patrick.net

I tried not to offend them and they need to understand that once you are here you are American and your allegiance is to the USA not any other country or peoples.

You are correct... but hiring is not about allegiance. It is about a greater good paradoxically created by unknowing self-interests through Free Market.

Former Cupertino Internet security worker pleads no contest to embezzlement
By Lisa Fernandez, Mercury News
Posted: 01/30/2009 08:38:46 AM PST

A former Internet security company employee has plead no contest to one count of felony grand theft following charges that he embezzled more than $130,000 from the Cupertino offices of Trend Micro.

In a statement issued today, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office said Russell Morita, 48, of Sunnyvale could receive up to three years in prison when he is sentenced in June. He entered the plea last week and is out of custody.

According to prosecutors, Morita used a company credit card from 2004 to 2007 to buy flat screen televisions, laptop computers, video games, furniture and other electronics — items that he had shipped directly to his home. Also, prosecutors say Morita charged twice the amount on some items he bought with the company credit card, then had the balance refunded to his personal account.

An employee in Trend Micro's accounting department became suspicious when Morita tried to pay $25,000 to his corporate credit card, prosecutors say. Morita violated company policy when he approved the payment and then signed the check himself.

Trend Micro was founded in 1988, and has its headquarters in Tokyo with a U.S. annual revenue of $848 million and more than 3,700 employees, according to the company's Web site.

NEC Corp. announced it plans to cut 20,000 positions worldwide starting in April. Half the layoffs will be full-time positions. The company, a Japan-based technology provider of network, IT and identity management systems, plans to exit the liquid-crystal display business.

According the the company's Web site, NEC and its more than 300 subsidiaries employ approximately 150,000. Several of NEC Corp.'s subsidiaries are in Silicon Valley, including Santa Clara-based NEC Electronics America, San Jose-based NEC Tokin America Inc. and Cupertino-based NEC FiberOpTech Inc. NEC Laboratories America has an office in Cupertino.

Ever since central banks stopped pegging their currencies to the price of gold, money has been a nebulous concept: a promise to pay the bearer, or "cheque" from the central bank, rather than a permanent store of wealth.

Global recession - where did all the money go?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/dan-roberts-on-business-blog/interactive/2009/jan/29/financial-pyramid

WHITTIER, CALIF. - How in the world does a woman with six children get a fertility doctor to help her have more -- eight more?

An ethical debate erupted Friday after it was learned that the 33-year-old Southern California woman who gave birth to octuplets this week had six children already.

Large multiple births "are presented on TV shows as a 'Brady Bunch' moment. They're not," fumed Arthur Caplan, bioethics chairman at the University of Pennsylvania. He noted the serious and sometimes lethal complications and crushing medical costs that often come with high-multiple births.

But Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, who has fertility clinics in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York, countered: "Who am I to say that six is the limit? There are people who like to have big families."

Kaiser Permanente announced the mega-delivery Monday. It was only the second time in U.S. history that eight babies survived more than a few hours after birth. The six boys and two girls are said to be in good condition.

So why, with a brood of six including 2-year-old twins, did Nadya Suleman chose to have more children?

Five young children and their mother are shot to death. Police find notes referring to 'work-related issues.'
By Andrew Blankstein, Richard Winton and Ruben Vives
3:15 PM PST, January 27, 2009
A man who had recently been laid off from a local hospital opened fire at his Wilmington home today, killing his five young children as well as his wife, police said.

The gunman then took his own life, according to authorities. Police said the children were an 8-year-old girl, twin 5-year-old girls and twin 2-year-old boys. LAPD Deputy Chief Kenneth Garner said police found notes inside the house in which the gunman referred to "work-related issues."

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"In these tough economic times, there are other options," Garner said. "In my 32 years, I've never seen anything like this."

Police discovered the bodies after a bizarre series of events this morning that included, authorities said, the gunman faxing a letter to KABC Channel 7 shortly before killing himself. Someone, possibly the gunman, called the LAPD about 8:20 a.m. saying, "I just returned home, and my whole family has been shot," according to Garner.

Police entered the house and smelled gunshot residue. The bodies were found around the house. Each person apparently had been shot with a revolver.

Garner said the bodies of the three girls were found in an upstairs bedroom and the bodies of the boys and the mother were found in a back bedroom. Notes found at the house suggested the case was a murder-suicide, he said.

According to Channel 7, the faxed letter detailed workplace problems both the man and his wife were having at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in West Los Angeles. The letter said that an unnamed administrator told him one day that he shouldn't have come to work and said "you should have blown your brains out."

The man said in the letter that he complained to his union to no avail. Then both he and wife were fired, Channel 7 reporter Gene Gleeson said in summarizing the letter.

The couple, Ervin Antonio Lupoe and his wife, Ana, were both former employees of Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Medical Center. "They were recently terminated," a spokesman for the hospital group confirmed.

"We are deeply saddened to hear of the tragic deaths of Ana, Ervin and their five children," Kaiser said in a statement, extending the hospital group's sympathies to their family and friends. "We are providing support to Kaiser Permanente employees."

Kaiser officials said they are cooperating with the ongoing LAPD investigation.

"Once you own a business your objective is to seek profit. In a capitalistic society, this is the right way to do."

We are not a capitalistic society and never have been. We are a democracy. In a democracy it is the majority that rules not one ideology or one party. If the people don't want H1B then it should not be there.

"You are correct… but hiring is not about allegiance. It is about a greater good paradoxically created by unknowing self-interests through Free Market."

Unknowing self-interest? LOL Free Market is about greed and collusion both by corporations and unions. It is a race to the lowest common denominator. With people literally beating up union organizers or beating up scabs.

Ever since central banks stopped pegging their currencies to the price of gold, money has been a nebulous concept: a promise to pay the bearer, or “cheque” from the central bank, rather than a permanent store of wealth.

Easy solution to that.

A. Get a job.

B. Get paid in worthless fiat currency.

C. Trade said worthless currency for gold.

Note that this arrangement is much more flexible than having a gold standard. Assets and labor become the standard.

Is the Bad Bank or no Bad Bank the real issue here? I have been hearing lots of pros and cons on CNBC throughout the day.

I think it is being able to separate the fixed income securities into granular groups per their risk/return characteristics, in order to separate the “toxic” assets from the rest of them (based on whatever criteria of what “toxic” is). If one can do that, pricing will be quite easy.

The way pricing has been done on Wall Street prior to this crisis proved untenable. Not that the theoretical models were bad, but the structures/data used as inputs into the models was and still is extremely “dirty”. If not the data itself then it was the meta-data, the data that described it, which was “dirty”.
For instance, most Wall Street financial institutions and rating agencies do not have systems providing for the ability to drill all the way from RMBS instruments to the underlying loans to identify exposures. This is because the data models are not in line in terms of complexity with the structures of instruments they attempt at describing.

Pools statistics are also very sparse (that is, many of important composite statistics like distribution across geography & prime/sub-prime, superimposed, are simply missing) to be able to reliably estimate risk exposures based on them.
Imagine having a warehouse filled with candy. You know that 10% of the candy is poisoned with cyanide, but the rest of it is perfectly good. And you lost track of the process that resulted in the candy getting poisoned. Regardless how you separate the candy into multiple piles, and how you call the piles, if you cannot separate the bad ones from the good ones, nothing would help.
A theoretically feasible solution would be to go after the originators of the loans and issuers of the securities to determine which loan “feeds” which security, and under which circumstances (it is dependent on many factors, some of which change over time). But that would be extremely expensive. Using the above analogy, it is a little better than unwrapping and testing each candy.

Some “forensic” type of analysis could be done, but the challenge is to optimize the cost/benefit of a garden variety of approaches.
Hopefully, the next time around Wall Street will not be looking at raw data, reference data, data warehousing and business intelligence as nice-to-haves. As they loved to say, “if it was an ideal world, we could afford looking into that, but now we are after frying a bigger fish.” Looks like the “big fish” got a little “burned”.

Never heard of it.

Libertarian hawks, it figures, no contradiction in that one.

BINGO! I always tell the Ron Pauloids that a gold standard is always available to you, go ahead and buy in.

The Pauloids and Liber-tards seem to suffer from a shared delusion.

"If we just do X, everything will get better. Trust us!"

Where X is the Gold standard, legalizing machine guns or privatizing the police department.

Well, RP is at least a consistent libertarian, if nothing else.

WSJ Opinion: Why Be a Nation of Mortgage Slaves? Article

Preventing foreclosures has become a top priority of politicians, economists and regulators. In fact, allowing foreclosures to happen has merit as a free-market solution to the crisis.

If the intent is to help homeowners, then foreclosure is undoubtedly the best solution. Household balance sheets have been destroyed by taking on too much debt via the purchase of inflated assets. With so little savings, a household with negative equity almost implies negative net worth. Walking away from the mortgage immediately repairs the balance sheet.

Credit may be damaged, but homeowners can rebuild it. And by renting something they can afford, instead of the McMansion they cannot, homeowners are most likely to have some money left over each month that they can save toward a down payment on a house they can eventually afford.

If the intent is to help the credit markets, then foreclosure is undoubtedly the best solution. The securitization model has proven to be flawed. Slicing loans horizontally into tranches created asset classes that have conflicting interests in a dissolution strategy of the same underlying asset. The holder of a senior tranche would be agreeable to modification, since his position is secured; the holder of a junior tranche would essentially be wiped out. The lower tranches are worthless but are still legally an encumbrance, hindering any type of sale or work-out effort.

Consider a property that sold for $500,000 at the peak, financed with a $400,000 first lien and an $80,000 second lien, which is now worth $300,000. The second lien is worthless, but the lien will remain as a cloud which complicates any modification effort by the senior lien holder. There is no incentive for the junior lien holder to voluntarily agree to a modification. Foreclosure would be the best and finite action. It wipes the slate clean.

What is the market telling us? Dataquick recently released December sales data for Southern California, once the hotbed of speculative excesses supported by nontraditional financing. Foreclosures now dominate sales. Prices are down. Sales volume is up. New home construction is down. These are beautiful textbook illustrations of supply and demand driving price and market equilibrium.

Toxic financing abruptly stopped during the spring of 2007. By that summer, there were no more 100% financing, negative amortization option ARMs, piggyback seconds, or the now-infamous NINJA (no income no job no assets) loans. Even though real-estate prices have continued to decline, post summer 2007 purchases are by a different class of buyers financed by loans with much tighter underwriting guidelines. We are at a crossroads. The time line of the default and foreclosure cycle is about to hit 2007 vintage loans. If the default rate on them is lower than for loans made from 2004 to early 2007, it would be the confirmation of a turning point.

Foreclosures provide the foundation of recovery, both for Main Street and Wall Street. As properties are foreclosed, they can move from weak hands to strong hands. Households that have been foreclosed upon today are the buyers of tomorrow, when given a chance to recover.

The replacement of credit flow is not all about money. It is about a new system of delivery that will provide clean guidelines, so there will be a reliable source for borrowers based on sound underwriting standards and a product that fixed-income investors have confidence in buying.

With the government in total control of the Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, this is the perfect opportunity to reform the secondary market.

Finally, loan modification is not only ineffective, it is evil. Coercing borrowers to continue paying a mortgage on a home that is hopelessly overvalued and not informing them of alternatives is predatory lending.

The media should interview those who had been foreclosed upon. Do they feel sorry or relieved? Are they rebuilding their credit, not to mention their lives? Do they miss the pressure of having to make payments they cannot afford on a McMansion that belongs to the lender?

The intent of modification programs to date is to create a generation of mortgage slaves. Fortunately, mortgage slaves can free themselves via foreclosure, and the masses are choosing to do so.

Mr. Su is a real-estate consultant and a former REO broker.

AP Investigation: Banks sought foreign workers
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Banks collecting billions of dollars in federal bailout money sought government permission to bring thousands of foreign workers to the U.S. for high-paying jobs, according to an Associated Press review of visa applications.

The dozen banks receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions that included senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists. The average annual salary for those jobs was $90,721, nearly twice the median income for all American households.

The figures are significant because they show that the bailed-out banks, being kept afloat with U.S. taxpayer money, actively sought to hire foreign workers instead of American workers. As the economic collapse worsened last year — with huge numbers of bank employees laid off — the numbers of visas sought by the dozen banks in AP's analysis increased by nearly one-third, from 3,258 in fiscal 2007 to 4,163 in fiscal 2008.

The AP reviewed visa applications the banks filed with the Labor Department under the H-1B visa program, which allows temporary employment of foreign workers in specialized-skill and advanced-degree positions.

It is unclear how many foreign workers the banks actually hired; the government does not release those details. The actual number is likely a fraction of the 21,800 foreign workers the banks sought to hire because the government limits the number of visas it grants to 85,000 each year among all U.S. employers.

During the last three months of 2008, the largest banks that received taxpayer loans announced more than 100,000 layoffs. The number of foreign workers included among those laid off is unknown.

Foreigners are attractive hires because companies have found ways to pay them less than American workers.

admin ... please take my post out of moderation ....

Just shocking... but this doesn't even start to address the corruption:

http://www.youtube.com/programmersguild

frank,

that was brilliant. Employers and immigration lawyers colluding to get H1B applicants approved and citizens excluded. I wonder how long before youtube has to take the video down, or is this work a parody and therefore protected?

Another thought: I think IEEE Spectrum magazine have been running the fake/bad-faith job ads for years now, maybe 20 years or more.

Should not IEEE and ACM refuse to run these ads in their publications?

can they tell the fake ads from the real ones?

For all you boomer-haters out there, I'd have to agree that the halftime show was lame and self-indulgent on the part of Bruce Springsteen. "Boss time" -- NOT!

Has he done anything useful since, oh, 1978??

Today we visited Kentwood Place, West San Jose (Cupertino school district). They are selling 1900 sq ft townhome for 850K.

What do you think, good deal?

http://www.braddockandloganhomes.com/communities/index.cfm?community_id=39

I dunno, personally I think those super-narrow 3-story townhouses are very impractical. And 850k in San Jose? I'd wait for it to be 600k max.

850K hmm.

I reckon the property tax will approach 10K per year on that one. Surely longtime residents (and renters) in that school district will be most grateful for your contribution.

>> I reckon the property tax will approach 10K per year on that one.

I plan to stay there for 8n years ... so 80K in property tax.
Is there a risk of getting zoned out of Monta Vista High School after buying. If so, it will be a disater .. at least 150K hit in finance.

>> Micheal Steele: hot or not?

I predicted this ... they needed him to counter Obama ...

Yes We Can!

Michael Steele, a black person the Republicans found somewhere, was elected leader of the Republican National Committee on Friday, after a daylong battle against traditional Republican party leaders (middle-aged white guys who dream of somehow owning slaves). America is healed.

Steele's victory is especially poignant because his main rival was an actual South Carolina plantation owner from one of those "whites only" golf clubs for the white racists.

This confederate country clubber, Katon Dawson, hoped to bring the party back to its White Power roots, but he was narrowly defeated by this legendary civil-rights leader, after hours and hours of grim-faced balloting by the RNC. This painful banquet-room contest between pinched-face cretins was, without doubt, the worst C-SPAN broadcast of all time.

Well if Monte Vista is what it's all about, that's only 4 yrs per kid, I'd pencil out the scenarios like renting in Monte Vista for those four years vs the cost of owning.

You could work Real Estate Only Goes Up in The Fortress into your scenarios, and future scenarios of the dollar vs Asian currencies which could dampen or amplify your Monte Vista projections, since in all likelihood the people you'd sell it to in 8 yrs will be wealthy Asians.

Sad news for chocolate fans.

Scharffen Berger Berkeley will be closed and moved to Illinois. I hope Hershey's is not going to shut it down eventually.

Permarenter,

the location is not bad, sandwiched between Cupertino and Saratoga, but that area seems to be a bit more commercial than residential.

I don't know about the school district, but why do you have to buy new? I'd be more worried about the HOA. HOAs of new condo/townhomes are running at $400-600 at least, that to me is a big turn off.

OO,

HOA is 195.00 per month ... material quality seemed to be good in model homes ...

>> Perma, did you write that?

No my style is to copy & paste ...... that I feel will cause debate ...

OO Says:
Sad news for chocolate fans. Scharffen Berger Berkeley will be closed and moved to Illinois. I hope Hershey’s is not going to shut it down eventually.

I was pretty outraged (at the bean counters in Hershey's) when I heard that on the news last week. The sad reality is that over time, one biz-school MBA reptile after another will chip away at the brand's quality - replacing suppliers, firing the original creators, "improving" manufacturing processes, etc. until there is nothing left but the carcass of a brand whose insides have been ripped out and restuffed with marketing bullshit. The final nail will be moving the factory to Mexico or China. Fucking Corporapists.

Hershey's might as well shut it down now - why the fuck will I want to pay extra for crappy corporate chocolate just because it has the Scharffen Berger name on it?

"Has he done anything useful since, oh, 1978??"

Uh... no. Evidently the SB "entertainment" guys have a knack for dredging up people who's careers should have long ended years ago. Janet Jackson, ZZ Top, Aerosmith ( who boy ) amongst countless others.

If it was up to me the stage would be set for true, hidden American gems and purists like Dick Dale ( King of the Surf Guitar ) or Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels etc. I say bring on the folks that -started- a genre ( not the ones that ended it ) That or bring on some young guys that are starting up.

I didn't see any comments on the new forclosure data http://economybust.blogspot.com/2009/02/forclosures-data-for-california.html
Is this good or bad for us long term bubble sitters?

Sad news for chocolate fans. Scharffen Berger Berkeley will be closed and moved to Illinois.
News flash! Cost of doing business is high in the Bay Area. Companies moving production to flyover country. Who would have guessed?
FWIW, they (the evil Hershey empire) claim most of the Scharffen Berger products are already made in Illinois. That said, it was great place to run by as chocolate permeated the air... Sigh...

I seriously doubt how big of a labor cost difference it is between Berkeley and Illinois, particularly in a business where cocoa beans (materials) makes the most difference. Scharffen Berger is good because the cocoa content is highly concentrated, unlike the high-fructose-corn-syrup Hershey's with very watered down cocoa content. People who pay 3x the price for a small can of cocoa expect that kind of quality. They are also one of very few undutched cocoa suppliers, if they take away that SKU, I am outta there.

You provide high quality, you charge a high price, and even in a depressionary situation, there will be people who care enough and make enough to afford these things, especially for these little luxury that are sold at discount outfits like Trader Joe's. I cannot afford a personal jet, but I sure can afford some kick-ass chocolates to brighten up my days. I honestly see a brand already on its dying path.

Is this good or bad for us long term bubble sitters?

When more people are throwing money at the pit... you tell us if this is good or bad for the housing market in the medium to long term.

Scharffen Berger is good because the cocoa content is highly concentrated...
I believe that the Scharffen Berger folks are single-handly responsible for the cacao wars (that is, getting high end bar manufacturers to state cacao percentage on their labels). Quite frankly, they "spoiled" my taste buds, and I can no longer eat the cheap cr@p.

European chocolate bars have had the cacao percentage on them for a long time, more than a decade at least.

I'm a bit worried about Scharffen Berger quality since Hershey's bought them, but I assume they know full well that people won't be fooled by any reduction in quality. I have a cup of Scharffen Berger cocoa each morning, no sugar. It's really great. Valrhona tastes rather burnt.