] Former Enron CEO Ken Lay, left, is led into Federal Court
] by law enforcment officers in Houston Thursday July 8,
] 2004.

Nothing like a good perp walk.

Yahoo! News - AP Photo - Ken Lay

] After the spectacular crashes of big-name Internet
] grocers in the late 1990s, the dream of a grand new wave
] of online food stores appeared to fizzle.
]
] But with intentionally meager fanfare, grocers have made
] Internet shopping available to tens of millions of
] consumers nationwide, and upcoming expansions will expand
] it to millions more.

I've always felt that online sale and scheduled delivery of groceries was a real no brainer. Webvan like ventures were simply expecting the demand to start off higher and to grow much faster. Usage of such services will continue to grow, but its not going to hit any kind of dot-com van fleet scale. Its a nice growing nitch market.

CNN.com - After flashy failures, online groceries quietly grow - May 19, 2004

] Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was taken to a hospital
] early Friday after several people called police saying he
] was pulling on their clothes and accusing them of being
] FBI agents, a police source told The Associated Press.
]
] Police found Skilling at 4 a.m. at the corner of Park
] Avenue and East 73rd Street and determined he might be an
] "emotionally disturbed person," said the source, speaking
] to the AP on condition of anonymity.

I've done the same thing, different section of town. Different reasons.

] Skilling was at two bars in Manhattan – American Trash
] and The Voodoo Lounge – where he allegedly ran up to
] patrons and pulled open their clothes, the source said.

I have not pulled anyone's clothes off, yet. I'd do that for different reasons as well.

If only someone got this on tape. I'd love to see Jeffery Skilling running around insanely drunk accusing people of being FBI agents. That would be some grade-a material. I'm sure this will be taken up as joke material by the late night TV hacks. They would be stupid not to have a go at this one..

Salon.com News | Enron's Skilling hospitalized after bar incidents

Our competitors know the secret of our sauce. But do we?

The Secret of Our Sauce

... an entire generation of lowered expectations ...

This author doesn't understand why we are ignoring the problem. If you look one article back in my MemeStream to "Creative Class War" you'll get the why to go along with this article's what.

Education Is No Protection

] "I really had been putting it off long enough; it was
] just that time," Frankel wrote Monday. "Launching Winamp
] 5 was a big goal of mine for the last nine months, and
] having it out in the wild made it that much easier to
] move on."

It sounded like he made his decision to leave right after AOL canned Waste on him.. His .plan at the time sounded like someone who's mind was already made up and wasn't going to change. One bitten, twice fuck you.. Or something like that.. However, much to his credit, Frankel followed through on Winamp 5 before leaving.

Frankel resigns from AOL, finally | CNET News.com

] PalJunction is a professionally designed website with the
] cocept of six degree of separation for social networking.
] This website allows you to meet the friends of your
] friend's! Allow users to extend and grow a huge network
] of people from the people they already know. Why meet a
] stranger on the net? Well use paljunction and meet a
] friend of your friend of your friend!

This is just too funny.. The market for Social Network sites really is maturing! No longer do we have to look to how much money Friendster or Tribe.net is getting to determine valuation. Nor do we have to wait for a few of them to make it public.. We are already in an oversupply situation, they are showing up on Ebay.

Hmm.. I'm getting pretty damn confident that I know some of what needs to happen here. I need to lurk a little bit less . . .

Ebay | UNIQUE ESTABLISHED WEB SITE wt 15000 Members

] The main recipients have been in the ball bearing, steel
] and other metal firms, as well as firms producing food,
] particularly pasta, and household items. The EU said
] information published so far indicates that the Bush
] administration is planning to distribute another $240
] million.

Hrm.. The way we have been addressing the steel trade deficit has been causing way too much tension. We need to find a way to keep these industries pumping, but not at the expense of trade. We should know this.

The other day, watching the Modern Marvels episode about the Bay Bridge, I remember hearing something about how the steel order for the project wound up being something like 10% of the United State's steel production volume during the period.

Anywhere we need a big bridge?

CNN.com - EU seeks sanctions against U.S. - Jan. 15, 2004

] We would achieve this balance by issuing what I will call
] Import Certificates...

This was a lot of information to digest. I too, am not at all savvy with my knowledge of macroeconomics. The best I can say is that this sounds like a pretty reasonable method of constructing a tariff that is both country and product neutral. This would not have been a reasonable idea several years ago, but given electronic markets I could see lively trade of these ICs Buffet suggests creating.

Trade deficits are something to be worried about.. However, I also don't necessarily think everything we "export" is something that can be laid out in a spreadsheet.

Jeremy meme'd something recently about outsourcing where he made a suggestion that in come cases we are making the choice between wealth and security, and there is a balance. There are countries we may find desirable to have a deficit with in order to drive positive growth in their local economy, hence positive change in their society. We do export freedom and democracy, and it comes back in many forms. There is a degree to which this is a hard^Wimpossible thing to fully account for..

This also makes me think of another meme Jeremy recommended about counter-insurgency.. There is a degree to which we are spending our wealth to dry up support for ideals and groups which lead to our security problems. Our wealth is one of the few things we can toss around to confront these asymmetric threats.

Buffet: America's growing trade deficit is selling the nation out from under us.

When CEO Michael Chasen thought about the other young people he knew who started companies when he did, he paused. Most of them aren't running companies anymore, he said. "I might be the only one."

I've been told that their original IPO plans were screwed up last year by the bad Interz0ne publicity.

Blackboard Looks Likely To Go Public