particular concern to making deposits via a smart phone app. The main issue is being sure to take basic precautions with your phone, says Joseph Steinberg, CEO of the IT firm Green Armor Solutions. “You should have security software on your smartphone. You should have the capabilities to do an anti-malware check,” Steinberg says. Of course, using a phone to deposit a check isn’t exclusive to upstarts. In addition to USAA Bank, which has but a handful of locations, big banks including JPMorgan Chase have since joined in. Brian Ruby of Stratford, Connecticut, uses the Chase app. “It’s very easy: endorse the check, launch the app, snap a couple pictures, confirm the numbers, wait for an email saying it’s good and shred it,” he says. “I don’t get checks very often, and when I would they would sit around for a long time since I seldom visit a branch, so now I’m much quicker on deposits.” Depositing a check by mail is riskier scenario than a deposit by phone app, Steinberg says. Online banking through remote Internet-based financial institutions isn’t new, but is growing with deposit technology. At State Farm Bank, mobile check deposits are up 150 percent since January. Customers using the technology run the age gamut — nearly 45 percent of mobile check deposit customers are 36- to 55-years-old, the company says. In case you’re concerned about the security of your online bank, check to see if your funds will be FDIC insured. State Farm, PerkStreet (through Bancorp Bank) and ING, for example, all are FDIC members. Being a revolutionary is one thing. But doing without that government deposit guarantee? That’s revolting in a different way. The author is a Reuters contributor. The opinions expressed are his own. (Editing by Lauren Young and Beth Gladstone) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

NEW YORK — Folk music legend Pete Seeger and `60s folk singer Arlo Guthrie joined Occupy Wall Street demonstrators Friday in their campaign against corporate greed while residents near the protest park encampment pushed to regain some peace and quiet in their neighborhood. Seeger joined in the Occupy Wall Street protest Friday night, replacing his banjo with two canes as he marched with throngs of people in New York City’s tony Upper West Side past banks and shiny department stores. The 92-year-old Seeger, accompanied by musician-grandson Tao Rodriguez Seeger, composer David Amram, and bluesman Guy Davis, shouted out the verses of protest anthems as the crowd of about 1,000 people sang and chanted. They marched peacefully over more than 30 blocks from Symphony Space, where the Seegers and other musicians performed, to Columbus Circle. Police watched from the sidelines. Occupy Wall Street began a month ago in lower Manhattan among a few young people, and has grown to tens of thousands around the country and the world. A recent Associated Press-GfK poll says more than one-third of the country supports the Wall Street protesters, and even more – 58 percent – say they are furious about America’s politics. But the encampment at Zuccotti Park has become more than a tolerable nuisance, some neighborhood residents say. At a meeting Thursday, they complained of protesters urinating in the streets and beating drums in the middle of the night. Some called for the protesters to vacate the park. The area’s community board voted unanimously for a resolution that recognized the protesters’ First Amendment rights while calling for a crackdown on noise and public urination and defecation. U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and state Sen. Daniel Squadron said in a statement that the resolution was “an attempt to establish a sensible framework that respects the protesters’ fundamental rights while addressing the very real quality of life concerns for residents and businesses around Zuccotti Park.” Asked about Occupy Wall Street on WOR Radio on Friday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the protesters’ leaderless structure has made it difficult to negotiate with them. Occupy Wall Street spokesman Han Shan, who has served as a liaison between protesters and local elected officials, agreed the protesters needed to be better neighbors. Shan, who attended the meeting, promised to limit the noise. At Columbus Circle, Seeger and friends walked to the chant of “We are the 99 percent” and “We are unstoppable; another world is possible.” Seeger stopped to bang a metal statue of an elephant with his cane – to cheers from the crowd. At the center of the plaza, Seeger and Amram were joined by Guthrie in a round of “We Shall Overcome,” a protest anthem made popular by Seeger. After more singing, Seeger asked for a mic check to tell the crowd: “The words are simple: I could be happy spending my days on the river that flows both way-ay-ays.” During the march, the younger Seeger, in troubadour fashion like his grandfather, walked among the protesters playing songs. Amra took up a flute and others enlivened the night protest with the sounds of the accordion, banjos, and guitars. At the front of the throng, marchers held American flags and a large blue flag that said: “Revolution Generation … Debt is Slavery.” Along the way, the crowd sang protest songs made popular or written by Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and others of the protest era. ___(equals) Associated Press writer Karen Matthews contributed to this report.