David Gross

With today’s flurry of financial events, I stopped to think, what’s not right about all this? And this is what I’ve come up with…

For those of you don’t know, here were the two big events of the day:

1. Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch for $44 billion.

2. No one is coming to the rescue of Lehman Brothers and it is almost certain that they will file for bankruptcy.

First up is BoA’s purchase of Merrill Lynch. Lynch’s stock closed at $17.50 Friday, but for some reason BoA is going to pay $29/share to take it over. Why, from a business prospective, would BoA pay this incredible hike when it could have waited for Merrill to collapse and acquired it on the cheap? The reason, in my eyes, is a very cozy relationship between the two CEOs. Merrill’s CEO John Thain was originally meant to have a “plain vanilla” $4 million compensation package per year, including benefits. That quickly ballooned to his now known pay of over $83 million. That, however, could rise to $120 million DEPENDING ON THE COMPANY’S STOCK PRICE. What I see here is the small time BoA investor getting royally screwed for the sake of both CEOs’ severance packages. This amounts to nothing less than extortion and I will make a call right now that both CEOs will be sitting in jail five years from now, but maybe not Merrill’s CEO Thain; he’s made over $300,000 of political contributions across the spectrum to shield himself. (He also has $300 million in Goldman stock, which could prove to be interesting).

Now let’s examine the Lehman Brothers plight. No one is coming to bail them out. Foreign banks, like Barclay’s, are slowly coming to the realization that we aren’t good for the money and are wising up to throwing good money at a broken system. Interestingly enough, not even Treasury Secretary Paulson will bail them out. He claims he is DEAD SET AGAINST IT. Well, what about the $200 billion he just threw at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a couple weeks ago? He had no problem with that. Why the quick change of heart? Either he’s completely incompetent and doesn’t know what the hell is going on, Bush told him to stop throwing money at everything because it’s making his “conservative” administration look blatantly socialist, even communist, or Paulson’s got a personal vendetta to see Lehman Brothers burn. After his tenure at Goldman, with Lehman as a prime competitor, it would not surprise me one bit…

Just some food for though. Post up some comments.

Tags: Bank of America, Barclay's, corruption, financial, Goldman Sachs, John Thain, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, subprime mortgage, Treasury Secretary Paulson

Soulja Boy

A miscreant from the sordid 4chan message-board community sent rapper and social media whiz-kid Soulja Boy a text message the other day, telling him to fork over $2,500 if he wanted control over his MySpace account back. God, I seriously can’t understand half of what he says.

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Tags: 4chan, Anonymous, MySpace, Soulja Boy

North Korea's Kim Jong Il

Is Kim Jong Il dead? According to a professor at Japan’s Waseda University, North Korea’s “Dear Leader” passed away in the fall of 2003 and a stand-in has been fooling the world for at least five years. They fake almost every other thing about the state of their nation, so I wouldn’t be surprised…

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Tags: Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, North Korea, Shukan Gendai, Toshimitsu Shigemura, Waseda University

This is a genuine near death experience. The train conductor just happened to have his camera sitting on the dash. The train turns a blind corner, one kid successfully runs across the rails right before, but the other kid slips and falls right onto the tracks and literally pulls away at the last possible second. He could have been an awesome nomination for one of this year’s Darwin Awards!

Tags: Darwin Award, near death experience, train

Firefox 3

There’s a contentious debate brewing around Firefox 3’s handling of SSL security certificates — the tools that tell the browser whether your connection is actually secure and connected to the site you’re trying to access. The funny thing is, roughly 18% of the Fortune 100 websites have expired SSL certificates. At the moment, it seems that Firefox 3 is blocking a lot of legitimate Internet traffic. So who’s to blame? The lazy webmasters who forget to renew their SSL certificate for a few bucks a year, or Firefox 3? I’m putting my bets with the former. Firefox 3 did deny me access to Microsoft’s website one time…so that’s always good. =]

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Tags: Computer Security, customs officer, Firefox 3, Fortune 100, Johnathan Nightingale, Microsoft, Netcraft, SSL certificate

Shamu

Forget about freeing just Willy. The supporter wants to buy one or more SeaWorld(s) (valued at $5-6 billion) so they can free all the animals. THEN he/she plans to replace them with virtual-reality or animatronic displays. I guess what Penn & Teller said is true, “PETA is bullshit.” I mean, does PETA actually think these animals can survive in the wild?

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Tags: Anheuser-Busch, animatronics, Lisa Wathne, Orlando, Penn & Teller, PETA, PETA is bullshit, San Diego, SeaWorld

A depiction of the Oort Cloud.

The Oort Cloud is a spherical cloud of comets believed to lie roughly 50,000 AU, or nearly a light-year, from the Sunm which places the cloud at nearly a quarter of the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun. The Kuiper belt and scattered disc, the other two known reservoirs of trans-Neptunian objects, are less than one thousand. “The new object is much smaller than Sedna, Becker said, probably 30-60 miles across.” Massive?

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Tags: 2006 SQ372, Andrew Becker, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, Proxima Centauri, Sedna, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Solar System, trans-Neptunian objects, University of Washington

This is one of the craziest videos I’ve seen. This guy is filming a thunderstorm on the beach (probably in a beach house) with the window open and a bolt comes down right next to him. The time difference between the strike and the crack is literally zero. You might want to turn your speakers down for this one. (Also, beware this has some pretty intense language in it if that bothers anyone, but I mean seriously if a lighting bolt came down five feet away from you, what would you be saying?) It is also interesting to note that this strike could have created glass where it struck (this usually only occurs if the bolt hits sand, which it did). It’s one of nature’s biggest mysteries. Read how lightning creates glass where it strikes at BamaWeather.

Tags: BamaWeather, beach, close call, glass, lightning

Weezer's newest single "Troubemaker"

Have Weezer got a proposition for you! The nerd rock mainstays are looking for a whole hell of a lot of folks to join them August 21 in Los Angeles as they shoot the video for Red Album single “Troublemaker”. I have no intentions of going, but I just thought I’d spread the word to anyone that’s interested…Weezer is cool enough I guess.

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Tags: Angels & Airwaves, August 21, Los Angeles, music video, nerd rock, Tokyo Police Club, Troublemaker, Weezer, weezervideo@gmail.com

Blake Pebbles dropped out of school to play Guitar Hero

Let’s try to keep the bad parenting bait to a minimum for this one, folks, but holy cow, I can’t not show you this story. A 16-year-old in Raleigh, N.C., whose parents have let him drop out of school so that he can focus on a professional gaming career via Guitar Hero. Awesome. So far he’s won 51 combo meals from tournaments hosted by the local Chick-fil-A. In 5 years, when nobody gives a crap about this game anymore, he’s gonna be screwed. On the bright side, though, he’ll be of drinking age. At least he’ll have something to do.

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Tags: Blake Pebbles, Guitar Hero, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 2, professional gamer, Raleigh, Xbox 360