GM = Bankrupt
Just think this through with me.
GM says they must have government money to survive. President Obama says he will use bankruptcy to restructure and refinance the company, according to the WSJ today.
Two thoughts.
- Doesn’t that make them technically bankrupt? If both sides have already firmly committed to the logic I laid out above, GM is in effect informing investors they are filing bankruptcy. GM closed today down 92 cents at $2.70. Who still owns this stock at any price? A bankruptcy filing means the value of these shares becomes $0.
- And for those who would complain about the government firing a CEO, remember that the government had no leverage to do that except this government bailout money. Understand the consequences of government bailouts before you accept them.
Lots more to talk about on GM, and I hope to do so, but those are just my first thoughts.
Experience Ethiopian Food in Sacramento
As most of you know, we’re in the process of adopting again, this time from Ethiopia. My sweetie and I were down in Sacramento last night and had a great dinner at Queen Sheba Ethiopian Restaurant at Broadway and 17th.
While waiting for our food, we learned that Amharic has a whopping 231 letters in its alphabet. Guess we better start memorizing now! 
We had yentil wraps, awazie beef sauteed in berbere sauce, chicken tibbs, kik wot and salad.
And remember, no forks! You use enjera (a pancake-like sourdough bread) to scoop up your food with your fingers.
It was great food. And fun to experience a taste of Ethiopian culture.
Google Reader
I finally broke down and started using Google Reader. If you haven’t checked it out, you really should.
I used to keep things on an iGoogle page. Then I got mad at them (not enough to kill my gmail account, but still…) and moved to a My Yahoo page.
But either way, I’m an “out of sight, out of mind” person. So if I tried to organize the blogs I follow into tabs, I’d forget to check the other tabs. So now, it’s the first button on my bookmarks toolbar, and one click opens up the stuff I read.
My big resistance to Google Reader is that it felt like e-mail, and I didn’t want another inbox. I already get tons of e-mail and it’s a lot of work to keep it current. And I hate the “unread messages” indicator staring at me constantly, which is why I had never put blog feeds in Microsoft Outlook.
But you know what? It’s working well for me. With a single click, I can pop open Google Reader, and I know instantly what I haven’t read yet. With another click, I can close the window with no prompt constantly telling my brain that something is undone.
And the other cool thing is folders. I can categorize the blogs I read, without losing sight of them. Pretty cool.
How do you like to read blogs? What blogs am I not following that I should?
PS to Josh Morgan: Just so you know, I organize blogs topically. So you’re under Business, despite being a friend. Didn’t want to mix your high-minded prose in with pictures of someone’s baby.
Preposterous: AIG Never Fired the Risk Managers
I’ve posted a few things about AIG, and to sum up my opinion: Wall Street compensation is crazy. If it is true that after the blowup, we promised the good people a retention bonus in March if they stuck around and turned down other offers of employment, then it is wrong to not pay people what they were promised.
Now, all that said, I was absolutely shocked to read this story in this morning’s WSJ.
Inside American International Group Inc., a group of top executives called the Credit Risk Committee oversaw some of the company’s biggest bets, such as the insurer’s foray into credit-default swaps.
But even after a $173 billion government bailout, this group, which reviewed and approved risk-taking decisions, remains largely unchanged. At least five of the 10 committee members have served for years, according to internal company documents. Some served as far back as 2003 and 2004, the documents show.
Even amid change at AIG, much of the company’s day-to-day infrastructure remains in place. Many of the high-level AIG executives who approved the insurer’s risk-taking before the company’s near collapse still are at their posts.
We — you and I — own 80% of this company. We’ve invested $173 billion dollars of our money in exchange for that.
One of the things that speaks volumes about a company’s culture is the answer to the question, “what does it take to get fired around here?”
Apparently, they still haven’t figured that out at AIG.
Perhaps there is some legitimate reason why these people haven’t been fired yet, but they haven’t even been removed from the job of managing risk?
When you’re in a job overseeing risk, how many billions do you have to lose before your boss says “you’re a good person, but this job is a bad fit for you, and we’re moving you over here”?
This is preposterous.
Illustration Credit: thepage.time.com
The Union: Sierra College Project a $10 Million Economic Stimulus?
Sorry for the late posting on this, but this has been a more-hectic-than-usual day at the office for me.
The Union has a great piece this morning on our continued effort to spend our local tax dollars with qualified local contractors. This is the first step in a long multi-step process, but we’re on the right track!
Looking to provide western Nevada County with its own economic stimulus, two local contractors have partnered with a well-known Sacramento builder in hopes of landing an estimated $11 million Sierra College expansion project.
It’s been more than four years since Nevada County voters (21,286 to 14,863) approved Measure G to issue $47 million in bonds to expand and renovate the Sierra College campus in Grass Valley.
Dear AIG, I Quit…
If you haven’t read this letter in today’s New York Times, you should…
After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.
Emergency Text Messaging at Sierra College
Tuesday’s very rare stabbing incident is a reminder that many of our security preparations on campus are working well, but need to be pushed forward in some areas. One of those is student and staff notifications.
If this had been a more widespread threat to the security of students and staff on campus, we need a quick and simple way to contact all students and staff, and issue lockdown or evacuation instructions.
There are companies selling big and expensive text messaging systems, so we could send a mass text message to students, and we haven’t moved forward on those because of the expense.
But here’s something we can do for free, and I’ll be proposing this at our next board meeting: let’s create a Sierra College Emergency Message account on Twitter for each of our campuses. The incident commander and site administrator for each campus would have access and could send messages.
We then publicize the accounts to our students and staff, and allow them to sign up for a free Twitter account and enable mobile alerts to be sent to their cell phones.
While this doesn’t ensure 100% participation among students, it’s completely free, and I’d venture to bet that our participation rates would be sky-high. I don’t see why we wouldn’t do it.
Blockbuster vs. Netflix
This post is attracting a lot of visits from people trying to compare Netflix vs. Blockbuster and choose between them. I’m doing the same thing right now.
If you’re interested in my thoughts on the matter, read this post, and then read What I Like About Netflix So Far. I’ll update this post again when I make a decision.
How we get movies at home has been changing for years.
Blockbuster took over home video rental with a national brand and great pricing (99 cents for older movies). They did the innovative thing and came up with a new model to pay the studios a percentage of rental revenue rather than per-tape, and were able to get 50 copies in each store, rather than 2 or 3.
Thus, the mom-and-pops closed up, and their next move was jacking the prices up to $5. Huge late fees. Treating customers badly created a huge opening for a competitor.
Along came Netflix. One low monthly fee. Movies in your mailbox. No late fees. Huge selection. Only issue was that you had to predict what kind of movie you’ll want on a given night, and you had to wait a day or two to get it.
Blockbuster could have avoided this by simply treating customers well. Bad move on their part.
Their response to Netflix was pretty innovative, again. First, they rolled out the same service but gave you two coupons every month for free movies in the store on top of that. This was cool, and I’d probably still be pretty happy if they had stuck with that. Instead, they switched to letting you trade the envelope you got in the mail for a new movie at the store, no charge.
The pricing was good at the beginning — sort of match Netflix, plus you get the in-store benefits. As soon as the business started growing, they went right back to jacking up prices again, and Netflix has still been thriving as a result.
All of this innovation is cool, but to be honest, I still feel sort of stuck as a consumer. Blockbuster is not so much winning my business right now as not losing it. Why?
My wife and I have very different taste in movies. And bless her heart, she has different moods for movies depending on the night. (I do this too, but not as much.) So we’re paying $17 per month for two DVDs at a time, and we never seem to have a movie we want to watch on hand.
Part of this is that we find it hard to predict what we want. The other part is that the queue doesn’t manage our movie choices well. I’d like to be able to have folders to sort the movies we want to see, and be able to select which TYPE of movie we want next for our two-DVDs-at-a-time plan. Like ensuring that I get one of CK’s favorites, and one of mine. Or one each of two particular genres. Neither Blockbuster or Netflix do this, to my knowledge. This could cause me to switch to get it.
The Blockbuster in-store exchange thing is supposed to help with this. But the closest store is 20 minutes away. Not making a special one-hour round trip for a movie…we’ll just watch TV or play cards.
When I pass the store on my way home from some place and think “we don’t have a very good movie at home…I should stop and get something she would like”, I never have one of the movies to trade with me. (See why the coupons worked better? I kept those in the car.) So I either skip it or spend another $5. Which irritates me.
On the flip side, Netflix has the “watch now” feature to stream movies online. The problem is, my Internet connection at home is awful. (If my friendly local Internet service provider is reading this, no offense — I know you’re doing the best you can with what’s available in Colfax, but that’s just the facts. I pay $85/month for 512KBps, and I’ve never actually seen that speed, but that’s a whole different post.) So this feature wouldn’t be much use to me.
Even without the online streaming piece, I could still spend the same amount with Netflix and get 3 DVDs at a time. Maybe that would give me enough variety to fix the problem. But without the folders thing, I’m still thinking I won’t have the right kind of movie on hand. And then I’ll always be spending $5 to get what my sweetie really wants.
Have you ever been a “stuck consumer” like this? Which companies are you loyal to for no reason than that there is no better option?
I’m thinking about trying the Netflix path and seeing if I feel any better about it. A one-month trial would be a lot more enticing than the 2 weeks they offer, though.
UPDATE: @quizwedge tells me Netflix allows multiple queues, sort of like the folders I was talking about above. That does it. I’m going to try Netflix. I’ll let you all know how it goes.
Safety of Students and Staff is Paramount
There are confirmed reports of a stabbing attack on the Sierra College Rocklin campus today. This is very, very rare…hasn’t happened while I’ve been in the board, and may not have happened ever before.
Unconfirmed reports are that the attacker was a student, and the victim is a former student. According to KCRA, the victim is in surgery at Sutter Roseville, and the suspect is in custody. Our police and Rocklin PD are still investigating.
Campus security incidents and attacks are on the rise. The board and our College President, Leo Chavez, have taken a very proactive approach to this, with a lot of focus on training and preparing our police force to deal with these types of events. Our new chief is leading POST certification and arming our police officers. The safety and security of both our students and our staff is of paramount importance.
Our thoughts and prayers are with the victim for a speedy recovery.
New Documentary on the Sierra Nevada
A great article in today’s Granite Bay Press-Trib about the new documentary by Gary Noy and Dan DeFoe on the Sierra Nevada…
A special showing of the Sierra College-produced “Tales of the Sierra Nevada” aired in Ridley Gallery inside Sierra College library Monday. The historical documentary is set to air on local PBS affiliate KVIE’s “View Finder” series Wednesday at 7 p.m.
The program was produced by Sierra College’s Center for Sierra Nevada Studies, which was founded in 2002, and was created by Gary Noy, the center’s director, and Daniel DeFoe, a history and communications professor.
“It actually came about as kind of an experiment,” Noy said. “We put together short little films for our classes and we decided one day, ‘Why don’t we connect these stories…and send it off to Channel 6?’”
