The destructive influence of the thoroughly corrupt Roy Cohn persists long after his death, in the person of Donald Trump. A subtext of this documentary is that Cohn was a “self-loathing Jew” who was ashamed of being gay.
Like Cohn, Beatles manager Brian Epstein was Jewish and gay. But what he helped to present to the world was as positive and happy as Trump is negative and hateful.
This cartoon by Paul Noth appeared in the 12/1/2014 issue of The New Yorker.
A preview of last night’s 60 Minutes profile of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
The complete segment can be seen here:
Will Intel use its $8.5 billion from the Chips and Science Act to do anything more than cover the company’s $7 billion loss in chip fabrication?
I’ve become cynical about government industrial policy. The reason why is the risk of picking winners — and losers — in a targeted market. Which happened with the HITECH Act of 2009 and hospital information system software. Epic Systems was the big winner, with its database vendor, Intersystems, also benefiting.
From 1971, before unemployment turned inflation into stagflation, it’s the towering John Kenneth Galbraith vs. the diminutive Milton Friedman. What economists seemed to miss at that time was everywhere around them. The peak of the Baby Boom generation was coming of age.
In his questioning of Galbraith, William A. Rusher, a William F. Buckley cohort, comes off as a major prick. Galbraith was wrong about the effectiveness of wage and price controls, which was the subject of my senior thesis for my BA in Economics. He was right about the effect of the deadly embrace between labor and big business on inflation. Galbraith also saw the possibility of inflation increasing despite rising unemployment, in defiance of the Phillips Curve.
Rusher obviously favored Friedman, who curiously discounted organized labor as an inflationary factor. It’s very interesting that 2% inflation was considered the ideal target even 50 years ago. Without saying he agreed with Galbraith about the Phillips Curve, Friedman correctly pointed out that low inflation isn’t necessarily inconsistent with full employment.
If I were a prospective juror in Trump’s trial over falsifying financial records to cover up his hush money to Stormy Daniels, could I be impartial? This is what I would say, when questioned by the lawyers.
Trump said in 2016 that he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose any voters. Based on that, I can see how the hush money might have been more about keeping Melania from learning about the affair.
When new hires seemed ready, they would go on a site visit with either myself or an experienced member of the group. The idea was the new person would participate in the technical work of a live field installation, and then conduct the training sessions with assistance from the experienced staffer.
The closer the customer was to the office the better, to keep travel expenses for two as low as possible. There were quite a few local customers back then, and those were ideal.
I preferred to trust an experienced member of the group, rather than going myself. It encouraged teamwork, while giving staffers who showed potential an opportunity to take a supervisory role.
The timeframe I’m talking about, by the way, was 1987, at the peak of the minicomputer era. In those days, an installation typically took an entire workweek, including travel. Leaving on a Monday and returning that Friday was the norm, with the more distant destinations requiring Sunday departures. Toronto? Leave Boston on a Monday morning. Seattle? Leave Sunday.
My group was always first in the installation schedule to go onsite at a customer. After the training visit a new staffer would fly solo and work alone. We were a System group, and we very rarely traveled with someone from an Application group in the company. This is an important point in Ted’s story, as will be explained later.
The upshot was that Ted did all right on his training visit. He managed the software installation and testing with minimal supervision, and he was a natural at conducting the training sessions. My boss and I were pleased with our new hire, and I forgot about my “little warning bell.”
