southsider2k5

QUOTE (bmags @ Mar 17, 2009 -> 11:55 PM) You are defending these bonuses on a bogus legal precedent. Maybe SS2K5. But let me tell you how outrageous it sounds to me, (after the labor unions of the car companies you demanded renegotiate your contracts) that a company like AIG hands out bonuses by contracts in spite of the fact that the company and its contracts would not exist without the federal government. You want to talk about a lack of patriotism. The thought of spitting in the face of our citizenry who donated their money to protect themselves from the consequences of the IDIOTS who took 30% profit over logic that it could all could fail and all those connected could fail, and have US bail them out and then STILL maintain profit because of their contracts only relevant because of our money is dispicable. And earmarks I'm not against it's just politics of politically minded people hoping to gain some points in the polls. It's not that big of a deal, I benefit from it, you do too. It may not be the role of the fed. gov't but I don't give a f***. Some things need funding that people don't realize. It's easy to throw out funny names and snark and act above everything, but Alaska and Lousiana, you are disproportionately gaining from these projects you hold your noses at. So without parsing of words. f*** YOU YOU f***ING HYPOCRITES I don't like the bonuses, anymore than I like the labor contracts or earmarks. I just think it is funny that people are willing to rush to the defense of something that is costing them a trillion dollars, or even nine billion dollar, but are all up in arms about $165 million. Also, we didn't "donate" a damned thing. The general populace didn't have a choice. It was our elected officials that decided it for us. I believe in most of these situations, public opinion has been decided to let all of these groups go at it on their own, just like the individuals in the general public have to.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 17, 2009 -> 06:56 PM) At least one of them realizes he's running a comedy show. One of them is a fraud who says he runs a comedy show, but gets to push his political beliefs without accountability.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Mar 17, 2009 -> 02:52 PM) One of Burnham's Yeah, that was mentioned in the news clip above. I interviewed with IB a couple of years back, and got to see the insides of it. There is a beautiful courtyard/atrium in the middle, and all of the innerwindows look in on it. It also has a stairwell that goes through it.

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Mar 17, 2009 -> 05:36 PM) Glenn Beck is the tv host right wing version of the New York Times I was going to go with John Stewart, but potato, potAto.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 17, 2009 -> 12:24 PM) Time for another T party. Anywho, there's a bit of reason that can be applied to focusing on these bonuses, just as there's a bit of reason about why earmarks get a particular focus...in both cases, as currently structured they're an invitation to a much larger corruption problem. In Congress, the ability of Congressmen to earmark funds directly to companies in exchange for "gifts" has now brought down what, 3, 4 Congressmen over the past couple years? Stevens in the Senate, Murtha's going down, Cunningham went down for that, the whole Abramoff clan, etc. In business, the bonus system is set up to provide these guys maximum rewards for short-term performance. These guys get richest if they make the largest possible bets on the market. If their bets succeed, they become ridiculously wealthy. If their bets fail though, especially if they fail really, really big, they lose nothing and still are making a fairly large amount. The only one who loses in that case is the taxpayer. The compensation structure is a key factor in driving Wall Street to ignore its long term risks at the expense of short term gains during positive market movements. Both cases suggest substantial need for reform. The big difference is that earmark corruption is still pretty far from destroying civilization as we know it. Wall Street corruption is not. And mark to market accounting is at the front of the line for destroying Wall Street.

Let me put it this way. When my dad had neck surgery in the mid 80's they let my less than 10 year old brother help pull them out. It was painless.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 17, 2009 -> 12:06 PM) Frankly, with AIG, I don't think they had a clue what they were doing, they just realized that they needed to do something. Let's review the schedule here: Friday, September 12th: Markets close with Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch teetering on the edge. Over the weekend, Lehman and Merrill have their books opened to the world to try to find a buyer, similar to what happened to Bear a few months beforehand. The Fed is able to convince BofA to take on Merrill's debacle, but Lehman is in worse shape and no one will take them on without a guarantee from the Fed similar to what they gave when Bear went down. Sunday night, Paulson says no. Monday, September 15th: Markets re-open. Merrill is in BofA's hands, but Lehman files bankruptcy for the largest in corporate history. DJIA drops 504 points. AIG is hammered. Its stock drops 60% in 1 day. Tuesday September 16th: The calamity of the Credit Default swap contracts AIG had put out covering Lehman bros has become clear to the Fed and to Paulson. They've realized their mistake. At 10:00 in the morning, the Fed rushes in with an $85 billion loan and takes an 80% stake in AIG to prevent the complete collapse of the financial system. A few days later the $700 billion bailout plan was announced. Just think through that. People had an inkling the week before that if Lehman went down, AIG would have problems, but the Fed and the Treasury had no idea how deep of a hole there was. Otherwise they never, ever would have let Lehman fall, they would have given it the same deal they gave Bear. Less than 36 hours pass from Paulson making the final call that they weren't going to bail out Lehman Brothers to the huge money infusion in to AIG. 1 business day. They went from basically knowing nothing about AIG's financial products to realizing the company was going down hard in less than 24 hours. I doubt they had a clue about 95% of AIG's business when they nationalized it. There just wasn't anywhere close to enough time. They just knew there was a hole on the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars in AIG's books after Lehman went down, and that if they didn't do something then Barclay's, Goldman Sachs (conveniently enough Paulson's former employer), Societe Generale of France, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citigroup, BofA, and a dozen others would have holes ranging from $5 to $10 billion suddenly appearing in their balance sheets as all of Lehman's bonds that they thought they had insured would go worthless...and God only knows how big those holes would be if all of AIG's debt went worthless as well. Which has nothing to do with the rest of the bailouts that they have handed out since. They disclosed all of their expenses up front.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 17, 2009 -> 12:07 PM) Back up the bus. I've seen you two agree with me that earmarks are a major problem, even though they are only 2% or whatever of the porkulus bill (tip of cap to Kap). And yet, you are saying we should ignore this $160M because of some other amount spent elsewhere being $9B? I call foul. Which is it? IMO, they are both bogus and should be dealt with. Personally I don't like the bonuses, but I don't buy the outrage for a second. I think Rick Santelli said it best this morning. He talked about the M's, the B's and the T's. We are more worried about the M's than we are the B's. We are also worried more about the B's than the T's. M's are millions, B's are billions, and T's are trillions.

That is a beautiful building. Interactive Brokers HQ is in there, along with a few other companies.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Mar 17, 2009 -> 11:12 AM) http://www.mercurynews.com/economic-crisis...?nclick_check=1 HMMMMMMMMM! OUTRAGE! This has been known for over a year... and OH THE OUTRAGE! And, why is it the porkulus bill, Dodd threw in the executive compensation clause, while exempting bonuses? We are being duped, people. These people all knew this was coming. And now, they are screaming to make it an example. I was just about to get on here and say a couple of things, and this was actually one of them. There is zero chance that a government bails out a multibillion dollar aid package without knowing every single detail of their business, especially 9 figures worth of an expense. This outrage timing is pretty interesting, because this is what I have gleened over the last two weeks. Wasting $9 billion in taxpayer money=part of doing business. Wasting $165 or 450 million, outrageous and we aren't going to take it. Seriously? Nine billion dollars get tacked on to our budget for earmarks, and we get told that despite the flaws in the bill, Obama isn't going to stand in its way, when he actually has the legal authority to try to stop it. Even though he doesn't like it, he will fix it in the future. $165 million gets paid out in contractual obligations that we knew about, and Larry Summers goes on CBNC to tell the nation that they are going to get "creative" to figure out a way to get that money back. This is a joke, and everyone who is all upset about this is just going the lemming parade right off of the cliff. Realize that the government just did the exact same thing to us on a magnitude of about a thousand times, and politicians were falling all over themselves to make excuses for it. Please forgive me if this seems like a cute little campaign to distract people away from the negatives towards the Congress and the President's job performance so far.

How was Colon's velocity? How about the tilt on his off-speed stuff?

QUOTE (BaseballNick @ Mar 16, 2009 -> 03:10 PM) Guaranteed bonuses? I need this guy negotiating my contracts. Sounds like a very unusual and dangerous business practice. At these levels of corporations, it is pretty standard practice.

QUOTE (BaseballNick @ Mar 16, 2009 -> 02:51 PM) The company I work for laid off 7% of our workforce, eliminated bonuses, and cut salary by a considerable amount. AIG would be in far worse shape than my company if not for government intervention. The fact that they were loaned billions of dollars from the govt. and chose to reward their top talent with loads of cash in the worst bear market in 70 years (due in large part to their own poor decisions) warrants their choices being called into question. They can do what they wish with their profits, but now that AIG is essentially a worthless pawn of the govt., I am free to question what they are doing with my money (especially since there's a lot less of it now). I understand that companies need to keep top talent around, and they do so by awarding bonuses, but how strong is your talent when you've bankrupted a "former" global, AAA rated conglomerate? The short answer is: not strong enough to justify $1.2B in bonuses paid with govt. money. The big difference is that these were pre-existing contractual agreements.

QUOTE (FlaSoxxJim @ Mar 16, 2009 -> 02:23 PM) Ouch. What happened and when did I miss it? Appendix? C-Section?? testicle implants.

QUOTE (BaseballNick @ Mar 16, 2009 -> 02:07 PM) Market is up and news came out that AIG has paid out $1.2B in bonuses. AIG pisses me off. They should have just called it a stimulus plan. Then it would have been unpatriotic to question it.

Let there be no doubt why Rodriguez chose Houston. Catchers 59 Lou Palmisano 55 Humberto Quintero 46 J.R. Towles

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Mar 16, 2009 -> 12:58 PM) The government will fail in this attempted overhaul, they will instead just subsidize the industry with enormous sums of taxpayer money, or newly printed money. Either way, they will have little effect on cost control. They've tried this many times before and it's always failed, and it will fail again. In this case the failure will be adding a ginormous amount of people to an already overburdened system. It will also cause people to not be interested in going into medicine because the reward isn't going to outweight the payout anymore.

QUOTE (Texsox @ Mar 16, 2009 -> 12:24 PM) I'm surprised you would think that health care would be less lucrative after the government takes it over. For those providing the services, there is no doubt in my mind. The whole big thing here is what health care costs. The government's whole intention is to go in and make it cheaper for people to get health services.

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Mar 15, 2009 -> 12:22 PM) go into anything that has something to do with health care. you'll be a frickin millionaire. Not after the government takes it over and slashed the entire cost structure out of it.

It seems a little odd to me that a guy who fled his country to make tons of money would be in support of Hugo Chavez, but it gives me yet another reason to hate this guy. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...V3SvaAD96UKOL80

If both Contreras and Colon are ready to go with the Sox out of the gate, I really hope whomever is the 6th starter goes to AAA to stay stretched out and to be ready for a problem with one of the starting 5. It doesn't make sense to me to keep your most qualified set of substitute starters in the pen, which would most likely force the Sox to go to something like their 7th or 8th best starting pitcher. If we felt that Contreras and Colon were going to give us 30 starts or so, it would be a different story. But when you feel that a DL trip is a basic certianty, you have to plan accordingly. Two of Marquez, Poreda, and Richard should be at AAA Charlotte as starters.

My question would be if the name does change, who would have to pay for all of the new signage?

One of those random emails that you get, I don't know if it is true or not, but I lol'd.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/08/o...x_n_132886.html

QUOTE (jasonxctf @ Mar 13, 2009 -> 09:24 PM) State income tax is an income tax in the United States that is levied by each individual state. Seven states choose to impose no income tax. These states are Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. Additionally, New Hampshire and Tennessee limit their state income taxes to dividends and interest income only. As of 2007, the highest rate of state income tax is that of California, with a maximum rate of 10.3%. Of those states which impose an income tax, the lowest maximum rate is that of Illinois, which levies a flat tax of 3%. Most states (34) have a progressive income tax, where the rate rises as an income gets larger. So, stop your b****ing. As gets thrown in my face when I mention the nearly 50% of people who don't pay income taxes in the US, there are a lot more than just the income taxes that go on here. For example the property taxes in IL, are hugely expensive, as are many of their fees that go back to the state.