Bankers, who probably are now in the same league with lawyers and politicians in terms of popularity, are not happy with potentially losing their bonuses. Here in the US there's been at least one prominent case of bonuses being granted despite some putrid performances by the company. Still, the bankers here haven't gone so far as to sue to keep their bonuses. In England? Bankers are gearing up for legal battle.
D.W. blogs about missing his regular Tuesday night Contra Dancing at the Vintage Theater in Winston-Salem while he was out of town. He has a little video to share as well. This caught my eye because I think it's where two of my favorite people met. D.W. describes the crowd as decidedly "hippy" and that definitely describes the members of my family who met there.
Celeste and I were driving through greater downtown Lewisville on Saturday morning when we encountered a closed lane on Shallowford Road and saw a race start/finish line set up by the square. We figured it was a bike race and both of us commented about how often we see things happening in Lewisville that we'd heard nothing about before the actual day of the event. We then wondered if it was a town sanctioned bike race since Lewisville is very popular with cyclists, or if maybe it was a race sponsored by a private company which is why we never heard about it.
WXII is reporting that some residents at Lazy Acres Mobile Home Park here in Lewisville may have been overcharged for years by Duke Energy. Apparently Duke charges a higher rate to homes that aren't 100% electric, and some of the mobile home residents say they were charged that rate despite being entirely electric. The difference is less than a penny a kilowatt hour, but for people on a fixed income that can make a big difference. One resident said she'd lived at Lazy Acres for 25 years and had been paying the higher amount the entire time. If that's true then Duke could be ponying up a hefty refund for her.
There's a cool graph at the Institute for Emerging Issues that shows changes in North Carolina counties from 1970 through 2030. The categories are population, population density and per capita income. What's really cool about the graph is that you can set it to play and it shows you how each county has changed in relation to the others over time. So you can see that a handful of "urban" counties were pretty much clustered together in terms of population in 1970, with Mecklenburg having 350,000 residents, Guilford 290,000, Wake 230,000, Forsyth 220,000 and Cumberland 210,000. Then in the 80s and 90s Mecklenburg and Wake literally exploded in population and that trend is expected to continue so that by 2030 Mecklenburg will have 1.39 million people and Wake will have 1.46 million people. Compare that to 590,000 for Guilford and 440,000 for Forsyth and I'd say we'll be living in a bucolic paradise by comparison.
and compare that to today:
and 2030:
Things don't seem to be trending well for Forsyth, huh? Actually that's kind of simplistic thinking because you also have to take into account cost of living and I suspect that if Mecklendburg and Wake have almost 1.5 million residents apiece the cost of living there will be sky high. Of course that helps explain why the income for some smaller population counties like Orange and Chatham are expected to be higher than the counties like Guilford and Forsyth; work in Wake but commute from a more sedate county like Chatham (sedate being a relative term). Huh, sounds a lot like the Northern Virginia I left five years ago.
Did you see the main op-ed pieces in yesterday's (Feb. 8, 2009) Winston-Salem Journal? Two pieces involving newspaper navel gazing. One was a piece titled "The Crisis Facing American Newspapers" by a guy at an investment bank that said the following public policy changes need to happen for newspapers to be saved:
I have to say that I agree with the basic premise of the first three, but it's the fourth one that cracked me up. Here's the entire reasoning for the anti-trust exemption:
Newspapers should be granted a finite (36-month) anti-trust law exemption to permit deployment of an industry-wide system to track and charge for re-use of their content. Whether that is accomplished through a "rights society" as with music publishers, or through the use of electronic watermarks, which could facilitate digitized tracking and usage charges, publishers cannot continue the practice of paying for the editorial staffs to source the news and then have it used for free by competing Web aggregators. There are numerous organizations that already have infrastructure in place to serve this purpose. The Associated Press already has existing license fee and "pay-per-click" payment structures.
Sadly the newspaper industry is making the same mistake that the music industry made, only 10 years late. They aren't recognizing the market for what it is. They aren't realizing that whether or not there's a printed form of journalism is irrelevant. Paper is a delivery vehicle, same as the airwaves and the internet. They also need to understand that if they pursue the whole watermark thing all they are going to do is minimize their own exposure and tick off their customers. What's important for them to understand is that instead of building walls around their news gardens they need to learn how to take their expertise and their (diminishingly) unique place in society and use every tool available to reach their audience.
The Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce sent out an email asking for volunteers for the Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools' annual egg drop competition on February 21. Volunteers will need to be at Hanes Mall at 8:00 a.m. and the event is scheduled to run until 1:00 p.m. I might do it just to wear one of the lab coats they provide to all volunteers.
From Sen. Richard Burr's blog:
It’s easy for Members of Congress to spend the people’s money without much thought to the overall cost–just look at congressional pay. As the law is currently written, Congress has to hold a vote to disapprove an automatic pay raise. As you can guess, these votes don’t occur too often. In fact, a raise has only been disapproved once since 2000, and only six times total since the law was established in 1975. To help bring some perspective to those who are crafting the law, I am introducing an amendment to the “stimulus” legislation that would eliminate automatic congressional pay adjustments. With every American family tightening belts in these tough times, Congress needs to follow suit.
Since Sen. Burr is a home boy from Winston-Salem and a Wake Forest grad I have a pre-disposition to liking him, but it's his approach to his position that I've really liked. I think this is a very smart amendment, especially considering what Congress is asking everyone else in the country to sacrifice to get the economy turned around. Yes it's largely symbolic, but that's the point.
At the Dishing it Out blog Michael Hastings has a Valentines gift selection if your dearly beloved is a beer lover. It's a limited edition brew from Foothills Brewing called Sexual Chocolate Imperial Stout. If you like beer it sounds like there's a lot to like about this brew, including the 9.75% alcohol content.
Earlier today I had a post about the silliness involved with comparing corporate executives' perks like corporate jets with President Obama's "perk" of Air Force One. I know where they're trying to go with it, but come on, that's just plain obtuse.
Befuddled 