About Me 0016: 2010

Thursday 30 December 2010

How to Making Money

On the CBS broadcast of the 33rd annual Kennedy Center Honors, Oprah Winfrey was one of the honorees to receive recognition from her fellow celebrities. Oprah pal John Travolta and Barbara Walters provided some harmless remarks, but luckily comedian Chris Rock arrived on the scene to offer some uncomfortably hilarious jabs at both the “most powerful person in the world” and the guy sitting next to her (Barack Obama).

While making fun of Oprah always seems amusing (as Bill Maher recently demonstrated), it’s particularly exciting watching it be done to her face. Rock joked about how Oprah got Obama his job and also about how rich she is, claiming “she’s so rich, China owes her money!”

Unfortunately, just when Rock gets warmed up, making a sex joke about Oprah and fellow honoree Paul McCartney, out rushed Travolta and Walters to end the fun.

Watch the amusing clip from CBS below:

well i don't have much thought provoking opinion in regards to any of those 5 subjects. except Øbomba is a liar and has no balls. now i am very confused what to think about JA. i just read a long article this morning on NYT about the accusations these swedish woman made in regards to him and having sex with him. i think they sound like tiger's dumb doo girls. they wanted it so bad from this julian man, probably secretly wanted to get pregnant. then twist the whole story and condemn him. i am just sick of all this shit being news anyway.

yeah, let's just all be really merry around here like WB7 is every day. winky faces galore and so happy holidays. jeeze get real, it ain't so happy for 99% of people on this earth. why are you pretending to be so above this blight of criminals, destroying every piece of earth, wildlife, ocean beings and people's lives and future, happy holly dazing. america showing all this fake shit like lights and cutting down evergreen trees and putting stupid fake ornaments and lights in each window. it is a BIG waste of energy, that gets EXCEL energy wealthy and those MOFO ceo's billions. christ someone here in boulder put up a HUGE light bulb star on flagstaff mt. it looks hideous. stars don't look like this, nor made of fake stupid incandescent light bulbs.

i don't celebrate christMASS, i get through it.

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Warren Buffett boosts Iowa wind | Green Tech - CNET News

Berkshire Hathaway-owned subsidiary goes big for wind in Iowa, inks deal with Siemens as turbine provider. Read this blog post by Candace Lombardi on Green Tech.

Windows Phone Marketplace hits 5000 Apps and is Cracked

There's been good news and bad for Microsoft this week. The good news is that the number of apps available in the new Windows Phone marketplace has been growing steadily since October and has now passed the 5000 mark. ...

Kidney Donation Set as Condition of Miss. Sisters - AOL News

Gov. Haley Barbour has pardoned Gladys and Jamie Scott, who were each serving life sentences for an $11 armed robbery. But to be released, Gladys, 36, must donate a kidney to her 38-year-old sister, Jamie, who requires dialysis and ...

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Tuesday 28 December 2010

Whos Making Money

...hopelessly outgunned presidential campaign as if it was a business, not even spending more money than he had in hand. C'mon now, how laughable is that in this day and age in modern America that someone who wants to run the federal government should live within his own campaign means? Just like normal people who live on a real budget with no ability to vote themselves a pay raise and a higher debt ceiling when no one is watching C-SPAN!

When the ultimate Democratic winner, in league with the extraordinary gentleman Harry Reid and the tough-talking San Francisco grandma who's House speaker, has decided to spend a gazillion more dollars than any non-federal calculator has digits to display.

These people, for Nancy's sake, are already spending the income taxes of the unborn grandchildren of those 4,000 babies that Paul delivered. A shocking realization that may be helping to fuel the recent re-examination of Ron Paul, who never met a federal dollar that needed spending -- unless it was going back to his district near Houston.

Ron Paul came within something like 1,000 delegates of catching John McCain for the Republican nomination in St. Paul. But when he finally gave up, Paul still had about $5 million left over. He's been investing it traveling around the country to speak and helping like-minded RFR's (Republicans For Real) organize all over. And, who knows, maybe sell a few books.

But now, just as his fierce supporters fearlessly predicted all along, many in American politics are coming around to think that maybe RP's crazy ideas, for example, of auditing and controlling the Federal Reserve, are maybe not quite so crazy.

Our news colleague in Washington, Don Lee, details the sea-change in opinion in a comprehensive look at the old guy's rebirth for weekend print editions, which we're sharing here this morning as a distinguished guest post for Ticket readers around the world.

And for any surviving Ron Paulites, who won't dare leave their typically snippy comments below because that would require them acknowledging that their favorite fiction about a MSM conspiracy to ignore the old guy is fiction.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Because no federal funds are involved, Ron Paul would want you to click here for Twitter alerts of each new Ticket item. Or follow us @latimestot. Or join us over here on The Ticket's new Facebook FAN page.

Here's Lee's reported news item:

For three decades, Texas congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul's extreme brand of libertarian economics consigned him to the far fringes even among conservatives. Not a few times, his views put him on the losing end of 434-1 votes on Capitol Hill.

No longer. With the economy still struggling and political divisions deepening, Paul's ideas not only are gaining a wider audience but also are helping to shape a potentially historic battle over economic policy -- a struggle that will affect everything including jobs, growth and the nation's place in the global economy.

Already, Paul's long-derided proposal to give Congress supervisory power over the traditionally independent Federal Reserve appears to be on its way to becoming law.

His warnings on deficits and inflation are now Republican mantras.

And with this year's congressional election campaign looming, the Texas congressman's deep-seated distrust of activist government has helped fuel protests such as the tea-party movement, harden partisan divisions in Washington and stoke public fears about federal spending and the deficit.

"People are wondering what went wrong. And they're not happy with what the....

....government is offering up," said James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, offering an explanation for why seemingly wonkish arguments over interest rate policy and the money supply are spilling over onto ordinary Americans.

Some of Paul's most extreme views are still beyond the pale for most economists. Despite the eroding value of the dollar, no one expects the U.S. to return to the gold standard, as Paul advocates; most economists think that could wreck the economy.

In their less drastic forms, however, Paul's ideas are being welcomed by conservatives and viewed with foreboding by liberals. For conservatives, runaway inflation constitutes the biggest potential threat to the nation's future. Liberals worry that cutting back stimulus efforts too soon could slow or even halt the current recovery.

The debate over that question -- what the basic thrust of U.S. economic policy should be -- is likely to dominate the coming elections and Washington policymaking.

And so far, Paul and his fellow conservatives are on the offensive. President Obama and congressional Democrats are repeatedly pledging not to increase the deficit and to begin cutting back soon.

"I think we're going to be in for more revival of fiscal responsibility," said William Niskanen of the Cato Institute, who headed the Council of Economic Advisors under President Reagan.

Niskanen sees the Texas Republican's increasing influence as stemming from the continued economic weakness. "To this extent, Ron Paul gains voice," he said.

Paul would go a lot further in cutting back the government's role than even free-marketers like Niskanen support. If Paul had it his way, for instance, he would do away with the Fed entirely. In his bestselling book "End the Fed," he lambasted the central bank as an "immoral, unconstitutional . . . tool of tyrannical government."

Such rhetoric might once have been dismissed as extremism.

But Paul's anti-Fed message has drawn broad support because of the central bank's failure to restrain the flood of cheap money and excessive risk-taking in the years leading up to the financial crisis.

It has stirred rallies on college campuses and supportive commentaries from Wall Street pundits. More than 300 representatives in Congress have embraced Paul's ideas for reining in the Fed.

The response "is even more than I ever dreamed," Paul said in an interview, reminiscing about one evening during his 2008 White House run when University of Michigan students chanted "End the Fed" and burned dollar bills.

Paul, a skinny 74-year-old with a hangdog expression, understands that historical circumstances have thrust his ideas to the fore. "An intellectual fight is going on," he said.

Paul traces his economic views to his frugal upbringing in Pittsburgh at the tail end of the Depression. He saved pennies from delivering newspapers and helping out his father's small dairy business.

And his first economics class at Gettysburg College was an eye-opener, Paul said. When a professor explained how banks keep only a tiny part of their deposits on hand and earn money by lending out the rest, Paul discovered one of the "tricks" of the financial system.

Beyond that, Paul's ideas are grounded in the work of economic thinkers from an earlier era who focused on problems similar to those besetting the U.S. today.

In particular, Paul is a disciple of Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian theorist born at the end of the 19th century who contended that government intervention in an economy would fail because free markets were better at allocating resources and fueling growth.

Having lived through Germany's devastating hyperinflation in the early 1920s, which helped pave the way for Hitler, Mises wrote long before the Great Depression that over-generous credit policies would encourage excessive borrowing, creating a boom and then a bust.

Mises' ideas became central to what is known as the Austrian School of economics, which emphasized tight controls on credit and money supply, a strategy that discouraged financial ups and downs but tended to slow growth.

By 1940, when Mises arrived in America, most Western economists had embraced the competing theories of Britain's John Maynard Keynes, who called for government to stimulate the economy by spending on infrastructure and cutting interest rates.

Obama has largely followed the Keynesian script, as President George W. Bush did when the economic crisis broke.

Paul's once-lonely espousal of the Austrian School's ideas has gotten new impetus from conservative economists and Republican political strategists.

"A lot of good ideas were shoved aside because of the Depression and the rise of the Keynesian view of the world," said George Selgin, an economics professor at the University of Georgia.

Paul contends that Austrian economics explains the most recent financial meltdown: "It says if you inflate too much, if you have no restraint on monetary authorities, you're going to bring on a crisis." Now, Paul says, administration policies are leading the country toward disaster.

Selgin and many mainstream economists agree that pumping too much money into the economy can lead to trouble, but they say Paul goes too far.

In the 1930s, say Selgin and many other economists, including Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the U.S. economy began pulling out of the Depression thanks to federal easing of monetary policy.

The economy tipped back into depression after the reins were tightened too soon.

"In this aspect of the monetary system, he's just blown it," Selgin said of Paul.

However, like Mises, whose portrait hangs on his Washington office wall, Paul is intransigent, and that has earned him an ardent following.

"His views are strong and hardheaded, but you've got to stand firm or you'll get blown over in this world," said Mark Skousen, editor of the newsletter Forecasts & Strategies and a former economics professor at Columbia University.

-- Don Lee

Photo: Larry Downing / Reuters; Orlin Wagner / Associated Press; Associated Press (Paul argues with Mike Huckabee in a GOP primary debate).

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/> [style="text-decoration: underline;">Ed. note: This post is authored by Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney of Kinney Recruiting, sponsor of the Asia Chronicles. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates and partners in Asia than any other firm in the past four years. You can reach them by email: asia at kinneyrecruiting dot com.]

Evan here. If you are a transactional associate at a top US firm and your name happens to be of Asian origin, especially of Chinese background, then you are probably receiving multiple cold calls per day from recruiters. After all the Asia lateral biglaw markets, especially HK / China are red hot now and it is of course very easy to compile a list of top US firm associates with Asian names.

Keep in mind that there can be very negative consequences in giving control of such an important career move and job search to someone calling you out of the blue (no matter how many times they may call). We often get calls from very well qualified US associates with sad tales of at worst their resume being plastered unauthorized all over China or other Asia markets; or at best only authorized submissions (thankfully) but realizing their recruiter has done little more than emailing their resume to begin with and is unresponsive for weeks.

It is important to note that your resume is a very valuable commodity to recruiters calling you. When you are placed at a law firm, the recruiter who submitted your resume is typically paid (by the law firm) 25 to 30% of your starting base salary. Thus, the recruiters cold-calling you have a big incentive to get a hold of your resume and email it to law firms, with or without your authorization (believe it or not, some biglaw recruiters in Asia are known to be even less ethical than the worst of the lot in the US). Once your resume has been submitted to a law firm, the recruiter who did so “owns” your candidacy there for at least six months. Further, when your resume has been submitted without your authorization, it will take an affidavit from you to the target firm explaining such for the submission to be reversed (and basically that is you explaining to the firm that you did not know you even applied there, which can of course cool off any motivation of that firm to continue to want to interview you, and the unethical recruiter is counting on you to thus not take that route).

We try to think that a lot of recruiters do not take such unethical steps, but please note that even the most well-intentioned recruiters trying to break into the Asia markets are more often than not woefully inexperienced with such lateral placements (and even most of those with some experience have never been more than resume pushers).id="more-49277">

We recommend that you make sure you are represented by a recruiter who is willing and able (has the experience necessary in your target market) to act as your agent, instead of just someone who is only able and / or willing to email your resume to firms. You should be pro-actively looking for an agent (we recommend interviewing prospective agent / recruiters months before you start your search when possible), not simply handing your search over to a headhunter that happens to be calling with the earth shattering news that they know, for example, of firms in China that have openings for Mandarin fluent US associates in cap markets and M&A (almost every top US and UK firm in HK / China has such openings), or that the sky is blue.

The question you should be asking is not whether there are openings and whether you would be very competitive candidate for such spots (yes and yes), but whether the person calling you is best suited for representing you.

At the very least, make sure the recruiter cold-calling you can:

a) Provide at minimum 10 references of US associates they have actually placed in your target market in Asia (I could easily provide 50, as 10 is a very small and unimpressive number, but should be a minimum guideline to figure out if the recruiter actually has a history of successfully placing US associates in your target market); and

b) Is able to discuss in great detail each roles you may consider targeting, including details regarding the relevant partners involved (does the recruiter even have a business relationship with the particular partners making the hire), including their personality, practice area, and plans for growth. I usually refer to this as the “3 hour rule”, in that if you get the impression that the recruiter could not talk non-stop about your target market for about 3 hours, then move on to the next recruiter (does not mean you actually have to listen to them for 3 hours).

It can be a lengthy process to find the right fit lateral spot in Asia, especially if you are moving from the US. It is much more complex than simply moving down the street to another big office. Instead you are moving to a much smaller office, smaller group, a place where you will have a lot more responsibilities with clients and where your personality fit with your primary supervising partner will be key (not only for progression at your new firm, but also for the foundation of your career in your target Asian market).

It is also a very exciting move and you deserve to be working with an agent / recruiter (rather than headhunter / recruiter) who is excited about helping you and the firms / partners he is recruiting for in Asia; who is excited to be invested in your career for the long-term; not focused on a recruiting fee (is willing to give advice not corresponding with recruiter being paid if that is the best advice); and who is capable (actual long-term experience with the market and similar lateral moves) of giving you the best advice and guidance.

Our team at Kinney can of course do a great job for you on an Asia job search. We know a handful of recruiters outside our recruiting firm as well whom we can recommend and are happy to do so. If unfortunately you have gone down the road already of being represented by a headhunter (instead of an agent) and you need advice, feel free to get in touch with us as well. While we can’t represent you at your target firms in such situations (remember, your headhunter already “owns” your candidacy at any firm contacted for at least 6 months), we are happy to give you advice and guidance regarding job search strategy and which offer to take (we have helped numerous US associates in such situations, including helping them negotiate their comp packages).

Thursday 30 December 2010

Tuesday 28 December 2010

Thursday 23 December 2010

Wednesday 8 December 2010

Tuesday 7 December 2010