Drexel Burnham Lambert Alumni Article: Brewer’s Mark Attanasio

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New Brewer CEO Mark Attanasio gets a few mentions in Jenny Anderson’s article on the Drexel Diaspora:

Several other former Drexel employees are managing billions for pension funds, endowments, wealthy people and one another – often using junk bonds. Mark L. Attanasio, a senior vice president at Drexel when it collapsed, is a managing partner at Trust Company of the West, a $109.7 billion money management firm. Last month, he bought the Milwaukee Brewers for more than $220 million.
Interviews with more than two dozen former employees showed that, far from being embarrassed by their connection to Drexel, most retain an almost cultlike devotion to the firm and much of what it stood for. Few of them were crucial players in building Drexel’s core franchise, junk bonds. And few of them were especially close to Mr. Milken, who has since survived cancer, established two major foundations devoted to cancer research and become a major investor in an education initiative, Knowledge Universe Inc.

Attanasio also worked at Global Crossing with another ex-Drexel player – Gary Winnick.

Photos Verboten: Chicago Publicly Financed Sculpture!

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Cory Doctorow:

Chicago spent $270 million on its Millennium Park, placing a big public sculpture by Anish Kapoor in the middle of it, bought with public money. Woe betide any member of the public who tries to photograph this sculpture, though: it’s a copyrighted sculpture and Chicago is spending even more money policing Chicagoans who try to photograph it and make a record of what their tax-dollars bought.

Controlling Madison Property Taxes?

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Rob Zaleski wonders why we cannot control property taxes:

Though they don’t get much media attention, there are, in fact, some ideas out there worth pursuing, Reschovsky says.
Among the most promising, he says, is a recent proposal by his colleague Don Nichols, director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs, that would freeze the rate of property taxes on all farms and homes to the rate of income growth of the average Wisconsin resident. The result, Reschovsky says, is that low-income people wouldn’t be driven from their homes. (For more details, see info@lafollette.wisc.edu)
Beyond that, some states have tried assessment caps, with mixed results, Reschovsky says. The best example, of course, is California’s controversial Proposition 13, which was passed in 1978 and limits increases in assessed value to 2 percent a year. A house gets reassessed at full value only when it’s sold.

GM Auto Marketing: Find Your Style (Wife, Girlfriend, Mistress)

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Driving back to SFO recently, I noticed this GM (General Motors) billboard. In essence, the message to Northern California drivers bound either for SFO or their jobs on the Peninsula or in Silicon Valley was:

Advertising is often a useful way to peer into the soul of a company, or in other words, think about their dna and how the firm views its interaction with the outside world.

This campaign smells desperate to me. I’m reminded of Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy’s spot on statement regarding software: “The quality of a company’s software has an inverse relationship to the amount spent on marketing.”

I must admit that this ad campaign doesn’t click at all for me, from any angle. The whole pitch, including the website, seems like a lot of fluff. I visited the site and it promptly crashed my computer (PC, in this case). I tried again and it worked, although it later crashed just my browser.

Perhaps this all makes sense for some car buyers…..

I think GM would be much better off seeding cars to bloggers and schools for long term reviews (with the agreement that they write about their year or two with a sedan, minivan, SUV or sports car). This will take some doing, but I think it would be money well spent. Essentially, they need to route around the legacy media (see Bob Lutz’s notes on this).

Losing Control of Your PC – Thanks to Dell

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Paul Biggar:

It seems that horrible day has come when my computer will no longer truly be mine. Since about 2000 we’ve heard about Palladium and Trusted Computing waiting in the wings for the day that I can no longer trust my computer, and my computer demands that it can trust me.
Digital Rights (restrictions) Management means that you can no longer play media which is not yours. Or, in its current implementation, you cannot use something which you have bought, in a way which you are legally entitled to play it, because the content owners do not wish it. Once Dell and others start shipping these chips, and Windows provides for it, then everything must be DRM, and non-DRM applications and hardware are rendered useless.

What can you do? Support the EFF and perhaps, buy a mac while it’s still open.