I don't follow pop music, movies, celebrity gossip, or other nonsense. Plenty of other snarky sites cover those subjects. This is financial sector sarcasm, folks, plus whatever else I see about business that makes me shake my head.
Uncle Sam is finally overcoming local NIMBYism in renewable energy development with BOEM's first ever lease sale for an offshore wind farm. The main obstacle to these types of deals has typically been small groups of well-heeled locals who don't want their ocean views ruined. Let's play the world's smallest violin for these saps. I hope they have hissy fits the next time they settle into their breakfast nooks and peer out their bay windows at brand new wind farms. Smart energy policy eventually bets parochialism but you have to give it a few decades.
Michael Dell almost has his computer company back in hand but Carl Icahn isn't giving up his fight for control. I respect Mr. Icahn's track record but this is one deal he just needs to walk away from. He's already hurting the company by forcing Michael Dell's team to pay out an extraordinary dividend just to convince shareholders to approve the buyout. The company could have used that cash productively but oooohhhh nooooo, the buyout king just had to extract one more pound of flesh.
The Amazon guy bought the Beltway's main gossip rag. There has to be a hidden agenda. No way is an e-commerce visionary going to run a printed newspaper the old-fashioned way. Warren Buffett praises Jeff Bezos' business acumen even though Amazon's net income turned negative after three years of rising revenue. I suspect WaPo will soon be an online-only news outlet to compete with the Huffington Post, another overrated digital portal.
Did you know that you won't be getting much of a pension if you're a municipal government employee? Well, now you do, and you can thank chronic underfunding. City workers in Vallejo, Stockton, and Detroit can pioneer new odd jobs after hours that other government employees can copy nationwide. Of course, you would have known this if you'd been reading my blog for a couple of years.
Speaking of odd jobs, a few idiots who've been ripping off the San Francisco veterans' community really ought to find more honest lines of work. They'll need to earn cash to cover their legal fees.
