$100 Million Tourist Trip Around the Moon

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John Schwartz:

NASA brought the shuttle Discovery back from low Earth orbit, now a private company plans to announce a more audacious venture, a tourist trip around the Moon.
Space Adventures, a company based in Arlington, Va., has already sent two tourists into orbit. Today, it is to unveil an agreement with Russian space officials to send two passengers on a voyage lasting 10 to 21 days, depending partly on its itinerary and whether it includes the International Space Station.
A roundtrip ticket will cost $100 million.

Christopher C. Kraft, a former director of the Johnson Space Center, said his feelings about the enterprise were mixed. “I think it would be a fantastic journey,” he said. “I could see why, if I had the price of the ticket and could use the money that way, that it would be tempting to go.”
But Mr. Kraft added that the flight would be cramped and probably extremely unpleasant. With three people in a small Soyuz craft for an extended trip, he said, “I imagine that you could endure that, but, man, it would be tough.”

Lind: Return of the Militia?

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William Lind:

This column continues #128, on the results of Colonel Mike Wyly’s Modern War Symposium, and specifically the discussion of what a state armed service designed for Fourth Generation war might look like. Since our number one goal should be to prevent 4GW attacks on American soil, our working group at the Symposium concluded such a service should be a militia.
The militia would be organized into three levels of types of companies. The first would be deployable world-wide, when our country had to respond to some event overseas. We anticipate that many of its members would be cops, as is true now of some Reserve and National Guard units, which means it would have a natural inclination toward de-escalating situations. This is what the FMFM 1-A, Fourth Generation War, suggests is the key to success in many 4GW situations.

Wal-Mart Advertising Apes Target

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Mya Frazier:

The rollback man is gone, as are the do-gooder anecdotes and smiling associates in frumpy blue smocks. There is no tooting of the corporate-image horn and not a single word on price. But what is found in Wal-Mart’s first major.

Take the geometrical print ad, from GSD&M, Austin, popping up in August titles such as Real Simple, that looks as if it’s pulled from the home-furnishings aisle at Target. A series of back-to-school TV spots tout brands and merchandise first, make actual jokes (a rarity in Wal-Mart ads) and don’t include any in-store shots (long a Wal-Mart staple).

Stock Options: Do They Make Bosses Cheat?

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My sister, Mary forwarded this interesting, brief summary of research (PDF) on the shareholder effects of large option grants to the chief executive.

QUESTION for shareholders: If the company’s directors give lots of options to the chief executive, should you be happy or nervous?

The traditional answer from academia was that big options grants were good. They aligned the interests of executives with shareholders, and they helped to offset the tendency of executives to avoid risky but potentially profitable investments.

But it turns out that the conclusions were based more on optimistic theories than data. Now, with option grants having become the largest portion of chief executive compensation – worth more than either salary or bonus for the average boss – analysis of data on corporate performance provides some disturbing results.

It appears that really big options grants make it more likely that companies will fudge their numbers and that companies with such grants are more likely to go broke.

Netscape IPO +10 Years

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Kevin Kelly looks at what Netscape’s IPO has wrought:

Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the Internet did not exist for most people. If it was acknowledged at all, it was mischaracterized as either corporate email (as exciting as a necktie) or a clubhouse for adolescent males (read: pimply nerds). It was hard to use. On the Internet, even dogs had to type. Who wanted to waste time on something so boring?
The memories of an early enthusiast like myself can be unreliable, so I recently spent a few weeks reading stacks of old magazines and newspapers. Any promising new invention will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder the nays. It’s not hard to find smart people saying stupid things about the Internet on the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: “It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals.” Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: “THE INTERNET? BAH!” The article was written by astrophysicist and Net maven Cliff Stoll, who captured the prevailing skepticism of virtual communities and online shopping with one word: “baloney.”

Thinking Different: GM $5,000 Chinese Minivan

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Keith Bradsher, former NY Times Detroit bureau chief and author of the SUV craze critique: High and Mighty writes about the maverick executive behind GM’s successful $5,000 Chinese minivan. The executive, Philip F. Murtaugh, is of course, no longer with GM.

Their development was led by an American, Philip F. Murtaugh, a native of Ohio and a maverick executive who was willing to zig while the rest of G.M. was zagging. Mr. Murtaugh was able to create in China the kind of innovative environment that G.M. has struggled for decades to achieve in its American operations. But whether G.M. can duplicate elsewhere its achievements in China or even keep its pace here is unclear.

In what may be a telling sign of the corporate culture at G.M., Mr. Murtaugh’s success in China led not to promotion but to his departure from the company. G.M. declined to discuss personnel matters, but both it and Mr. Murtaugh said he resigned and was not dismissed.

A soft-spoken man in a company known for autocratic leaders, Mr. Murtaugh ran the China operations for more than nine years from his base in Shanghai, repeatedly making some of the best calls in the industry. Now he finds himself unemployed and living in a small community in rural Kentucky.

Bradsher’s tenure covering the auto industry was rather controversial. More on Bradsher.

WISTAX: Wisconsin Income Taxes are in the top 10 for Mid/High Income Filers

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Via WisPolitics:

n 2003, Wisconsin state income taxes paid by filers with incomes in the $35,000-$75,000 range were higher than in many other states. For single filers with incomes in this range, Wisconsin’s income taxes were among the top 10 nationally. For married, joint filers, Wisconsin ranked from 11th to 15th, depending on income. These are several of the findings in a detailed new study of income taxes nationwide published by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX).