Why? Why does that win the attention of the President of the United States? The pardoned man, Ronald Lee Foster of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, received probation and a $20 fine. This was one of 9 pardons, the first set of pardons by President Obama. The NYT characterized all the pardoned crimes as "small-scale offenses committed many years ago," but 4 of the cases involved cocaine. Maybe the coin-mutilating is in there to make cocaine look small scale.
I wonder what, exactly, Ronald Lee Foster did to coins? From CoinTalk:
I looked but can not find out anything about what he did to coins. I wonder if he is the first person to produce the infamous "Lincoln looks at Kennedy" pennies? There was a guy back in the 1960's who used a machine to shave pennies to the size of dimes and passed them in vending machines. Now what is "mutilation of coins" and what did this guy do?
***
In 1963, he was earning $82 a month as a Marine at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, when he says he and 16 others hatched a scheme to cut pennies into dimes so they could use them in vending machines. But the Secret Service caught them....
Hmmm, that reminds me. We used to try to turn quarters — back when they were silver — into rings. Step 1 was banging on the edge with a spoon to flatten and broaden it. No one ever got to step 2, which would have required some drilling.
Eyes... bucks... Not sure what Drudge is driving at here. Some strange coded message to Ohio? And why show the front and not the back of the dollar bill?
Asks David Frum. I got there via Hot Air. Hey! I wrote a post 3 days ago titled "Is the proposal to build a mosque near Ground Zero more political performance than reality?" I was bouncing off the same New York Post story that inspired Frum. Damn! I could have had a Hot Air link. But I decided not to publish my post, because, reading to the end of the story, I saw that although the would-be mosque-builders only owned one of the buildings needed for the project, they did have a lease and an option to purchase the second building at its assessed value. That is, the path to acquiring the second building looked clear, assuming they could raise the money for the project. So raising the money for the project is the only real difficulty, which is the same thing we thought when it seemed that they already owned both buildings.
So is Frum seeing more than I saw or less?
The mosque developers are three Arab-American businessmen: Sharif and Sammy el-Gamal and Nour Moussa. They have a partner in Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Muslim writer and publicist who does most of the talking. But the money and credit pledged to the project belong to the company owned by Moussa and the el-Gamals, Soho Properties.
Soho Properties has paid some $5 million in cash to buy the Burlington Coat Factory building, a building that yields no income. They are paying rent to hold rights to the Con Ed building, which also yields no income. All of this in the midst of the worst commercial property slump in memory, in an area of New York with a very uncertain economic future....
You can see why the Gamal-Moussa team would be dazzled by the notion that philanthropists in the Persian Gulf might donate $100 million to raise a grand gleaming Islamic center in lower Manhattan. You can tuck a lot of development fees into a $100 million project. And if not a mosque … what else do you do with their two loser properties on Park Place?
Frum thinks the Gamal-Moussa businessmen really did originally intend to build condos, but that wasn't going to work, and they hooked up with Feisal Rauf believing he was the kind of guy who could connect them to guys in the Middle East who'd give them $100 million if they were buttered up in a suitably Islamic way. Is "publicity stunt" the right word for Frum's theory? It sounds more like he thinks it was a hare-brained real estate scheme.
$100 million is not so easily raised, not even in Abu Dhabi, not in the middle of a global commercial property slump, not with the Manhattan real estate market in a shambles. Believe it or not, rich people in the Persian Gulf are not yearning to plunge into a U.S. political controversy.
And, of course, the mosque will never be built. The idea that I tossed aside was different. I entertained the notion that the idea was to propose it in order to stir up the reaction that was, in fact, stirred up. Some Americans would be outraged, including a subgroup that would say anti-Muslism things, and some Americans would get passionate about freedom of religion and celebrating diversity. In this theory, the point was always and only to undermine American society by dividing us in two and touching off a terrible, endless fight between the two halves. In this theory too, then, the mosque is never built. It's not that the business scheme fails, but that the proposal was itself the project, and the project succeeds.
"If it's impossible to pay cash when you buy stuff, it's also impossible not to leave electronic footprints behind you, and the electronic footprints from what you buy put together can tell the entire story about your life. This can be very sensitive information... Most people don't want this total surveillance society."
Tom Link, son of Lisa Link, served as a planning committee member on the project for 2.5 years.
“My mother would’ve been comfortable with the type of people that use the park, but a lot of people can’t deal with homelessness and poverty,” Link said.
Do you think a multilingual pole will turn things around?
How about an ATM machine? That's also part of the plan:
[T]he panhandling ordinance of the city states that panhandling is not permitted within 50 feet of an ATM machine, a common activity performed by the park dwellers.
“There is a perception that this plan is solely is to discourage panhandling, and I don’t support that motivation in any way,” said an opposing commission member. “Now we’re looking at an ATM that I was not thrilled with and a social engineering aspect that could be very controversial.”
A headline from Australia that baffled me a little. The "chips" are computer chips, and the prediction is that your portable electronic device — basically, your phone — will become your means of paying for everything.
This is all very nice, but my iPhone is already making me nervous. I won't leave my passwords in it for fear of theft. Can they please figure out how to make the thing work only when I'm touching it?
(And, yes, I know about passcodes, but: 1. I don't want to be bothered entering a code every time I use the phone, and 2. Thieves sometimes snatch the phone right out of your hand while you're using it.)
Okay. But, now, wait. $100 million. I forget. That's a lot of money, right? We're supposed to think that when we're supposed to think that. But at other times, $100 billion is hardly worth noticing.
Those holding 92 percent of the $6.9 billion in secured debt already approved a deal that would give bondholders $2 billion. Together, Indiana pension funds said they had $42 million invested in Chrysler, less than 1 percent of its secured debt. They paid about 43 cents on the dollar to acquire their share and, under Chrysler's plan, would get back 29 cents on the dollar.
The bankruptcy judge said, in effect, that these small players should not stand in the way of a deal that could save Chrysler and keep the company in business making cars and trucks.
So $42 million is chump change. And the rule of law? No time for that! It's an eeeemmmmerrrrrgenceeeeee.
Partly women fear being too aggressive and feisty - which can be viewed as negative in the workplace - but I think it's more complex. It is part of our conditioning that men equate money with status and power but women see job satisfaction as more of an issue.
Women are more likely than men to think, well, I'm good at my job, so I will be noticed and promoted, and I will eventually get a pay rise. Men, on the other hand, will go to their line manager and say they deserve a pay rise... now.
ADDED: Suddenly, I realize I need to just say to you: I think that you should value this blog and show your appreciation in dollars. There is a PayPal button in the sidebar to use whenever you want, and here it is, to be forthright and clear in a manly way: If you read every day, I recommend $20 a year. $5 or $10 would also be good. Or just toss in $1 whenever a post makes you feel you've really gotten something worthwhile.
