20 March 2009
20 March 2009
WHAT THEY SAY…
0633 by Jeff HessA Daily Dish reader writes:
I’m not an accountant or a lawyer, but the way I read that is that, as of the December 2007 effective date of the contract, AIG was already aware that their CDOs and market cap were diving or preparing to take a dive, and this was a way of offsetting those losses for the very employees responsible for those failures.
I’ve been around the block a few times, and have participated in a fair few bonus and retention programs myself, but I’ve NEVER worked anywhere ballsy enough to say “Hey, you’re efforts are destroying this company, in fact we expect the company to go down in the next year or two, so here’s some money to ensure that you stick around for the fun.” I mean, this is why the letters W, T, and F were invented.
19 March 2009
18 March 2009
18 March 2009
WHAT THEY SAY…
0745 by Jeff HessThe hostility Kain senses isn’t due to schadenfreude induced glee, it’s from frustration built up over the years because those who foresaw the media blood bath coming – often bloggers and others familar with new media – were repeatedly ignored, and still are.
17 March 2009
THE REAL FACE OF THE REVOLUTION…
1723 by Jeff Hess
Inter alia, the Times article reports the division [AIGFP] is now run by Gerry Pasciucco, a former vice chairman of Morgan Stanley. [Above], you can see a recent photograph of Mr. Pasciucco from a party in Belle Haven, sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt, blue blazer and handkerchief, with some sort of sporting drink I’m unable to identify (possibly a mojito?).
16 March 2009
THEY’LL BE HERE SOON…
0658 by Jeff Hess16 March 2009
SELF-DELUSION HAS KILLED THE NEWSPAPER…
0650 by Jeff HessBack in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry”s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry”s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
Clay tells the story well, but he’s off by about 15 years. The death of newspapers could be seen by those paying attention in the mid- to late-’70s when it became clear that the micro-computer revolution had changed the rules.
By the early ’80s the Journalism school at Ohio University partnered with CompuServe to explore the potential of Videotext — graphics were coming, but for then we had scrolling text at 300 baud — and that 14-year-old in the mid-west was toothless and in diapers.
When I started as an assistant editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1985, publishers thought I was nuts when I told them that print was dead. The only question they could ask was: How do we make money that way?
Hoping that you’ll be retired before the change comes is not a good business strategy.
They all get no sympathy from me.
13 March 2009
WHAT THEY SAY…
1525 by Jeff HessNot only do most people not know or care about earmarks in general, they are often quite fond of earmarks that go to their districts. Ron Paul sometimes gets in trouble with pundits who like to point out that he requests earmarks for his district as part of his role as their representative, but in many of those cases it is hard to see why, for example, shoring up a sea wall in Galveston, which is an area vulnerable to storm surge during hurricane season, is such a terrible or wasteful thing.
Indeed, even if you are a strict constructionist, it is not so far out to think that the federal government might even have some proper role in providing for coastal defenses against natural disasters. It is also difficult to understand why representatives should not do what they can to get their constituents a share of the money that the government has taken from them.
13 March 2009
MY COMMENTS…
1108 by Jeff Hess12 March 2009
12 March 2009
WHAT THEY SAY…
1449 by Jeff HessBlogging takes you into the ever instant-present, and the world’s rapidly changing scene can prompt shifts in your outlook you never truly expected and don’t yet quite understand. I realize that my passionate dismay at the Freeman affair, for example, was surprising to some, and even to me.
I’m a passionate believer in Israel’s right to exist and care about her security. But the changing world requires adjusting to new realities and past experiences. And sometimes events bring ruptures to the surface that reflect tectonic shifts underneath. And that requires some context.
By its nature this post is therefore somewhat solipsistic. Please skip this post if my own internal angst is of understandably minimal interest to you. But I’m a believer in expressing conflicts, not inhibiting them. I don’t work on background.
Ignore Sullivan’s out. Read the entire post
12 March 2009
12 March 2009
MY COMMENTS…
1331 by Jeff Hess11 March 2009
WALMART WEDNESDAY…
1030 by Jeff Hess
It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees, Robert Feinman and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.
WAS IT A MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT…? Attorney Daniel Becnel asserts that Walmart and Netflix cut a deal to partition the market for DVDs where Netflix gets to maintain its position in the rental market and Walmart maintains its own lucrative position in the sale of DVDs. Keep reading…
WALMART CUTTING SOME LOSSES… As I read my morning news the first ten stories on my reader page had some permutation of the headline: Wal-Mart sales beat estimates. But beating a low-balled estimate isn”t difficult. I found a more interesting head on page 2: Keep reading…
IS CHARLES PLATT ON A ROLL…? Boing Boing has been running a number of guest bloggers. This week the guest is Charles Platt. He”s already raised Jonathan”s blood pressure and now has taken up the Walmart Saves The World banner. Here”s my favorite bit. Keep reading…
WALMART IS NOT THE ANTICHRIST… Neither is anyone at the company, past or present, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or George W. Bush. Walmart is well, just Walmart, and that is bad enough. Part of the curse of marketing is that everything must be über good or über bad. Keep reading… Continue Reading »
11 March 2009
SOCRATES CAFÉ: THE MORNING AFTER…
0704 by Jeff Hess
Last evening the Cleveland Socrates Café met at the Mayfield Road Phoenix Coffee House to discuss:
Why do people think they need something when it’s really just a want?
We began with a great deal of discussion on just what are needs and what are wants and how relative position on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can determine how any one individual describes a particular desire.
We also explored how physical and psychological demands may be placed in either or both categories.
Towards the end of the evening we took apart the question to understand the possible value judgments in the question; are needs objective and acceptable but wants subjective or selfish and less acceptable?
If you’ve had a morning-after thought or just wish to jump into the discussion, please help us continue in the comments.
10 March 2009
MY COMMENTS…
1851 by Jeff Hess10 March 2009
WHAT THEY SAY…
1656 by Jeff HessEven if a president wants to have differing sources of advice on many questions, the Congress will prevent any actual, genuinely open debate on Israel. More to the point: the Obama peeps never defended [Chas] Freeman. They were too scared. The fact that Obama blinked means no one else in Washington will ever dare to go through the hazing that Freeman endured. And so the chilling effect is as real as it is deliberate.
When Obama told us that the resistance to change would not end at the election but continue every day after, he was right. But he never fought this one. He’s shrewder than I am.
10 March 2009
9 March 2009
REALITY, SCIENCE AND PRESIDENT OBAMA…
0732 by Jeff HessScience, like reality, is that which doesn’t go away when you ignore it. For eight years the administration of President George Bush disregarded this simple post-modernist fact at the peril of the strength and well-being of the nation he served.
President Barack Hussein Obama today will, with the stroke of a pen, toss that dangerous and ignorant policy into the trash and “restore scientific integrity” to the decision making process in the White House.
How good it is to have an adult in the Oval Office.
