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Island Morning with Mitch Cormier
Play Segments 508 segments
CBC Radio's Island Morning is a news and current affairs information source for Prince Edward Island. Host Mitch Cormier talks about the issues that matter to the people of P.E.I.
More on Island Morning
Visit us for articles and more from Island Morning with Mitch Cormier
Jan. 30, 2023: Full service passport office coming to P.E.I. next year
Jan. 30, 2023: Canada Games shaping up
Jan. 27, 2023: Concern over shoreline policy change
Jan. 27, 2023: Cutting back on the booze
Jan. 25, 2023: Elizabeth May on P.E.I.
UPEI Student Housing Shortage
The housing crisis on the Island is impacting students at The University of Prince Edward Island....UPEI has more than 400 people on its housing wait list. CBC has more.
Aired: Aug. 12, 2022
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How do Custom titles get assigned?
Discussion in 'The Lounge' started by Angus, Dec 15, 2005.
Do the mods assign them? does the Head monkey do this?
You just ask for one. That's all there is to it.
PM the mods, and they'll hook ya up.
Yup, just ask for one in a thread.
EDIT: I'm not being mean to Mike. He's my jew.
Start a thread about being towed.
well one way to get one is to ride with a moderater and then have to stop, sit down and puke mid-ride. That's how I got mine at least.
I've noticed a huge reduction in custom titles since RM changed hands.
By lightweight, do you mean dumbass???
yes, that and the fact that he was supposedly drunk from 3 martinis.
that'll shirley get you one.
You know that your title is "I rule", right? That doesn't mean you rule, it means you think you rule.
You're splitting hairs. If you think you rule, you rule. Other peoples opinions are bunk.
i think i'm the only person round here who picked my own by just pm'ing and asking politely.
Yeah, Probably. From what I hear if you PM or post about a custom title, they just give you one that makes fun of you.
Or, in my case, they just make fun of you because you are always breaking somthing!
Using this word, kid or not, is just plain stupid. It's not the 80's, unless you are skaredsh*thead.
I said something stupid, it's also around that time someone screws with my profile again.


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All across America elected officials urge Congress to take on a clean energy stimulus plan
By Maegan Brejnik The lack of normalcy has resulted in COVID-19 taking a toll on the economy. To help recover from this deepening recession evidence points to the necessity for Congress to adopt a national stimulus plan aimed at building back the economy on the basis of clean energy. There is precedent. President Barack Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act […]
By Maegan Brejnik
The lack of normalcy has resulted in COVID-19 taking a toll on the economy. To help recover from this deepening recession evidence points to the necessity for Congress to adopt a national stimulus plan aimed at building back the economy on the basis of clean energy. There is precedent. President Barack Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 proved to be the stimulus plan needed to end the Great Recession. The ARRA package included $90 billion in clean energy investments and tax incentives.
A coalition of elected officials from across America, the Elected Officials to Protect America, has been urging Congress to enact a clean energy stimulus that will create millions of jobs while combating climate change and reclaiming our position as global leader. EOPA's recommendation is to use the ARRA as a starting point, in order to ensure America runs on 100 percent clean energy. Many of the policy recommendations proposed in the recent Congressional Report, Solving the Climate Crisis, that build a clean energy economy which values workers, righting the wrongs of environmental justice, should also be used.
"At this moment we have an historic opportunity. Together we can rebuild, revitalize, and restructure our economy in a manner that puts people before profit—that rewards work rather than wealth—an inclusive, sustainable economy worthy of our ideals," said Oregon State Representative Major Paul L. Evans USAF (Ret.), EOPA Co-Chair. "We must start with a clean energy stimulus package that provides jobs for those hardest hit economically by COVID-19."
As millions of people continue to face the effects of COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown, we have been provided the rare opportunity to see the direct impact of our presence and our absence on the environment. Our social isolation has resulted in an improvement in air quality, cleaner beaches, and a decrease in environmental noise level.
Los Angeles, a city known for its nightlife and smog, saw its longest streak of clear skies in decades. Coronavirus has demonstrated the clear effects of our daily actions. In order to maintain these healthier living conditions, these daily changes must be regarded as a template for future actions.
Los Angeles before and after the COVID019 lockdown
"It's hard to convey what I felt seeing a crystal clear LA skyline. It put things into perspective and made me more determined to continue to work to keep it that way," said Former Culver City Mayor, and current council member Meghan Sahli-Wells, Elected Officials to Protect California Co-chair. "Recently, our region was ranked #1 for the worst air quality in the nation for ozone pollution by the American Lung Association. We need Congress to provide a clean energy stimulus that will transition us completely to 100 percent clean, renewable energy."
A recent study found that daily global carbon dioxide emissions have fallen by about 17 percent as a result of the lockdowns, with 43 percent of that decrease coming from reduced transportation from cars, buses, and trucks. Air pollution is a large source of respiratory illnesses, responsible for nearly 40 percent of lower respiratory tract infections. Coronavirus, a respiratory illness, is made more deadly by our carbon dioxide emissions. According to the Environmental Protection Agency the transportation sector is responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.
Scientifically we know it is imperative that we encourage the growth of clean energy. Extreme weather conditions worldwide point to climate change caused by human activity as the culprit. The question remains: how do we strike a better balance between our lives and the environment? The health of the planet directly affects our own. Unless immediate action is taken, the post-coronavirus world will leave us in an even worse position to address our climate emergency.
Oregon State Rep.Major Evans USAF (Ret.), said we must take advantage of this opportunity and rebuild our lives and the economy by transitioning to 100 percent clean renewable energy with a new nationwide plan of action, in the form of a stimulus package
"Now is the moment for all of us in the public arena to work in common cause," said Oregon State Rep. Major Evans USAF (Ret.). "American history shows we have been the catalyst for positive globe change before when we led the world out of the Great Depression. The United States must take advantage of this opportunity and act on a comprehensive clean energy stimulus plan."
On June 3, 2020, Germany released their green stimulus package. This $145 billion plan aims to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and provide the support that clean energy sectors need to grow. It is their intent that, in benefiting environmentally friendly sectors, their economy will begin to bounce back post pandemic.
It's not just Germany. The European Union is preparing to announce a similar plan: a green recovery package to curb pollution and boost the economy. This is widely acknowledged to be the next necessary step in coronavirus recovery. The United States -could follow the lead set by Europe and act on a plan to boost our renewable energy sectors.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, voiced strong support for a post coronavirus stimulus plan, saying, "A global stimulus package of unprecedented proportions will … be needed to restore sustainable growth and safeguard peoples livelihoods." European countries, along with the United States, have the opportunity to lead by example to benefit the planet.
Clean energy has the potential to greatly serve the national and global economy in the near future. In 2018, renewable energy employment accounted for 4.2 percent of all jobs added nationally, and that same year the industry's employment grew 3.6 percent. Additionally, a 2010 study found that clean energy creates more jobs per unit energy than the coal and natural gas industries. With a stimulus, the field could continue to grow.
According to the World Meteorological Association, global temperatures have already increased 1.1oC above pre industrial levels. Without global moves towards a reliance on clean energy, the world is on track for devastating climate disruption. Coronavirus has provided an opportunity, but simply self isolating cannot solve this problem. COVID-19 is the beginning; more pandemics will follow if climate destruction is not addressed.
Our health care workers are already facing intense pressure, and as long as climate degradation continues unabated, the need of their services will only continue to rise. In June, 40 million health care workers signed an open letter to the G20 leaders urging them to implement a green recovery from COVID-19. This group, which makes up about half of the global medical workforce, placed a heavy emphasis on air pollution, which causes 7 million premature deaths around the world each year. We need to heed the warning of millions of medical professionals who stand with the implementation of a clean stimulus package.
What benefits the economy can also benefit the environment. With a stimulus plan focused on clean energy, more jobs will be created compared to allocating the same amount of funds to the fossil fuel industry. For every $1 million invested in renewable energy, roughly three times as many jobs are created than if the same money was invested in fossil fuels. This massive job creation more than makes up for the job losses that will come from divesting from fossil fuels.Furthermore, moving from fossil fuels to clean energy could boost global GDP by 2.5 percent by 2050, whereas climate damages will continue to cause economic losses.
"We can't miss this opportunity to build a more sustainable inclusive economy, which will be as resilient as it will be equitable," said New York Assistant Speaker Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, EOPA Council Member. "Congress must take action with a clean energy stimulus for the future of our nation, and the world. If the people of New York State could come together in common purpose to fight COVID-19 – Congress can surely unite for America."
The United States can make great change happen, if our Congressional leaders are brave enough to meet the challenge.
The mission of EOPA: To create a safe, prosperous, and healthy planet, we empower leadership from elected officials and civic leaders to protect our environment, and fight the climate crisis. As current and former elected officials who care deeply about protecting our planet and people from the dangers of climate change, EOPA educates through value-based storytelling, trains lawmakers, and connects elected officials to inspire strong environmental policy. Lawmakers who are veterans and elected officials lead our mission.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The wording almost makes it seem like they'll be continuing after the regular games end? Not entirely sure.
This is why I usually go to the drive through if I'm only getting the free fries. They have to give out the orders in order.
I don't think your philosophy of lowering product standards for promotional items is the way to go. It's important to maintain consistency, even during promos and freebie handouts. I bet if you're running a AYCE restaurant, you'd be reheating old food to save money. "Wot wot wot, customers pay $10 for AYCE and still expect something FRESH? Any food at all is a win for them!"
free mini blizzard when you download the DQ app!
Hrm... I think it's YMMV. The McD's I go to hand out the fries to me real quick, in one instance they called out my order number before I had even pulled the receipt out of the self-order kiosk despite there being 4 or 5 orders ahead of mine. For such a tiny order they get it out first, at least at the McD's I go to.
FFS I hate how everything has to be done with an app these days.
Looks like free fries again tomorrow!
So many fries! And its great to hear that it keeps going into the playoffs too!
Last ever fries offer ??
According to the McDonald's Canada Twitter feed the free fries will continue through playoffs.


Who & what are Japan's 'evaporating people' and where do they go?
AS A NEWLYWED in the 1980s, a Japanese martial arts master named Ichiro expected only good things.
He and his wife, Tomoko, lived among the cherry blossoms in Saitima, a prosperous city just outside of Tokyo. The couple had their first child, a boy named Tim. They owned their house, and took out a loan to open a dumpling restaurant.
Then the market crashed. Suddenly, Ichiro and Tomoko were deeply in debt. So they did what hundreds of thousands of Japanese have done in similar circumstances: They sold their house, packed up their family, and disappeared. For good.
Since the mid-1990s, it's estimated that at least 100,000 Japanese men and women vanish annually. They are the architects of their own disappearances, banishing themselves over indignities large and small: divorce, debt, job loss, failing an exam.
"The Vanished: The Evaporated People of Japan in Stories and Photographs" (Skyhorse) is the first known, in-depth reportage of this phenomenon. French journalist Léna Mauger learned of it in 2008, and spent the next five years reporting a story she and collaborator Stéphane Remael couldn't believe.
These lost souls, it turns out, live in lost cities of their own making.
The city of Sanya, as Mauger writes, isn't located on any map. Technically, it doesn't even exist. It's a slum within Tokyo, one whose name has been erased by authorities. What work can be found here is run by the yakuza — the Japanese mafia — or employers looking for cheap, off-the-books labour. The evaporated live in tiny, squalid hotel rooms, often without internet or private toilets. Talking in most hotels is forbidden after 6pm.
Here, Mauger met a man named Norihiro. Now 50, he disappeared himself 10 years ago. He'd been cheating on his wife, but his true disgrace was losing his job as an engineer.
Too ashamed to tell his family, Norihiro initially kept up appearances: he'd get up early each weekday, put on his suit and tie, grab his briefcase and kiss his wife goodbye. Then he'd drive to his former office building and spend the entire workday sitting in his car — not eating, not calling anyone.
Norihiro did this for one week. The fear that his true situation would be discovered was unbearable.
On what would have been his payday, Norihiro groomed himself immaculately, and got on his usual train line — in the other direction, right toward Sanya. He left no word, no note, and for all his family knows, he wandered into Suicide Forest and killed himself.
Today, he lives under an assumed name, in a windowless room he secures with a padlock. He drinks and smokes too much, and has resolved to live out the rest of his days practising this most masochistic form of penance.
Yuichi is a former construction worker who vanished in the mid-1990s. He'd been taking care of his sick mother, and the expenses involved — home health care, food, rent — bankrupted him.
What Yuichi did next may seem paradoxical, perverse even — but in Japanese culture, in which suicide is considered the most dignified way to erase the shame one has visited upon their family, it makes sense. He brought his mother to a cheap hotel, rented her a room, and left her there, never to return.
"Evaporations" have surged in Japan at key points: the aftermath of World War II, when national shame was at its apex, and in the aftermath of the financial crises of 1989 and 2008.
A shadow economy has emerged to service those who want never to be found — who want to make their disappearances look like abductions, their homes look like they've been robbed, no paper trail or financial transactions to track them down.
Hatori charged $3,400 per midnight move. His clientele was vast: from housewives who'd shopped their families into debt to women whose husbands had left them to university students who were sick of doing chores in their dorms.
He refused to give specifics to the authors, but he eventually quit; as a child, Hatori himself had disappeared with his parents from Kyoto, after they found themselves in debt. He believes that his former line of work was a kindness.
Whatever shame motivates a Japanese citizen to vanish, it's no less painful than the boomerang effect on their families — who, in turn, are so shamed by having a missing relative that they usually won't report it to the police.
Those families who do search turn to a private group called Support of Families of Missing People, which keeps all clients and details private. Its address is hard to find, and its headquarters consist of one small room with one desk and walls sooty with cigarette smoke.
The organisation is staffed with detectives — often with evaporations or suicides in their own family histories — who take on these cases pro bono. They average 300 cases a year, and their work is difficult: Unlike the United States, there is no national database for missing people in Japan. There are no documents or identifiers — such as our Social Security numbers — that can be used to track a person once they begin travelling within the country. It is against the law for police to access ATM transactions or financial records.
"Most of the investigations end part way through," says Sakae Furuuchi, a detective who serves as the group's director. He cites the prohibitive cost of hiring private detectives: $500 a day, up to $15,000 a month — impossible for those whose loved one has fled due to debt.
Another case, unresolved, involved the young mother of a disabled 8-year-old boy. On the day of her son's school musical, in which he was performing, the mother disappeared — despite promising the boy she'd be sitting in the front row.
Her seat remained empty. She was never seen again. Her husband and child agonise; the woman had never given any indication she was unhappy, in pain, or had done something she thought wrong.
In many ways, Japan is a culture of loss. According to a 2014 report by the World Health Organisation, Japan's suicide rate is 60 per cent higher than the global average. There are between 60 and 90 suicides per day. It's a centuries-old concept dating back to the Samurai, who committed seppuku — suicide by ritual disembowelment — and one as recent as the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II.
Japanese culture also emphasises uniformity, the importance of the group over the individual. "You must hit the nail that stands out" is a Japanese maxim, and for those who can't, or won't, fit into society, adhere to its strict cultural norms and near-religious devotion to work, to vanish is to find freedom of a sort.
For younger Japanese, those who want to live differently but don't want to completely cut ties with family and friends, there's a compromise: the life of the otakus, who live parallel lives as their favourite anime characters, disappearing from time to time into alternate realities where, in costume, they find themselves.
These sites were assembled to create a very user friendly experience.Full of useful information & is a continuous work in progress. Thank you for visiting & pass it on to others for their enjoyment also.
Warren Buffett donated about $US2.2 billion ($2.9 billion) of stock in his annual gift to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, betting that risk takers at the group will make breakthroughs in global health and US education even as they acknowledge that some efforts will be unsuccessful.
The Sage of Omaha and Berkshire Hathaway's CEO isn't likely to want to leave his investing powerhouse.
Buffett, 85, contributed 15 million Class B shares of his Berkshire Hathaway stock to the foundation Wednesday, according to a regulatory filing Thursday. He made a pledge in 2006 to hand over a total that equates to 500 million shares, and each year he gives 5 per cent of the remaining total.
Through last year, he donated more than $US17 billion of stock to the foundation. The annual sums have often climbed because of gains in the share price.
While he is known for looking for a margin of safety with Berkshire's investments and often faults himself when his stock wagers sour, Buffett is more tolerant of bets going bad in philanthropy. "If you succeed in everything you're doing in charity, you're attempting things that are too easy," the Berkshire chairman and chief executive officer said in 2011.
The Gates Foundation has donated more than $US36 billion, including for projects that expand access to immunisations in developing countries and provide financial services to poor communities. Bill Gates, the 60-year-old co-founder of Microsoft Corp., has acknowledged it's been more difficult to make advances improving US education than in boosting mortality rates for children.
Does a $100,000 bonus for a job well done beat a pat on the back?
US oil and gas company Hilcorp's 1350 employees think so.
Every single employee – no matter how junior – received a $US100,000 ($137,000) bonus this year as part of a company-wide incentive program called "Dream 2015" to double the company's size.
The bonus motivated everyone to do their absolute best, said Ms Thompson, who has worked with the company for 10 years.
She told Fox 26 nobody was going to give "any less than 100 per cent each day".
Hilcorp's payout has been hailed as the ultimate Christmas bonus by newspapers looking for good news stories, even though the bonus was paid in the US spring.
The reward came after the privately held company realised its goal of doubling its oilfield production rate, net oil and gas reserves and equity value over five years.
It's not the first time that the Houston-based company has given enormous bonuses.
When Hilcorp doubled its size in 2011 as part of an earlier program called "Double Drive", each employee was rewarded with a $US50,000 voucher to spend on a "dream" car or cash.
As with many privately held US companies, the billionaire owner Jeffery Hildebrand prefers to stay out of the news.
But the company has developed a reputation as one of the best places in the US to work. And not just because of the generous bonuses and incentives.
In Fortune magazine's annual list of great places to work, employees used words such as empowerment, freedom, responsibility and communication to describe the company.
Fortune said the company had a "we are all in this together" culture, which manifested itself in "open book management, rich bonuses averaging 33% of pay and outrageous rewards for meeting certain goals".
Many companies claim that their employees are their most valuable resource, but Hilcorp employees seemed to believed the claim.
The company's core values include: "Work Like You Own the Company", "When Hilcorp Wins, We All Win" and "Get Better Every Day".
The company's website says Hilcorp is a company where the employees have the autonomy to make decisions, a place where all its employees can develop and grow a career in a field they are passionate about.
"We are committed to unlocking energy for the betterment of our employees and our communities," it says.
"We are a place where the employees share in the success of the company. At Hilcorp, we work together as a team; we focus intensely on a common goal and dedicate ourselves to the long-term.
Police and tax investigators have raided the Sydney home of a man that members of the Australian bitcoin community say might be the mastermind behind the controversial cryptocurrency, just hours after reports emerged in the United States suggesting that he may be its secretive creator.
However, Fairfax Media has been told the raid at the property of Craig Steven Wright relates to an "individual taxation matter" involving Mr Wright, rather than his apparent role in creating the encrypted currency.
The alleged creator of Bitcoin, Australian Craig Steven Wright.
The Australian Federal Police attended Mr Wright's home in Gordon, on Sydney's north shore, on Wednesday afternoon to assist the Australian Taxation Office in carrying out a search.
In a report published on Wednesday morning, US tech publication Wired said it had uncovered enough evidence to suggest that bitcoin's mysterious founder, who operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, was actually 44-year-old Mr Wright.
Wired acknowledged that its report was based on "unverified leaked documents" that it admitted "could be faked in whole or in part".
Fairfax Media attempted to contact Mr Wright for comment but received no response. The Australian Federal Police referred matters to the ATO. The ATO declined to comment.
Mr Wright is listed by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission as a director of Hotwire and another company, Panopticrypt, which are both registered at a residential address on Sydney's North Shore. He has been a shareholder and director in a range of other enterprises, the ASIC database shows.
This Sydney property owned by Craig Steven Wright was searched by police on Wednesday.
He is also listed as chief executive on the website of a company called DeMorgan, which describes itself "a pre-IPO Australian listed company focused on alternative currency, next generation banking and reputational and educational products." Calls to this company went straight to voicemail.
At about 4.15pm, the real estate agent managing the Gordon home leased by Mr Wright entered the house after being told by a neighbour, who knew the owners, that it was being searched.
The AFP and tax investigators raid Craig Wright's home in Gordon.
Federal Police and the ATO officers were then later seen leaving the property, at 4.50pm. Asked why the federal police were at the house, they offered "no comment".
Neighbours, who didn't wish to named, said Mr Wright was an elusive man who had two children and a partner. He had an expensive taste in cars, they said, having seen him pull up to the house in a Toyota Land Cruiser, a Lexus, and a Jaguar.
Mr Wright, his partner, and children were not seen within the vicinity of the house.
Apart from owning a dog, which one neighbour described as "noisy", he also owned hens, which could be seen out the back of his house.
Another neighbour said Mr Wright apparently had three-phase, 450-volt power — normally used for industrial applications — installed at the home.
The same neighbour said he recently heard that Wright had packed up the house as he was apparently off to go live in London. None of the neighbours interviewed said that Wright had told them he was the creator of Bitcoin.
Chris Guzowski, founder of ABA Technologies and a regular on the Bitcoin conference circuit, said Wired had uncovered enough circumstantial evidence for Mr Wright to be a plausible candidate.
Andrew Sommer, a partner at Clayton Utz and who testified at last year's Senate Inquiry into digital currency, is reputedly Mr White's lawyer.
But Mr Sommer said he couldn't comment on any client when contacted by Fairfax.
Zhenya Tsvetnenko, founder of bitcoin remittancy company Digital BTC, has discussed business with Mr Wright previously and was struck by his understanding of Bitcoin and his long history with the protocol.
The Wired story was not the first time a media outlet has claimed to reveal the true identity of bitcoin's founder.
Last year, US magazine Newsweek said it had found the mysterious person behind the cryptocurrency t. However the man it named, Dorien Nakamoto, unconditionally denied Newsweek's claim, and subsequently sued the publication.
The Wired report cites archived blog posts from as far back as 2008, purportedly written by Mr Wright, which discuss aspects of the distributed ledger that is a key element of bitcoin, as well as leaked emails and a liquidation report by Australian corporate recovery firm McGrath Nicol involving one of Mr Wright's companies.
McGrath Nicol confirmed the veracity of the liquidation report, which states that the company, called Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence, was backed by $30 million in capital that was "injected via bitcoins".
Wired acknowledged that the trail of evidence leading to Mr Wright could be part of an elaborate hoax.
Asher Tan of CoinJar, Australia's largest bitcoin exchange, said he was skeptical of Wired's claim, pointing out the bitcoin community relies on mathematical proof.
Solid technical proof should be given more weight than speculation, he said.
"There are some methods of doing this," Mr Tan said. These would include "moving bitcoin attributed to Satoshi's personal stash or utilising his personal encryption key (PGP) to communicate.
The New York Times, which conducted an inconclusive investigation of its own into the matter, has described Mr Nakamoto's identity as "one of the great mysteries of the digital age".
But many in the bitcoin community believe that the identity of the person (or people) behind Nakamoto is irrelevant, since the virtual currency is an open source and community driven technology. It sure is a fun story though.
Do you know Satoshi Nakamoto? Email our reporters.
John Arnold and his wife Laura are targeting contrarian, underappreciated causes, things like research integrity, drug-sentencing reform, organ donations and broken pension systems, an especially radioactive issue.
When John Arnold was a trader, he had a serene – some would say bloodless – way of seeing the world. He wanted the truth, the cold, hard truth, and embraced the power of an idea no one else was seeing. Then he bet nearly everything he had on it.
In 2006, Arnold's hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors, took a huge contrarian position on natural gas prices and made a fortune. In 2008, it anticipated the commodities crash.
Three years ago, at the tender age of 38, married with three children and $US4 billion richer, Arnold shut his fund and decided to spend the rest of his professional life giving away his money as counterintuitively as he had earned it.
He had made millions at Enron and billions at Centaurus, zigging when others zagged. Now, that rare person who grows less popular the more he gives away, he is focusing on dilemmas dragging down the nation that no one else wants to confront.
Arnold and his wife, Laura, a former corporate attorney, are targeting contrarian, underappreciated causes, things like research integrity, drug-sentencing reform, organ donations and broken pension systems, an especially radioactive issue. This is partly, they say, because while a billion dollars sounds like a lot, it isn't when applied to a multitrillion-dollar conundrum.
Arnold is a private man who doesn't engage in a lot of pleasantries. He has grown a beard that disguises a trademark boyishness. He chooses his words deliberately and folds his hands together.
Pension reform appealed to Arnold the moment he first read about it. The problem is complex, seemingly unsolvable, and just about no one else was willing to get involved.
And Arnold, a moderate Democrat who believes a rich country like the US should provide a high safety net for its citizens, sees the stakes as being no smaller than the survival of the very governments that provide that net.
Pensions work like this: every year, employees and the government both pay into a fund, and when the employees retire the government uses that fund to pay them until they die. There are decades between the pay-in and the pay-out, so the government can invest the fund and make sure the money is there.
But problems have arisen. While employees' contributions are taken directly out of pay cheques, mayors and governors have routinely not paid their share into the system, arguing (often wrongly) that they will get a higher return than predicted. In addition, the market crash of 2008 wiped more than $US1 trillion off pension funds' assets.
A study of more than 150 state and local pensions found the total unfunded liability between $US1.1 trillion and $US3.1 trillion.
This is not a problem most philanthropists have had any interest in solving.
"Fixing" pensions means, almost by definition, cutting payments to people who need and were promised them, raising retirement ages, reducing cost of living adjustments, introducing defined contribution plans for new workers and increasing how much employees must put into their retirement. The Arnolds argue that despite the pain caused, without the changes both governments and pensioners have no future.
They don't recommend specific changes, only present states and municipalities with options. Through their advocacy organisation, they support candidates and ballot initiatives, sometimes providing the vast majority of the donations in places including Phoenix and San Jose. They include legal work to defend the changes from court challenge. The Arnolds supported the overhaul of the Rhode Island pension system led by state Treasurer Gina Raimondo who they later backed in her successful gubernatorial run.
Arnold, who grew used to being unpopular as an investor, says the pension work has been worth all the criticism. He acknowledges that policy is a squishier realm than the metrics-oriented world of financial markets. Failure is a frequent, even elemental, part of success. But he finds inspiration from the recent and sudden surge of gay rights, a once unpopular cause.
A German's View on Islam – worth reading.
A German's View on Islam – worth reading. This is one of the best explanations of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read. His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read. The author of this email is Dr. Emanuel Tanya, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist. A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates.. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.
Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand.
Extend yourself a bit and send this on. Let us hope that thousands world-wide read this, think about it, and send it on before it's too late, and we are silenced because we were silent!!
The Smorgon family, Australia's richest, have a hugely diverse range of investments across up to seven wings of the family. Property, equities, pastoral holdings, technology firms, biodiesel, tuna, retail and infant milk formula are among the many industries the family has investments in via several management firms. The Smorgon wealth traces back to 1927 when brothers Norman, Moses and Abram Smorgon emigrated from Russia and opened a butchery in Carlton, Melbourne. Norman's son Victor took over the company and diversified the business into a number of operations, including steel and paper manufacturing. The family started a divestment of Smorgon Consolidated Industries in 1995 and completed this process in 2007 with the sale of Smorgon Steel to OneSteel for $2.5 billion. The proceeds from these sales are spread among the extended family. Victor Smorgon died in 2009, aged 96.
The Liberman family investors span far and wide under patriarch Boris Liberman. The family has several wings with a diversified range of interests, including a growing array of stakes in emerging technology firms under Justin Liberman who is involved in the SquarePeg venture capital company and heads Jegen Investments. Josh Liberman chairs the large LJCB Investment Group, which has interests in petroleum distribution and energy production, property, banking and finance, equities, funds and venture capital. Small Giants, co-founded by Berry Liberman, has investments in many environmentally sustainable businesses, including property, wind farms, a hazelnut business in Bhutan and the Dumbo Feather magazine. The Liberman family rose to prominence under former patriarch Jack, who moved to Australia with brother Chaim after World War II. Jack Liberman died in 1997.
Leadership of BCG now resides with Andrew and Sam Buckeridge, sons of the late Len Buckeridge, and his step-son Julian Ambrose. Len Buckeridge was a powerful driving force behind BCG (which stands for Buckeridge Group of Companies) before his 2014 death. The company turns over more than $3 billion annually and dominates the Perth building and construction market. It has a hand in just about every facet in the building process, owning cement, roof, tiling, quarrying, insulation and window business, a construction arm and property management service. It also has a mining and civil engineering business and a transport and haulage fleet.
Besen family patriarch Marc Besen received due recognition for his philanthropic endeavours earlier this year when he was named as a Companion of the Order of Australia. The award was bestowed for services to the visual and performing arts. Besen's business interests are mostly in property with the third-share of Melbourne's High, though he reportedly bought shares in the Medibank Private float last year. Son Daniel Besen back developer Fridcorp, run by Young Rich Lister Paul Fridman, while daughter Carol Schwartz also has investments in property through the Qualitas group. Marc Besen and wife Eva also own the TarraWarra winery.
The wealth of Melbourne's Myer family traces back to the beginning of the retail department store chain that still bears their name. These days the family only has a small stake in the retailer, having diversified their investments throughout property and other ventures. The Myer Family Office is a long-established and respected investment and advisory firm that specialises in providing advice to families, individuals and institutions. It has a particular penchant for philanthropy, assisting foundations get established.
Multiplex heir Tim Roberts has had mixed results splashing out on assets. His AVWest aviation business took delivery of Australia's first Gulfstream G650 jet, which cost about $US65 million, in April. In July he sued the designers of his $30 million luxury yacht Anya, alleging a series of faults that rendered the boat unsuitable for commercial or private use. Roberts, his brother Andrew and sister Denby are children of the late Multiplex founder John Roberts, who died in 2006w after which the trio sold their remaining 26 per cent stake for about $1.2 billion. Andrew Roberts co-owns property funds management company CorVal Partners, which owns buildings in Canberra and Sydney.
The Barro family's wealth is derived from two big private and public assets. The Barro Group of concreting, quarrying and construction materials businesses is one of the biggest of its kind in Melbourne, while the family also has a 32 per cent stake in ASX-listed building materials firm Adelaide Brighton. Barro Group, now run by Raymond Barro, was founded by brothers David and Marcello Barro in the 1940s and members of both branches of the family remain involved in the business. Rhonda Barro, an executive director of the group, is also the president of Italian migrant welfare non-profit organisation CO.AS.IT.
Ken Talbot's charitable foundation is said to be receiving 30 per cent of the wealth left by Ken Talbot, who died in a plane accident in Africa in mid-2010. The remainder is being shared between his widow Amanda and his four children. His son Liam has developed a motorsport team, driving a Ferrari 458, and has his charitable foundation KM 4 Kids. Much of the Talbot family wealth stems from Macarthur Coal, founded by Ken Talbot. The family still has an extensive range of share investments in resources companies.
The Tieck family has made several moves in the property sector in the past year via their Gwynvill Group. Along with office group Investa, Gwynvill lodged a development application for a new landmark commercial tower in Sydney's Martin Place, with an end value of more than $750 million. Gwynvill has also emerged in a joint venture that owns and operates the Ocean Club Resort, a mobile home resort in Port Macquarie, NSW. The Tieck's family wealth was built by the late Norman Tieck, who founded the Franklins supermarket chain with business partner Harold Cornock. The duo sold Franklins to Hong Kong conglomerate Dairy Farm International in 1979.
The Saunders family owns the property development company Terrace Tower Group, formed with the fortune late family patriarch John Saunders made from co-founding Westfield with billionaire Frank Lowy. Saunders died in 1997, leaving behind a $500 million fortune now spread through a variety of property investments in Australia and the United States. Terrace Tower Group owns the Eastgardens shopping centre and Supa Centre Moore Park in Sydney, and office blocks in California and Oregon. Saunders' daughters Betty Saunders Klimenko and Monica Saunders Weinberg are joint deputy chairmen. Weinberg's husband, Richard, is the company's managing director and Klimenko's husband is non-executive director. Klimenko also owns the Erebus V8Supercars motor racing team.
The Paspaley family's investments range from what it is known best for, pearl production, to some lesser-known ventures. In more recent years the family has got involved in agricultural properties, a chain of resorts and a vineyard. The Paspaleys have also in recent years invested in a detention centre and hold extensive property assets throughout Darwin. The pearling company that bears the family name was founded by the late Greek migrant Nicholas Paspaley snr, whose family arrive in Australia after World War I. His son Nick Paspaley is the company's chairman. He joined with former billionaire Nathan Tinkler for a tilt at small explorer Orca Energy earlier this year.
The Darling family trace their Australian presence back to the 1840s, when they begun a wheat trading business after arriving in Scotland. A bigger success came from a move into mining, with the family being early investors in what is now BHP. A Darling family member had a BHP board seat until 1986. The family's investments are now managed by private firm Caledonia, which manages about $2 billion worth of global equities. The firm, run by Mark Nelson, has investments in several technology ventures, including US real estate listings business Zillow.
The Lewis family now own 100 per cent of Lewis Land Group after buying out minority shareholders, including former chief executive Robert Cleland. The group was founded in 1957 by Bernard Lewis, who died in 2004. Under new CEO Chris Calvert, Lewis Land is seeking new opportunities and developing the land around its Harbourtown shopping centre on the Gold Coast. The group's $700 million master planned Sovereign Hills development in Port Macquarie, NSW, is booming and Lewis Land has substantial land banks around the country. It has also developed Sovereign Islands, Harbour Keys and Ephraim Island on the Gold Coast and owns the Drinx Group of pubs and bottle shops.
Though most of its investments are now held in property, the Fairfax family is best known for their past involvement with the media industry. John Fairfax bought the Sydney Herald in 1841 and founded the predecessor to what is now Fairfax Media (publisher of BRW). The family have severed virtually all ties to the company, when John B Fairfax's investment vehicle Marinya Media sold its almost 10 per cent stake in the group. Tim Fairfax supports rural and regional communities in Queensland and the Northern Territory through his foundation. John B Fairfax has been waiting for approval for a possible sub-division of the sprawling family estate Elaine in Sydney's Point Piper, which has been on the market since 2013.
The Spooner family has every intention of holding onto its main asset, a huge 120-hectare property bought by Archie Spooner in the outer Melbourne suburb of Scoresby during World War II. The area already houses many commercial offices and industries facilities, with the family planning over 200,000 square metres of building space at its Caribbean Park development. The project comprises 40 buildings and a 80 acre lake, fresh produce market and cafes. Archie also established boat-builder International Marina, now managed by grandson Richard Spooner. Archie's son Rod Spooner is chief executive of the Caribbean Business Park.
A bastion of the Melbourne business establishment, the Baillieu family provides services to other wealthy individuals and families via its family office, Mutual Trust. The firm was formed in the 1930s to manage the Baillieu fortune, originally derived from the Melbourne land boom of the late 1800s. The family has had a diverse range of interests since that time, including extensive rural property holdings. Mutual Trust appears among the top 20 shareholders of several listed companies, including Seek, REA Group and Village Roadshow.
While the Belgiorno-Nettis family keep a relatively low profile, the company from which they derive most of their wealth has been unable to stay out of the spotlight this year. Transfield Services has been a target of a negative investor and activist campaign because of its contract to manage the federal government's refugee detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru. Transfield Services was founded by the late Franco Belgiorno-Nettis and Carlo Salteri in 1956 and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2001. The Belgiorno-Nettis family maintains a stake of about 12 per cent in the company and has a large property portfolio throughout NSW.
More than 90 per cent of shareholders in Coopers Brewery, the largest Australian-owned beer brewery, are direct descendents of Thomas Cooper. He started the company in 1862, manufacturing an all-natural beer in South Australia. Today, Coopers has about five per cent of the Australian beer market and remains the largest and last of its type after Foster's Group was taken over by SABMiller in 2011. Chief brewer and managing director Dr Tim Cooper practiced medicine before joining the family business in 1990. Coopers made a $28 million profit last year, slightly down from the year before. Its distribution arm Premium Beverages signed a deal to brew and distribute one of the leading United States craft Beers, Brooklyn Lager, this year.
The Burger family's City Freeholds property management, investment and development business doubled its net profit in the 2014 financial year to about $22 million. In the same period net assets for the business, which owns properties in and around the Sydney CBD, jumped about $20 million to $224 million. The family's late patriarch David Burger made his first fortune in the clothing manufacturing sector before venturing into the property game with his sister Rose and her husband Morris Rose. Burger died in 2007, leaving City Freeholds to his widow Diane, who is a company director, and their four children.
Brothers John, Russell and Graham Knowles established their ARCare residential aged care business in 1997, close to 30 years after building their first retirement village with Ian Ball in Frankston near Melbourne. In 2007, their initial company Australian Retirement Communities (ARC) was sold to Stockland for $329 million, leaving them with ARCare. It continues to expand, now holding aged care facilities in Queensland and Victoria.
The Baiada family's huge poultry farming operation suffered a bout of negative publicity in May when the ABC's Four Corners program alleged it was exploiting migrant workers at some of its processing sites. The allegations included underpayment and slave-like conditions. Baida Poultry turns over more than $1.3 billion annually and incorporates brands such as Steggles and Lilydale. The company was founded by the late Celestino Baiada in the 1950s after he immigrated to Australia from Malta. The Baiada family also owns the Celestino property group, which earlier this year launched The Gables, a $4 billion master-planned housing estate in Sydney's north-west. Celestino also has other property developments in the west of Sydney and holds more than 8000 land lots in growth areas such as Ipswich and Logan in Queensland's south-east.
The children of the late cattle king Peter Menegazzo have been embroiled in legal action regarding the family fortune. Peter Menegazzo's son Mark took Supreme Court action in Queensland against his three siblings claiming they 'deceived' him 8 years ago regarding their late father's assets. Mark Menegazzo got $64.7 million after tax as a quarter share, but claims he should have received another $40 million when he sold his share of the Stanbroke Group pastoral empire. The group, owned by the remaining siblings, is one of the world's largest private integrated cattle breeding, processing and distribution concerns and owns six Queensland properties spread across 1.6 million hectares.
The later Bill 'Tiger' Wyllie formed the family boutique investment Company The Wyllie Group in 1992 after spending decades making his fortune in Hong Kong as a company turn around expert. The Wyllie Group remains family owned with Bill's widow Rhonda and several of their children on the board. The group has a diverse range of investments, including commercial property, farming land, a horse racing bloodstock business, a sizeable small and mid cap share portfolio and several private equity holdings. Rhonda Wyllie is engaged to former Nine Entertainment Co executive Jeff Browne, who helped negotiate the network's record $925 million NRL broadcast rights deal this year.
The Kornhauser's family property assets are mainly found in Queensland and Victoria. The northern state is where the late Eddie Kornhauser made most of his fortune after migrating to Australia from Germany in the 1930s. He operated a fur trading business before moving into property. For decades, Kornhauser surfed the Gold Coast property boom, building apartment towers and other property projects.
The Farrell family has been caught in a verbal stoush with independent Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie regarding the family's offer to spend $100 million in the island state if it receives an extension to its poker machine monopoly that expires in 2023. Federal said its wants licence certainly and if granted it would improve its Wrest Point and Country Club casinos and build a new boutique hotel at Port Arthur. The family fortune was built by the late Greg Farrell senior, who opened Wrest Point as Australia's first legal casino in 1973. His five children now run Federal Group, which owns and manages a range of tourism and hotel assets around Tasmania, including The Henry Jones Art Hotel and Saffire.
The Ring family's slice of the $1.67 billion payday when the majority of the Swisse Wellness vitamins company was sold to Hong Kong listed Biostime in September has its origin in a trip to Switzerland by Kevin Ring in the 1960s. Ring studied natural medicine techniques and came back to Australia to establish an organic bakery. The business eventually became Swisse. The company's big breakthrough came in 1991 with the release of its flagship Swisse Women's Ultivite. A period of rapid expansion followed before a real boom in the past 12 months thanks to exporting to China. Ring has stepped away from the Swisse board after the sale, though his sons Edward and Charles remain in executive roles.
It has been a case of history repeating itself for the Scott family's K&S Corporation. The ASX-listed transport company, controlled by the Scott family, took a hit in February after the uncovering of a $7.1 million fraud against it. It came a decade after the company hit the headlines for a similar reason but to the tune of $22 million. Allan Scott built the family business from his base of Mount Gambier in regional South Australia before dying in 2008. The family is the largest shareholder in K&S and also has had extensive retail and property investments.
McDonald Holdings (MDH) is one of Australia's largest beef companies, owning a herd of 175,000 head of cattle spread across 11 stations over 2.26 million hectares in northern Australia. The family has an association with the land stretching back to 1827 and the first shipment of cattle to Tasmania. The current business stems from the late Jim McDonald aggregating several properties around Cloncurry, Queensland in the 1940s. The family is also the largest shareholder in the Super Butcher retail business, which sells meat across six outlets in south-east Queensland.
The Richards family have proven there is money in muck. Their JJ Richards & Sons is Australia's largest privately owned waste company, employing more than 2000 people around the country. It makes more than 2 million rubbish bin collections for 42 councils and local authorities each week and has a joint venture oil refinery business in Gladstone, Queensland. The late Joseph John Richards the waste management company in 1932.
The Laidlaw family made its fortune with the Hard Yakka brand of clothing and workwear. The business was founded by David Laidlaw in 1922 in the backyard of his parent's home in then working-class Collingwood in inner-city Melbourne. The family sold the business to the listed Pacific Brands in 2007 for $270 and have since made several safe invests in commercial property. Pacific Brands last year divested its workwear business, which included Hard Yakka, to Wesfarmers as part of a $180 million deal.
The Maloney family has a long track record in the pub game, stemming back to the late Cyril Maloney who passed away aged 93 in August 2013. A third-generation hotelier, Maloney's first job was at the Railway Hotel in Orange, NSW. His estate sold the Bondi Hotel to his son Kim Maloney for more than $43 million in October last year, keeping the family name synonymous with the hotel since Cyril Maloney bought it in the 1980s. The Maloney family assets are tied mainly to the Maloney Hotel Group, which owns seven venues in and around the Sydney CBD.
The Anderson family's wealth falls this year due to a drop in the share price of GWA Group, which supplies residential and commercial bathrooms, kitchen fixtures and fittings and doors and door systems. The company's brands include Caroma, Dorf, Gainsborough and API Locksmiths. GWA shares have fallen in the past 12 months and the company suffered a $27.6 million impairment charge after the sale of its struggling Glideral Garage Door business. GWA's managing director Peter Crowley delived his last results in the role, a post-tax loss of $16.2 million for 2015. Richard Thornton and Robert Anderson are the family members who remain on the GWA board.
The lower Australian dollar has been welcomed by the Casella family. Its Casella Family Brands winery business, established by Filippo and Maria Casella in rural NSW in 1965, exports about two-thirds of its product to the United States. From there Casella brands such as Yellow Tail are distributed to countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom. The business is now run by Filippo and Maria's sons John, Joe and Marcello. The group is focusing more on exporting to Asia and late last year acquired full ownership of Peter Lehmann Wines.
The Chan family's Banna Property Group manages more than 50,000 acres of retail property space, ranging from small strip retail shops to large neighbourhood shopping centres. Most of its investments are based in Sydney, including Cabramatta Plaza and property in the heart of Chinatown adjacent to the CBD. The family fortune was build by Bernard Chan, who started with a general store in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea. He migrated to Australia in 1967 and his wealth was inherited by his four sons. Banna is controlled by his grandson Brad Chan.
The Handbury family's wealth goes back to a 1994 deal during which Rupert Murdoch secured control of the then News Corporation by paying $600 million for the stakes held by his sisters, including the late Helen Handbury. The Handbury family now holds investments in a range of industries, including the ACE Radio network through Geoff Handbury and various property holdings held by his son Paddy. He sold the Moonah Links golf and residential estate on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula to Chinese-backed buyers earlier this year for about $18 million.
The Scheinberg family has been gradually selling down its property assets, including a leased landholding in the Sydney suburb of Chullora late last year that was offloaded for $15.75 million. The late Albert Scheinberg operated a leathergoods business with brother John Hammond after their migration from Hungary in 1937. A diversified range of investments followed, including clothing company Best and Lest, sold in 1998 for $100 million. Albert Scheinberg died in 2008 aged 96. The family owns private property investment company McDonald Industries and the Brahman cattle breeding operation Mogul Stud in Maclean, NSW.
Brian White is the third generation leader of the Ray White real estate business, founded in 1902 by the late Ray White. Brian White is joint chairman of the business alongside Paul White. They are part of the third generation of the business, with four of Ray White's great-grandsons also directors on the company's board. The Ray White business is one of Australia's largest real estate groups, working across all facets of the property sector including residential, commercial, rural and livestock, hotels and even marinas.
Melbourne's Rabinowicz family has kept a low profile since the 2011 sale of the Rabinov Property Trust to Growthpoint in 2011. The family fortune was built in the textile and hosiery industries by the late Ezriel 'Ziggy' Rabinowicz, who also went by the surname Rabinov. He sold out of the clothing sector in order to make a foray in the property sector. His daughter Roseanna Amarant controlled the property trust at the time of its sale.
Melbourne's Pellicano Group has been concentrating on the Queensland property sector in recent times, selling more than $33 million of industrial assets in the sunshine state in the first quarter of the year to reinvest in residential construction. The private company, owned and run by Nando, Michael, Antonio and Renato Pellicano, have 360 apartments across three projects under construction. The family traces its business success back to 1951, when Rocco Pellicano arrived in Australia from Italy to join his brother Nick to start the family business. Pellicano Group builds property across several assets around the country, including residential, business parks and aged care.
The Caratti family owns extensive rural landholdings across rural Western Australia and industry property in Perth. The family business has embarked on several residential property projects in recent years, some of which has sparked legal action involving family members and some business associaties. Allan Caratti and his brother John inherited the family earthmoving and property empire from their late father Mick Caratti, who died in 1992.
The Hutchison family own the long-established Queensland construction company Hutchinson Builders. Jack Hutchison, a British immigrant, established the business in 1912 and it has since passed through another three generations of owners. Today the company turns over more than $1.2 billion annually and made $25 million net profit in the 2015 financial year, up from $17 million the year before. Greg Hutchinson, a former executive director of the Queensland and NSW Master Builders Associations, is now in charge of a business that works across commercial, high-rise residential mining and industrial property and has established a presence in New Zealand.
The Cardaci family lost its patriach Frank Cardaci in 2014, close to six decades after his family left Sicily and settled in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Frank Cardaci became a chef at his uncle's restaurant before moving to Perth in 1959. He and his brother bought a bought a repossessed truck and then another, eventually establishing a trucking business. The family's CFC group now has interests in distribution, logistics, mining services, property and infrastructure. The group, run by Marc and Phillip Cardaci, is WA's largest privately-owned logistics provider.
For billionaire Manoj Bhargava (like many other people), the world is a place full of problems. Between poverty, pollution, food growth, and access to water, the list seems to be ever growing. That's why he's recently pledged to spearhead a group aimed at giving away all their billions to turning things around for mankind.
It seems like a promotional video, but the message behind it is so important.
Regardless of whether he's naive or not, there's no question his motives are pure. It's certainly something society — and the world — needs. Stereotypes and politics aside, there are many wealthy people that truly help the needy…and we hope the number of those people increases.


What an original concept, so effective Ana!! Love this one!! LF!!
Thank you so much, Danu.
Marsha, thank you so much, my friend.
You have already found happiness dear Ana :) I love this uniquely different piece of yours!!!
Florin, thank you so much for the feature in ORIGINALS FOR SALE group.
Eric, thank you so much for the feature in DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS group.
Zsuzsa, thank you so much for the feature.
Thank you so much, Dagmar.
Yes, Gun, you may..... :).... Thank you.


Texas Taxpayer Number assigned to MICHAEL T. HOLDINGS, LLC is 32014700937. Texas SOS File Number of this company is 0800321707. This company state of formation is Texas.
MICHAEL T. HOLDINGS, LLC mailing address is 2011 SILVER ST HOUSTON, TX 77007-2801. Registered office street address is 2011 SILVER STREET HOUSTON, TX 77007. You can find this business by geo coordinates: 29° 46' 33.1" N , 95° 22' 38.5" W.
MICHAEL T. HOLDINGS, LLC was incorporated on Thursday 25th March 2004, so this company age is fifteen years, one month and one day. Company right to transact business in texas is currently ACTIVE.
MICHAEL T. HOLDINGS, LLC agent is MICHAEL S TAPICK. Company has one officers: MICHAEL S TAPICK employed as member. Check more michael companies.


text:
O Escape é um SUV compacto da Ford. A versão europeia tem o mesmo nome do coupé esportivo que durou de 1969-1979, que alegam ser uma muito parecido com o Nissan Terrano II.

Esse modelo conta com uma versão híbrida equipada com transmissão continuamente variável (Câmbio CVT).

Galeria

Ver também

 Ford EcoSport
 Ford Edge
 Ford Explorer

Escape
Utilitários esportivos
Veículos híbridos elétricos
Veículos que utilizam transmissão continuamente variável

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Grab a few friends, come check out the oldest wine region in the western hemisphere and taste what all the fuss is about!
Wanna add a little hops to your wine tour? We've got beer fever and craft brews are just starting to take off. We can visit one brewery or a make a day of it!


Q: How does the Red Hat acquisition improve the IBM hybrid cloud offering?
A: I don't think it particularly does. Not by itself. It's very late for IBM to be trying something like this with one big fat caveat and that is that IBM strive to dominate the mid-market. That is to say that everything IBM has ever done with AS/400 has to die, right now, at IBM's command. They need to stop supporting that operating system and make RHEL run on all IBM iron.
Then they need to reorient itself in the market and stop trying to make money on high end hardware until they can price it like clouds. In other words, they need to be able to sell two big IBM mainframes that run in a skanky environment and say that it can run 1000 containers simultaneously. That way you don't have to go to the cloud until you outgrow that - and that path would be seamless. IBM mainframes therefore have to be drop dead rugged and shipped overnight in a container to any location with enough electricity. That's attractive. That's something nobody else will do. And that's something that can be facilitated by a company the size of IBM. Why? Because IBM will finance the whole thing.
What IBM must do, in the end, is beat Salesforce.com. If it cannot beat Salesforce, then it has no business in the cloud. Because it cannot and will not beat AWS, GCP or Azure. IBM needs to master the downmarket as I said before.
Everything IBM must do with RedHat is make RHEL administrators and software devs feel like they have an inside track to a comprehensive set of cloud management APIs that give them a reason to stick with IBM for 5 years. That means whatever the IBM cloud looks like today, it had better port over to RHEL in short order and the RedHat people need to be really excited about that.
I don't think IBM management is so courageous, and I do believe that the RedHat people are just going to be very happy with their stock premiums. I'd bet the best of them are ready to ride off into the sunset and that this purchase is their last hurrah. The alternative is that IBM provide an exciting vision that encompasses cloud, mid-market, devOps and big rugged IBM hardware.
IBM vision? Let's wait and see, but if I see another animation of an MRI brain scan coming from IBM marketing, I'll know they've run out of ideas.
Here's the highlight reel. When Peter Drucker invented the MBA part of the idea of professional business management was that ordinary individuals could be trained to run a business. Not a generalized business, but a specialized business in some category. (NAICS codes). The way Harvard has been teaching case studies was that within the scope of business and product analysis such a cadre would be measured and their public company made an indicator by P&L and balance sheet metrics to the public shareholders. IE, IBM competes in its NAICS sector, becomes a market leader taking product share away from competitors, then you know to buy the IBM ticker. All the analysis is around product competition and market share and the effectiveness of management has everything to do with its ability to execute in that narrow area.
This doesn't work for general contractors. This doesn't work for hospitals. This doesn't work for software. This doesn't work for conglomerates. Shareholder maximization only works for certain kinds of single focus businesses. So long as the balance sheet works, in this narrow way of looking at business performance, you can justify all kinds of trickery which is not good management or good governance.
So there are only a few management teams, relatively speaking, who know how to make a company profitable on narrow profit margins. A conglomerate can have a balanced portfolio of businesses that won't suffer the business cycle. That's how Berkshire Hathaway makes money. By running multiple businesses in different NAICS and not making their whole company dependent on a killer app. Each of these businesses, after a time, contribute to a large pool of funds that allows the directors to make experimental buys in new areas, instead of mergers in the same area. Bezos has said specifically that Amazon can afford to make billion dollar mistakes, because the underlying businesses are already fully capitalized and don't need to keep growing or be leveraged before they are mature.
People have wanted AWS to be spun off from Amazon for years, and Wall Street has been hedging on the stock price because before it became a market leader, he never broke out it's P&L and balance sheet from the whole of the company. Wall Street for the most part doesn't know how to do company management analysis either. That's why index funds are winning. Anyway, conglomerates are safer from hostile takeovers because the executives actually understand how to run their businesses and there is no incentive to sell out the business. That's why a class of Silicon Valley VCs and entrepreneurs loathe the idea of working for Amazon. There's no exit strategy. You don't exit conglomerates. They scale horizontally.
It's interesting how well Bezos has run it as a conglomerate, given the bad news recently about GE. I don't think, outside of P&G, that most Americans understand conglomerates. So I'm hoping that Amazon does a stock split and gets listed on the Dow.
I know something about this. You should too.
We see that Redshift has improved its vacuum capabilities and added more functionality all around. It has improved its performance all around, but it hasn't changed its overall performance characteristics. Redshift is not fundamentally different after two years. It still behaves like Redshift when compared to Vertica, the other MPP columnar database we support at Full360.
We have been able to learn quite a bit more about tuning Redshift. Full360 will be offering this service soon. It's called Upshift and it is surely the most comprehensive performance evaluation available in the industry.
I have to qualify all of this by saying that I personally work a lot more with Vertica than I do with Redshift. These two products may seem very similar but the details are often overwhelming. Fortunately we are developing a methodology that expresses the rules for optimization very well. So while the characterization I've made still holds true, there will be a growing number of exceptions and interesting circumstances. I call Vertica a magical sword. It is powerful, precise and it sharpens itself. I can cut intricate and delicate patterns, and chop hundreds of large heads. I call Redshift an ogre's club. It is massively powerful, brain dead simple to use and relatively inexpensive. So you basically have to look at your application and know whether or not it is a job for a club or a sword. Our methodology will tell you exactly which, but like I said, the devil is in the details and we are wrangling dozens of demons.
The good news is that both products are improving at a good clip. Still, I confess I'm paying more attention to Vertica. I'm really impressed with the overview I got yesterday on Vertica 8. They've optimized some of their geospatial algorithms. They've incorporated several ML features directly into the core product. They've dramatically improved their integration with Hadoop, Spark and Kafka. They're claiming to perform 160% of Impala. So that's superb. Most importantly there is enthusiasm for the creation of the new company, which is less like Vertica getting sold to Microfocus and more like a rebirth of Microfocus itself who is, by the way, the owner of Suse Linux. The Vertica guys are thrilled that they'll be working for a software company. That means the upcoming integration with S3 is serious as is their priority on cloud implementations. All good.
A couple weeks ago, something profound occurred to me about enterprise software. I realized that when it is priced by server or by processor, that it's a ripoff. When it is priced by data usage, it's a bargain. You are paying for the potential of being able to use 8 cores even when you are not using them. Admittedly this is rather easy to see if you have experience working in the cloud and then take a turn doing on-premise practices, but it seemed rather profound to me. Imagine, if this is not obvious to you, that you pay a standard or premium license fee to your mobile phone carrier based upon whether you are using a brand new smartphone or an old one. Right. It makes no sense to pay money for anything but the minutes you use on the phone. Mobile phone billing is done right. You pay for minutes. All software could be that way, so that you're not paying for servers, but for functions that spring to life do your bidding, charge you a fractional penny and then die.
This week my boss sent me a link to a guy named swardley who likes ducks. It turns out that this character is quite capable of blowing my tiny mind. He's done it twice already, and so now I have the burden of a speck of enlightenment. It is an enlightenment which is commensurate with my understanding of (Wladawsky-Berger 1999) n-tier computing and then (Vogels 2008) horizontal scaling. So since I've been doing cloud for six years, I now understand what's happening next. God save us all.
Tying software development to economics and cost accounting has long been the stuff of magic, SWAG and charlatans. At least that's what it seemed like for most of my career. But I think Simon Wardley has the solution. He has outlined an ecosystem and a framework for understanding how one can iterate (captive) algorithms towards mutual value for the developers and the customers. He calls it FinDev.
Like most useful thinking on the progressive edge of IT, one must assume AWS. That is to say, very little of what exists in the world that is not part of AWS's ecosystem can be thought of as having great potential in the future of computing. AWS is beyond doing things very well, they are evolving at a monstrous pace and at enormous scale. As an aside, I asked some Agilists last night at El Torito why Amazon manages its businesses so well. He said it's because Amazon is a collection of relatively small businesses that work on a common billing system, and that's what keeps it simple to manage. They are not only eating, but profiting from their own dogfood, which is the fully meticulous tracking of compute resource costing, and now with Lambda, down to the function. All the hardware is a sunk cost. Cloud computing is a utility. What matters now is billing by the function. Simply assume the cloud. It's already done.
So there is a scary aspect to this which is something we all should have been afraid of all the time. It is what happens to craft when things become industrialized. Your personal touch matters less in a market which is defined towards optimization, cost-cutting and efficiency. Nobody cares how you show off the horse, we're all driving cars now. Nobody cares about your budget system, we're all using SAP now. Nobody cares about your fat client, we're all using browsers now. What's coming is a COTS revolution in which your college professor optimized the Towers of Hanoi solver and now owns the moneyTicker on the algo. In a global library of cloud interoperable functions, the scope of what you get to work on gets narrower and narrower. The good news is that we are 20 years away from lockdown. The V8 of compute engine economies is invented. Say hello to the next 50 years. You Wankels don't stand a chance. When I was an undergrad, I used to think of software as the same thing as law. There are lots and lots of lawyers but only a few legislators. The assumption was that the best lawyers at some point got to legislate and the rest just interpreted and borrowed citations for the benefit of those who never read the law. I believe there will be some measure of stare decisis in the new FinDev ecosystem.
So the future belongs to engineers who really know their customer's needs. The economy of FinDev provides value to developers and customers only to the extent that something can be built (at scale in the cloud) that customers want to use. When you charge by the use, that's a different business model than anything we've seen. Chances are it will be disruptive because it will go after captive inefficiently spent money. But there's greenfield out there too. More hopefully, there are new places computing can and will go once we wean ourselves from the economics of capacity planning, system depreciation, outsourced consulting and all that. I think AWS will be capable enough to handle global innovation in this regard; they're certainly leading. Now is the time to work our way towards best practices, evolving towards the revolution.
In Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko series, the protagonist, Renko informally adopts an orphan who is a chess genius. Playing at the genius level, the kid doesn't require a board or pieces. He, and those like him, can just recite moves. He has a virtual queen and doesn't even need hardware. If you're thinking about physically moving pieces, you're not playing chess.
At Full360, we have developed a best practice around our design of greenfield and re-engineered DW applications. The following is a high level guide to how we accomplish this in Vertica. Vertica optimization is something we have pursued with vigor at Full360. There are several different levels at which this can be pursued. Implicit is the modularization of the applications so that the major functions of our data management philosophy can be expressed discretely. But let's get to the $10 words, shall we?
Both I and JDub could go on at to absurd lengths about how important this is to the modularizationf DW design. I will simply, which characteristic casualness, tell you that it makes all of our stuff idiot proof, in that it makes our data provision dependencies kind of go away. The basic idea is that in application units(which basically means the chunks at which the data to be consumed makes process and business sense) you make your input streams discrete. So when your input streams are discretely chunked, you can run your process over and over without concern about whether it has been done once, twice or never. You just run that independent data provision job and it creates the right sized bucket of data.
VLDB folks are probably familiar with why you do ELT rather than ETL. The simple way of saying it is that database developers are more stingy and efficient with data than ETL developers. I developed a taste for hand-crafted 'ETL' back in the days when Informatica was a baby, and having my Unix biases, I always loved moving files around. At the time, my focus was on Essbase which had not ETL hooks, even though Arbor should have purchased an ETL company cheap. Interestingly tangential, Wall Street has never been very long in ETL companies. Anyway, I expect that Informatica and Talend will not like to hear that their days are numbered, but then neither did Carleton and DataStage, and they used to rule the world. The bottom line is that moving data from table to table using SQL rather than in a GUI that does not is going to be, in certain databases, much faster and more human readable than in third party tools. So we do set transformation, and even regex stuff, inside Vertica. One day we may even benchmark UDFs against external programs.
Vertica like Redshift is not a transaction database. It is columnar and it easily handles 600, 800, 1200 column tables. It was designed to. So there is no reason to do a lot of silly little joins in silly little tables to get juicy fat data. We make all that part of the ingestion process, which gives us what we want. Think about it for a minute. Consider the volatility of lookup tables and dimensions as compared to the volatility of atomic facts and transactions, aggregated or otherwise. The facts will be bigger and more fluid. So why spend join energy on query exhibits over the long haul when you can easily have all the columns you want? You don't have to. There are no table scans from hell, that's what columnar solves. So we go big.
I'm not going to talk about the guts of Production other than to mention it briefly here. Production is some of the genius and we have a bag of tricks that is ever-expanding as we deal with realtime, near-realtime, and other odd types of data sources. Yes we lambda with streams and lakes, but we smart lambda. Again with whatever tech makes sense. Right now we're playing with Kinesis and Kafka and our own custom Actor models which we're sure will evolve over time. We're also looking at how to use Redis and other superfast KV stores. So I suspect we will grow many efficient tentacles as we Produce standardized data for ingestion into our columnar DW apps. Nuff said.
We ingest data into source tables for each schema as they come to us. No matter how many fields, large or small, we will take them in using a COPY from produced files. Whether in Vertica or Redshift we standardize on UTF-8 with vertical bars delimited and a backslash escape. In some cases, if we've munged up variable length stuff from our own custom regex routines or other JSON, AVRO or semi-structured effluvia, we will have an additional pre-step using Vertica Flex Tables. We are coming up with best practices there too.
These source files should also retain the original names of the fields of the produced data when possible. This assists in debugging with the original developers.
All of the data that is to be used in the application should then be mapped to a view. This is the staged data. Staged data should be of the increment of ingestion (discretely chunked in application consumption units). That is to say that your _SRC and _STG will carry the same number of records although they are likely to carry a different number of fields once the ingestion is done.
The clean tables should be materialized tables with human-readable fields that are conceptually discrete. This is generally accomplished through a direct insert from one or more _STG views. Clean tables can be defined with blank fields for further rule application. Clean tables that contain all history for the query space should have the term _HIST_CLN, otherwise one should assume that a clean table is the same size as an ingestion increment. Clean tables should be optimized for the scope of the transactions that take place in their creation. When you are looking at the clean tables, you have all of the data you need from all of the sources presented in the way you as a developer think about the data. There should be very little ambiguity at this point, it's your best look at the details before they are aggregated and rationalized.
Lookup tables are straightforward. They should be optimized for their transaction capacity with clean tables.
In a complex model, clean tables can be made into Intermediate Fact tables. The intermediate fact tables are materialized tables with all of the necessary dimensions that support measures that can be made across the full query space. These may or may not be exhibited directly, but should be useful in a partial analysis of the particular measures they contain. An intermediate fact table should be the place where window functions are applied. They should be the place where obscure field conditions are made into explicit attribute and status fields. It is important to know that an application may have dependencies of different measures that seem to be dimensionally equivalent, but actually aren't. So by using IFTs we unburden ourselves of the very idea of a single massive star or snowflake that might have holes. Also, we can capture all of the attributes of a set of measures completely without concerning ourselves with the weight of them in the final presentation layer.
So think about this. A clean look of the data will probably not have sensible status fields they will have codes. There may be multiple ways to interpret a certain combination of fields. So whatever you need to support a the full scope of consumable data, even if it means synthetically remastering transactions, you can do with IFTs beforehand. Building these are the real guts of the DW application, and it's where the fun of working with sharp analysts come in, especially when it comes to data integration projects. I will apply all of the reasonable and semi-reasonable business rules here. This is where I have enough detail to point machine learning, because at this point the data is explicit and human readable. It will reveal the more interesting cases and outliers. And here it should be very rich - beyond human comprehension, so yeah maybe you don't go full wide with these tables, only add 4 of the 50 psychographic customer tags you have against their ID, because, security.
Exhibit tables are materialized views in some cases but generally views that are presentable to the end user. These should be indexed and optimized for query retrieval. Security access rules are applied to user groups, etc only to exhibit tables. It should be assumed that none other than dbadmin processes will have access to any tables or views but the exhibit tables.
So there it is. This is rather the state of the art that I have internalized in five years of cloud based columnar data warehousing. Maybe I should write a book.


Portrait of Lady Charlotte Fitzroy in a rose-coloured dress sitting on the ground; on her right, a boy in brown dress and sandals kneels, offering her a dish of grapes.
Behind the sitter is a stone frieze of putti with a goat.
From the collections of Viscount Dillon, and Sir Bernard Eckstein.


Sijo Reading by David McCann and Won J. Park.
Sijo reading by Professor David McCann (Harvard University), Ellee Pai Hong (former NBC news anchor), and WonJung Park (Korean TV PD and host for the Cultural Walk). Enjoy wine, hors d'oeuvres, and paintings, photographs of Asian-American artists while listening to contemporary sijo written in English as well as classical sijo by Korean poets translated into English.
Won J. Park is the anchor and the producer of the Chicago's popular evening show, News Magazine on Ch.41 KBC-TV.
Park joined News Magazine in Feburary 2007. Before joining KBC-TV, Park anchored Radio News Programs and DJed music shows for radios including Radio Korea and Seoul Broadcasting.
Plus, Park is very active as MC in various national, international, and community events.
With music composition degree, Park is also highly active in Chicago's music scene as composer, conductor and jazz pianist.
Sijo recital will be accompanied by piri performances by Sung Soo Jin (진 성수).
He will also perform piri solo pieces.
Recorded Korean -Japan world cup opening ceremony music.
Director - Korean Traditional Music Pop Orchestra "Yeo Min" .
it plays an active role in leading melodies in the traditional instrumental orchestra and traditional dance.
who is providing the event location.
Street Parking is available on streets at the gallery.
Gallery is located at NW corner of W Superior St and N Franklin St.
Street Parking - Fee $2.50 per hour at street parking Pay Box.
(credit card payment accepted at Pay Box).
Subject line: "Reservation - SIjo Reading "
Please include your name, phone number, address and number of people.


text:
Q: Do access modifiers matter for the method Main? Do the available access modifiers matter for the method Main? If not, why does Main allow us to specify the modifier? Why does the compiler not prevent us from specifying something that are trivial?

A: Main being public/private does not affect the CLR calling it at all.
The CLR will look for a static method named main (by default, but not necessarily) which is associated with its entry point, without looking at access modifiers.
It only affects the visibility of main to the other functions.
Good practice is for Main to not be public since it is not to be called by other methods in your assemblies, only by the CLR.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Hypertek Music Boss, 2face Idibia who previously signed on Dammy Krane to his record label, has come to the latter defense, dismissing the credit card fraud charges leveled against the singer. 2face tagged the "mess" dammy krane is currently embroiled in, as an "implication".
This is the first time 2baba Idibia would be speaking up about the messy court case since the 'Amin' singer was arrested and charged to court.