I missed a credit union failure last week, I was busy battling the elements to get to my Eugenia’s Bat Mitzvah.
While I was battling the elements, the NCUA was closing the St. Francis Campus Credit Union of Little Falls, Minnesota (Full NCUA list), the 3rd closing of the year.
Given that there were 24 failures of banks, and 13 credit unions closed in 2013, it appears that we are slightly ahead of last year’s trend.
Its beginning to look like George Zimmerman is starting to learn that there are people out there who aren’t NRA gun nuts with small penises with racial murder fantasies:
Zimmerman taped an interview last Tuesday with Univision and Fusion, and then took his girlfriend, her kid and his brother to the beach. While they were catching some rays, people noticed him, started harassing him, and then someone shouted out George had a $10,000 bounty on his head.
We’re told it freaked him out and they all retreated to the hotel, but the crowd followed them.
Security swept their room to make sure no one tampered with their stuff and then stood guard throughout the day and night. We’re told Zimmerman did his CNN interview early the next morning and then beat it … literally fleeing Miami.
I am not feeling any sympathy, or empathy, for that racist murderer right now.
If you read of my recent travel problems, I should note that they were all weather related, and everyone at United was polite, and efficient, energetic, and quite competent.
I really mean that.
But, because of the inevitable consequences of the snowtastrophe, it meant that I spent hours on hold.
And United has licensed George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as its theme, and so it is their on hold music.
So I heard it for hours ……… and hours ……… and hours ……… AND HOURS ………
It’s a musical masterpiece, and I can no longer listen to it.
UAL, drop Rhapsody in Blue as your hold music, please.
Jobless claims fell slightly, while the 4-week moving average rose slightly.
More significant might be the small improvement in the Index of Leading Economic Indicators.
Given the recent weather though, I’m not sure how reliable any of this data is though.
The White House budget to be released early next month will propose $56 billion in new spending on domestic and defense priorities and drop a proposal that was included in last year’s budget as a way to attract Republican support — a plan that would have included less generous payouts of Social Security benefits.
The budget would aim to reduce the emphasis on austerity that has been the preoccupation of American politics for the past four years and also highlights top Democratic priorities in a year when Democrats hope to save their majority in the Senate.
A White House official said President Obama decided to release a budget that fully represents his “vision,” rather than to continue to pursue a fiscal agreement, because Republicans have refused to engage in good-faith negotiations over the nation’s top priorities. Obama is planning to pay for fresh spending by closing tax breaks that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
Make no mistake though, Obama and His Evil Minions™ REALLY wanted to do this:
………One of the White House’s most poorly kept secrets is that many of Obama’s economic advisers support Chained CPI on the merits………
Because hurting the poors is a good thing, because ……… I can haz bipartisanship!
When the f%$# is the Democratic party going to nominate a Democrat for President?
They are now giving glassholes instructions on how not to to be complete jerks:
Google, in perhaps a tacit realization that it has spawned a small army of particularly insufferable cyborgs, has issued an etiquette manual for the first generation of Google Glass users (or “Glass Explorers” as they’re called).
With a list of unsolicited “Do’s” and “Dont’s” posted on Google’s Glass website, the tech giant highlights a number of central concerns around the subjectivities its wearable computing system is creating. High among them, the fear that “Glassholes” start living their lives as nonstop surveillance robots.
One “Do” and a corresponding “Don’t” advise “explorers” to not use Glass to record others in their vicinity without permission:………
Dont: Be creepy or rude (aka, a “Glasshole”). Respect others and if they have questions about Glass don’t get snappy. Be polite and explain what Glass does and remember, a quick demo can go a long way. In places where cell phone cameras aren’t allowed, the same rules will apply to Glass. If you’re asked to turn your phone off, turn Glass off as well. Breaking the rules or being rude will not get businesses excited about Glass and will ruin it for other Explorers.
It appears that Google is beginning to realize that its early adopters have all the social skills of a toaster, (perhaps less than said kitchen appliance if one considers the toaster from Red Dwarf), and this does not make them good ambassadors for the technology.
The head of the union at Volkswagon is saying that the the labor environment in the South means that VW should conduct future expansion elsewhere.
Seeing as how labor unions effectively control a majority of the seats on the board, this looks to revealing Senator Bob Corker, who claimed that VW told him that not having a union was key to expansion, to be a lying sack of sh%$:
Volkswagen’s top labor representative threatened on Wednesday to try to block further investments by the German carmaker in the southern United States if its workers there are not unionized.
Workers at VW’s factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, last Friday voted against representation by the United Auto Workers union (UAW), rejecting efforts by VW representatives to set up a German-style works council at the plant.
German workers enjoy considerable influence over company decisions under the legally enshrined “co-determination” principle which is anathema to many politicians in the U.S. who see organized labor as a threat to profits and job growth.
Chattanooga is VW’s only factory in the U.S. and one of the company’s few in the world without a works council.
“I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the south again,” said Bernd Osterloh, head of VW’s works council.
“If co-determination isn’t guaranteed in the first place, we as workers will hardly be able to vote in favor” of potentially building another plant in the U.S. south, Osterloh, who is also on VW’s supervisory board, said.
The 20-member panel – evenly split between labor and management – has to approve any decision on closing plants or building new ones.
Here’s a thought: If you want to locate a plant in a 3rd world country, actually set it up in a real 3rd world country, as opposed to the 3rd world country wannabees in the south.
This sounds a lot like the collapse of a pump and dump:
Rents collected on the collateral for the first U.S. rental-home securities declined by 7.6 percent from October to January, according to Morningstar Inc.
Payments declined as expiring leases and early tenant departures left residences backing the bonds of Blackstone (BX) Group LP’s Invitation Homes vacant, Becky Cao and Brian Alan, analysts at Morningstar’s credit-ratings unit, said in a report. While 8.3 percent of the properties were vacant or occupied by delinquent renters in January, renewals on 78.5 percent of leases that expired the prior month exceeded the analysts’ expected rate of 66.7 percent.
The deal’s performance is being watched as Wall Street bankers and institutional property investors seek to follow Blackstone’s $479.1 million transaction in November with additional offerings. Initial lease expirations for the 3,207 homes are scheduled to peak from January through March, Morningstar said. To woo investors and rating firms in the new market, the transaction started with all of the units leased, unlike bonds backed by apartment-building loans.
They are claiming that this is going to improve, but these protestations of improving prospects sound awfully hollow.
Understand that this is in some way even scarier than what they did with the alphabet soups like MBS and CDS, because these psychopaths are now responsible for fixing things like broken heaters, plugged drains, etc.
There are already anecdotal reports that the banksters are horrible landlords (big surprise), and one wonders what is going to happen when tenants start suing them or organizing rent strikes.
This time, it’s Matt Taibbi, who is perhaps the only financial journalist in America who has not gone native with the financial services industry:
Matt Taibbi, who made a name as a fierce critic of Wall Street at Rolling Stone magazine, has joined First Look Media, the latest big-name journalist to leave an established brand to enter the thriving and well-financed world of news start-ups.
Mr. Taibbi will start his own publication focusing on financial and political corruption, he said in an interview on Wednesday. First Look is financed by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who is worth $8.5 billion, according to Forbes. Mr. Omidyar has pledged $250 million to the project.
“It’s obvious that we’re entering a new phase in the history of journalism,” Mr. Taibbi said. “This is clearly the future, and this was an opportunity for me to be part of helping to found something and create something that might carry us into the next generation.”
………
First Look began its first publication, The Intercept, with the national security reporters Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. In recent weeks, the group has hired Lynn Oberlander, formerly of The New Yorker, as its general counsel, and the author and journalist Peter Maass, among others.
Taibbi, of course nailed Goldman Sachs, and enraged vampire squid aficionados everywhere, when he described them as, “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Also, we have seen Dan Froomkin and Jay Rosen.
This is beginning to look like an impressive team, if someone *cough* Jim Romenesko *cough* could update us on whether they are getting some utility infielders to go along with the stars, I would be more sanguine about its prospects.
After I wrote a post about the abuse of the IP process and price gouging for a potential HIV prophylaxis treatment, I got an email from a PR person with a link to a promotional graphic for the product, and a request that I post it.
No offer of payment.
Not even an offer of swag.
I realize that my readership numbers probably don’t rate a T-shirt, but I wasn’t even offered a f%$#ing key fob.
Seriously, if you are not going to read my article, and know that I condemned what your employers are doing, at least have the decency of offering some form of remuneration.
It’s a matter of pride.
To quote fellow engineer Montgomery Scott, “This was a matter of pride.”
Whenever I do tofu stir-fry, a common dish at Chez Saroff, I find it hard to get a proper crust on the it.
The extremely high water content of bean curd makes it tough to brown, at least not without one of those huge stove burners that you find in Chinese restaurants.
I have come up with a solution: Instead of cubing the tofu, I cut it into fish-stick sized pieces, which meant that they could be laid flat against a screaming hot skillet.
The greater surface area allows for proper browning.
In the last 8 months, there have been 12 suspicious deaths, including one suicide by nail-gun to the head & chest with 7 or 8 shots.
There is also a missing financial reporter with the WSJ.
To quote Richard Dreyfuss, “This was no boat accident.”
Some of the deaths were clearly suicides, and the intern who died of exhaustion induced seizures is merely deplorable, not suspicious, but some of them, particularly Richard Talley, the nail-gun guy, make you wonder if some of the banksters, or perhaps some of their sketchy clients *cough* Russian Mafia *cough* might be tying up some loose ends.
* This is a reference to the old joke that goes:
Q: What do you call 5000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start!”
How the F%$# did the UAW manage to lose a union election when Volkswagen was their biggest supporter?
Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., have rejected the United Auto Workers, shooting down the union’s hopes of securing a foothold at a foreign-owned auto plant in the South.
The vote was 712 to 626, said the UAW, which blamed the loss on “politicians and outside special interest groups.”
The vote, announced late Friday night after three days of balloting, is a devastating loss for the UAW, whose membership has plummeted from a high of 1.5 million in 1979 to around 400,000 today. Outgoing UAW President Bob King had staked his legacy on organizing a Southern auto plant for the first time.
But the decision is a triumph for Tennessee Republicans like Sen. Bob Corker, who lured Volkswagen to Chattanooga as mayor in the early 2000s. Corker and other Republicans warned workers that the UAW’s presence would irreparably harm the plant, and in recent days he claimed — with little evidence — that Volkswagen would choose not to expand the plant if workers unionized.
How the hell did they pull this off?
This was like shooting fish in a barrel. VW wanted the union so that they could establish a “works council”.
The UAW had advantages in organizing the Volkswagen plant it probably won’t find elsewhere. For starters, Volkswagen — under pressure from the powerful German steelworkers’ union, IG Metall, which holds seats on the company’s board — decided not to resist unionization. The union’s presence would have also allowed the company to set up a German-style “works council,” in which representatives of both workers and middle management offer advice to executives on how to best run the plant.
“I don’t think this is a bellwether for future success for the UAW,” said Donald Schroeder, a management-side labor lawyer at Mintz Levin, before the results were announced. “The UAW almost has had a free run at unionizing.”The UAW had advantages in organizing the Volkswagen plant it probably won’t find elsewhere. For starters, Volkswagen — under pressure from the powerful German steelworkers’ union, IG Metall, which holds seats on the company’s board — decided not to resist unionization. The union’s presence would have also allowed the company to set up a German-style “works council,” in which representatives of both workers and middle management offer advice to executives on how to best run the plant.
“I don’t think this is a bellwether for future success for the UAW,” said Donald Schroeder, a management-side labor lawyer at Mintz Levin, before the results were announced. “The UAW almost has had a free run at unionizing.”
This is an unmitigated disaster for the American worker.
Taken at George W. Bush airport.
No merch with the logo at the store, it’s just an ordinary airport news stand.
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On the flight down to Houston, I got to be in the colicky baby row!
I am truly blessed.
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The first of 2 legs to Baltimore.
I am expecting a delay from Godzilla at this point.
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Now out is weather in Chicago that has our flight canceled!
Shoot me now!!!
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We are all in Seattle.
We are all in the apartment we rented.
Now all we need is our f%$#ing luggage!!!!
So I drove to the airport to see what could be arranged at the ticket counter.
There are no seats avilable, so we will be playing the wait list tango at BWI starting very early in the morning.
Keep your fingers crossed for me.
Thank you Mr. Anthropogenic Climate Change.
With a bit of luck, we will make it by Friday some time.
I keep expecting Chevy Chase to appear, because it does seem like one of his Vacation movies.
Flight is cancelled, and I have f%$#ing been on f%$#ing hold for 2 f%$#ing hours.
I’m thinking that it would be faster to drive to BWI (We just got our road plowed*), and a round trip should be less time than I have spent on hold.
*Additionally, I am feeling the need to get a bit plowed myself.