Weird, yeah, but pretty amazing. While many probably wouldn't have bothered to give the would-be robber a break, this guy gave him not only a major break, but a bit more.A potential victim became a compassionate counselor during a recent robbery attempt, changing the would-be criminal's mind -- and apparently his religion.
Storekeeper Mohammad Sohail was closing up his Long Island convenience store just after midnight on May 21 when -- as shown on the store's surveillance video -- a man came in wielding a baseball bat and demanding money.
"He said, 'Hurry up and give me the money, give me the money!' and I said, 'Hold on'," Sohail recalled in a phone interview with CNN on Tuesday, after the store video and his story was carried on local TV.
Sohail said he reached under the counter, grabbed his shotgun and told the robber to drop the bat and get down on his knees.
"He's crying like a baby," Sohail said. "He says, 'Don't call police, don't shoot me, I have no money, I have no food in my house.' "
Amidst the man's apologies and pleas, Sohail said he felt a surge of compassion.
He made the man promise never to rob anyone again and when he agreed, Sohail gave him $40 and a loaf of bread.
"When he gets $40, he's very impressed, he says, 'I want to be a Muslim just like you,' " Sohail said, adding he had the would-be criminal recite an Islamic oath.
"I said 'Congratulations. You are now a Muslim and your name is Nawaz Sharif Zardari.'"
When asked why he chose the hybrid of two Pakistani presidents' names, the Pakistani immigrant laughed and said he had been watching a South Asian news channel moments before the confrontation.
Sohail said the man fled the store when he turned away to get the man some free milk.
He said police might still be looking for the suspect but he doesn't intend to press charges.
"The guy, you know, everybody has a hard time right now, it's too bad for everybody right now in this economy," said the storekeeper.
- Source
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Store owner converts would-be robber and gives him food?
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Duke Nukem Foerever may be gone, but the hollowed out shell of 3D Realms will remain. To do nothing. Ever.
Seriously, what the shit is this? Okay, so 3D Realms has indeed canned Duke Nukem Forever due to lack of funding, but 3D Realms is still around? To do what? They couldn't even make Prey! It took 10 damn years and they still couldn't finish it so they handed it off to Human Head Studios. Valve spent 9 years doing Team Fortress 2, but in the end Valve actually did make the damn game! (and a mighty fine one at that!)In light of recent press articles and statements by Take-Two (to the media and in a lawsuit), we want to set the record straight on some issues.
Despite rumors and statements to the contrary, 3D Realms (3DR) has not closed and is not closing. 3DR retains ownership of the Duke Nukem franchise. Due to lack of funding, however, we are saddened to confirm that we let the Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) development team go on May 6th, while we regroup as a company. While 3DR is a much smaller studio now, we will continue to operate as a company and continue to license and co-create games based upon the Duke Nukem franchise.
As some of you may know, Take-Two filed a lawsuit last week containing various accusations and claims against 3DR and the uncompleted DNF game. Take-Two never paid 3DR advances or any signing bonus or any other funds related to DNF, up until July 2008, at which time they paid $2.5m in connection with another agreement for an unannounced game. This is the sum total Take-Two has paid 3DR in connection with DNF. Take-Two claims that they paid $12m to GT Interactive/Infogrames to acquire the publishing rights for the DNF game. To be clear, 3DR was not a party to that transaction and did not receive any money from it. When the DNF game was originally signed with GT Interactive in 1998, GT paid 3DR a $400,000 signing bonus. Up until July 2008, this was the only publisher money we received for the DNF game. Meanwhile, 3DR put over $20m into the production of DNF.
Take-Two retains publishing rights for the DNF game, although 3DR retains certain rights to sell the game directly to the public. Late last year, 3DR began negotiations with Take-Two to provide funding to complete the DNF game. In the meantime, 3DR was hitting mutually-agreed milestones, despite not having a new agreement finalized. Take-Two was well aware that 3DR needed the funding to continue the DNF game development. Suddenly, after months of negotiations, Take-Two materially changed the parameters of the proposed funding agreement. 3DR informed Take-Two that it could not financially afford the changes Take-Two was suggesting and would be forced to release the team if an agreement was not reached. Take-Two made a last minute proposal to acquire the Duke Nukem franchise and the 3DR development team. Take-Two's proposal was unacceptable to 3DR for many reasons, including no upfront money, no guarantee minimum payment, and no guarantee to complete the DNF game. From 3DR's perspective, we viewed Take-Two as trying to acquire the Duke Nukem franchise in a "fire sale." Those negotiations fell through on May 4th, a deal never materialized, and the DNF team was sadly released a few days later.
Less than a week after the DNF team was released, Take-Two filed its lawsuit in New York, seeking immediate temporary injunctive relief. The court denied Take-Two's request for a temporary restraining order. While we cannot comment on the details of the ongoing lawsuit, we believe Take-Two's lawsuit is without merit and merely a bully tactic to obtain ownership of the Duke Nukem franchise. We will vigorously defend ourselves against this publisher.
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Okay, so, 3DR spent $20 million making DNF, but they have no abandoned it. They still plan to make other games based on the Duke Nukem franchise, though. What the fuck kind of stupid shit is this? You ABANDONED a game that you spent $20 million on and spent 12 years making, but now you're going to focus instead on making newer, different games? I'm sorry, but something does not compute with that. Mainly, what fucking games are you going to make? iPhone apps?
Dude, do the honorable thing and just close shop. This is embarrassing and complete bullshit. You guys haven't made a game since 1997. Stop pretending like you have even a semblance of integrity or respect, because you don't. No publisher is goin to want to fund you. It's sad, yes, but it's time to move on.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Penn Jillette on counterintuition and the Obama economic recovery plan.
Just hit the jump and read it.Counterintuitive action makes a fellow feel smart. When I first got my driver's license, I took my old Ford Falcon into the Greenfield Public High School parking lot when it was freshly covered with fresh powder on top of wet slippery Western Massachusetts snow and ice. I turned fast, gunned it and lost control of the car in a skid.
I turned into the skid and instantly gained control of my car. Telling someone to turn into a skid, that's crazy talk. It seems so wrong, but my Dad knew it worked. Dad suggested I do it over and over in the parking lot, so I would conquer my intuition to be ready when a real emergency arose on a real road. Counterintuitive actions prove we can trust real knowledge and do the opposite of what we feel makes sense.
I'm a fire-eater. There is some technique to fire-eating, but most of the practice goes into learning that one's mouth is wet enough, most of the heat goes up enough, and cutting the oxygen leg off the fire triangle (it's now a fire tetrahedron, but I learned fire-eating a long time ago) with one's mouth really does put the fire out.
It took watching a professional whom I trusted do it -- a lot of trust and a lot of practice -- before my first reaction, when my mouth started to burn from the lit torch in my mouth, was to put the torch deeper in my mouth, close my mouth around the torch and put it out.
Handling fire seems like a superpower. There are whole seminars and self-help jive centered on fire-walking, which is hustled as "mind over matter," or "empowerment" but is really just counterintuitive physics. As long as the fire walk is set up right and you keep moving, you can even hope and pray to be burned, while yelling counter-self-help slogans such as "I do not have any power to do this" and "universe, please burn my little piggies," and you'll be fine.
Whether it's fire walking or knowing that the Earth is round, everyone seems to dig counterintuitive thinking. Many dig it when our president explains we're going to spend our way out of debt. That's way against all the intuition we've developed in our adult lives. Spending our way out of debt doesn't work often, does it? It's crazy talk. Didn't a lot of people try that spending out of debt thing?
I live in Vegas, and I see people by the side of the road with cardboard signs who seem like they might have tried that spending their way out of debt thing. Or maybe they tried the all too intuitive "crack will make me feel healthy again" thing. I don't know.
Didn't lots of people try piling up debt on credit cards and buying houses they couldn't afford in hopes of solving all their financial problems? I've tried spending more than I was going to earn (remember, I was carny trash, that's why I know how to eat fire), and it way didn't work. Spending more money than I had to spend put me more in debt, just like my silly intuition warned me.
President Obama is so damn smart. He just drips smart. He clearly understands stuff that we could never understand. He's trustworthy. If Obama were teaching fire-eating, we would all learn fast. If he told you that the burns would be minor and the fire would go out when you closed your mouth, you'd believe him. If I weren't twice his weight, I'd fall back with my eyes closed into his caring arms in one of those cheesy '70s church trust exercises. He could talk me into anything.
Obama tells us that we can spend our way out of debt. He tells us that even though the government had control over the banks and did nothing to stop the bad that's going on, if we give them more control over more other bank-like things, then they can make sure bad stuff doesn't happen ever again. He says we can get out of all those big wars President Bush caused by sending more troops into Afghanistan. And I don't know. I really don't know.
I trusted my Dad that turning into a skid would work. I trusted my carny mentor, Doc Swan, that closing my mouth around a burning torch would put it out. They were right. Maybe the United States borrowing more money than I could imagine in a billion years with a billion computers and a billion monkeys typing on them, will get us out of financial trouble. I really don't know. It's certainly true that many counterintuitive things are true, and when you have the guts to do something counterintuitive that works, it's really cool. It's a superpower under our yellow sun.
But there are some things that are just intuitive. Did you know, that if you're going 100 mph, directly at a very, very thick, reinforced concrete wall, and you speed up, so you're accelerating right when you hit the wall that the accident you have is going to be much worse than if you'd jammed on the brakes as soon as you saw the wall at the end of the street? Did you know that? It's exactly what everything you know and feel would tell you, and it's exactly true. Most times when you're driving, or playing with fire, or handling money, the thing that makes sense to you is also true.
I way hope we're turning into a skid and not accelerating into a concrete wall.
Note: Reading this article does not give you the information you need to really eat fire, fire walk or even turn into a skid. Do not try any of it. You really need a trained professional to teach you, and most important you need to sign something that says Penn Jillette and CNN are not in any way responsible for your inevitable injuries.
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CDs killed the record label.
Well, I partly agree with the idea put forth, but I think it glosses over a few things. Namely, the price scheme. I remember when CDs were first emerging and the line was touted that, as the prevelance of CDs grew and the medium got cheaper, albums would cost $10. They never did. You can find some new albums for $15, but most are $20 or more.
Anyways, the notion that cheap CDs and shoddy album compilations is what really caused such massive revenue loss for record companies is interesting.Traditionally, the majors blame the internet for devaluing music, but the most forward-thinking in the business are starting to reverse this equation. “In a way, the CD is what destroyed the music business,” says Joe Mardin, a musician, producer, arranger, and engineer. Mardin grew up in the music business; his father was Ardiff Mardin, the legendary producer of Hall & Oats, Norah Jones, Aretha Franklin, and others. “People were buying millions of CDs to replace their catalog," says Mardin, explaining how industry greed ended up killing the Golden Goose. “There was this imperative that started to emerge: 'You must fill up a CD with as much music as possible,’” Mardin says. “The rest was filler. You ended up with albums that were one or two hits and a bunch of wanna-be hits.” The record industry itself killed the album, trying to maximize profits.
"The very concept of the album itself, a consecutive body of work designed by the artist to be experienced in its entirety, has been lost," explains Caraeff. And as a result, the traditional labels are contracting radically, morphing into a much humbler business. "The labels will survive," Mardin predicts, "but with much smaller margins and sales." And that might not be such a bad thing for music—or musicians.
After the current contraction, a few artists, like Lil' Wayne, will still be able to rake in large sums. But the top-heavy shape of the industry as a whole will change. There will never be another 100-million-selling album, there may not ever be another 20-million-selling album. “The profits were just gloriously obscene,” says Bob Sherwood, who was head of marketing for Columbia when Faith was released, and has had top positions at Mercury Records, CBS Records, and Sony. “You can’t do that today.”
Yet there will always be fans, always be musicians, and—of course—there will always be money. “If you find 100,000 fans who are willing to contribute $15 a year for your music, that’s one and a half million dollars," says Goldberg, doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation. "If you can find a way to get your music to them efficiently and for them to get that money to you efficiently, you can make a very nice living.” It's the internet, not the labels, that connects musicians to their audience. What's gone is the major-label hit-making machinery. “The top is going to come down," says Goldberg, "but the middle class is going to grow."
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Sunday, March 1, 2009
Glenn Beck debating marijuana legalization.
You probably know that Glenn Beck is insane as a shit-house rat. But maybe you don't know that Glenn used to do a lot of drugs. I don't know if he "chased the dragon", but he did do cocaine, pot, and was a huge drunk.
Anyways, here's a little vid of Glenn debating Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project. I don't know what the fuck Glenn was/is on, but he should cut it out. It's making him act like a weirdo. I also like that Glenn can't come up with any arguments against ending marijuana prohibition, but he's still against it anyways. Why the harping of "they shouldn't do it juts to raise money!" Did it ever occur to Glenn that maybe it's not just the money, but actually because of all the reasons why Kampia mentioned?
nothing after the jump
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That asshole clerk might have once been a CEO.
Saw this on the Consumerist and thought it a rather interesting read. Next time you're at a gas station and the cashier's being a huge dick with an inflated sense of self-importance, it may be because they actually were important once.Meet John Eller. Five years ago, he was a Sprint executive earning $150,000 for managing 7,000 employees at 13 call centers. Today, he's a grocery store baker making $10 an hour. The Times tells us he's not the only former executive now working for minimum wage.
nterviews with more than two dozen laid-off professionals across the country, including architects, former sales managers and executives who have taken on lower-paying, stop-gap jobs to help make ends meet, found that they were working for places like U.P.S., a Verizon Wireless call center and a liquor store. For many of the workers, the psychological adjustment was just as difficult as the financial one, with their sense of identity and self-worth upended.
"It has been like peeling back the layers of a bad onion," said Ame Arlt, 53, who recently accepted a position as a customer-service representative at an online insurance-leads referral service in Franklin, Tenn., after 20 years of working in executive jobs. "With every layer you peel back, you discover something else about yourself. You have to make an adjustment."
Some people had exhausted their jobless benefits, or were ineligible; others said it was impossible for them to live on their unemployment checks alone, or said it was a matter of pride, or sanity, that drove them to find a job, any job.
In just one illustration of the demand for low-wage work, a spokesman for U.P.S. said the company saw the number of applicants this last holiday season for jobs sorting and delivering packages almost triple to 1.4 million from the 500,000 it normally receives.
It's nothing new, but it shows just how far anyone can fall. Something to keep in mind next time you're talking to a customer service representative.
"It has been the hardest thing in my life," said Arlt. "It has been harder than my divorce from my husband. It has really been even worse than the death of my mother."
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Netflix to offer streaming-only subscription plan.
While I like the idea, I wonder about how feasible it is. America is woefully low-tech for such goals. We don't have a solid fiber-optics network to provide such massive bandwidth that so many entrepreneurs want to use for business models. Streaming TV sounds nice, but it's going to take a huge toll on ISPs. And don't plan on doing any online gaming or browsing while downloading these movies. It will most likely take 30 minutes to an hour plus to download a movie, and that's using up all of your bandwidth. Also, there is only a very small percentage of Netflix's movies that even available for streaming. The good news is, this plan may help to boost the volume of available streaming movies. Netflix Chief Financial Officer Barry McCarthy said on Wednesday it plans to offer its online streaming service on a stand-alone basis.
"We're likely to do that in the foreseeable future," McCarthy said at the Jefferies 5th annual Internet and Media conference in New York.
Netflix customers currently pay a fixed monthly subscription fee for access to the company's popular by-mail DVD service, with about 100,000 titles, as well as its online streaming service, with more than 12,000 titles available for viewing.
Netflix recently said it had hit 10 million subscribers, and said last month its stronger-than-expected quarterly results were propelled by growth in its Web video streaming service.
The Watch Instantly streaming service was first available only on personal computers, but is now offered through various devices, including the Roku set-top boxes, Microsoft Corp's Xbox, and LG Electronics Inc products.
McCarthy stressed the company still remains focused on providing a bundled offering, but said he understands that some viewers will find a stand-alone streaming service to be compelling, particularly as more compatible devices become prevalent.
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Saturday, February 21, 2009
Gabe Newell's DICE keynote address.
Ah Gabe Newell. Smart man. I'm not a 100% fan of Valve, I never really liked Half Life all that much and didn't really care that much for Half Life 2 either. I do like Steam, though. It's a great service, definitely the best Digital Distribution Service (DDS) out there, and it's wonderful feature list just keeps expanding. (a web browser while playing games? oh hell yeah!) I also highly applaud Valve's long-term patching and free DLC support for their games like Team Fortress 2.
Back to the topic on hand, Gabe Newell was scheduled to give a keynote address at this year's Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (DICE) conference in Las Vegas. The address was entitled, "Entertainment as a Service" and dealt with a lot of great elements regarding piracy, which has been a very big issue with the widespread availability of high-speed internet access.
Keep in mind this was done by G4 as a moment-by-moment posting, so that's why it may seem kind of odd and unprofessional.Gabe beileves the old way of entertainment: Indirect customer relationships, product orientation. The new way of entertainment now: Direct customer relationships, service orientation. Valve aims to touch its customers in some way every three weeks, not every three years when a new game is shipped.
Through this perspective, Gabe and Valve have observed the following:
Gabe doesn't believe that pirates are really seeking to get things for free. They are people that spend thousands on their PC's and Internet service. He believes that pirates are beating companies on service. He cites TV shows not available in certain parts of the world. Pirates have TV shows up on the Web minutes after they have aired.
DRM decreases service value for customers. It also makes pirated copies of games look more appealing. Anecdotal evidence appears to suggest that DRM is increasing and not decreasing piracy.
As far as privacy goes, Gabe believes that people are willing to give up system and personal information if they feel it's being used to get a better service. Steam's hardware survey is an example of this. Rather than spying on users for nefarious reasons, Gabe believes things like its hardware survey helps with better sales of products and service. As long as companies are transparent, he feels that customers will accept this.
As far as the shrinking distance between Valve and its customers, Valve didn't find any service in existence so it made its own: Steam.
Steam stats time:
There are competitors, but they are all trying to do the same thing. These include services like Games for Windows Live, Direct2Drive, iPhone App Store, Stardock Impulse. Gabe was very modest , not mentioning that Steam is wildly more successful than any of the other services. But that's why he's giving the keynote. No need to brag.
From a customer's perspective, they want things like portability of content and files, anti-cheating, auto-updating & version control, new games, old games, indie games, 24/7 availability, and community tools. Yep, Steam has all of those. I still think the groups need an upgrade, but they are definitely functional enough to get the job done.
From a business perspective, developers and publishers want piracy protection, keeping customers current with the latest version, direct communication to customers for marketing and promotion, instant sales and promotional performance data, and being able to take advantage of new business models like DLC, subscriptions, and micro-transactions.
With Team Fortress 2, Valve shipped the game as a service and not a product. Valve uses "updates" to create more value for its customers. Updates can be bug fixes, new achievements, maps, and unlocks. There have been 63 updates to Team Fortress 2 since its release. This is also why the PC version is so much better than the Xbox 360 version.
Gabe now speaks about how important Web content creators and blog writers are for the future of games. It brings a tear to my eye! They'll be able to help market products with authority and knowledge.
Gabe brings up an excellent point that successful entertainment companies will realize that fans of properties like the property, not the specific product. They are Harry Potter fans, not just fans of the books. The team that's making the TF2 character videos (which are awesome!) are going to be working on comics.
He's now going showing the Sniper short film. Yay, I get to laugh all over again!
"It works because the people that built that [video] are the same people that built the game."
Valve has been using its existing customers to gain new customers. "There's no way to go into Circuit City to pick on the dead" and get a free weekend. Ouch, Gabe. Ouch.
Valve has seen a great turnaround rate on guest passes. Friends invite their friends to play a game they already own. Game invites that also walk a gamer through a purchase process are also effective.
Time to look at the sales of Team Fortress 2 to see the impact of the updates on revenue. Holy s#!%. The sales spike by huge amounts everytime there's a sale or major update. Steam sales went up 106% after a free update. Player minutes went up by 105%. Gifting has thrown a 71% sales increase. Surprisingly, sales from retail stores also went up by 28%. Finally, it saw 75% increase in new users. Knock knock. Who's there? Steam. Steam who? Steam is so successful it hurts.
Price changes in the retail world don't allow for much freedom. Steam and other services offer flexability. In fact, users apparently respond to pricing discounts within five minutes.
Valve was afraid that too many price changes would "confuse and anger" customers. It isn't the case.
Last weekend, Valve decided to do an experiment with Left 4 Dead. Last weekend's sale resulted in a 3000% increase over relatively flat numbers. It sold more last weekend than when it launched the game. WOW. That is unheard of in this industry. Valve beat its launch sales. Also, it snagged a 1600% increase in new customers to Steam over the baseline.
Worried retailers, fear not. The weekend sale didn't canabalize sales from retail. In fact, they remained constant. Well, constant isn't a 3000% increase, but it's still pretty good, right?
Looking at a third-party game, it saw increases of 36,000% with a weekend sale. Oh. Em. Gee. Okay, Gabe is starting to convince me that PC at retail is going to die very soon.
Oh, more data. I'm such a data nerd. Here's some data!
During the Holiday sales:
At 75% off, they are making 15% more money than they were at full price.
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Friday, February 20, 2009
We're in the shit now. Beer no longer recession-proof.
People thought the video game industry was recession-proof. Well, they were wrong as shit about that one. Game studios have been closing down left and right and larger developers and publishers have been trimming jobs in the tunes of hundreds.
According to FiveThirtyEight.com, which gained national prominence for being incredibly accurate in its guess of the 2008 Presidential Election (actually being the most accurate to a nearly uncanny degree), beer sales are declining. Beyond just being very politically savvy, FiveThirtyEight.com obviously has good taste. As they ponder some of the reason's for the decline, they make note and mention of both ThreeFloyd's Alpha King and of famed Maryland brewery, Dogfish Head. And not just mention, but hotlinks as well. Huzzah! While I prefer ThreeFloyd's Robert The Bruce scotch ale, Alpha King is a damn good beer for any hop-lover.Beer, it seems, is no longer what's for dinner.
The chart that follows details the quarterly change in alcohol purchased for home consumption, adjusted for inflation and dating all the way back to 1959. We can compare this against the quarterly change in real GDP:
As you can see, there has generally not been much of a relationship between alcohol purchases and changes in GDP -- the correlation is essentially zero. Nor have alcohol purchases historically been any kind of lagging or leading indicator.
But something was very, very different in the fourth quarter of 2008. Sales of alcohol for off-premises consumption were down by 9.3 percent from the previous quarter, according to the Commerce Department. This is absolutely unprecedented: the largest previous drop had been just 3.7 percent, between the third and fourth quarters of 1991.
Beer accounts for almost all of the decrease, with revenues off by almost 14 percent. Wine and spirits were much more stable, with sales volumes declining by 1.6 percent and 0.9 percent respectively.
Now, there are several plausible explanations for this. Alcohol sales -- but particularly beer -- had been on something of a hot streak prior to the 4Q, so perhaps there was some reversion to the mean. Perhaps people are substituting Michelob and Coors for more expensive microbrews like Alpha King and Dogfish Head. (This is unpatriotic, by the way, since all the macrobrews are now owned by foreign-based multinational conglomerates. Stimulate your country -- and your tastebuds!).
Perhaps retailers are discounting their prices, or brewers are passing along cost savings to their consumers (there had been a hops shortage for much of 2007-08). All of these are probably factors to some extent or another.
Nevertheless, it's absolutely startling to see a major consumer staple experience a sales decline like this.
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FiveThiryEight also notes that both gambling and jewelry/watches are down too, but I couldn't care less about that. I don't wear jewelry nor watches, as the societal norm of wearing a watch on your left wrist feels awkward against my nerve-deadened scar (which basically feels like permanent local anaesthesia), and Virginia doesn't have gambling. And, no, the lotto doesn't count. I mean good, fun gambling, like blackjack and poker.
NY noping to stymie rise of DIY medical treatment.
Think you could set your own broken bone? That's what some of the millions of uninsured people in America end up doing when they need medical care.
I can personally attest to as to why you should not do this, but obviously some people have to resort to this kind of thing when they can't afford the hospital bills or don't have insurance. And the numbers of those people is most lively increasing in these hardened economic times. At least, it certainly is getting talked about more often.
They borrow leftover prescription drugs from friends, attempt to self-diagnose ailments online, stretch their diabetes and asthma medicines for as long as possible and set their own broken bones. When emergencies strike, they rarely can afford the bills that follow.
“My first reaction was to start laughing — I just kept saying, ‘No way, no way,’ ” Alanna Boyd, a 28-year-old receptionist, recalled of the $17,398 — including $13 for the use of a television — that she was charged after spending 46 hours in October at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan with diverticulitis, a digestive illness. “I could have gone to a major university for a year. Instead, I went to the hospital for two days.”
In the parlance of the health care industry, Ms. Boyd, whose case remains unresolved, is among the “young invincibles” — people in their 20s who shun insurance either because their age makes them feel invulnerable or because expensive policies are out of reach. Young adults are the nation’s largest group of uninsured — there were 13.2 million of them nationally in 2007, or 29 percent, according to the latest figures from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group in New York.
Gov. David A. Paterson of New York has proposed allowing parents to claim these young adults as dependents for insurance purposes up to age 29, as more than two dozen other states have done in the past decade. Community Catalyst, a Boston-based health care consumer advocacy group, released a report this month urging states to ease eligibility requirements to allow adult children access to their parents’ coverage.
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The consumerist has a bit of good advice for those seeking insurance.
The good news is that by joining a group like Freelancer's Union you can get access to affordable health care, provided your industry meets the eligibility requirements. It's certainly better than the alternative, putting a $17,000 hospital bill on credit cards, or tying a split with one hand while turning the pages of a battlefield medic manual with the other.
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Thursday, February 19, 2009
Sub Pop article on CNN Money? Yep. Sub Pop's still going strong.
I was pretty shocked to see an article about Sub Pop on CNN. Let alone a business article about the indie label. It is a pretty interesting read, especially where they talk about how Nirvana is what has essentially kept the label afloat, and not just because of sales from Bleach.By any reasonable standard, Sub Pop should no longer be in business.
The iconic label, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2008, made its name nearly two decades ago with such classic albums as Nirvana's Bleach and Mudhoney's Superfuzz Bigmuff, but its brand of off-kilter, rib cagerattling independent rock eventually fell out of vogue.
Yet despite self-destructive impulses and changing trends in the music scene, Sub Pop survives. The company declines to disclose revenues but says 2008 was a good year, with a surge in digital sales (which now account for 37% of its business) and strong releases from both the Seattle band Fleet Foxes and the HBO-connected Flight of the Conchords.
In 1988, Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt quit their day jobs (Poneman at Kinko's, Pavitt at Muzak) and joined forces to parlay Pavitt's underground music compilations into a real record company. Thanks to local bands like Mudhoney and Nirvana, Sub Pop had an auspicious launch. Within two years, annual sales volume grew from a few hundred records to tens of thousands.
But as Megan Jasper, a Sub Pop receptionist at the time, recalls, "The problem was that you didn't have businesspeople working there. It was all music lovers. And people who love music aren't necessarily great at running a business."
Mudhoney singer Mark Arm adds, "We were all just making stuff up on the spot."
The label nearly tanked, but it survived with some unexpected help from Cobain and Co. When Nirvana left for big-league Geffen Records in 1991, Sub Pop was awarded points, or a percentage of sales, on the group's Geffen albums, resulting in millions of dollars in new revenue. Sales of Bleach, Nirvana's only Sub Pop album, skyrocketed; to date the company has moved 1.7 million CDs, a massive number for any indie release. In 1995, at the height of the grunge era, the Warner Music Group (WMG) paid $20 million for a 49% stake in Sub Pop.
Now playing in the big leagues, Poneman overspent on recording budgets and videos, squandering Sub Pop's good fortune. Early this decade, however, business began to improve. Sub Pop released buzz-worthy debut albums by The Shins and The Postal Service, while Poneman built a leaner, meaner organization.
"We try to make our money go as far as it possibly can," says Jasper, who returned to Sub Pop in 1998 and is now executive vice president. There are 27 employees, down from as many as 60 in past years, and the label makes a profit of about $5 a CD.
"It sounds obvious," Poneman reflects, "but it took some tricky navigation to get us back to our original mission: putting out great records by great artists. We felt like we'd become music impresarios, when in fact we were just dirtbags from Seattle."
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Drunk man gets shit-ton of money. Jurors are fucking morons.
I don't... Honestly... I can't... This is... FUCK!
This is why trial by jury is fucking stupid. A trial by your "peers" who are made up of fucking complete morons is absolute bullshit. Sure, trial by a jury of your peers sounds great, but it's not. It is so horrendously flawed that the entire concept is beyond just bullshit and falls into the dumb beyond fucking belief category. Proof?A Brooklyn man who was drunk when he fell into the path of a subway train and lost part of his leg has been awarded $2.3 million by a jury.
Dustin Dibble has admitted that he was so drunk he doesn't even remember the incident at the Union Square subway station in April 2006.
But Dibble's lawyer argued in court that the motorman had time to stop the train when he saw the 25-year-old lying on the tracks 180 feet away — and the jury agreed, assigning most of the blame to New York City Transit.
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Obviously, none of these fucking retards understands how a train works. HINT: It's a big fucking heavy piece of equipment that takes a lot of time to slow down, let alone stop.
Fuck do I hate the shit out of society.
Monday, February 16, 2009
You're fucking FIRED, dumbass!
Oh, Donald Trump. You love to talk a lot of shit, act tough, and pretend like you're some super savvy business prodigy, but in reality you're an idiotic hack who has repeatedly lost billions. Remember when you tried to trademark the phrase, "you're fired"? Yeah, that was funny because it fell flat on its face. And now, Trump, you're going bankrupt. Again. For the third time. You are FIRED, you bloviating fucktard! Try and trademark that.Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc, Donald Trump's casino group, is expected to file Tuesday for bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The company's board was scheduled to meet late Monday night to decide whether to authorize the filing, the newspaper reported in its online edition. Otherwise, the casino operator would be forced into bankruptcy involuntarily by creditors, the newspaper said.
Such a filing would mark the third appearance in bankruptcy court for Trump Entertainment, which most recently emerged from bankruptcy proceedings in 2005, the newspaper said.
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Oh, and your casinos fucking suck balls.
Begala takes the piss out of stimulus detractors.
There's been much bally-hooing by the GOP over the recent stimulus package put forth by Obama. The GOP apparently just plans to sit there, thumbs firmly affixed up their asses, and shout, "no, no, no, no, no..." until the economy slides down the shitter some more. Then they'll pop right up and proclaim, in a chorus, "see! I told ya so!"
Seesm that the recent grandstanding has really hit a nerve with Paul Begala, and he squarely takes aim at South Carolina Governor, Mark Sanford.Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina took umbrage at my writing that his approach to the economic crisis is to do nothing. I'll deal with his "ideas" in a moment, but first let me make a modest proposal:
If Republican politicians are so deeply opposed to President Obama's economic recovery plan, they should refuse to take the money. After all, if you think all that federal spending is damaging, there are easy ways to reduce it: Don't take federal money.
Gov. Sanford can lead the way. South Carolina should decline to accept any federal funds for transportation, education, health care, clean energy or any of the other ideas President Obama is advocating to fix the economy. And the rest of the GOP can follow suit.
Justice Louis Brandeis famously called states "laboratories of democracy." So let's experiment. Gov. Sanford can be the guinea pig. His Palmetto State already gets $1.35 back from Washington for every dollar it pays in federal taxes, according to 2005 numbers, the latest calculated by the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit tax research group.
South Carolina is a ward of the federal government. It's been on welfare for years. If Gov. Sanford is so all-fired opposed to federal spending, let's start by cutting federal spending in South Carolina. Otherwise, he's got about as much credibility on fiscal conservatism as A-Rod has on steroids.
Under the Bush-Sanford economic theories, South Carolina's unemployment rate has reached 9.5 percent -- among the highest in the nation. But if Gov. Sanford wants to continue those policies, good luck to him.
Make no mistake about it, Republicans like Gov. Sanford want to go back to the bad old days of George W. Bush. In his CNN.com column, Gov. Sanford expends 605 words attacking President Obama's plan to turn the country around after eight years of Bush-Republican-Sanford economics.
That is his right, but attacking President Obama's plan is not itself an alternative plan. Nor is dredging up hoary old gripes about the New Deal. Nor, indeed, is deriding neighborhood electric vehicles -- which create jobs, save money and reduce pollution -- as "streamlined golf carts." But that is what Gov. Sanford offers us. iReport.com: Share your thoughts on the stimulus plan
Then Gov. Sanford turns to his ideas (keep in mind he was responding to my charge that he favors doing nothing). He devotes precisely one half of one sentence to his plan to save the world economy; 24 words that will create millions of jobs, restore liquidity to capital markets, protect investors and consumers, regenerate stagnant demand and restore the capitalist system. Here they are:
"... cutting the payroll tax, opening foreign markets through an expansion of our trade agreements, and reducing our corporate tax, which is among the highest worldwide."
Wow. As we say in the South, I've got the vapors. So cutting taxes and cutting trade deals will get us out of this mess? That's all we need to do?
We don't need to extend unemployment insurance, or update health information technology, or move to renewable energy or repair roads or rebuild bridges or modernize the power grid or prevent states and cities from laying off teachers and cops or any of the other myriad proposals in President Obama's plan?
To be sure, President Obama's plan includes tax cuts -- mostly for middle-class families. But cutting taxes on corporate profits is of little utility when there are no corporate profits to tax. And precisely with whom would Gov. Sanford cut these miraculous trade deals? In case he hasn't been watching CNN, the entire world economy is in the tank.
If cutting taxes for the rich and for big corporations and promoting foreign trade alone could energize the economy, we wouldn't be in this mess. But maybe Gov. Sanford is right. Let's keep our federal money -- give it to states where the governors will actually put it to good use. We'll let Gov. Sanford try his plan, we'll try President Obama's plan.
Something tells me Gov. Sanford won't take that gamble. Because for all his rhetoric about hating federal spending, he can't wait to get his hands on our money.
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Krugman: USA hs had zero wealth creation in the 21st century.
This isn't merely just Paul Krugman's opinion, although his Nobel Prize winning opinion does carry a lot of weight. This is evident from a Federal Reserve report showing savings amongst US citizens has plummeted drastically and that wealth creation has remained static for many or declined. This is not good news.By now everyone knows the sad tale of Bernard Madoff’s duped investors. They looked at their statements and thought they were rich. But then, one day, they discovered to their horror that their supposed wealth was a figment of someone else’s imagination.
Unfortunately, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what happened to America as a whole in the first decade of the 21st century.
Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.
At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much faster than personal income. Why should we have expected our net worth to go up?
Yet until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. And if the belief of many Americans that they could count on capital gains forever sounds naïve, it’s worth remembering just how many influential voices — notably in right-leaning publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and National Review — promoted that belief, and ridiculed those who worried about low savings and high levels of debt.
Then reality struck, and it turned out that the worriers had been right all along. The surge in asset values had been an illusion — but the surge in debt had been all too real.
So now we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, I think, than most people realize even now. And I’m not just talking about the dwindling band of forecasters who still insist that the economy will snap back any day now.
For this is a broad-based mess. Everyone talks about the problems of the banks, which are indeed in even worse shape than the rest of the system. But the banks aren’t the only players with too much debt and too few assets; the same description applies to the private sector as a whole.
And as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, the things people and companies do when they realize they have too much debt tend to be self-defeating when everyone tries to do them at the same time. Attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump.
Are policy makers ready to do what it takes to break this vicious circle? In principle, yes. Government officials understand the issue: we need to “contain what is a very damaging and potentially deflationary spiral,” says Lawrence Summers, a top Obama economic adviser.
In practice, however, the policies currently on offer don’t look adequate to the challenge. The fiscal stimulus plan, while it will certainly help, probably won’t do more than mitigate the economic side effects of debt deflation. And the much-awaited announcement of the bank rescue plan left everyone confused rather than reassured.
There’s hope that the bank rescue will eventually turn into something stronger. It has been interesting to watch the idea of temporary bank nationalization move from the fringe to mainstream acceptance, with even Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham conceding that it may be necessary. But even if we eventually do what’s needed on the bank front, that will solve only part of the problem.
If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn’t just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government’s debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to G.D.P. was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom.
Since nothing like that is on the table, or seems likely to get on the table any time soon, it will take years for families and firms to work off the debt they ran up so blithely. The odds are that the legacy of our time of illusion — our decade at Bernie’s — will be a long, painful slump.
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Sunday, February 15, 2009
Yet another reason why not to shop at GameStop.
As someone who primarily plays their vidja games on the PC, I don't have much use for places like GameStop. Their used games are overpriced, and I don't even own a console that's newer than the Playstation 1. I much rather prefer to buy my used NES and Genesis carts from ebay or from places like JJ Games (great service, excellent prices. okay, done with the plug).
Still, that doesn't mean that I don't care about how shitty GameStop is as a company, let alone a video game retailer. Asides from extremely poor trade-in value where they give you $10 for new games, like Killzone 2, and then sell that game for $40, they are notorious for demanding employees constantly push for pre-order sales and Game Informer subscriptions. There is a lot of debate as to whether there is actual commission-like pressure on these employees that is then tabulated in "employee reviews" that determine how many hours they get or whether they are let go.
One thing that is not in dispute is that they use fucked up Maestro debit cards to pay their employees who do not have direct-deposit. What's so bad about this? Read on.Remember our post on student loan debit cards? The cards are pitched as a great convenience, or less expensive to distribute than paper checks, or more secure, when in reality they're germy with hidden fees that slowly nickel and dime your balance. Turns out, GameStop uses a similar system to pay its employees.
An anonymous GameStop employee writes,It's a Comdata card (with fees) or direct deposit, but they really encourage you to use the Comdata cards. [See rebuttal to this in the comment below.]
They load your paycheck onto it, every two weeks (pretty standard), and you're supposed to have one free transaction after each payroll deposit.
Gamestop is one employer who uses this service with little/no reason to. They are the world's largest specialty videogames retailer, and they do not have the "logistics" issues that other industries (Trucking, in particular) have that even possibly warrants the use of this horrible little card.
They claim it is because many of their employees are younger, and do not have bank accounts. That's the only reasoning I've heard from them, after months of (somewhat muted, I needed my job, however stingy the hours were and however minimum wage it may have been) complaining and questioning.
I would love to see some evidence that any other company of Gamestop's size/market share uses this system...
This obviously isn't directly a consumer issue, although if you work there and read the Consumerist, you can see why we'd suggest you opt for direct deposit and save yourself a ton of hidden fees, or pull out all the cash using your single free withdrawal. In a more general sense, however, we think it demonstrates GameStop's hostile attitude toward its own workforce. Forget that nonsensical "our employees don't have bank accounts" excuse; the only valid reason we can think of for a company to use Comdata is to save money on payroll fees, by passing the cost on to its own employees under the ruse of a cash card being more "convenient." It's yet another reason why we don't like to shop at GameStop anymore.
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I first saw this story over at Kotaku.com, another Gawker blogging site:GameStop employees can't get paper checks. True, most of the civilized world is on direct deposit by now. But for GameStoppers who aren't, the only alternative is a cash card that nickel-and-dimes them.
Consumerist talked about this in the past week. GameStop, as well as many retailers in the same market, offer direct deposit and these "Maestro" cards, which are inconvenient to use and which deduct fees if you use it more than once in a month.
According to a GameStop employee who contacted Consumerist, the drawbacks are legion. Checking one's balance can only be done over the phone. Literature that comes with the card encourages using it for everyday purchases, but is vague on what kind of transaction fee that incurs (from 25 cents to a dollar). ATMs universally consider the card out of network and pile on their own fees. You can't get cash back on top of a purchase like you can with a debit card. And the only way to get money out of the card and into your account, without doing an ATM withdrawal (remember, ATMs don't dispense coins or usually anything less than a $20 bill) is to do so at the bank level, which often incurs its own set of fees.
GameStop's justification for this is that many of its employees are teenagers and do not have bank accounts. That's a cop-out. Legal age to work in most states is 15, and while I don't have stats in front of me, I can scarcely imagine that the majority of kids so responsible as to be working a part-time job wouldn't open bank accounts to deposit their funds.
There is some dispute as to whether managers at the store level encourage employees to take the cards over direct deposit; the company line seems to clearly encourage direct deposit.
But either way, it's total bullshit that a business of GameStop's size doesn't lay out the cash necessary to run a proper payroll operation to pay employees with a paper check if it's needed, not some ripoff card that charges fees for doing absolutely nothing. I'm sure some white paper or business study out there applauded the beancounter who thought up this anti-worker "best practice," which seems to have been adopted by many large-scale retailers because of what it shaves off the overhead.
This is just another way business in America reminds its workers that they don't create or provide anything of value. They just cost money. Fuck this team spirit, team member garbage you hear in your interview or new hire orientation. And forget larger causes like health care or retirement savings, when business will chisel and cut corners on even the basic dignities of employment - like how you are paid. Until that costs too much. Then you're fired. That's the country we've built.
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I couldn't agree more with Kotaku's weekend editor, Owen Good. This practice is immensely deplorable. Here, in Virgina, local legislators have been taking a hard stance against the types of predatory practices used by payday lenders. This is way worse than that. Yes, you can avoid the whole hassle of these cards by using direct deposit, however, many former and current GameStop employees have commented that it took anywhere from a month to 4 or more to set up their direct-deposit. That means, that for at least 2 pay periods, these employees are forced to use these cards which are loaded down with hidden and excessive fees. Besides that, one should not have to choose between setting up a bank account or getting fucked over by your employer. One should never even have the option of getting fucked over by their employer!
While many may take the "whatta ya gonna do?" approach of apathy, with arms shrugged high into the air, I've decided to take the better route. I have printed a copy of the Consumerist article, along with a printed letter, and will be promptly snail-mailing it to the distinguished gentleman from Virginia, Sen. Jim Webb, Monday morning. I have also emailed a copy of the Consumerist article to Sen Webb. I highly suggest you do the same for your own local legislators and federal representatives. Paying your employees in this manner should be illegal. You should never have to face the option of being fucked over and having your wages unfairly garnished by overhead fees. I don't know if this is illegal, but if it's not illegal, hopefully, it will be soon enough.
Beware! What you post on Facebook. It doesn't belong to you anymore.
I don't use Facebook, hell I barely use MySapce. I just don't care enough about the whole "cyber social networking" thing enough. I don't have a brand or anything that I want to try to sell or promote. Even this blog is purely for me, and I don't make any money in any shape or fashion, hence why there's no advertisements. I do, however, have a few works of mine in my MySpace picture gallery and news of Facebook's updated ToS (Terms of Use) makes me wonder if perhaps I should consider removing that content.Facebook's terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.
Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
That language is the same as in the old TOS, but there was an important couple of lines at the end of that section that have been removed:You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
Furthermore, the "Termination" section near the end of the TOs states:The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.
Make sure you never upload anything you don't feel comfortable giving away forever, because it's Facebook's now.
Oh, you also
agree to arbitration, naturally. Have fun with that.
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What does this mean? Let's say I upload some really snazzy graphics that I've done that are completely my own IP. Facebook can take those images and use them in an advertisement. Or they can use them in a layout scheme, or they can use it for... well, anything really. And do I get any payment or even acknowledgment for my works being used? No. No, I don't. To take it further, let's say you're a band. You have some tunes on Facebook to promote yourself. Facebook can use your music in a commercial and is not required to give you anything.
Facebook's ToS has, apparently, always been like this. However, the kicker is, the new ToS makes it so that even if you delete your content, FAcebook owns it. And they own it forever.
Pay to imprison: Judges paid millions to send kids to privately run juvie.
I'm not a fan of privatized prisons. There's a lot of reasons why, and I'm not going to get into them. This article, however, shocked me on several fronts. Not only because I didn't know that juvenile detention centers were also being privatized (I should have presumed as much, I guess), but because this is one reason as to why I had never thought, nor heard of, to despise private prisons for.Two Pennsylvania judges were sued in federal court this past week for allegedly taking $2.6 million in kickbacks from private juvenile detention facilities. In exchange, they sentenced hundreds of youths to the centers over the past 5 years. One of the judges, Mark Ciavarella, sent 1 out of 4 defendants to the centers, compared to a statewide rate of 1 in 10.
Judge Michael Conahan is accused of securing the contracts from PA Child Care's former owner, Robert Powell, while Judge Ciavarella did the dirty work of keeping the private facilities well-stocked with new wards. With Judge Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said.
They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.
Prosecutors say the judges tried to conceal the kickbacks as payments to a company they control in Florida.
Both men pleaded guilty to fraud on Thursday, and if the plea is accepted by the court, they'll spend 87 months in prison, be forced to resign from the bench and the bar, and lose their pension benefits.
Separately, plaintiffs in the federal suits are also suing the former and current owners of PA Child Care, as well as the owner of the construction company that built the detention centers. The feds, on the other hand, have said they're not targeting PA child Care in their corruption probe, which has been under new ownership since last summer.
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Saturday, November 29, 2008
Capitalism at its finest.
I'm sure you've already seen this. It's pretty fucked up.
Three violent deaths in two stores marred the opening of the Christmas shopping season Friday.
In the first, a temporary Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in a rush of thousands of early morning shoppers as he and other employees attempted to unlock the doors of a Long Island, New York, store at 5 a.m., police said.
In the second, unrelated incident, two men were shot dead in a Toys "R" Us in Palm Desert, California, after they argued in the store, police said.
The Wal-Mart worker, whom authorities did not identify, was 34 and lived in Queens, said Nassau County police Detective Lt. Michael Fleming.
"This was utter chaos as these men tried to open the door this morning," Fleming said.
Video showed as many as a dozen people knocked to the floor in the stampede of people trying to get into the Wal-Mart store, Fleming said.
The employee was "stepped on by hundreds of people" as other workers attempted to fight their way through the crowd, Fleming said.
"Several minutes" passed before others were able to clear space around the man and attempt to render aid. Police arrived, and "as they were giving first aid, those police officers were also jostled and pushed," he said.
"Shoppers ... were on a full-out run into the store," he said.
The crowd had begun forming outside the store by 9 p.m. Thursday, Fleming said. By 5 a.m. Friday, when the doors were unlocked, there were 2,000 or so shoppers, many of whom "surged forward," breaking the doors, he said.
The man was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Others in the crowd sustained minor injuries such as sprained ankles, Fleming said.
A 28-year-old pregnant woman was taken to a hospital, but "the baby is going to be OK," Fleming said. She was to be released later in the day, he said.
The California shootings occurred about 11:30 a.m. (2:30 p.m. ET), authorities said.
By the time police arrived, two men were dead from gunshot wounds, Riverside County sheriff's Sgt. Dennis Gutierrez said. He said authorities are not seeking any other suspects.
Gutierrez said that the men did not appear to be store employees and that the dispute appeared unrelated to shopping.
"There was a confrontation inside of the store. But over a toy? I don't think that is accurate," he said.
Two handguns were found near the men's bodies, Gutierrez said.
In a written statement, Toys "R" Us spokeswoman Kathleen Waugh said the shooting appeared unrelated to the heavy shopping day.
"Our understanding is that this act seems to have been the result of a personal dispute between the individuals involved," she said.
She said company officials were "outraged" by the shooting and were working with authorities to find out what happened.
Gutierrez said no one else in the store was injured. Gutierrez said no one else in the store was injured. The store remained closed Friday afternoon but was expected to open as usual Saturday.
He said authorities would not release the men's names until their families have been notified.
Daniel Watson said he was at home with his children when his wife called from the Toys "R" Us store, where she and her mother were shopping.
"All I could hear was gunshots in the back," he said. "She said, 'They're in here shooting.' I told her to run and hide, stay down and hide."
He said his wife did just that, ducking under a clothes rack until the threat was over. Watson said neither woman was hurt.
Asked about the possibility of criminal charges in the Wal-Mart death, Fleming said he would not rule it out but noted that charges would be "very difficult," as it would be "almost impossible" to identify people in the crowd from the video, and those in the front of the crowd were pushed by those behind them.
Hundreds of people may have lined up in an orderly fashion but got caught up in the rush, he said.
Wal-Mart spokesman Kelly Cheeseman issued a statement saying, "We are saddened to report that a gentleman who was working for a temporary agency on our behalf died at the store and a few other customers were injured. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families at this difficult time."
The company is investigating the incident, the statement said.
Officers patrolling the shopping center overnight had had concerns about the size of the crowd, Fleming said, and had tried to get those in line better organized. Wal-Mart security officers were also present overnight, but he said he did not know how many.
"I don't know what it's worth to Wal-Mart or to any of these stores that run these sales events," Fleming said, "but it has become common knowledge that large crowds do gather on the Friday after Thanksgiving in response to these sales and in an effort to do their holiday shopping at the cheapest prices.
"I think it is incumbent upon the commercial establishments to recognize that this has the potential to occur at any store. Today, it happened to be Wal-Mart. It could have been any other store where hundreds and hundreds of people gather."
Asked whether the security had been adequate, Fleming said, "In light of the outcome, in hindsight, the answer is obviously no. ... This crowd was out of control."
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more...
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
It's good to be AIG.
So, what happened after the US government bailed out AIG in the tune of over $80 billion? After securing 79.9% of AIG's equity in exchange for saving the company from certain collapse, AIG executives felt they deserved a reprieve from the stress of being bailed out. What better place to go than a spa?Days after it got a federal bailout, American International Group Inc. spent $440,000 on a posh California retreat for its executives, complete with spa treatments, banquets and golf outings, according to lawmakers investigating the company's meltdown.
AIG sent its executives to the coastal St. Regis resort south of Los Angeles, California, even as the company tapped into an $85 billion loan from the government it needed to stave off bankruptcy.
The resort tab included $23,380 worth of spa treatments for AIG employees, according to invoices the resort turned over to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The retreat didn't include anyone from the financial products division that nearly drove AIG under, but lawmakers still were enraged over thousands of dollars spent on outing for executives of AIG's main U.S. life insurance subsidiary.
"Average Americans are suffering economically. They're losing their jobs, their homes and their health insurance," the committee's chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, scolded the company during a lengthy opening statement at a hearing Tuesday.
"Yet less than one week after the taxpayers rescued AIG, company executives could be found wining and dining at one of the most exclusive resorts in the nation."
Former AIG CEO Robert Willumstad, who lost his job a day after the Federal Reserve put up the $85 billion on Sept. 16, said he was not familiar with the conference and would not have gone along with it.
"It seems very inappropriate," Willumstad said in response to questioning from Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland.
"Those executives should be fired," Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama said at a debate with Sen. John McCain on Tuesday, referring to the retreat participants. Obama also said AIG should give the Treasury $440,000 to cover the costs of the retreat.
But Eric Dinallo, superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department, said he could see the value of such a retreat under the circumstances.
"Having been at large global companies and knowing what condition AIG was in ... the absolute worst thing that could have happened" would have been for employees and underwriters in its life insurance subsidiary to flee the company.
"I do agree there is some profligate spending there, but the concept of bringing all the major employees together ... to ensure that the $85 billion could be as greatly as possible paid back would have been not a crazy corporate decision," Dinallo told the House committee.
The hearing disclosed that AIG executives hid the full range of its risky financial products from auditors as losses mounted, according to documents released by the committee, which is examining the chain of events that forced the government to bail out the conglomerate.
The panel sharply criticized AIG's former top executives, who cast blame on each other for the company's financial woes.
"You have cost my constituents and the taxpayers of this country $85 billion and run into the ground one of the most respected insurance companies in the history of our country," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York. "You were just gambling billions, possibly trillions of dollars."
AIG, crippled by huge losses linked to mortgage defaults, was forced last month to accept the $85 billion government loan that gives the U.S. the right to an 80 percent stake in the company.
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