The Last Ephor

I got a call from a recuiter about a position at a bank. It's a BI job (since nearly all of my readers have seen my resume you know that's what I generally do). It was sold to me as a PM job by the recuiter but when I spoke o the client they billed it as more of a tactical role. When I expressed confusion they were confused and asked which role I'd like to be doing I told them that tactical was losing its luster and PM is where I want to be. "Interesting" they said. No indication of "good interesting" or "bad interesting". From there I had two more technical interviews with Infrastructure and BI Champion which makes me assume it was more toward the "good interesting" side of things. Things went well and then went quiet. That's usually not a good sign. I called the recruiter a few days later and he said they were interested and would meet my quote (huzzah!). But...(you knew that was coming didn't you?) they had to rew...

may be called that for another reason: American Digest points to a domestic field that holds between 200 and 400 beeeeelion barrels of oil. This will, of course give Leftists apoplexy. Look for immediate legislation declaring these lands protected because the Black Hills Newt uses it as a breeding ground or some sort of Native American Heritage Site or whatever conveniently environmental restriction will keep us from ever using it. This same group will simultaneously rail against our dependence on "foreign oil" without a hint of irony.

Guilded Age indeed! This would make for a mighty nice corporate retreat. I've been to a few of those and the nicest one was at Hartfeld so this one is a bit beyond my frame of reference. I can only imagine who is spending the scratch to have a retreat at one of these places. Not too shabby. (h/t: Sully

John Scalzi has written a very successful book called "Old Man's War." In this article, he pulls back the curtain to let his readers see about how much he earned last year doing so. I was surprised by his frankness but moreso by the mechanics of the business. I, of course, had this notion that once the book was in the galley, the writers were off on vacation while the royalty checks rolled in. Silly deluded me. Read the whole thing esp. if you're a scifi fan or aspiring writer (or both).

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe. It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs. Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks. Wow. Just wow. This would be the single biggest medical breakthrough in decades. Who would take up the production? There's be little to no margin and the cost of getting the drug to market would probably preclude a dir...

Free Beer!… And other perks CEOs get when they lose their jobs. I used to work in Corporate Compensation and even administered the executive comp system for a Fortune 100 bank. That was in 1999 when thing really started to get crazy. The analysts then knew that things were really going off the rails. Some of the banks in the league tables tried to constrain the explosion but were wildly unsuccessful. A big part of this is fueled by performance based pay. It used to be that CEO's drew large salaries and had lots of perks and some stock. Corporations found that they could defer the those salaries in favor of stock options and grants. That would then put the CEO's focus on stakeholder value which is his fiduciary duty anyway. The idea being, that if he's a large shareholder he will act to increase share value to benefit himself and subsequently, the other holders as well. Further, they found they could defer those stock awards and bonuses to the end of the CEO's te...