bidness
mikethemadbiologist | April 9, 2010It's as if funny accounting is second nature for these guys:
The Republican National Committee at the end of last year struck a deal with the Michigan Republican Party that if the state party could raise what turned out to be a half a million dollars for the RNC from its donors, the committee would immediately give the money back, in a scheme apparently devised to increase the RNC's 2009 fundraising numbers.
"It was a known secret that a deal had been struck on the topic," a former RNC official confirmed to The Daily Caller.
"I think the benefit to them was them getting guaranteed money," the…
mikethemadbiologist | April 6, 2010Recently, some people have been asking if Wall Street, Big Shitpile and the other elements of the Great Pandimensional Economic Clusterfuck of 2008-2009 would have been as bad if women were more common on Wall Street. My answer: absolutely not. What follows are some personal experiences as to why I think this.
Many years ago (OK, around 2000), when people, by and large, still respected Wall Street and investment bankers*, I was often told I was being wimpy for putting most of my 401(k) money into U.S. securities and bonds (GIRLIE MAN!), instead of stocks and other high-risk, high-yield…
mikethemadbiologist | March 29, 2010Since healthcare is temporarily off the radar screen, despite Republican attempts to have Romneycare declared unconstitutional (how Romneycare would be unconstitutional, but Medicare wouldn't, well, that would be fun...), we can now return to the never-ending attempt by conservatives to gut Social Security. One of the key figures and bankrollers in that attempt is financier Peter Peterson. By key, I mean that he has spent around one billion dollars financing the Peterson Foundation, which advocates various 'fiscal responsibility' measures (i.e., making Granny eat cat food) and slashing…
mikethemadbiologist | March 11, 2010Brown University president Ruth Simmons has recently come under fire for serving on the board of Goldman Sachs. More than establishing any possible perfidy on the part of Simmons, this just shows how utterly useless boards of directors are. Other than hiring and firing the CEO (or, in the non-profit world, the executive director) and approving the overall activities at a very superficial level, they don't do much. They're certainly not going to exercise oversight or change the culture. Why? Because, even if they're motivated, they show up a couple of times a year and read a massaged…
mikethemadbiologist | March 9, 2010Florida Governor Charlie Crist has been trying to run as a moderate in his re-election campaign (he's even toyed with running as an independent). He is to the left of the Republican Party on several issues: if nothing else, he thinks the stimulus was a good idea. He's also more gay-tolerant than the GOP as a whole. But Monday, The New York Times ran a story detailing how Crist really screwed up the Everglades restoration project by giving sweetheart deals to sugar cane growers. Said one critic:
"To replace projects that were under way for a possibility of a project decades from now is…
mikethemadbiologist | March 7, 2010Well, I suppose the snarky response is that your household doesn't have direct control over multiple battle carrier groups. Joking aside, the fixation on reducing budgets is essentially the economic equivalent of flat-earthism. James Galbraith, in a must read piece, spells out why public deficits are necessary:
To put things crudely, there are two ways to get the increase in total spending that we call "economic growth." One way is for government to spend. The other is for banks to lend. Leaving aside short-term adjustments like increased net exports or financial innovation, that's…
mikethemadbiologist | February 16, 2010In the political bloggysphere, there's been some discussion about former Congressman and Two Million Dollar Man Billy Tauzin losing his job as the top lobbyist for Big Pharma. I follow this stuff a lot more than most--my observation that much of what our great congressional solons do is geared towards their retirements, to me, seems so obvious that I'm surprised it received some minor circulation. But Tauzin's degeneracy is stunning (italics mine):
So in 2003 Mr. Tauzin, then chairman of the powerful energy and commerce committee, made a deal. Though still on a modest Congressional salary,…
mikethemadbiologist | February 13, 2010One thing about Big Shitpile that seems to have gone under the radar is the potential for--and, increasingly, the reality of--debtor revolt. That is, people who owe more than their home is worth refuse to pay without a renegotiated mortgage. Sean Broderick thinks that "a debtor's revolt is going to be one of the defining trends for 2010", and recounts this episode:
Two years later, Adam's $450,000 Loxahatchee House was worth only $189,000. And he couldn't find a renter for his home in Lake Worth. He tried working with the bank (one bank had given him mortgages on both properties), but they…
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2010Are Democrats intentionally trying to lose the next election? Because that's the only possible way to explain this:
Twelve Democratic Senators spent last weekend in Miami Beach raising money from top lobbyists for oil, drug, and other corporate interests that they often decry, according to a guest list for the event obtained by POLITICO.
The guest list for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee's "winter retreat" at the Ritz Carlton South Beach Resort doesn't include the price tag for attendance, but the maximum contribution to the committee, typical for such events, is $30,000. There…
mikethemadbiologist | January 28, 2010Or something. Tuesday, I wrote about the reporting on the Oregon ballot initiatives, but, of course, the ballot initiative itself actually matters. And Oregon voters approved the tax increases (italics mine):
Yesterday Oregon voters delivered a huge victory for progressives by approving Measures 66 and 67, raising taxes on incomes over $250,000 and large corporations to generate $733 million to close the state's budget deficit. The Oregon legislature had approved the taxes last summer, but a corporate/teabagger alliance organized to put it to voters in a referendum.
One wonders if the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 20, 2010These will have to be some quick hits, since I'm at a meeting; I'll try to revisit them later this week:
1) The absolute numbers indicate that Democrats lost this election:
In 2008, Obama received 1,904,097 votes; in 2009, Coakley received 1,058,682.
In 2008, McCain received 1,108,854 votes; in 2009, Brown received 1,168,107 votes.
This is a massive defection by Democrats--it's nearly a 50% drop for Democrats versus the Republicans holding steady in absolute numbers. 20% of Obama voters crossed over to Brown.
2) Following on #1, the entire active rank-and-file warned the Democratic '…
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2010Many grants have what are known as milestones: dates by which certain activities are supposed to occur; with some grants, failure to meet these milestones (or does one pass milestones?) can ultimately result in withdrawal of the grant. There is a lot of grantsmanship involved in milestones. For obvious reasons, you don't want to set lots of impossible-to-reach milestones. Likewise, you want some low hanging fruit in there too (to confuse images and metaphors).
For example, let's say a Mad Biologist were to sequence a bunch of bacterial genomes. Here are three milestones:
1) Get all of…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2010I've made this point before--if your mortgage is underwater, you should consider a 'strategic default' (which is what it would be called if you were a business), and, unless you were speculating, it's not unethical to do so. First, you didn't force the lender to give you the money (and to the extent that there was fraud, it was usually the lender who enabled it--ninja loans, for instance). Second, since housing loans are traded as commodities, there is no community bond: you're not hurting the ability of a local bank to make loans to your community (or driving up the borrowing costs of…
mikethemadbiologist | January 6, 2010For those who haven't read the Judge Dredd stories (I'm not referring to the movie), they take place in a dystopian future (other than Star Trek, do sci-fi stories occur in any other kind of future...) where the predominant theme is that, due to technological advances, very few people have jobs, creating huge urban megalopolises (megalopolae?) where crime is rampant.
With that cheery introduction, we note Matthew Yglesias' assessment of the news bidness:
You hear a lot of talk about different kinds of ideas to bolster revenue models or get people to read more. But the reality is that the web…
mikethemadbiologist | December 30, 2009Ever since I was a wee Mad Biologist, I've been told by Very Senior People that 'in five years, there's going to be a massive wave a retirement of older faculty.' This, in my mind, ranks up there with the Friedman Unit (in the next six months, we'll know if we have to leave Iraq, and six months later, we need another six months to know this), and the Samuelson Unit (the length of time to the ULTIMATE DOOOMMM!!! of Social Security is always 30-38 years from the time of prediction). Consequently, we will have a 'science gap' since not enough U.S. students know TEH SCIENTISMZ!!, even though…
mikethemadbiologist | December 19, 2009With some sadness, we read that GM is killing off Saab, although spare parts will still be made. The BBC's Jorn Madslien explains how a well-engineered car line died (italics mine):
When its owner GM bought Saab, it was seen as a brand that could become the US automotive group's European luxury brand.
But the quirky cars did not attract a broad enough following, so it failed to make money.
GM's solution was to cut costs by sharing ever more parts with Opel while, at the same time, toning down their design.
Such moves alienated traditional Saab customers without gaining new ones. New product…
mikethemadbiologist | December 14, 2009Many people have been discussing the structural impediments to passing legislation, or what is often called legislative gridlock. As Matthew Yglesias put it:
The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it's not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it's the fact that the country has become ungovernable....
We're suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the…
mikethemadbiologist | December 11, 2009One of the major factors leading to political corruption is the revolving door between the private sector and political staffers. It's no accident that many political scandals, not to mention bad policy, can be traced back to former Congressional aides. There's a lot of money to be made lobbying your former boss and friends. One reason why public servants make this jump is poor salaries. There's no incentive to make a career in government service when the financial compensation is very small:
Daniel Schuman notes:
The people who are working on issues worth billions of dollars and…
mikethemadbiologist | November 14, 2009
How many lives is a $100 million oil lease worth? That's the question someone needs to ask Ambassador Peter Galbraith. Peter Galbraith was a 'liberal' hawk who advocated the invasion of Iraq, and then argued that the U.S. should maintain a strong presence in Iraq. During the Bush Administration, he was an advocate for and architect of Iraq's federalist system that ceded significant autonomy to the Kurds.
And that's where it gets sleazy (italics mine):
Now Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars as a…
mikethemadbiologist | November 11, 2009Robert S. Khuzami, the Securities and Exchanges Commission enforcement director:
"If you find yourself chewing the memory card in your cellphone to destroy any record of your misconduct, something has gone terribly wrong with your character."
Indeed.