Bizzy’s AM Coffee Biz-Econ-Life Links (081806)

Free Links:

• I glossed over this in my AM Post on Wednesday (5th item at link), but the Dell battery recall is yet another big black eye for the company that in its heyday was run by a guy (Akio Morita) who wrote co-authored an in-your-face business book essay called “The Japan That Can Say No.” (The book of the same title was solely authored by Shintaro Ishihara). That company, Sony, has since turned into the gang that can’t shoot straight. The battery recal may cost Sony as much as $430 million. Posts on last year’s rootkit disaster, where Sony’s CD copy-protection scheme caused computers to become vulnerable to viruses and malware, are here, here, and here.

• Wrong Place, Wrong Time:
  

  A man attempting to rob City Pawn decided that wasn’t such a good idea when he discovered the clerk at the shop happened to be putting away a gun at the time.

  Dumb luck you might call it, the owner of the shop here happened to be putting his guns in the glass case right as the robbers busted in. So he turned the tables on them.

  ….. A few minutes after he opened his store some unwelcome customers walked in; three men intent on robbing the place.

  ….. Marinos says they, “pulled out the gun, cocked it, pointed it at me.”

  Strange coincidence, right then, Bill was pulling out his guns for sale and putting them in the case. He raised the one in his hand and pointed right back at the burglar.

  Marinos says the lead robber swore, “and ran out the door.”

  He caught the robbers completely off-guard. One hardly made it over the threshold of the door before he was spun around and headed back out.

  No word on whether Marinos’ gun was actually loaded.

• How much of this isn’t getting caught? (HT Large Bill) –
  

  If there’s one thing Donovan Riley apparently learned during his time in Chicago, it was “Vote early and often.”

  Riley, 69, the former CEO of the University of Illinois Medical Center and a former law professor at Loyola University, is running for a state senate seat in Milwaukee.

  On Nov. 7, 2000, the day of the big election between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Riley appeared at the polling place in Oconomowac, Wis., where he had registered to vote just the day before, voting records show. His ex-wife owned a home there.

  “Then he drove down to Chicago where he was already registered and he voted again,” said Michael Crooks, a Wisconsin attorney who filed a complaint against Riley with Wisconsin election officials. “This is about as blatant as it gets.”

  Large Bill points to the usual failure to report Riley’s party affiliation (If you have to ask, you haven’t been paying attention; for newbies, it’s Democrat).

  Riley got caught because he was running for office (there has to be a stronger word than chutzpah for this). How many thousands of people who don’t aspire to office but are nevertheless politically active (and ethically challenged) are engaged in this? It’s long past time for a cross-check and scrubbing of interstate and intrastate voter-registration databases, with prosecutions for those proven to have voted in multiple jurisdictions.

• The SEC’s recently announced Sarbanes Oxley breaks for small companies (found first at Ohio Society of CPAs web site) are mostly deferrals, and not eliminations, of onerous requirements that shouldn’t exist, and that will either cause more smaller companies to stay private, force them to look overseas for public-equity funding, or both. The fact that newly-public companies can wait a bit until their first “full SarBox” annual cycle begins is the one genuine improvement, but nowhere near enough.

• If you would like to know exactly what earmark/pork projects have been slated for your area – A left-leaning foundation (HT Instapundit sans link) has posted a great US map (HT Porkopolis) that can show you just that. It’s good to see that controlling earmarks/pork has at least some bipartisan appeal.

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UPDATE: The first item above for Sony was corrected to reflect that Morita co-wrote a essay called “The Japan That Can Say No,” but was not the author of the book by the same name. Thanks to commenter Joel at Far Outliers for the correction.