Category: Business

Another Shareholder Revolt

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Unfortunately, it was unsuccessful, but the attempt by GE shareholders to exert greater control over management was pretty damn close:

Shareholders in General Electric have come close to winning a vote that would have given them more direct control over the the largest US industrial group by market capitalisation against the wishes of its board.

In the latest sign of rising shareholder activism in the US, a proposal at GE’s annual meeting in Detroit on Wednesday to allow shareholders to make decisions about the company “by written consent” won the support of some 47.5 per cent of the votes cast.

This would have meant that shareholders would not have had to call a special meeting to push through corporate change. The motion was backed by Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, the corporate governance advisory firms.

There was also a significant vote for appointing an independent chairman of the board, which was backed by 22 per cent of the votes cast, although that was lower than the 35 per cent support the proposal won last year.

I think that shareholders are beginning to understand that management will keep them in the dark, and then f%$# them like a drunk school girl if they don’t make changes.

You gotta love the American MBA culture.

Israeli’s Get to Qualify Their Own Missiles on the F-35

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I think that the folks at Lockheed and the F-35 program office were pretty desperate to get the Israelis in as a customer for the JSF, as evidenced by the facility with which the IDF/AF has been able to incorporate indigenous systems into the aircraft:

The Israeli air force’s Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters will be armed with a mix of US- and Israeli-made weapon systems, sources have confirmed.

“At least one main weapon system” for the nation’s conventional take-off and landing F-35As will be of Israeli origin, sources related to the issue said on 17 April. The Israeli air force has previously expressed its wish to equip the type with a nationally-developed new-generation air-to-air missile.

………

While the first batch of aircraft will carry the integral electronic warfare system being supplied under the Lockheed-led Joint Strike Fighter programme, it is expected that this will later be “enhanced” by additional units developed in Israel.

You’ll notice that none of the other customers, or for that matter the partners in the development program, have had this sort of ability to integrate their own systems into this.

Basically, the market dynamics are such that the if the Israelis are not willing to buy a US aircraft, it would seriously hinder other foreign sales, so they got some special considerations with regards to integrating their own systems.

And We Are Supposed to Trust the Cable Companies Because?

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Yes, they are moving to the gated garden, where favored vendors receive priority bandwidth:

It looks as if Comcast is preparing to move from a limited beta test to a wide release for its long-promised Xbox Live streaming video app, with some details appearing on the company’s support pages. Probably the biggest revelation about the service is that streaming Comcast’s On Demand videos through the Xbox 360 will not count towards customers’ 250GB monthly data limit.

Comcast says the Xbox app gets special treatment because the video is “being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet.” This gives the service a potentially large advantage over not just other video streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus, but also over Comcast On Demand content streamed through the company’s website and mobile apps, both of which count against the data limits.

Enjoy your 3rd party streaming while you can, because it is not going to work reliably much longer.

I expect them to start f%$#ing with 3rd party IP telephony in the next few years as well, so buh-bye Skype.

H/t Harold Feld.

Orwell Much?

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It looks like Samsung has come up with a telescreen that has cameras and microphones that it can use to watch you:

Samsung’s 2012 top-of-the-line plasmas and LED HDTVs offer new features never before available within a television including a built-in, internally wired HD camera, twin microphones, face tracking and speech recognition. While these features give you unprecedented control over an HDTV, the devices themselves, more similar than ever to a personal computer, may allow hackers or even Samsung to see and hear you and your family, and collect extremely personal data.

While Web cameras and Internet connectivity are not new to HDTVs, their complete integration is, and it’s the always connected camera and microphones, combined with the option of third-party apps (not to mention Samsung’s own software) gives us cause for concern regarding the privacy of TV buyers and their friends and families.

Samsung has not released a privacy policy clarifying what data it is collecting and sharing with regard to the new TV sets. And while there is no current evidence of any particular security hole or untoward behavior by Samsung’s app partners, Samsung has only stated that it “assumes no responsibility, and shall not be liable” in the event that a product or service is not “appropriate.”

…………

A Samsung representative showed how, once set up and connected to the Internet, these models will automatically talk to the Samsung cloud and enable viewers to use new and exciting apps.

These Samsung TVs locate and make note of registered viewers via sophisticated face recognition software. This means if you tell the TV whose faces belong to which users in your family, it personalizes the experience to each recognized family member. If you have friends over, it could log these faces as well.

In addition, the TV listens and responds to specific voice commands. To use the feature, the microphone is active. What concerns us is the integration of both an active camera and microphone. A Samsung representative tells us you can deactivate the voice feature; however this is done via software, not a hard switch like the one you use to turn a room light on or off.

Seriously Eric Arthur Blair must be spinning in his grave at sufficient velocity to power all of Totnes on Devon.

Yes, we have a TV that watches you back, just like Big Brother in 1984.

Any bets on how long before the NSA hacks the cloud that this interfaces, so they can spy into people’s homes?  Certainly, the TOS described here would allow it, so perhaps they would not even have to hack into the system.  They just need to twist some arms at Samsung.

Lovely.

H/t Slashdot.

It Looks Like Ion Drive is Going Commercial

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Following the success of the Dawn Spacecraft in exploring the asteroids, I suppose that it was inevitable that ion propulsion would hit the commercial satellite industry:

It’s no secret that Boeing’s space systems unit is aggressively pricing bids in an effort to grow its commercial business segment as government spending flags. But even the most bullish observers were taken aback by an estimated $400 million deal just signed with Asia Broadcast Satellite (ABS) and Satellites Mexicanos (SatMex) to build the first all-electric commercial telecom spacecraft intended for launch to geostationary orbit.

The technology—which uses light-weight xenon-fueled ion thrusters rather than conventional chemical propulsion to maneuver a spacecraft into position—is promising. Imagine cutting in half a satellite’s weight, and subsequently its launch costs, which can top $100 million depending on the size of the spacecraft. All-electric satellites could potentially save fleet operators hundreds of millions of dollars in annual launch expenditures, with potentially no impact to their satellites’ capability or performance.

The downside is that while most commercial communications spacecraft are expected to be on station and making money within a few weeks of launch, new all-electric satellites could spend up to six months using slow pulses from ionic propulsion systems to maneuver into their final orbital slot—months when the spacecraft is not generating any revenue. This might not pose a problem for large operators with established revenue streams who can accommodate the lag in revenue as they incorporate new satellites into fleet-replenishment programs. But it could put small companies at a disadvantage as they sacrifice up to half a year’s income waiting for the spacecraft to enter service.

In either case, employing an all-electric spacecraft requires getting an early start on the capital-spending cycle to accommodate the lengthy orbit-raising process.

“It is easier for a company with a large fleet that has to anticipate replacement satellites several years in advance to tolerate the several months it takes for an electric satellite to reach position once it has separated in orbit,” says Romain Bausch, chief executive of Luxembourg-based SES, the world’s second-largest fleet operator by revenue.

Basically, chemical maneuvering thrusters have something like a hundred times more thrust, but have about 100x lower ISP (fuel efficiency).

The downside to ion propulsion close to earth is time, but the lines cross for anything farther the earth-moon system.

FCC Takes a Bite Out of Clear Channel and Its Ilk

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It looks like the FCC is finally moving on low power local radio, and in so doing, they are going to be kneecapping crappy mass market radio, which includes a lot of the right wing talkers:

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision issued Monday (PDF) will clear the runway for hundreds of new community radio stations that broadcast on low-power FM signals, bringing progressive, community voices to urban areas that have for decades only known what’s being broadcast by major corporations and America’s political right.

In other words, the dismantling of Rush Limbaugh was just the beginning, and the whole FM dial is next.

The FCC’s decision on Monday wipes away a massive backlog of applications for FM repeater stations, which are transmitters that repeat signals broadcast by corporate and religious radio operators — many of which rake in big listening audiences for right-wing syndicated talk shows.

“So, what a lot of right-wing, conservative radio stations have been able to do is expand their reach out in communities by just having these translators out in the wild, which is why Rush Limbaugh gets the type of audience that he has — because the networks take one signal and repeat it over and over and over across the dial all over the country,” Steven Renderos, national organizer with the Center for Media Justice, told Raw Story on Tuesday. “They’re constantly looking for opportunities to expand that, so there were a slew of these applications pending at the FCC.”

…………

Instead of slowly grinding down thousands of repeater station applications that leave no room for community radio, the FCC essentially threw most of those applications away by limiting who can apply, how many filings a single entity can make, and which markets can consider new repeaters — all of which frees up the regulatory body to examine applications for new community stations. The regulatory agency still gave some deference to corporate broadcasters, however, by allowing them one shot at revising their applications to fit the new guidelines.

…………

The FCC’s move Monday was the first step on a path laid out by the Local Community Radio Act, signed by President Barack Obama at the start of 2011, which represented the first real victory in activists’ long fight against the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) the radio industry’s biggest lobbying group. The bill freed up portions of the radio spectrum that had otherwise been kept empty by the larger broadcasters, who had long insisted upon four clicks of blank space on the FM dial to prevent interference. It also stipulated that new space on the dial must be reserved for community stations in urban areas where there might otherwise be none.

The radio stations that they are clearing the deck are limited to non profits, and each one has to be independently owned.

So, we’ll see more diversity on radio, and we’ll have better radio.

Heh

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It looks like Rush’s going postal is causing significant blow-back for all of the hate jocks:

Rush Limbaugh made the right-wing talk-radio industry, and he just might break it.

Because now the fallout from the “slut” slurs against Sandra Fluke is extending to the entire political shock-jock genre.

Premiere Networks, which distributes Limbaugh as well as a host of other right-wing talkers, sent an email out to its affiliates early Friday listing 98 large corporations that have requested their ads appear only on “programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).”

This is big. According to the radio-industry website Radio-Info.com, which first posted excerpts of the Premiere memo, among the 98 companies that have decided to no longer sponsor these programs are “carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm), and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway).” Together, these talk-radio advertising staples represent millions of dollars in revenue.

They have a right to speak.

They don’t have a right to make millions of dollars a year to do so.

Please Let This Mean That Marty Peretz is Fired, it is Good

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One of the founders of Facebook, Chris “Not Zuckerberg” Hughes has purchased The New Republic:

The newest owner of The New Republic magazine is Chris Hughes, a new-media guru who co-founded Facebook and helped to run the online organizing machine for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Hughes’s purchase of a majority stake in the magazine will be announced on Friday, once again remaking the masthead of the nearly century-old magazine that helped define modern American liberalism.

Of course, over the past 40 years, the former owner, Marty Peretz, has done his best to betray American liberalism.

TNR has been reduced to a caricature, endorsing just about every bone-headed ‘Phant idea, particularly in the foreign policy area, and giving Republicans the the refrain, “Even the liberal New Republic.”

That, and the fact that TNR is a petri dish for trustifarian Ivy Leaguer plagiarists, like Glass and Shalit.

This is why it’s circulation has fallen, and its publication frequency has been cut in half,and The Nation has 3 times the circulation.

I don’t expect “Not Zuckerberg” to turn this around though. His brave new idea is to sprinkle Web 2.0 pixie dust to make everything work:

His focus, he said in an interview in advance of the announcement, will be on distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad. Though he does not intend to end the printed publication, “five to 10 years from now, if not sooner, the vast majority of The New Republic readers are likely to be reading it on a tablet,” he said.

The problem is that the magazine sucks.  The only thing that tablet, or web based, features can do is lower the cost of distribution, and allow for some multimedia content.

Its employment policy is best described as affirmative action for overpriviliged youth, and its schtick, hippie punching, was old in 1982.

What Is The Difference Between A Broker And A Psychopath?

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The answer appears to be, “psychopaths are much better for the rest of us“:

What makes individual stockbrokers blow billions in financial markets with criminal trading schemes? According to a new study conducted at a Swiss university, it may be because share traders behave more recklessly and are more manipulative than psychopaths.

Two weeks ago, yet another case of rogue trading shocked the financial world when UBS trader Kweku Adoboli was arrested for allegedly squandering some $2.3 billion with a risky and unauthorized investment scheme. The 31-year-old, who had been based in London for the Swiss bank, remains in jail. The bank’s chief executive Oswald Grübel, meanwhile, has resigned over the scandal — the third major embarrassment to rattle the institution in just a few years.

…………

According to a new study at the University of St. Gallen seen by SPIEGEL, one contributing factor may be that stockbrokers’ behavior is more reckless and manipulative than that of psychopaths. Researchers at the Swiss research university measured the readiness to cooperate and the egotism of 28 professional traders who took part in computer simulations and intelligence tests. The results, compared with the behavior of psychopaths, exceeded the expectations of the study’s co-authors, forensic expert Pascal Scherrer, and Thomas Noll, a lead administrator at the Pöschwies prison north of Zürich.

…………

“Naturally one can’t characterize the traders as deranged,” Noll told SPIEGEL. “But for example, they behaved more egotistically and were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test.”

So, Dr. Noll, could you explain to me why we cannot, “characterize traders as deranged?”

It seems to me that if there is any lesson of the past few years, it is that traders are deranged.

Here’s Some Insanely Great Tech

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It looks like someone has come up with a method of simultaneously transmitting different signals in the same frequency:

A team of Italian radio boffins – and one Swede – have one-upped their pioneering countryman Guglielmo Marconi by demonstrating a method of simultaneously transmitting multiple signals on the same frequency.

“This novel radio technique allows the implementation of, in principle, an infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth, even without using polarization, multiport or dense coding techniques,” the team explains in a paper in the March issue of the New Journal of Physics.

If refined and commercialized, the technique developed by Fabrizio Tamburini and his team could radically increase the carrying capacity of today’s cramped bandwith of radio, television, Wi-Fi, and wireless telecommunications.

Essentially, it appears to be some sort of phase/geometry trick:

The breakthough achieved by Tamburini and his crew is based on adding orbital angular momentum to the signal-carrying mix, essentially twisting the directed signal in a way that offsets multiple signals in the same frequency.


The signal-spinning Venetian antenna

The team “spun” the signal in their successful demo by simply slicing one radius of a conventional parabolic antenna and raising one end of the slice above the other. Doing so gave the part of the transmitted signal from the elevated section of the antenna a small “head start” on the part from the lower segment.

The sent beam was then encoded with two separate signals timed to occupy opposite angles of the spin, and antennas were set up to receive each of them. Theoretically, much more discrete signal-slicing could fit more signals into the same transmitted frequency.

One beam, two signals received by antennas on either side of the signal’s centerpoint

Team member Bo Thide of Swedish Institute of Space Physics first conceived the orbital angular momentum idea in a 2007 paper focussed on radio astronomy, but in which he wrote that the concept “paves the way for novel wireless communication concepts.”

I’ve heard of some other techniques that will provide similar capabilities, and I would hope that if we do see a massive expansion in the carry capacity of wireless capacity, that much of this delta would be directed away from the incumbent carriers.

If there is any lesson to be learned about the history of data transmission, wired, and wireless, it is that incumbent monopolies, and near monopolies, are the enemies of innovation, not its source, because their profit margins are driven by preserving their monopolies.

It’s a Start

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But only a start.

The FCC has placed further restrictions on robo-calling:

Those aggravating automated telemarketing calls will be interrupting your dinner a lot less often.

After receiving thousands of complaints from consumers, the Federal Communications Commission clamped down Wednesday on unwanted robo-calling by approving sweeping changes to its telemarketing rules for wireline and mobile phones.

Even with the national Do Not Call Registry in effect — the initial effort to block those pesky calls — telemarketers have found ways around the rules. But the FCC’s latest effort is “closing a loophole,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“This is an important step forward to make it easier for consumers to take advantage of the Do Not Call list,” Rotenberg said about the FCC’s changes. “These are additional safeguards to provide consumers greater protection.”

Telemarketing calls have a bigger effect on mobile phones, he noted, because those calls can eat up the minutes in consumers’ wireless plans.

Under the new FCC rules, telemarketers are required to obtain written consent, which can be in the form of an online approval, before placing autodialed or prerecorded calls to a consumer.

Telemarketers also must provide an automated opt-out mechanism during each robo-call so that consumers can immediately tell the telemarketer to stop calling.

The FCC also eliminated the “established business relationship” exception, which had allowed robo-calls to be placed to the land-line home phones of consumers with “prior or existing” associations with companies represented by telemarketers.

And the agency strictly limited the number of abandoned or so-called dead-air calls — in which consumers answer their phones and hear nothing — that telemarketers can make within each calling campaign.

The exemptions are still more than I would like to see, the exemption for non-oprofits, allows them to contract out to for-profit telemarketing firms, for example, but it’s a positive development.

They Are A Bunch of F%$#ing Ghouls!

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Sony Music, one of the slimiest record distributors out there, has just topped itself.

It raised prices on Whitney Houston’s music less than 12 hours after her death:

It’s easy to get so emotional about a singer after they’ve passed prematurely, as Whitney Houston did Saturday at the age of 48. But fans seeking to buy her digital albums in remembrance weren’t too happy at sudden price hikes so soon after her death.

The Brits picked up on it quickly, with London-based Next Web writer Matt Brian and The Guardian’s Josh Halliday both finding the price increases, which raised Houston’s “The Ultimate Collection” 2007 album from £5 (about $7.89) to £8 (about $12.63). In the United States, the cost is even steeper: $15 for the “Greatest Hits” collection at both Amazon (mp3 store) and iTunes.

Halliday found out that Sony Music increased the price of “The Ultimate Collection” at about 4 a.m. Sunday, not even 12 hours after news broke of Houston’s death. Fans were quick to point fingers at Apple for the anti-sale, but it turned out that when Sony bumped up the wholesale price of “The Ultimate Collection,” iTunes and other retailers automatically upped their pricing.

Not a fan, but sort of crap is cold.

H/t Chris in Paris.

I’m Expecting an Alien Tort Claim Act Against Apple

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William Black makes the convincing case that the widespread abuse of contractors’ employees in the manufacture of Apple products is the product of deliberate management decisions:

Apple has released a report on working conditions in its suppliers’ factories. It highlights a form of control fraud that criminology has identified but rarely discussed. I write overwhelmingly about accounting control fraud because it drives our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. The primary intended victims of accounting control frauds are the shareholders and the creditors. Other private sector control frauds target customers (e.g., George Akerlof’s 1970 article on “lemons”), and the public (e.g., the unlawful disposal of toxic waste, illegal logging, and tax fraud).

Anti-employee control frauds most commonly fall in four broad, but not mutually exclusive, categories – illegal work conditions due to violation of safety rules, violation of child labor laws, failure to pay employees’ wages and benefits, and frauds based on goods and loans provided by the employer to the employee that lock the employee into quasi-slavery. Apple has just released a report on its suppliers that shows that anti-employee control fraud is the norm. Remember, fraud is hidden and is often not discovered and Apple did not have an incentive to make an exhaustive investigation. Apple calls its inquiries “audits” and it is apparent that most of its information comes from reviewing written and electronic records at its suppliers. That is exceptionally revealing. The suppliers know that they can defraud their employees with such impunity that they don’t even bother to get rid of records that prove their frauds. Apple has resisted making public its suppliers and the report refused to identify which suppliers committed which violations – often for years despite repeated, false promises to end their anti-employee control frauds. Two other facts are evident (but not reported). First, Apple rarely terminates suppliers for defrauding their employees – even when the frauds endanger the lives and health of the workers and the community – and even where Apple knows that the supplier repeatedly lies to Apple about these fraudulent and lethal practices. Second, it appears unlikely in the extreme that Apple makes criminal referrals on its suppliers even when they commit anti-employee control frauds as a routine practice, even when the frauds endanger the worker’s and the public’s health, and even when the supplier repeatedly lies to Apple about the frauds. Apple’s report, therefore, understates substantially the actual incidence of fraud by the 156 suppliers (accounting for 97% of its payments to suppliers).

The ATCA has been used in cases like this, and what is clearly a policy of deliberate blindness to these abuse by Apple, seems to me to bean opening for a very well deserved lawsuit.

Don’t Use Download.com

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Seriously.  They have taken to bundling malware with their download installers:

From: Fyodor
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 14:35:30 -0800

Hi Folks. I’ve just discovered that C|Net’s Download.Com site has
started wrapping their Nmap downloads (as well as other free software
like VLC) in a trojan installer which does things like installing a
sketchy “StartNow” toolbar, changing the user’s default search engine
to Microsoft Bing, and changing their home page to Microsoft’s MSN.

The way it works is that C|Net’s download page (screenshot attached)
offers what they claim to be Nmap’s Windows installer. They even
provide the correct file size for our official installer. But users
actually get a Cnet-created trojan installer. That program does the
dirty work before downloading and executing Nmap’s real installer.


At least, there is symmetry

Note that the author of this post is also the author of Nmap, and this violates his license.

Here’s some more background.

The fact that they (CNET/Download.com) also employ “Draw by Crayon Libertarian” Declan McCullagh, who is still proud of creating the “Al Gore created the Internet” lie provides a book end for this crap.

I’m not suggesting a boycott here.  I’m suggesting that CNET, and more specifically Download.com, has crossed a line and is now a purveyor of malware.

It’s just not me saying this, it’s, “Panda, McAfee, F-Secure,” (top link) who are classifying their wrappers as spyware.

Sacrilege!

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Seriously, some cultural icons should never be turned into advertisements.

I’m sure that Patrick McGoohan is turning over in his grave:

Yes, I know that this appears to be over 20 years old. The styling for the car is clearly 1980s, which implies that McGoohan approved, but I still do not approve.

Where Am I Going to Go for Dipping Dots and Bubble Tea?

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This is a busy day at the mall!

It looks like the Owings Mall is going to be torn down.

Not surprising.  The mall has been in slow decline for some time, with at least one wing on the top floor shut down for the past two years.

Some of the anchor stores, as well as the theater, will remain, but it’s not going to be a classic mall anymore.

I’m not sure exactly why it failed, it’s located at the terminus of the Metro, and there is a rather large mixed used development in the area reaching completion.

Of note is that the operator of the mall, GGP, is in Bankruptcy, and is is owned by the Bucksbaum family, and Ann Bucksbaum Friedman is the wife of New York Times columnist (Who I would never call a schmuck because a schmuck has a head) Thomas Friedman.

I can’t avoid negative effects of this guy even if I never read his incoherent crap.

Worse Than Wal-Mart

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The big banks, who are so dedicated to nickel and diming their customers that Wal-Marthas experienced explosive growth in its check cashing services as people desperately try to find a bank that does not cheat them:

Americans say they are fed up with banks. They are protesting on Wall Street and raising a ruckus over outsize fees. Now there is a surprising beneficiary: Wal-Mart.

Geoffrey Cardone, a 26-year-old factory worker, said he dumped his bank account because he felt that he was being nickeled and dimed by fees. His new payday ritual includes a trip to the Wal-Mart here in northeastern Pennsylvania.

“It’s cheaper,” said Mr. Cardone, who was charged a flat fee of $3 to cash his paycheck. Many check-cashing stores keep a percentage of the check, which tends to be higher.

The Wal-Mart here has a clerk in a brightly painted Money Center near the entrance, like more than 1,000 other Wal-Marts across the country. Customers can cash work and government checks, pay bills, wire money overseas or load money on to a prepaid debit card. At most Wal-Marts without dedicated Money Centers, the financial services are available at the customer service desks or kiosks.

Four years ago, Wal-Mart abandoned its plans to obtain a long-sought federal bank charter amid opposition from the banking industry and lawmakers, who feared the huge retailer would drive small bankers out of business and potentially conflate its banking and retail operations. Ever since, Wal-Mart has been quietly building up à la carte financial services, becoming a force among the unbanked and “unhappily banked,” as one Wal-Mart executive put it.

Even before the recent outcry against banks, the services had become popular with cash-poor customers, many of whom never had a bank account and found the services more affordable than traditional check-cashing operations. Now newcomers to the ranks of the banking disaffected are helping to swell the numbers, Wal-Mart officials said.

Here is the kicker:

In research conducted a year and a half ago, Wal-Mart found that more than 60 percent of the customers using its financial services had bank accounts. When Wal-Mart asked those people how much their banking activities cost them over the last six months, the answer was between $200 and $400, Mr. Eckert said, with overdraft fees, minimum-balance charges and so forth.

 (emphasis mine)

So for the privilege of giving customers ¼% on their own money, money that they then lend to them at 23% as revolving credit, they are also charging them around $500 a year.

Let’s see, 500 a year, ¼% … So the break even point is about $200,000.00.

And the VSPs wonder why people hate the banksters.

Osama Who Ever Is In Charge of al-Qaeda , Take Me Now!!!

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MTV is making a casting call for The Real World occupy Wall Street:

MTV has made an industry this year of recycling its vintage content, from Beavis & Butthead to Liquid Television.

Now the network appears to be updating or at least remixing its Real World franchise with a tip of the hat to the Occupy generation.

Casting calls in Los Angeles and New York this week are looking for …

Is there nothing that our society does not cheapen?