Oakland A’s in First Place – Brewers are Not

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Bob Sherwin:

Yet other teams have smart players with skill and vision. Tampa Bay has had several first-round draft choices over the years. Texas is loaded with young talent, as are Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and others. But those teams do not get off the ground, while Oakland soars.

Oakland General Manager Billy Beane continues to make it happen. Milwaukee, while, perhaps slowly improving, just is not in the same league, despite a similar small payroll.
Michael Lewis’s Moneyball is a must read for this interested in just how the A’s have been very competitive while the Brewers have not…

Water Wars come to Southeast Wisconsin

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I lived in the western US for a number of years. During this time, I became quite familiar with water shortages and local efforts to address these problems. Living in San Francisco (late 1980’s/early 1990’s), I remember many restaurants stopped serving water with meals (unless one asked – 5+ times). I also recall the mandate that residents restrict their bathing frequency to 3X/week. Fast forward to 2005 and I find that Waukesha, just 55 miles east of Madison, faces significant water problems. Felicity Barringer digs in:

The draw-down of water from the deep aquifer was gradual at first, accelerating in the late 1980’s and throughout the next 15 years. In recent measurements, the water level had dropped about 600 feet. And the deeper the water source, the more likely that it would be contaminated with too much radium, a naturally occurring radioactive element.

A must read, for all water consumers: Cadillac Desert.

The Decline of Hard News TV

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Dave and Doc discuss the decline of CNN as a hard news network. It seems like some of these entities are chasing attention at any cost, rather than developing and sticking to a philosophy. Unfortunately, I think we’ll see more of this, rather than less. The hard news is largely going to be online.

Northwest Goes after the Small Airlines with Non-Stops to Las Vegas

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Northwest Airlines, Madison’s largest air carrier, announced new non-stop service to Las Vegas yesterday. This service competes with an existing non-stop route flown by Allegiant Airlines. The major airlines have often used this tactic to drive low fare competitors from the market. Northwest flies several non-stop routes from Milwaukee that compete with local favorite Midwest Airlines. These flights are unusual in that they do not require connections on NW’s Minneapolis, Detroit or Memphis fortress hubs.

$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.