Small Business in Californio land

Daniel Weintraub (Sac Bee) reports that 90% of all businesses in CA employ 5 or less workers; there are 2,600,000 sole proprietorships in CA now!

Steve McQueen on Charlie Manson's death list

One week before the Woodstock Music Festival kicked off in Bethel, New York, McQueen had been invited for dinner at the Roman Polanski-Sharon Tate home in the Hollywood hills by mutual friend and hairdresser-to the-star Jay Sebring. An unexpected rendezvous with a mystery woman prompted him to cancel his appointment. In the wake of the Manson Family Tate-LaBianca murders at, respectively, 10050 Cielo Drive and 3301 Waverly Drive, McQueen would later learn that he was accorded the kind of priority billing for which he was unprepared: he topped Charles Manson's celebrity death list. Thereafter he carried a concealed weapon.

The guy who made billions on subprime

On Wall Street, the losers in the collapse of the housing market are legion. The biggest winner looks to be John Paulson, a little-known hedge fund manager who smelled trouble two years ago. Read about Paulson Company here

Magnificent Seven film trivia

Mexican censors required the peasants to always be wearing clean clothes.

Money is . . .

Money is the root of all evil... If a man is after money, he's money mad; if he keeps it, he's a capitalist; if he spends it, he's a playboy; if he doesn't get it, he's a never-do-well; if he doesn't try to get it, he lacks ambition. If he gets it without working for it; he's a parasite; and if he accumulates it after a life time of hard work, people call him a fool who never got anything out of life.

Songs of the Century

For a look at the great songs of the 21 st century (I'm not sure how these were picked) click here

NASA Air Carrier Survey analyzed by CAPBOR

NASA Air Carrier Survey

On News Year's Eve 2007, NASA released a heavily redacted "report" regarding an $11 million survey they ran between 2001 and 2004. The data were released in formats virtually impossible to analyze.

NASA spokesmen said they can't see why the flying public would be interested in this data. Why would taxpayers NOT be interested in these results? So CAPBOR cross-referenced the questions and answers from section B and also created a spreadsheet with section A and section B data.

The first of our releases to the public was the following document that cross-referenced the results of the survey with the questions asked. Keep in mind this is a small sample of pilots that were surveyed. Notable results:

• 168 reports of landing an aircraft without getting clearance.
• 1528 reports where aircraft diverted to an alternate airport or returned to land because of an aircraft equipment problem.
• Hundreds of reports where aircraft had uncommanded movements of rudders, ailerons, spoilers, speedbrakes, etc, in flight!
• Hundreds of reports of in-flight smoke, fumes and fire in engines, flight decks, passenger cabins, etc.
• 2339 reports where Air Traffic Control refused to requests to change course due to severe weather.
• Over four thousand reports where reserve fuel was required to stay flying.

read everything . . . click here

Anglers are important to California economy

1/30/08

San Francisco, CA - A report released today finds that anglers in California generate billions of dollars in direct and indirect revenue in the state, which supplies an important economic boost, particularly for rural communities. The report also recommends that a high priority be given to habitat protection and maintenance, which would increase present and future economic benefits to the state's economy.

The report was conducted by Carolyn Alkire of Environmental Economics and Policy Consulting and was released by the advocacy group California Trout to develop a deeper understanding of the factors that determine fishing's economic effects, expanding the study of this important relationship for the benefit of decision-makers and policy-makers in the state.

"We knew that fishing was important to California's economy, but now we know just how important," said Brian Stranko, CEO of California Trout. "The findings of this report make it abundantly clear that people all over the state depend on the financial infusion caused by recreational fishing, and that this beneficial effect could be increased even further by better protecting and maintaining the streams and surrounding habitats that make fishing possible. Also, by encouraging young people to get involved in fishing, the people of California can maximize the long-term value of this healthy, sustainable activity."

Christ Evert Lloyd Mill Norman

While watching the Open Championship and Greg Norman surge to lead this morning and watching Chris Evert (the new Mrs. Norman) interviewed I wondered what happened between her and Andy Mill . . . . . so I found this -

Their divorce was finalized on 12/04/2006. Citing irreconcilable differences, Chris agreed to pay Andy cash and securities amounting to $7 million. Andy will also keep their $4 million vacation home in Aspen, Colorado, a Porsche, and other automobiles.

OK, now I know and I hope Christ and Greg are happy for evermore.

WALLE

If you want a very enjoyable movie experience, don't miss the latest from Pixar . . . . for that matter, just go see every Pixar movie and you won't be disappointed.

catch the trailer to WALLE here

The Open Championship

Here's the link to the Open Championship . . . . . at Royal Birkdale click here

You think you've made bad investments?

Three months ago, with Washington Mutual's shares at $13.15, Forth Worth, Texas-based TPG and a group of investors agreed to buy $7 billion of stock at $8.75, a 33 percent discount. The stock slumped 35 percent yesterday to $3.23, leaving TPG's investment down 63 percent. TPG also has warrants to buy 57.1 million shares at $10.06 a piece.

Oh heck, it'll probably work out . . . .

Do we have a smaller government?

I keep asking my demopulican friends about the number one concern for our great nation . . . . is the government getting smaller or larger? George W. Bush ran on the "I'll reduce the size of government" pledge way back in 2000 . . . he failed on that pledge within months of taking office and we all know how much government has grown over the last 8 years . . . . . so it shouldn't be any surprise to us neysayers when we see that now the government is going to be the defacto holder of last resort for half of the Trillion dollar outstanding mortgage porfolio held by Freddie and Fannie by "helping" them through their cashflow problems. Now, mind you, the government says this is only a temporary thing . . . . . yeah, right. We heard that language before haven't we.

Let me introduce you to Phil Gramm . . . .

in case you've been in a vacuum lately, he's Republican McCain's chief economic adviser but more importantly he has a very important job at UBS (which has been just killed by bad investments while Phil's been working there), read this story in Slate Magazine and then think about how you would feel having this guy as the Treasury Secretary . . . . click here

more pain for the financials

IndyMac Bancorp Inc. became the biggest casualty of the subprime mortgage crisis on Friday, as federal regulators shut down the troubled Pasadena, Calif.-based savings bank in one of the largest U.S. bank failures ever.

Sir Isaac Newton and sunlight

Sir Isaac Newton dismantled the age old deity of sunlight when he let sunlight pass through a prism. OK, he didn't discover color but until then everyone thought that sunlight was white and was the central element in divine creation. This was in 1666. Newton called his discovery the "oddest if not the most considerable detection which hath hitherto been made in the operations of nature."

The Longest Day

Since we returned from France and our visit to Normandy to see the D Day beaches I've been wanting to see the 1962 film "The Longest Day" and it was on AMC two days ago. What is one remarkable element about the film is that the assault at Pointe du Hoc was shot on location! You can see my photos of the region at my Flickr site, click here

CraigKincaid.com

craigkincaid.com . . . . check it out

Counterknowledge

If you're like me and think that there's a lot of hogwash out there masquerading as information then you'll enjoy reading "Counterknowledge: how we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history" by Damian Thompson click here

do you know what a SPAC is?

Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, sell units, usually one share of common stock and one warrant, and use the money to buy a closely held company. They're also called blank- check companies because they don't disclose targets before their IPOs. One recently created by investor Thomas Hicks is buying 66% of Graham Packaging Holdings Co. from the Blackstone Group. This type of transaction is new to Wall Street but allows investors in LBO's (leveraged buyouts) to exit their investment. Typically this is done in an IPO but that market is dead now.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

When Louis De Bernieres was asked about his opinion of the film based on his book, he told the Financial Times . . "Well, I could go on about that for a long time. There is a lot of good about it," he begins. But he can't restrain himself for long. Hollywood directors are "like dogs who want to piss on lamposts to show it's theirs", he suddenly says. " They just can't resist tampering with stories."

"Did short sellers kill Bear Stearns" in Vanity Fair

"At Phi Kappa Wall Street, most of the frat boys are instantly recognizable. There’s the big, backslapping Irishman, Merrill Lynch, the humorless grind, Goldman Sachs, and the straitlaced rich kid, Morgan Stanley. And then, off in the corner, wearing its beat-up leather jacket and nursing a cigarette, was the tough-guy loner, scrawny Bear Stearns, who disdained secret handshakes and towel snapping in favor of an extended middle finger toward pretty much everyone. Bear was bridge-and-tunnel and proud of it. Since the days when the Goldmans and Morgans cared mostly about hiring young men from the best families and schools, “the Bear,” as old-timers still call it, cared about one thing and one thing only: making money. Brooklyn, Queens, or Poughkeepsie; City College, Hofstra, or Ohio State; Jew or Gentile—it didn’t matter where you came from; if you could make money on the trading floor, Bear Stearns was the place for you. Its longtime chairman Alan “Ace” Greenberg even coined a name for his motley hires: P.S.D.’s, for poor, smart, and a deep desire to get rich.

Bear Stearns was an investment bank, but the traditional banking roles, such as advising on corporate mergers and trading stocks, were always an afterthought there. What the P.S.D.’s at Bear Stearns did best was trade bonds. The firm’s executive history was the story of three bond traders, each with his own outsize personality. From the mid-1930s till the late 1970s, Bear was the province of Salim “Cy” Lewis, the cantankerous Wall Street legend who forged a cutthroat culture run less as a modern corporation than as a series of squabbling fiefdoms, each vying for his approval. Ace Greenberg, an avuncular sort who kept his desk on the trading floor and answered his own phone, took over after Lewis’s death, in 1978, and while his edges were softer, Bear remained a Mametesque pressure cooker where top traders could pull down $10 million a year while runners-up were tossed into the alley."

The Vanity Fair piece blames everyone from shorts to CNBC to Charlie Gasparino and David Faber.

Yet bottom line remains: If your financial condition is so precarious that rumors can bring you down, then its the finances, and not the rumors, that are to blame . . .

Let the closings begin . . .

It's been said that there won't be any real beginning to the end of the stockmarket/retail collapse until stores are actually closing by the big box chains, etc. Well, today we get the first of the "good news" items on closings . . . . Starbucks Corp. will close 600 U.S. coffee shops and eliminate as many as 12,000 jobs, the most in its history, as it slows the chain's expansion after it doubled in size in four years.