Couldn’t Help But Notice (091007)

In an editorial, the New London Day (requires free registration; will require subscription after seven days) tells us that absolutely nothing has been done in the area that was the subject of the Kelo v. New London (CT) Supreme Court decision — even though the final settlement agreement with the holdouts was over a year ago. Oh, and the first agenda item for the area where a perfectly fine neighborhood of houses, many over a century old, stood, is ….. (brace yourself) ….. building 80 units of ….. (I warned you to brace yourself) ….. rental housing.

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Ho Hum Hiring Headline:

11:53 AM September 7, 2007
Taiwan firm to expand, add 1,400 jobs

A Taiwan-based computer component manufacturing company plans to add 1,400 jobs over the next two years as part of an expansion in Plainfield, Gov. Mitch Daniels said today as he departed for a trade mission to Japan.

….. Daniels said FoxConn (Electronics) would make a multi-million dollar investment to its assembly facility following the company’s recent receipt of a significant order from a customer. The governor declined to identify the customer, but noted Foxconn is trying to get another major contact, which would entail more possible jobs.

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Here’s yet another article about companies making “high-risk workers” pay more for health-insurance coverage. In it, a privacy organization weighs in:

The National Workrights Institute says employers that assess surcharges are trying to control private behavior and amassing huge amounts of personal health data.

“It’s a backdoor approach to weeding out expensive employees,” legal director Jeremy Gruber said.

What if the evidence shows that people who are divorced have histories of higher health claims than those who are married? Or, as I suspect is the case, that those who engage in what is euphemistically referred to as “alternative lifestyles” have histories of higher health claims? If any company is successful in making those arguments stick and starts assessing higher medical costs on those affected employees, you’ll see a really quick 180-degree turn on the part of many who currently think all of this is a good idea.

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Some news about the $215 million Bureau of Workers’ Compensation scandal found in the Toledo Blade:

The head of a money management firm indicted in June in the loss of $215 million in Ohio injured-worker investment funds concealed the circumstances of his earlier departure from two bank jobs, the government contends.

Before Mark D. Lay of MDL Capital Management in Pittsburgh was hired to manage Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation funds, he lost nearly $1 million in foreign currency trading at Mellon Bank and nearly $800,000 at PNC Bank in 1988-89, prosecutors said in a July 26 filing that was the subject of a hearing Thursday in U.S. District Court.

Prosecutors said the personal background that Mr. Lay gave the bureau did not mention his jobs at the banks.

The information, the government said, “could have alerted the [bureau] to his tendency toward rogue behavior.”

Note, however, that it’s an Associated Press story. Blade reporters can’t be bothered covering a $215 million BWC loss, even though they did the saturation thing with Tom Noe and Coingate. Though it has taken years and has cost millions in opportunity costs (money that could have been made if invested elsewhere), it looks like the Noe money will nevertheless be recovered. The Lay money is gone forever.

I wonder what page of the Blade’s print edition this news appeared on? Betcha it wasn’t A1 above the fold.