FYI: On Friday afternoon I stop paying attention to work email about 2:45pm.
Wendy’s Franchise Cuts Employee Hours To Part-Time To Avoid Obamacare
Not long after the owner of the Olive Garden and Red Lobster chains admitted their anti-Obamacare campaigns hurt more than helped, the owner of a Wendy’s franchise in Omaha, Nebraska plans to cut 300 employees’ hours to part-time to avoid providing them health care coverage.
By moving workers to part-time status in order to avoid paying for their health benefits, the Wendy’s franchise would shift the costs of insurance coverage onto hundreds of employees[…]
Goddamn square hamburgers.
Intel will end support for Oregon Boy Scouts over Scouts’ policy on gays
Boy Scouts in Oregon have few benefactors more generous than Intel, which has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to Boy Scout troops and Cub Scout packs over the past few years.
It’s not that Intel has a particular affinity for Scouting; its employees do. By volunteering as scoutmasters and in other roles, they trigger a $10 corporate donation for each hour spent helping a troop.
And with close to 17,000 employees in the state, those hours — and dollars — really add up. In 2010 alone they came to $180,000, according to the Intel Foundation’s most recent tax filings.
The donations, though, are now drying up.
A “lightning rod for controversy” indeed.
World’s Youngest VC-Funded Entrepreneur?
Move over Brian Wong. You my have lost your title as the youngest-funded entrepreneur. The new contender is a 16-year-old kid who has raised $1 million for his news summary app. For the record, he was only 15 when he received his first chunk of that change.
Nick D’Alosio’s story starts like any high school kid’s might: on spring break. The London-based teenager was on vacation with his pals when he received an email from a group of investors in Hong Kong. D’Alosio admits he almost didn’t open it. “Who are these guys?,” he wondered. Turns out, “these guys” were from Li Ka Shing’s Horizons Ventures (the same Horizons Ventures that has invested in both Facebook and Spotify). Horizons wanted to know more about the news-summarizing app (then called Trimit) D’Alosio had built and released months earlier in the Apple’s UK App store.
i’m stark raving at 445 in the AM and all over this bigassweb. i already saw bigfoot and wanted you to see this lil’ cracker. sheeeutt!
Disney buys LucasArts alongside Lucasfilm
The Walt Disney Company purchased the rights to Star Wars with its acquisition today of Lucasfilm, the production company that makes Star Wars, and all of its subsidiaries. That includes video game developer and publisher LucasArts.
“Disney bought all Lucasfilm companies, including LucasArts. For the time being, all projects are business as usual. We are excited about all the possibilities that Disney brings,” Lucasfilm publicist Barbara Gamlen said. The original release notes that all LucasArts employees will remain on staff, but Disney executives did reference plans to focus on social and mobile Star Wars games as opposed to high-end console releases.
Yoda: “Into exile, I must go. Failed, I have.”
Elsewhere:
The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy
Ever since the financial crisis started, we’ve heard plenty from the 1 percent. We’ve heard them giving defensive testimony in Congressional hearings or issuing anodyne statements flanked by lawyers and image consultants. They typically repeat platitudes about investment, risk-taking and job creation with the veiled contempt that the nation doesn’t understand their contribution. You get the sense that they’re afraid to say what they really believe. What do the superrich say when the cameras aren’t there?
A VERY interesting read. I pride myself on being able to try to see it from “their” POV from time to time, a practice I consider spiritually healthy.
This guy’s logic really doesn’t hold up though. And, as always, what really burns me is that there will be poor people, Dems and Republicans, right and left, that will buy his nonsense wholesale.
A key point is that he makes lots of abstract points. Another key point is that the facts just plain say that the super wealthy gambled with other people’s money. They did not intend to lose their bets. They feel bad that they were wrong.
But at the end of the day they are still stinkin’ rich and always will be. It would take Global Catastrophe to change the fact that they are the rich and the 1%. It would take a miracle to get him and others like him to admit to this and other facts of life.
It’s not that mysterious or controversial to say that the bankers gambled with other people’s money. Knowing all the while that they’d still be rich at the end of the day. Know what? Don’t need to be a Philadelphia (or NY) lawyer to know that much.
15 minutes later…
and the sheer SMARM of the mofo.
the fecklessness that is the Republican party. The unwashed masses, that’s me and you, couldn’t possibly understand the complexities of things like, oh, arithmetic.
Fascist swine. One and all. A vote for W in the day or for Romney in the future is equivalent to having sympathy for this schmuck.
When the arithmetic doesn’t make sense, there’s something wrong. And these hybrid bait and switch artists couldn’t pass remedial ‘rithmetic. They want me to believe that 2 and 2 make 5, or almost 5. Or not quite 4. And oddly enough, with their accounting, it’s always the poor who take it in the shorts.
When the arithmetic doesn’t make sense, and they vote that way anyway, I strongly suspect there is another reason for their ideology. And I don’t care if it’s not popular or it’s talking about your friends and family, but the reason is mean-spirited, or simply hate. One brand or another, the Republican party can’t even say most of their party-line with a straight face.
This story is about a guy who’s in the top .1% of the wealthy. Did you even have to ask what party he supports?
What I have to ask is the question about the poor people who vote for these reptiles. They gave us lamp-shades and soap, and will again, you heard it here first.
Finally, a Judge Stands up to Wall Street
Rakoff of course is right — the settlement is nuts. If you take Citi’s $160 million profit on the deal into consideration, what we’re talking about then is a $125 million fine for causing $700 million in damages. That, and no admission of wrongdoing.
Just imagine a mugger who steals $70 from some lady’s wallet being sentenced to walk free after paying back twelve bucks. Magritte himself could not devise a more surreal take on criminal justice.
It gets worse. Over the last decade, Citi has repeatedly been caught committing a variety of offenses, and time after time the bank has been dragged into court and slapped with injunctions demanding that they refrain from ever engaging the same practices ever again. Over and over again, they’ve completely blown off the injunctions, with no consequences from the state — which does nothing except issue new (soon-to-be-ignored-again) injunctions.
Read the news and you’ll at least know who not to bank with.
On Lake Michigan, a coal-burning steamship gets a pass
But every day it sails between this old shipbuilding port and Ludington, Mich., the Badger dumps nearly 4 tons of coal ash into Lake Michigan — waste concentrated with arsenic, lead, mercury and other toxic metals. During its spring-to-fall season, federal records show, the amount far exceeds the coal, iron and limestone waste jettisoned by all 125 other big ships on the Great Lakes combined.
…
As the last season before the EPA’s deadline comes to an end, the owners instead are seeking an exemption from the federal Clean Water Act that would delay a fix until at least 2017.
Not sure why this boat is still allowed on the water. It should’ve been docked years ago. Worse still is that people rally behind the SS Badger.
55 or so hours a week is making me sleepy.
Sorry… that’s not in your contract.
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© Edsgar Dijkstra
