cBride, in her post, goes on to challenge the Jensen prosecution on grounds of cost: "I’d be willing to bet that the prosecution cost the taxpayers more money than the supposedly illegal campaigning did. That would be a great question for the media to ask the Dane County DA: Mr. Blanchard, what was the bill?"
Well, as Woody Allen says in Annie Hall, it so happens that we have Marshall McLuhan right here.
"Ms. McBride is wrong on the comparison of costs," writes Blanchard in response to an e-mail from Isthmus. (Hmm, why didn’t McBride, a former reporter, think to try this?) "Easily many millions of dollars in public money are not currently being spent – and will not be spent in the foreseeable future – on anything resembling the large partisan caucus offices that Republican and Democratic legislators alike used in recent years to run private campaigns.
A federal judge accused prosecutors Thursday of overreaching in their attempt to show that former KPMG executives sold questionable tax shelters to wealthy clients.
Lawyers involved in the case expect U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to reject defendants' calls to dismiss the case.
The New York judge, however, faulted what he called the government's "shameful" activity that led the accounting firm not to pay defendants' legal bills, contrary to past practice. He also suggested that prosecutors drop some lesser counts.
A federal judge raised questions yesterday about the prosecution of 16 former KPMG employees over aggressive tax shelters, criticizing prosecutors for what he called murky definitions of fraud and evasion.
The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said he was confused by what prosecutors said was a conspiracy by the defendants to make and sell aggressive shelters that allowed hundreds of wealthy investors to evade $2.5 billion in taxes from 1996 to 2002.
"Frankly, I'm very bothered by it," the judge said, saying the document "puts the government's thumb on the scales" and raises questions about the Sixth Amendment constitutional right to legal representation.
No court has ruled the shelters illegal, but the I.R.S. has never considered them valid for deductions.
Nonetheless, Steven Bauer, a lawyer who represents John Larson, a former KPMG partner who is one of the 18 defendants, said prosecutors had withheld important information detailing, among other things, debate inside the I.R.S. over whether the shelters were legitimate.
Judge Kaplan ordered the prosecution to turn over any withheld information.
One day last year, my musician friend Jonathan drove up in a Mercedes. This was odd, since Jonathan is so resolutely counterculture that he once tried recording an album in the woods, without electricity.
His car's exhaust smelled faintly of french fries, and therein lay the explanation: The new Jonathan Richman tour vehicle -- an '84 300D Turbo -- was running on vegetable oil-derived biodiesel fuel as he and his drummer crisscrossed the nation in it, a deep fryer on wheels.
I was intrigued: Biodiesel comes from renewable resources. It's made from soybeans, corn or other oil crops, saving America's farmers. Or it comes from recycled kitchen grease, saving America's sewers. It pollutes remarkably less than petroleum fuel, and could potentially make the U.S. energy self-sufficient, freed from bargaining with dictators and terror-sponsor states.
What this means is that Google and Earthlink plan to use online files (known as cookies) and other data-collection techniques to profile users and deliver precise, personalized advertising as they surf the Internet. (Earthlink is working with the interactive ad company DoubleClick, which collects and analyzes enormous amounts of information online to engage in individual interactive ad targeting.)
Not everyone is enthused by the Google/Earthlink model. San Francisco was advised by a trio of privacy advocates to develop policies that would respect personal privacy. In letters to the city, the ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the adoption of a "gold standard" for data privacy (pasted in below from http://epic.org/privacy/internet/sfws22106.html), insuring that its Wi-Fi system would "accommodate the individual's right to communicate anonymously and pseudonymously." The groups also suggested that the city require any Wi-Fi company to allow users to "opt in" to any data-collection scheme. [Full disclosure: I rent office space in Washington, DC, from EPIC].
has released Who Pays The Individual AMT: State-by-State Estimates for 2006. Wisconsin ranks #6 - ouch!
The issue of importance is not the cost of broadband; that is higher than it should be in the US, but it will fall. Neither is the issue of importance the speed. Higher speed is nice, but what's available in the US is adequate for now.Handley is correct. www.schoolinfosystem.org is a very small attempt to address some of these issues.
What is important is the extent to which home users on the internet are empowered: Do their terms of service allow them to run their own web pages off their home machines? Can they run personal blogs and wikis for their friends to visit? Can they log into their home machines from somewhere else? And so on.
The common place TOS in the US prevent such activities; the powers that be in the US are interested in making the US an alternative form of television, and very much a one-way medium. Not only is this profoundly immoral, it is profoundly undemocratic, and profoundly stupid (since it is yet one more attempt to freeze an existing business model rather than looking at the big picture of how to take advantage of new, as yet undreamed of possibilities); but of course, this sort of trifecta is about what one expects from US business these days.
The point of my writing is to express my disappointment that these issues were not raised; either in the context of the US or in the context of France. I would like to hope that French companies are being better citizens about this than their US counterparts, but I have no reason to believe so. I would, however, hope that a newspaper article would include at least some nod to issues more important than saving a few bucks on one's cable bill.
Yours sincerely,
Maynard Handley
Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to do certain kinds of business. Yahoo! has placed user e-mail data within legal jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China. Google and Microsoft have both chosen not to do so. Why did Yahoo! chose to do this?
It must want to buy something. No other conceivable explanation jumps to mind for why a cash-gushing monster with an $8 billion war chest would toss away another 5 million shares in tonight's shelf filing.
Scheduled 2006 big ticket items are $1 billion to AOL for the search deal, $1 billion (rumored) to Dell for the Google Pack deal, and $1-$2 billion for capex, all offset by an estimated $2-$3 billion of positive cash flow. Add that together and you get a net 2006 cash outflow of maybe $1 billion, leaving $7 billion on the balance sheet--more than enough to compete with anyone except...
Music journalist Ashley Kahn profiles singer-songwriter Neko Case. She has a unique approach to lyrics and uses vivid musical imagery. Case's new album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, has just been released.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University reports today that only 30 of the nation's 180,000 plus millionaires were subject to face-to-face audits in FY 2005. When only traditional face-to-face audits are considered, those reporting less than $25,000 in total positive income were six times more likely to be audited than all those reporting $200,000 or more in income. IRS continues to withhold from TRAC statistical data it has made public in the past that might explain the aberration.
For years, France's telecommunications industry was a state-owned monopoly with one of the world's most backward broadband markets. But thanks to deregulation six years ago, French consumers have access to high-speed Internet service that is much faster and cheaper than in the U.S.
One telecom company in particular has exploited the changes and created competition in France -- a start-up called Iliad. Over 1.1 million French subscribers pay as low as €29.99 ($36) monthly for a "triple play" package called Free that includes 81 TV channels, unlimited phone calls within France and to 14 countries, and high-speed Internet. The least expensive comparable package from most cable and phone operators in the U.S. is more than $90, although more TV channels are generally included.
Savvy companies understand the competitive value of talented people and spend considerable time identifying and recruiting high-caliber individuals wherever they can be found. The trouble is that too many companies pay too little attention to allocating their internal talent resources effectively. Few companies use talented people in a competitively advantageous way—by maximizing their visibility and mobility and creating work experiences that help them feed and develop their expertise. Many a frustrated manager has searched in vain for the right person for a particular job, knowing that he or she works somewhere in the company. And many talented people have had the experience of getting stuck in a dead-end corner of a company, never finding the right experiences and challenges to grow, and, finally, bailing out
It's Sunday morning and as usual I'm wearing a numbered bib and doing agility tests in an aircraft hangar with 1,000 Germans I've never met before!
As you'll have guessed, the one thing we had in common is that we all thought it sounded interesting to be a volunteer in the first - and probably only - evacuation trial of the A380.
So here we are on a miserable, wet airfield in one of the biggest hangars in Europe at Airbus' Finkenwerder production facility next to the River Elbe.
I'm number 873, proud of it, and with a white bib numbered in black to prove it. We hand in everything in our possession which, though I don't realise it then, is going to make the next five hours pass very slowly indeed.
This morning I was chased out of the University of Wisconsin student union by a college student half my age telling me I couldn't take photographs there. I know, I know...it wasn't his fault, he was just doing his job. I asked him why I couldn't take photographs there. He said everything in the Wisconsin Union was copyrighted and no one could take photographs inside the building without a "permit."
I am begining to find that in Madison, Wisconsin, one of the most liberal cities in America, it is becoming increasingly difficult to take photographs on state owned and/or tax payer financed facilities (i.e. UW, Overture Center, Monona Terrace, etc.). Ironic, isn't it? What's worse, I was at a learning institution!
The current excitement over ethanol derives from research that has cut the cost of converting nonfood plant matter like grasses and wood chips into alcohol. Mr. Khosla says he believes that such ethanol, called cellulosic ethanol, will eventually be cheaper to produce than both gasoline and corn-derived ethanol.Interesting photo, new Janesville assembled Chevy Tahoe SUV with Vinod - a prominent Silicon Valley VC.
Can investors whose pockets are not as deep jump into the ethanol market? Yes, but they are taking a big risk. Picking long-term winners among the companies that make ethanol — or, for that matter, develop other alternative energy technologies — is a very uncertain business. The few public companies that focus on ethanol are typically unprofitable. Pacific Ethanol, for example, has not yet had a profitable quarter and will not until at least the fourth quarter, when its first plant is scheduled to begin production, Mr. Langley said.
Would you ever agree to work overtime for free, indefinitely, creating profits for someone else?
I didn't think so.
But that's often what we do when we buy a product or service from companies. That's because they can continue to make money off us by selling whatever personal information we give them in the course of the transaction. Your payback: more junk mail and greater risk of identity theft.
And now it looks very likely that tax preparers will be able to profit off clients in ways having nothing to do with taxes.
Thanks to proposed changes to the IRS' privacy regulation of tax preparers, everyone from H&R Block to your local tax-prep shop may be allowed to sell their clients' tax return information to any third party, including marketers and data brokers.
Mind you, they would need to get your consent, according to the proposed regulations.
The debate over the choice between income and consumption taxation has been ongoing since the beginning of the modern economy, seemingly without end. Those who argue for an income tax usually claim that taxing capital income is central to a fair tax system because those with capital income appear to have a higher ability to pay. Moreover, reducing taxes on investment income would seem to reduce the progressivity of our tax system, a result that is particularly worrisome at a time of growing inequality.
Flashing lights from an unmarked black sedan; sudden short blare of a siren out of nowhere. I pull over, but the police car doesn't move on. Those lights, for me? For me?
I'd been tooling along John Nolen Drive, lost in Ligeti's propulsive first Étude. Is that what it was about the throbbing blue Beetle, swimming along in a sea of cars going just as fast, that asked for special attention?
Carol Bartz has outlasted most CEOs of big companies. She has been chief executive of Autodesk for the past 14 years, when the median tenure is just five years. She led the Silicon Valley software company through economic ups and downs. In May, Ms. Bartz will relinquish her CEO post and become executive chairman. But her longevity as CEO gives her a rare perspective on what it takes to weather mistakes and business cycles and to be an agent of change.
Don't rest on your honeymoon-period laurels.
When she first became CEO, Ms. Bartz joked that her task was "playing Wendy to the Lost Boys of Autodesk." The company had one product, profits were sagging and employees, who brought their dogs and cats to the office, weren't used to answering to anyone. Even by Silicon Valley standards, the atmosphere was chaotic, choking creativity.
In Fast Company's first decade, we introduced readers to a lot of amazingly smart people. To launch our second, we asked 10 of our favorite brains what's next--and how to get ready for it.I think Malcolm Gladwell nails it, business will become much more active in political issues:
"Business has to find its national voice. It has to be engaged in the politics of this country in a way it's not accustomed to. Right now, executives are very good at saying, 'Cut our taxes, cut our regulations.' And they're really terrible at making far more important and substantive arguments about social policy. It's time they stopped banging this one-note drum and started saying that a lot of the things that have been relegated to ideology are, in fact, matters of fundamental international competitiveness for this country.
Take, for example, health care. We are ceding manufacturing jobs to the rest of the world because we can't get around to providing some kind of basic, uniform health insurance. Because of our strange ideological problem with nationalized health insurance, we're basically driving Detroit out of business--which strikes me as a very counterintuitive, nonsensical policy. The simple fact is that GM and Ford and Chrysler cannot compete in the world market if they're asked to bear the pension and health-care costs of their retirees. Can't be done. It's that simple.
Researchers hoping to ease America's oil addiction are turning sawdust and wood chips into bio-oil, a thick black liquid that could become a green substitute for many petroleum products.
Bio-oil can be made from almost any organic material, including agricultural and forest waste like corn stalks and scraps of bark. Converting the raw biomass into bio-oil yields a product that is easy to transport and can be processed into higher-value fuels and chemicals.
"It is technically feasible to use biomass for the production of all the materials that we currently produce from petroleum," said professor Robert C. Brown, director of the Office of Biorenewables Programs at Iowa State University.
1. We get only 55 percent of recommended medical attention [TC: hey, didn't an earlier Rand study show us that more care doesn't translate into better health care outcomes?]
2. "Those with annual family incomes over $50,000 had quality scores that were just 3.5 percentage points higher than those with incomes less than $15,000....insurance status had no real effect on quality."
This should make everyone uncomfortable, but most of all those who think that access to health insurance is a panacea. Here is the press release, the piece is in The New England Journal of Medicine. Am I supposed to believe the following?:
Inflation is the basic reason the AMT is spreading.
Many parts of the tax code are indexed for inflation, including brackets and personal exemptions. However, the AMT exemption is not. So over the years, as everyday people had larger, inflation-driven exemptions under the regular tax code, the gap narrowed between what they owed under it vs. what they owed under the AMT.
Congress addressed the narrowing gap by temporarily raising the AMT exemption in 2001 and 2003. But the last temporary fix expired in 2005, so many more people will feel its sting this year.
Cheese championships are hardly a spectator sport, but cheese-lovers will have a unique opportunity to observe the 2006 World Championship Cheese Contest right here in Madison. Free and open to the public, the contest is slated to take place at the Monona Terrace Convention Center on March 21-23.
While UW-Madison scientists don't usually compete, they do influence the contest's outcome. This year, for instance, Mark Johnson, a scientist at UW-Madison's Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research will join an international panel of judges that will include cheese connoisseurs from France, Japan, the Netherlands and South Africa. Another judge on the 15-member panel will be a Puerto Rican, Leyda Ponce de Leon, who earned a doctoral degree in food science at UW-Madison in 1999.
Spring break 2006 presented an opportunity to check out a ski area that was within a reasonable distance (avoid flights) and promised a decent amount of snow. I surfed the web last week seeking such a destination and found Whitecap, a resort that Ski Magazine has posted favorable words on the years. Those reviews, along with a very attractive package ($199 per person for 3 nights, 3 day lift tickets, 2 dinners, 3 breakfast meals, rentals and a one hour daily group lesson) sealed the deal.
Whitecap is an easy four hour drive north from Madison. We arrived just as crews were clearing snow from last weekend's 20 to 30" storm - creating great midwest conditions for our visit. Whitecap's founder: Dave (an amazingly active guy), mentioned in between bulldozing snow, grooming trails, cleaning rooms, helping with the lifts and feeding wood to lodge fireplaces that a number of cars were stuck during the storm (see photo) and the resort lost power for a short period of time.
Our package include a room in the Whitecap Lodge. This facility provides very convenient ski in/ski out access, nearby parking, a large hot tub and indoor heated pool. The only downside to the lodging was the smoking rooms nearby (be sure to request non-smoking if that is important to you). Perhaps living in Madison has made it far too uncommon to encounter a smoking facility. I was surprised at the number of smoker skiers. The rooms had plenty of hot water for a decent shower. Some include a kitchenette while others feature a microwave and small refrigerator.
Skiing
Whitecap's 43 trails provide a great deal of variety, from wide, well groomed slopes for beginners to some quite challenging (viewed from a chair lift) double black diamonds. The requisite bunny hill is available for newby's. They also offer a tiny slope with a "magic carpet" for those just starting out. The other extreme, at least from a view perspective is the double chairlift that goes up Eagles Nest Mountain and continues, if you'd like, over a valley to the top of Thunder Mountain.
There was never a wait at the chairlifts and whitecap provides plenty of terrain to keep one busy for several days.
Links & Commentary
Go Ski's discussion board has some useful comments.
Bill Semion took a look at Whitecap's new trails a few months ago.
I've posted some additional photos below.
Dave takes pride in his family oriented destination, as well he should. There's also a golf course for summer fun.
A movement to uproot crop subsidies, which have been worth nearly $600 billion to U.S. farmers over the decades, is gaining ground in some unlikely places -- including down on the farm.
In Iowa, one of the most heavily subsidized states, a Republican running to be state agriculture secretary is telling big farmers they should get smaller checks. Mark W. Leonard, who collects subsidies himself and campaigns in a white cowboy hat, told a room full of farmers recently that federal payments spur overproduction, which depresses prices for poor growers overseas.
"From a Christian standpoint, what it is doing to Africa tugs at your heartstrings," Mr. Leonard told them. Last year, he helped humanitarian group Oxfam International in its anti-subsidy campaign by escorting a cotton farmer from Mali to church gatherings near his farm in Holstein.
Last week in The New York Times (TimesSelect), Joseph Nocera quoted Robin Hanson as saying private businesses had not made a breakthrough with the use of idea futures. It seems natural to let your employees bet on future business conditions, the success of product lines, or broader questions of corporate strategy. Microsoft and Google and a few other companies have played with the idea, but it does not (yet?) seem to be taking off. Why not?
- Prediction markets threaten the hierarchical control of top managers. It would become too obvious that most managers are idiots, unable to predict the future.
- Prediction markets make a big chunk of the bettors into "losers." Yet within a company morale is all-important. Businesses proceed by soliciting feedback, and by reshaping their plans to pretend that everyone is on board and has an ego stake in the final outcome. Prediction markets make this coordination more difficult. Once people make bets, they start rooting for their bet to win and for the other bet to lose. They move away from maximizing the value of the firm and develop an oppositional mentality vis-a-vis other employees. Furthermore it is disruptive to have a running tally on who are the winners and losers each day.
I hope McClatchy's obviously sound instincts, in business and journalism, continue with the enlarged company. Having met and chatted with some of their senior folks, and admiring the journalists I know there, I'm fairly confident that McClatchy will do well. But it faces the same economic pressures that forced Knight Ridder to cave in to speculators and other investors for whom journalism is an abstraction -- an unfortunate cost of being in business -- and certainly not a priority.Terry Heaton has more in a related post.
I'm not nostalgic for what many newspapers have become: empty journalistic vessels working mostly for the advertisers and shareholders, only vaguely interested in serving the people of their communities. But when newspapers do their best, they are vital parts of those communities, and we need quality journalism more than ever.
According to the TSA, in the 9th Circuit Case of John Gilmore, you are allowed to fly without showing ID -- you'll just have to submit yourself to secondary screening.
The Identity Project wants you to try it out. If you have time, try to fly without showing ID.
Senator Barack Obama flew at least nine times on corporate jets last year, traveling to fund-raisers in New York and San Francisco, home to Chicago and to Rosa Parks's funeral in Detroit. Each time, he reimbursed the plane's owners at first-class rates, as Senate rules require.Details on Wisconsin's federal delegation are available here. Standing on top of the corporate travel list is Wisconsin's own Jim Sensenbrenner. Others flying via corporate jet include:
But Mr. Obama, freshman Democrat from Illinois, felt queasy about this perk of Senate life, so he said he gave it up.
"It's not only a perk," Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said, "but a serious abuse that should be stopped."
Mr. Feingold said he always flew on commercial planes.
Lee Hawkins, Jr (a writer who used to work in Madison and Milwaukee):
In December, General Motors Corp. ran a series of ads across the U.S. showing Cadillacs being driven in snow. The decision to do so was made by the giant car maker's executives in Detroit, where on Christmas Day, temperatures hovered just above freezing.Hawkins does a nice job digging into this issue with examples from mid level GM employees. GM has a large assembly facility in nearby Janesville.The ads also ran in Miami, a vibrant car market where GM has bombed for the past 15 years. As Christmas dawned, temperatures there started climbing into the high 70s.
GM is struggling under a financial burden created by monumental pension and health-care obligations. But it's also having a hard time persuading Americans to buy its cars. One reason: GM's cumbersome and unresponsive bureaucracy, the one that ran the snow ads in Miami, has for years failed to connect with the tastes and expectations of consumers outside the company's Midwestern base.
Retired Texas schoolteacher is "madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail" because the Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation on him. The reason? He had the gall to pay down his credit card, which apparently marks you as a potential terrorist in Bushworld.
In a cramped shop filled with stale aromas of Chinese herbs, Keary Drath, a stout Wisconsin farmer and self-appointed ginseng sleuth, picked up a dry, wrinkly ginseng root, broke it in half and chewed it.
Clerks and customers of Ginseng City Trading Inc., stopped haggling in their rapid-fire Mandarin and stared. "From China," he declared. "Not Wisconsin."
"What's the difference?" asked a shocked customer, Max Chen, who has used ginseng for 20 years. "They all say it is Wisconsin ginseng. I know Wisconsin's is superior."
Mr. Drath, 42 years old, wishes he had an easy way for Mr. Chen and millions of other ginseng buyers in Asia and in Chinatowns all over the world to make the distinction. The future of Wisconsin's century-old ginseng farming business, now under attack by global rivals, depends on it.
The root has been worshiped as an energy-balancing folk medicine for 5,000 years. Ginseng -- or Ren Shen, meaning "Man Root," in Chinese -- has two types. American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) has a cooling effect. Asian ginseng (Panax ginseng) provides a hot rush of energy.
With its rich loam, sunlight and cool summers, Wisconsin -- especially Marathon County in the central part of the state -- produces premium American ginseng. It is more potent and more bitter than American ginseng grown elsewhere.
To an untrained eye, dried Wisconsin roots look the same as those produced in great quantity in Canada and China. Mislabeling and product mixing abound.
And that is threatening the livelihood of Wisconsin's ginseng farmers, whose roots trace back to the early 1900s when the four Fromm brothers began cultivating ginseng in Marathon County. Ginseng isn't easy to cultivate: It takes four to five years to grow ginseng under wood or fabric canopies.
"Kids are easier to raise than ginseng," says Stephen Kaiser, 59, of Rozellville, Wis., who has been grown ginseng since 1977. "Kids only get colds, flu or pneumonia, but ginseng, it tends to die very easily."
I'm here for the famous Taos ridge, which offers some of the most difficult, unspoiled terrain in any ski area in the country. The ridge is double-black-diamond terrain accessible only by foot; to get there, skiers must take lift No. 2 to its highest point, take off their skis and hike up a steep trail to the top. Because of the hiking and the double black diamonds, skiing the ridge has a hard-core cachet.
Not that I'm all that great a skier. But Taos's "learn to ski better week" is about to change that, with a immersion program at its much-praised ski school. When you sign up for the "learn to ski better" program, you are assigned to a group at your level (there are many levels; "expert" alone has 10 different gradations, with the highest one being professional, and then ski every morning, Sunday to Friday. You're on your own in the afternoon to practice what you've learned.
I came here last January to learn to ski better, and to ski terrain that was fun and challenging for me. Here is what I was not here to do: ski tedious blue runs just to keep a friend company; squabble about whether to stop for lunch; spend two hours looking for my missing nephew. These things tend to happen when you ski with friends and family. Inevitably, people have different skill levels. Last time I was at Taos, I went with five friends and family members. We skied together the first hour of the first day and then broke apart. No two of us were at the same level.
Charlie and I are extraordinarily lucky. We were born in America; had terrific parents who saw that we got good educations; have enjoyed wonderful families and great health; and came equipped with a “business” gene that allows us to prosper in a manner hugely disproportionate to other people who contribute as much or more to our society’s well-being. Moreover, we have long had jobs that we love, in which we are helped every day in countless ways by talented and cheerful associates. No wonder we tap dance to work. But nothing is more fun for us than getting together with our shareholder-partners at Berkshire’s annual meeting. So join us on May 6th at the Qwest for our annual Woodstock for Capitalists. We’ll see you there.
I've been avoiding trips to local ski areas from many years. The AA tag on my ski bag tells the story. The last time the bag was used was a flight from Albuquerque to Dallas - our last pre-children ski trip. The ski bag, along with my boot bag made the journey from Dallas to Madison in 1993.
Living in a four season climate, my recreation thoughts have generally drifted toward warm weather vacations. However, and perhaps giving in to the inevitable, I put my fun but evidently outmoded skis (purchased at Denver's Gart Brothers during my days there) in the car and made the short drive to Tyrol Basin early Saturday morning.
A glorious, sunny day, there were perhaps 15 cars in the lot as we walked toward the ticket office. The temperature and conditions were quite good, with only a bit of ice detected here and there.
Moments later, standing on top of the basin, I enjoyed the view and thought that it was quite pleasant to be within an hour's drive of this place.
While checking out the basin's runs - all except the moguls, my thoughts turned to:
You are weird skiing is odd and my lower back is sore!!!!! Overall it was a fun experience, and I would love to go more often next year!!! Thank you Nora for teaching me!!
Prosecutors call it a corruption case with no parallel in the long history of the U.S. Congress. And it keeps getting worse. Convicted Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham actually priced the illegal services he provided.
Prices came in the form of a "bribe menu" that detailed how much it would cost contractors to essentially order multimillion-dollar government contracts...the California Republican's "bribery menu"... shows an escalating scale for bribes, starting at $140,000 and a luxury yacht for a $16 million Defense Department contract. Each additional $1 million in contract value required a $50,000 bribe.
The rate dropped to $25,000 per additional million once the contract went above $20 million.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the FCC begins reviewing thereported and alleged merger of the AT&T/BellSouth deal. As it may be a much different Commission body with the hopes of Robert McDowell's confirmation by the Senate.I can't imagine this will be, in any way positive for our lagging broadband services. Read "We thought you said spend the $200 billion on dark fiber" for more on this mess.
Mr. McDowell is a telecom lawyer who currently serves as assistant general counsel at Comptel and opponent of the AT&T and Verizon mergers last year. Mr. McDowell is scheduled to appear before a Senate committee on Thursday for his confirmation and is likely to be asked about the merger.
David Sally, a behavioral economist at Dartmouth, responds to the discussion I had with Bill Simmons yesterday on the tendency of NBA players to so dramatically over-perform in the last year of their contract:
With regard to the contract year phenomenon, we can go a little further--we can predict that the likelihood of the post-contract dip is positively correlated with the height of the player. Why is that? Again, the answer lies in the environment-individual link. The seven foot guy has heard that he should be a basketball player since he was eight years old or even younger. He's been pushed his whole career onto the grade school team, onto the varsity, into Division I, and then the NBA draft. He is much less likely than the six foot guy to ever have made a committed choice. He may never had to exert anything approaching his maximum effort level until his contract year. As a result, he has either no idea how to persevere or no intrinsic motivation. So, Simmons' rule is actually too blunt: it seems he should be able to draft contract-signing point guards and two guards for his fantasy team, but never centers or fours. Small forwards--we'd have to do the empirical study.
The wording is so bland and buried so deep within a 324-page budget document that almost no one would notice that a multibillion-dollar scam is going on. Not the members of Congress voting for it and certainly not the taxpayers who will get fleeced by it. And that is exactly the idea.
With Washington reeling from the Abramoff lobbying scandal and Republicans and Democrats alike pledging to crack down on influence peddling, with one lawmaker already gone from Capitol Hill because he traded favors for cash, you're probably guessing this isn't the best time for members of Congress to dispense a fortune in favors to their friends.
Guess again.
Chapter three in a series of articles about Grand Strategy in a 4GW Era
Threat definition is the key phase when developing a grand strategy. Especially today, as America faces many dangerous enemies.
No, instead I’m concerned about our country’s lack of vision for the future and the can-do attitude that we seem somehow to have lost — at least, it’s missing from most discussions on issues facing us today. In a nutshell, I’m lamenting the apparent mortal illness of optimism and ingenuity — the kind of spirit and drive that ignores all the negative issues in the news, the naysayers and the partisans and simply presses forward, driving toward solutions that benefit all of society.
I know we had that once, because the car industry as we know it today was not the invention of large and well-funded corporations. It was created and delivered by men who, though they often worked against the most incredible odds, never lost sight of their dreams and visions. With that focus — which often earned them scorn and insults — they changed the world for the better in a way that centuries of innovation hadn’t. And they did it in mere decades.
Singer Rosanne Cash performs solo and acoustic on Morning Becomes Eclectic at 11:15am. Audio | VideoFabulous.Posted by James Zellmer at 8:18 PM
The finalization of the deal hinged on a separate contract for access to light poles: I’m not sure why this wasn’t reported earlier, but the first I heard about this utility pole arrangement being a gating factor is in this article in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer. The agreements could be introduced to the city council for approval tomorrow. Details of the main contract for service have been only sketchily released. For instance, I found out a few weeks ago—and had confirmed by city CIO Dianah Neff—that a 15-square-mile pilot network has to be built by EarthLink and tested through early users and independent evaluation before the full network is built. This is a prudent step.
