[Quote:]

Nine dead so far, developing….

location of the crash is here

If you’re a company, and you discover one of your employees is terminally ill, what do you do?

This: You take out a life insurance on him, of which the premiums are tax-deductible, although the payout will be tax free. Then, you kick the employee out.

And nobody will find out, unless the post office fucks up delivering the pay-out check.

[Quote:]

Flee the maximum security prison by dangling from a rope ladder hanging out of a hijacked helicopter once, shame on you.

Flee the maximum security prison by dangling from a rope ladder hanging out of a hijacked helicopter twice, can’t get fooled again.

[Quote:]

A mob of crack-smoking rhesus monkeys could have designed a better standard than NMEA 0183.

[Quote:]

For its $5.3 billion — on top of the $4.3 billion it has received since December — Chrysler offered little more than an assurance that it has already cut costs and accomplished most of what it had to do to become a valuable, viable company. It offered to trim production by a paltry 100,000 units — leaving it with capacity to make almost one million vehicles more than it will sell this year — on the questionable assumption that demand, and its market share, will bounce back next year.

Chrysler said the only reason it was back asking for more money so soon was that the car market was worse than it had expected two months ago.

This cavalier approach to the public purse raises a very big question. If Chrysler is really on track for a turnaround and all it needs is some financing to get over a bad patch in sales and debt markets, why doesn’t Cerberus Capital Management, which owns 80 percent of the company, put up the money itself? Why should taxpayers have to take the risk? That’s what private equity funds like Cerberus are supposed to do.

Cerberus and Daimler, which retained a stake in Chrysler, have promised to convert $2 billion in loans to Chrysler into equity, which should help reduce its debt. But Cerberus said giving fresh money would violate its fiduciary duty to investors, breaking company rules limiting how much it can commit to any given investment.

We suspect these rules would be more pliant if Cerberus deemed Chrysler to be a good deal.

It seems the secretive private-equity fund is willing to gamble on Chrysler’s survival with the taxpayer’s dime, but not its own.

[Quote:]

The Allegheny County councilman accused nearly two years ago of improperly making $40,000 in political contributions from an elderly widow’s trust fund has been charged with 23 criminal counts, including theft, misapplication of property, criminal conspiracy and making false reports.

[..]

The investigation involves Mr. McCullough’s handling of the trust account of Mrs. Jordan, a 91-year-old widow in Upper St. Clair. The investigation began in April 2007, following the publication of a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette revealing that Mrs. Jordan had been the single largest donor to four local Republican candidates even though she hadn’t voted in seven years.

[This is actual sample code from the Pylons documentation:]

${c.employees.pager(‘Page $page: $link_previous $link_next ~4~‘,

   onclick=”$(‘#my-page-area’).load(‘%s’); return false;”)}

<ul>

% for employee in c.employees:

   <li>${employee.first_name} ${employee.last_name}</li>

% endfor

</ul>

[Quote:]

A little more than a month after the first family’s move to the White House, reports of strange happenings have continued to surface, with Sasha Obama confirming Tuesday that she had once again been visited by the eerie specter of the Bush twins.

Sasha, who was playing in the East Wing of the executive mansion so as not to disturb her busy father, reported seeing the former first twins while riding her Big Wheel tricycle down the Cross Hall corridor. The frightening apparitions, the 7-year-old said, emerged out of thin air and were dressed in identical outfits consisting of spaghetti strap tank tops and denim skirts.

[..]

While some White House staffers believe the visions to be nothing more than a child’s plea for attention, others are less skeptical, claiming that the building’s last resident committed horrible atrocities.

[Quote:]

The big brains in banking just aren’t feeling the love.

Up and down Wall Street, financial types are grumbling that their industry’s highest highflyers are getting their pay capped.

Many Wall Streeters say this would be disastrous. The sharpest financial minds will up and quit, the argument goes, and take their smarts with them at the very moment they’re needed to re-engineer their companies and restart the economy.

Interesting how they’re not concerned about the likelihood of a brain drain among the educators, who make, on average, about $41k per year. High pay is more likely to attract the greedy as the smart. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but I don’t know too many people who are really smart who pick their job based on how much they can make. Smart people tend to pick jobs that they will enjoy doing and jobs that present a challenge.

Attracting the greedy to be in charge of your company: there’s your problem right there.

A really competent banker should be able to live on $500.00 a month, or even $500.00 a year. Hell, it should be a mandatory part of their training. It should be a fundamental basic skill. If most of the rest of the world can do it it should be a piece of cake to a genuine financial wiz.

[Quote:]

now also available in XXL

Here is what happens when you try to outsource your tech support to your customers…

[Quote:]

“Nobody is going to put fresh capital into the banking business when your major competitor is going to be continuously bailed out by the United States government with more and more money.”

- Rusty Cloutier, President/CEO of MidSouth Bank

[Quote:]

For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.

The new accounting involves spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Medicare reimbursements to physicians and the cost of disaster responses.

But the biggest adjustment will deal with revenues from the alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax system enacted in 1969 to prevent the wealthy from using tax shelters to avoid paying any income tax.

[Quote:]

Investors wiped out by the Bernard Madoff scandal got more bad news on Friday: Investigators have confirmed suspicions that the monthly statements showing the disgraced financier was making stock trades for them were pure fiction.

“We have no evidence to indicate securities were purchased for customer accounts” in the past 13 years, said court-appointed trustee Irving Picard at a packed, town-hall style meeting at U.S. Bankruptcy Court in lower Manhattan. “This is a case where we’re going to be looking at cash in and cash out” — the shorthand definition of a Ponzi scheme.

[Irony:]

Whistleblower website Wikileaks faced a dilemma this week when a list of email addresses for the site’s donors was submitted as a leaked document.

The issue arose after a fund raising email on Saturday went out with all 58 addresses in the To field (instead of the bcc field). The all too common schoolboy error meant that all the recipients found out the online identities of other donors.

[Quote:]

Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.

[..]

Each contains the same language: “A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”

And of course it’s all “for the children”. Really – read the article.

But they really didn’t think this through.

1. technical reasons: all the log is going to show is which IP address was given to which MAC hardware address. They are a) easily forgeable, and b) not registered anywhere. Next up will be a law that makes it illegal to use unregistered MAC addresses, I guess.
2. Most people can’t even find he setting to turn on encryption on their WiFi, let alone keep logs for 2 years
3. I’m going to disable DHCP on my WiFi and call the network “use 192.168.1.1[0-9][0-9] route192.168.1.1”

Perhaps everybody should automatically email their logs to their representatives in Congress – and point to their email retention policy if the police wants old logs…

[Quote:]

If anyone receives mistreatment at Guantanamo, it is the guard force.

— Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC)

And in the real world:

[Quote:]

Bradley recently met Mohamed in Camp Delta’s sparse visiting room and was shaken by his account of the state of affairs inside the notorious prison.

She said: “At least 50 people are on hunger strike, with 20 on the critical list, according to Binyam. The JTF [the Joint Task Force running Guantánamo] are not commenting because they do not want the public to know what is going on.

“Binyam has witnessed people being forcibly extracted from their cell. Swat teams in police gear come in and take the person out; if they resist, they are force-fed and then beaten. Binyam has seen this and has not witnessed this before. Guantánamo Bay is in the grip of a mass hunger strike and the numbers are growing; things are worsening.

“It is so bad that there are not enough chairs to strap them down and force-feed them for a two- or three-hour period to digest food through a feeding tube. Because there are not enough chairs the guards are having to force-feed them in shifts. After Binyam saw a nearby inmate being beaten it scared him and he decided he was not going to resist. He thought, ‘I don’t want to be beat, injured or killed.’ Given his health situation, one good blow could be fatal,” said Bradley.

“And today, President Obama announced a salary cap of $500,000 for executives at banks and companies that have received taxpayer bailout money. And you know — it is good. But I’ll tell you something, you can tell a lot of these CEOs don’t get it. They said, ‘Well, that’s $500,000 a month, right?’”

–Jay Leno

[Quote:]

For hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs during the recession, there’s a new twist to their financial pain: Even as they’re collecting unemployment benefits, they’re paying bank fees just to get access to their money.

Thirty states have struck such deals with banks that include Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., JP Morgan Chase and US Bancorp, an Associated Press review of the agreements found. All the programs carry fees, and in several states the unemployed have no choice but to use the debit cards. Some banks even charge overdraft fees of up to $20 — even though they could decline charges for more than what’s on the card.

“It’s a racket. It’s a scam,” said Rachel Davis, a 38-year-old dental technician from St. Louis who was laid off in October. Davis was given a MasterCard issued through Central Bank of Jefferson City and recently paid $6 to make two $40 withdrawals.

Spoiler

I don’t know if this a true leak, but we’ll know this weekend

[Quote:]

The board of the Swedish carmaker Saab, which is owned by General Motors, has held an extraordinary board meeting to consider its future.

Local media reports have suggested Saab was considering taking measures to seek protection from creditors.

[..]

GM has been looking for a buyer for Saab, and said on Wednesday “given the urgency of stemming sizeable cash demands associated with Saab operations” it would need support from the Swedish government prior to any sale.

But the country’s Enterprise and Energy Minister Maud Olofsson told Swedish public radio that “voters picked me because they wanted nursery schools, police and nurses, and not to buy loss-making car factories”.