Archive for February, 2008

Those must have been some delicious tacos. I have been known to stalk people coming out of Five Guys with bags of burgers, but never have I thought of tacos in the same way.

A hunger for carnitas nearly led to some carnage after a Fontana man was robbed of a bag of tacos at gunpoint. Police Sergeant Jeff Decker said the 35-year-old victim had just bought about $20 in tacos from a street-corner stand Sunday night and was bicycling home when the suspect confronted him and said “Give me your tacos.”

Decker said the suspect grabbed the bag of food, punched the victim in the face and began to flee.

When the victim demanded his tacos back, the suspect pointed what appeared to be a handgun at the man and threatened to kill him before running away.

So, what do you think? Was the guy just hungry or was there another reason for snatching the tacos?

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I am good at managing my money, but I am terrible when it comes to understanding certain economic “ideas”. Why on Earth would banks be borrowing against their own assets? Aren’t the banks the ones which should be lending money in order to generate interest from those loans, etc? Why would they borrow against their own assets, unless they owe someone money that they cannot afford to pay?

Banks in the United States have been quietly borrowing “massive amounts” from the U.S. Federal Reserve in recent weeks, using a new measure the Fed introduced two months ago to help ease the credit crunch, according to a report on the web site of The Financial Times.

The newspaper said the use of the Fed’s Term Auction Facility (TAF), which allows banks to borrow at relatively attractive rates against a wide range of their assets, saw borrowing of nearly $50 billion of one-month funds from the Fed by mid-February.

I can see where analysts would get nervous when this starts to happen. If the banks cannot pay their bills, the Fed is going to have to foreclose on the bank. Right? Is that how it works? I hate all this fuzzy math, I’m not sure it’s so fuzzy though. When banks start “quietly” borrowing money from the Fed, I can’t help but wonder what is on the horizon.

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It’s amazing that they have gone this long with their sodium levels as high as they are. Really. Everyone I know has eaten Campbell’s soups, and I still find myself eating them from time to time.

The Campbell Soup Co.’s kid-oriented soups, which feature characters such as Dora the Explorer and Batman on the cans, are getting their second sodium reduction in three years, the company announced Monday.

This time, the 12 soups designed for children will have 480 milligrams per serving, which means the company can legally label them as healthy foods for the first time.

“Your kids can enjoy Dora the Explorer even more,” said Douglas R. Conant, Campbell’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “They’ll be down to heart-healthy levels.”

For Camden-based Campbell’s, high sodium levels have been a big health concern for decades, especially in relation to products that are otherwise generally healthy.

I just think it’s funny they are finally doing this. My question is, since they are cutting sodium levels, exactly what are they adding to help keep the soups edible. Maybe it’s scarier than the sodium, who knows.

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This guy is really, really, really, smart.

Mr. Widget wants to go to space.

Ken Schellenberg, who has adopted the alter-ego on his company website, wants to put a simple but highly engineered bottle rocket into orbit.

This could be impossible, but the CEO of AntiGravity Research already holds the altitude record for boosting an elongated plastic pop bottle – propelled by a bicycle pump, water and a bit of soap – into the air.

He has sent a bottle rocket as high as 379 meters, and because of that he thinks it’s possible to launch one into orbit.

One question. Why?

Before you comment, I know why. “Because he can”. Right?

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Why do people always expect someone else to “protect the children”. Why don’t they step up and do what they can to help protect them? I find it hilarious that they want Google and Yahoo to “erect” stronger barriers when they should be the ones doing that very thing.

The world’s leading adult film studio is calling on Internet giants Google and Yahoo to “erect stronger barriers” to keep children from viewing online pornography.

Vivid Entertainment co-founder Steven Hirsch said he plans to make his case publicly during a lecture at Yale’s School of Management on February 16, during the Ivy League university’s “Sex Week.”

“None of the search engines and portals, but particularly Yahoo and Google, has taken any significant steps in this direction,” Hirsch said in a written release.

“This is not about First Amendment rights, it is about protecting children.”

This guy even goes on to say that ISP’s should aggressively verify ages of people seeking to buy adult content. Hello. Thats what YOU are supposed to do. The ISP has no idea who is using the computer to access your site. They know whose account it is, but that doesn’t mean they’re the ones trying to purchase the porn.

Get with it Hirsch, step up out of the gutter and be accountable, don’t blame it on the ISP’s or the search engines. You do enough dirty work every day, adding this to your agenda should be no problem at all.

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Have you heard the news? Our trade deficit declined this year, after five years of record setting totals. Overall, our trade deficit with all foreign countries dropped 6.2%! Awesome right? Not so much. Our deficit with China alone rose 10.2 percent.

Despite a soaring foreign oil bill and another record deficit with China, the overall U.S. trade deficit declined in 2007 after setting records for five consecutive years.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the deficit dropped to $711.6 billion last year, a decline of 6.2 percent. The trade deficit with China continued to rise, jumping by 10.2 percent to $256.3 billion. That was the largest gap ever recorded with a single country, as Chinese imports surged despite a string of high-profile recalls of tainted products.

The Bush administration credited its free trade policies for spurring strong growth in exports while critics contended that even with the lower overall deficit, the imbalance is still nearly double what it was in 2001, the year Bush took office.

All this means to me is that we aren’t buying as much stuff from all the other countries in the world and we’re buying more shit from China. Wonderful.

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Is it any surprise that investment firms that deal with mortgages are still cutting back? As more and more homeowners default on their mortgage and more of them enter foreclosure, it’s only logical that more and more brokers and such would be laid off.

Morgan Stanley (MS.N) will slash 1,000 jobs, scale back its U.S. home-lending business and shut down a British mortgage unit as new management takes a hard look at the continued deterioration in mortgage markets.

The cuts announced on Wednesday affect Morgan Stanley employees who generate home loans through brokers and other third parties, as well as bankers who packaged these loans into bonds. The bank declined to detail cuts for specific areas.

Including the latest moves, Morgan Stanley has laid off 2,900 people in mortgages, wealth management, investment banking and capital markets since October. That’s 6 percent of Morgan Stanley’s 48,256 employees at the end of November.

Once the market for mortgage-backed securities picks up again, I’m sure things will look different, but until then, we’re going to see more of these cuts, and I’m pretty sure this is still just the tip of the iceberg.

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First it was Ford, now GM is going to offer buyouts to all of their union employees.

General Motors Corp (GM.N) said on Tuesday it would offer buyouts or early retirement to all of its U.S. hourly union workers, and expects the lackluster North American market to rebound in the second half of 2008.

The top U.S. automaker posted a quarterly loss reflecting a slump in its North American market, but analysts were encouraged that the sweeping deal with the United Auto Workers covering 74,000 workers would cut labor costs more aggressively than expected.

I know the risk of getting laid off is higher, but would you really want to take a buyout offer if you knew there wasn’t a chance you were going to get another job after this one, at least for a while anyway?

Oh sure, it’s a great deal for people who were planning to retire anyway, but the rest of them would be crazy to take the deal, wouldn’t they?

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It’s not often that moose fall from the sky, unless you forget to pick them and they overripen on the tree.

Alaska State Troopers see plenty of hazards, but Trooper Howard Peterson was nearly felled by a new one: falling moose. Peterson was driving Feb. 2 on the Seward Highway south of Anchorage when something big and black fell out of the sky about 20 feet in front of his patrol car. “Falling rock!” he thought, ready to steer clear if it bounced onto the highway.

The thing didn’t roll or shatter. It turned out to be a moose that fell from cliffs next to the highway.

Drivers often see Dall sheep on the cliffs but rarely moose. Peterson estimates the animal fell 150 feet or more.

It was windy that night, Peterson said, and a gust may have startled the moose into a fatal fall.

Poor moose.

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Project Lifeline? Hahaha. Yeah. If you wait for the boat to sink and the passengers to drown, what’s the point of throwing in a lifeline?

Six top mortgage companies on Tuesday launched a new program aimed at staving off foreclosure for seriously delinquent borrowers in the hopes that new, more affordable loan terms can be worked out.

“Project Lifeline,” backed by the U.S. Treasury and Department of Housing and Urban Development, would pause foreclosure proceedings for borrowers more than 90 days in arrears while servicers determine whether they could make payments under new terms, the lenders said in a statement.

While it’s nice to think they are trying to help homeowners keep their homes, they’re really just making sure the government doesn’t start regulating the hell out of them.

Think about it. If they help ma and pa who are in a subprime mortgage by allowing them to refinance into a traditional fixed rate mortage, how are ma and pa going to pay that higher mortgage? They couldn’t afford the interest only they were paying in the first place.

Pay no attention to the window dressing, look inside for the real picture.

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