Author: Serkadis

I’m a UW employee too, sort of

Editor, The Times:

It was with great interest I read Nicole Brodeur’s column in The Seattle Times on Dec. 18 [“Crocodile tears from the UW,” NWFriday]. The column noted UW President Mark Emmert’s compensation of $905,000 per year, plus generous perks — free mansion, club memberships, etc.

The article also mentioned UW Provost Phyllis Wise ($535,000 per year) and her recent appointment to the Nike corporate board.

As a nurse at Harborview — the only Level I trauma center serving the four-state region of Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Montana — I’m a UW employee too, but the similarity stops there. The average full-time Harborview RN makes about 1/13 of Emmert’s salary, with none of the perks, unless one considers working nights, weekends, all major holidays and generally through a 30-minute lunch break (for which we are not paid) to be a bonus.

A corporate lawyer stated in the article that “if you don’t pay your best people, they’ll walk across the street and work somewhere else.” I guess nurses, or police officers, firefighters and teachers don’t count as “best people.” Hey, maybe I could go across the street and get a job with Nike; I actually wear their shoes while running all night during those 12-hour shifts.

— Gayle Hawney Krona, Seattle

The corporate gravy train

Full marks to columnist Nicole Brodeur for taking on top UW administrators Mark Emmert and Phyllis Wise for padding their already plump salaries by joining corporate boards.

This greedy grab by two of the highest-paid employees in state government is an affront to every taxpayer in the state. We pay Emmert nearly $1 million a year to do his job and Wise more than $500,000 a year to do hers. They may be worth it, but for that kind of money we have the right to insist that they apply 100 percent of their efforts to their state jobs.

The UW regents are supposed to guard taxpayers’ interest at this public university, but in this instance have clearly abdicated their responsibility. Rather than insisting that UW administrators earn their money by devoting full attention to their jobs, the regents reportedly agreed to Emmert’s demand that he be allowed to serve on as many as three corporate boards. They then left it up to him to decide whether his underlings could join him on the corporate gravy train.

Since Emmert now serves on only two boards, we can all look forward to him joining another, just as soon as he finds one that pays better than the one he let Wise join. And please, don’t tell me that these two can fulfill their corporate responsibilities in their spare time. That’s not possible — at least if they intend to earn their money. It is time for the UW regents to man up and insist that Emmert and Wise earn their UW salaries by applying themselves full time to their jobs.

— Michael Sweeney, Seattle

Worth every penny

UW President Mark Emmert is a good man who takes time to listen to everybody. He gives up tens of millions of dollars that he could make in the private sector to give to our community.

He runs the largest organization in the state, and is an expert at helping acquire the 90 percent of UW funding not coming from the state.

— Thomas Finnelly, Seattle

Jingle Bell Bash rang with adult humor

I attended the Jingle Bell Bash sponsored by KISS-FM (106.1) with my daughter over the weekend [“Jingle Bell Bash is ready to ring, with All-American Rejects and more,” NWTicket, Dec. 18]. It was a great concept and a great value — so many bands together for one performance. The music was enjoyable even at my age.

Yet I was shocked at the show’s content.

The show was promoted as being for all ages and the majority of the attendees were of middle-school age. The show began with the disc jockey referencing being drunk. There were continued references to excessive drinking.

There was pervasive use of inappropriate language, which ironically would not be permitted on air. Yet, this language was used by both the bands, DJs, and guests throughout a show that was promoted for all ages.

There were inappropriate sexual innuendos and comments and references to recreational drug use.

I consider myself to be open minded. In the right context, with the right warning, and appropriate audience, much of what would have been presented would have been OK. But, it most certainly was not a show for all ages.

— Steven Simao, Snohomish

Let it go, let it go, let it go

I was dismayed to see that we still haven’t gotten over last year’s snow [“911 callers waited desperately for help,” page one, Dec. 20].

When did all the whiners move to Seattle?

Please, get over it already.

— Patty Johnson, Seattle

Pinching nickels and dimes

I am more than disappointed to read that The Times thinks now is not the time for health-care reform because the economy is faltering [“Put health care aside and fix the economy,” Opinion, editorial, Dec. 20].

Saving money on health-care reform now is as misguided as failing to dispatch the fire engines when the city is on fire because the price of gas is too high.

The most powerful nation on Earth simply cannot afford not to insure all its citizens, regardless of the timing.

— Catherine L. Gaylord, Seattle

Only hope local leaders are listening

I applaud The Seattle Times for speaking out on the shortfalls of the health-care-reform legislation, and for suggesting that Washington state’s congressional delegation stop supporting it — now.

I only hope Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, along with representatives like Jim McDermott, are listening and heed this message. The Times is correct in calling for a unified proposal and an economy on the mend before passing national health-care legislation.

There is a time and a place for everything, and passing a massive spending bill, just to pass something, should get someone fired. The voters of Washington state need to hold our elected officials accountable and should be inundating their offices with demands to vote no on this ill-conceived legislation.

The midterm election is only 11 months away and Washington voters will not forget what our elected officials have done if they help pass this legislation. The unfettered spending in Washington, D.C., needs to stop here and now.

Health care should be carefully debated by the 112th Congress during 2010.

— Thomas M. Lindberg, Seattle

The Video review of the new and now available Verizon Wireless Omnia2. The device is very nice and as you can see in the video it is pack with software and the hardware is not lacking either. The video I demoed(Hitch) was playing at a not too fast 448Kbits/sec and at 800 X 336 resolution, but I have plaid videos at 500Kbits/sec+ and it is still very smooth.

Human sexuality: not a reliable topic for the church

The Most Rev. Alex J. Brunett uses the sugarcoated — but devious and deceptive — language of the church in an attempt to show the church’s centuries-old tradition of caring for the poor [“Catholic principles for health-care reform,” Opinion, guest commentary, Dec. 17].

But he ignores the church’s centuries-old tradition of torturing and killing during the Crusades, the Inquisition, the decimation of the indigenous people of South, Central and North America, and the church’s discriminatory practices against women and gays.

He credits Catholic hospitals with accepting the uninsured into their emergency rooms without mentioning the fact that since the passage of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 every emergency room in every hospital in the U.S. has been required by law to offer such care.

He speaks of the church’s position on abortion as if it were neutral when almost everyone knows the church has consistently tried to weaken, eliminate and even criminalize a woman’s right to choose. Why is it that the church seldom talks about contraception, which it also considers a sin?

The church lacks creditability and sincerity on any issue having to do with human sexuality.

— Jim Grenfell, Sedro-Woolley

DOA in Congress

I give Catholic archbishop Alex Brunett credit for candidly admitting that the church is not trying to change U.S. laws that give women a legal right to abortion because such an attempt would be dead on arrival in Congress.

But if the church didn’t believe that efforts to make abortion laws stricter would be dead on arrival in Congress, would it be holding back on such efforts? I doubt it.

I hope to see a future Seattle Times article in which the archbishop explains why the Catholic Church has repeatedly tried to torpedo international conferences on population control, forbade married couples from using so-called artificial birth control, forbade homosexuals from using condoms to decrease their exposure to the AIDS virus, and apparently been practically oblivious to unsustainable population growth as a critical factor in problems such as hunger, disease and global warming.

Perhaps such an explanation would improve my understanding of the reasoning of the church on those issues too.

— Ted Yellman, Bellevue

What about the 9 million living children?

It boggles the mind that senators and other political leaders are fighting over the abortion issue while the 9 million uninsured children already living among us are denied health care.

— Frances Campbell, Seattle

Another example of how the patent system is being used to hinder, rather than help, innovation. While we’re no fans of Microsoft’s view on patents these days, that doesn’t mean we approve of ridiculous lawsuits against the company either. The one that got all the attention this year was a tiny Canadian startup, i4i, that claimed a patent (5,787,449) on editing an XML document, and then sued Microsoft and won (in Texas, of course). Not only did the company win, but the court ruled that Microsoft owed $98 per copy of Microsoft Word for this minor feature. On top of that, the court issued an injunction saying Microsoft could no longer sell Microsoft Word with this feature. Given the MercExchange ruling that said that injunctions don’t always make sense in patent cases, it was hard to defend such an injunction as being necessary.

But… never let common sense get in the way of how the judicial system works when it comes to patents. The appeals court (CAFC) has now upheld the lower court ruling, requiring Microsoft to pay the $290 million and bars further sales of any copy of Microsoft Word with this feature as of January 11th. Microsoft’s response is that it will simply remove this “little-used” feature. So this feature is rarely used, and yet it’s worth $98 per copy of Word sold? How does that make sense?

Meanwhile, the tiny Canadian company is thrilled. It just made hundreds of millions of dollars for stating the obvious. And, rather than encouraging innovation, it’s forcing a company to remove features. How is that innovative? How does that do anything at all to “promote the progress”? While some Canadian law professors might like to make up facts as to why these types of rulings make sense, I’m still at a loss as to how progress has been promoted here.

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Steak and Shake has truly become an outside-the-box corporation.

They’re diversifying from sandwiches and shakes to, well, insurance thanks to the vision of their chairman.

Fremont Michigan InsuraCorp (FMMH.OB) execs must have been pretty surprised when they heard that Steak and Shake was making an unsolicited bid for their company.

AP: [Steak and Shake] said it would pay $24.50 per share, half in cash and half in Steak n Shake stock. Steak n Shake said the offer represents an 11.3 percent premium to Fremont’s Monday closing price. Fremont’s shares trade over the counter.

A spokesman for Fremont, an insurance company, said Tuesday that its board would meet to discuss the unsolicited bid and to prepare a response.

Ridiculous? The market doesn’t think so, SNS shares popped 10% today and have done very well over the last few weeks.

What are they rallying on? Here’s the vision of Steak and Shake’s chairman, Sardar Bilgari:

Steak and Shake 2009 Report: Simply because profits are generated in the restaurant business doesn’t mean the money must be reinvested there. The Steak n Shake restaurant chain has been resuscitated and now enjoys prodigious cash flows. The parent firm has been reorganized as a holding company and thus is now in the business of acquiring other businesses

…

You should be aware that we have no investment committee intruding on capital and investment decisions. Any mistakes that would occur, and I assure you there will be errors, are only mine to make.

…

We acknowledge that this change in corporate direction will disappoint those who favor a “pure-play,” i.e., a company in which resources are reinvested only in one line of business. Of course, you will need to form your own views on whether you are comfortable with our idiosyncrasies. Otherwise, this is not a stock for you.

Thus an investment in Steak and Shake has become a huge bet on the investment acumen of Mr. Bilgari alone, who can invest in anything, without a prior investment mandate, and without an investment committee. Which makes him essentially like a hedge fund manager and SNS a hedge fund, or perhaps more precisely a listed private equity vehicle under the control of a single opaque decision maker. Yet Investors are loving it so far.

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See Also:

• Hedge Fund BlueGold: The So-Called Sovereign Debt Crisis Is A Distraction
• Former SAC Capital Trader: Stevie Cohen Runs The Cleanest Hedge Fund In The World
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Article Tags: Nigel Lawson

The U.S. president is in deep denial.

The world’s political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. While acknowledging that the outcome of the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen fell short of their demand for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions by developed and developing countries alike, they insist that what has been achieved is a breakthrough and a decisive step forward.

Just one more heave, just one more venue for the great climate-change traveling circus—Mexico City next year—and the job will be done.

Or so we are told. It is, of course, the purest nonsense. The only breakthrough was the political coup for China and India in concluding the anodyne communiqué with the United States behind closed doors, with Brazil and South Africa allowed in the room and Europe left to languish in the cold outside.

Source: online.wsj.com

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Article Tags: Lord Monckton

It is a glorious day outside the window of the Library at Carie. A foot or two of snow is on the fields and forests and on the distant Grampian Mountains. It is so cold that Loch Rannoch, the watery remnant of a mighty glacier that once swept majestically down from Rannoch Moor to distant Dundee 110 miles to the east and now placidly laps at the foot of our graceful lawns, is giving off a pearly mist, through which occasional darts of sunlight strike diamond fire from the fresh snow on Beinn Mhorlach, the little mountain on the far shore.

We cannot go anywhere, and no one can come to us. The roads for 30 miles around are impassable, and there is nothing the gallant roadmen of Perth and Kinross Council can do to keep them clear. So there is time to think a little, after the pandemonium of the collapsed Copenhagen climate conference.

The glaciers were here as recently as 9000 years ago. Then, by little and little, they went. Did they go because of manmade “global warming”? No, of course not. There were too few humans. There had been no Industrial Revolution. Our ancestors’ few, puny fires did not emit enough CO2 to make any measurable alteration to the composition of the atmosphere. Yet the glaciers went. There are greater forces acting upon our planet than we yet understand, and a little humility from the climatological/political community would be in order.

Source: sppiblog.org

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Here’s another bit from Famitsu. Koei has revealed the main characters of Hokuto Musou in the Japanese gaming mag’s pages. Hit the jump for details.
 
Thanks to Peter for the tip!

Filed under: Technology, Ford

Before we get into the nitty and/or gritty of what Ford is up to with their pending Sync app store, we should share with you a few facts FoMoCo shared with us. In 2010 fully 28 percent of the driving population will be between the ages of 16 and 31. These folks, known as Millenials (though us altecachers still prefer “Generation Y”) love their smart phones and social networks the way the Baby Boomers loved the Beatles and Generation X loved moping around and bad tribal tattoos.

As such, the number one access point to the internet is no longer a computer — it’s a mobile device.

Now we turn to Ford’s Sync, a piece of software developed with Microsoft’s help using the Seattle software giant’s Microsoft Auto platform. While on the surface Sync has often appeared as little more than a fancy way to spin songs off your iPod, in reality it’s a sophisticated piece of middleware that allows the vehicle to harness the power of a given mobile device. In other words, Sync allows whatever Ford/Lincoln/Mercury vehicle you’re driving to act as a controller for your iPhone/Droid/Pre/whatever.

Handsfree access to your favorite songs and phone numbers is one thing, but what about all those fancy-pants apps you’ve spent so much time (and maybe money) downloading? Are they to be totally forgotten while you’re in the car? Admittedly, you might be saying “of course,” but Millenials think different. Besides, what if there were smart phone apps that actually enhanced the driving experience? With your hands on the wheels and eyes on the road, how would you access them? Here’s a larger point, how does the internet work at 70 mph? Ford thinks it’s got the answers to most if not all of these questions.

Continue reading Ford goes open source, gets students to develop phone apps for Sync

Ford goes open source, gets students to develop phone apps for Sync originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Night, New Year’s Eve, in a snowy forest, as if by magic, flared festive lights on the Christmas tree. And all around the mysterious lights lit up! Sparkled snow drifts began to shine – as if covered with deposits of diamonds. Give yourself a sense of celebration!

Vinnie alerts us to a story out of Chicago, where two of the larger regional supermarket chains, Jewel and Dominick’s, recently put out ads congratulating Michael Jordan for all of his accomplishments (at the time of his induction into the NBA Hall of Fame). But, according to Jordan and his lawyer these newspaper ads celebrating Jordan’s accomplishments were actually trademark infringement. Now, it is true that there are certain publicity rights when it comes to celebrities and “endorsements,” but it’s hard to see how a congratulatory message from local Chicago grocers would be seen by any moron in a hurry as an “endorsement” (no matter how good his outside jumper might be). I guess the solution is just to stop recognizing Jordan’s achievements altogether.

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