The Games The Duds Play In The White House

That Bill Clinton is one popular Dud.

America Loves Its DUDS!

Listen to them.

They are practically cheering on Bill Clinton every day.

THE DUDS RULE AMERICA!










http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=1348

The American Presidency Project

William J. Clinton

XLII President of the United States: 1993 - 2001

Remarks at a Reception for Hillary Clinton in New York City

September 11, 2000


if people play games










From 3/16/1991 ( my first successful major test of my ultraspace matter transportation device as Kerry Wayne Burgess the successful Ph.D. graduate Columbia South Carolina ) To 9/11/2000 is 3467 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 5/1/1975 ( the US SEC deregulated brokerage commissions ) is 3467 days



From 1/9/1962 ( John Kennedy - Remarks to the Vienna Choir Boys ) To 11/18/1996 ( premiere US film "Star Trek: First Contact" ) is 12732 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 9/11/2000 is 12732 days



From 9/11/2000 To 9/11/2001 ( the scheduled terrorist attack by force of violence to destroy the New York City World Trade Center and the Headquarters of the United States Department of Defense "The Pentagon" by Bill Gates-Microsoft-Corbis-George Bush the cowardly violent criminal with massive fatalities and destruction ) is 365 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 11/2/1966 ( David Schwimmer ) is 365 days



From 1/18/1991 ( premiere US film "Flight of the Intruder" ) To 9/11/2000 is 3524 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 6/27/1975 ( premiere US TV movie "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" ) is 3524 days


http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/12/nyregion/congressman-gets-help-of-president.html

The New York Times


Congressman Gets Help Of President

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: September 12, 2000

DANBURY, Conn., Sept. 11— President Clinton attended a fund-raiser and political rally here today to support the re-election campaign of Representative James H. Maloney, hoping to tip the scales in a tight Congressional race that has drawn intense interest from both major parties nationally.

In a rematch of the 1998 campaign, Mr. Maloney, a two-term incumbent Democrat, is being challenged by Mark Nielsen, a Republican lawyer and former state legislator. Two years ago, Mr. Nielsen came within 2,400 votes of unseating Mr. Maloney in one of the country's closest races.

At a luncheon that raised more than $200,000 for the Maloney campaign and at the rally later on the campus of Western Connecticut State University here, Mr. Clinton warmly embraced Mr. Maloney, presenting him as part of a Democratic package for continued prosperity.

''You need Al Gore, Joe Lieberman and Jim Maloney,'' he told more than 3,000 people who filled an outdoor amphitheater for the rally. Mr. Clinton, who campaigned earlier in the day in Westchester County for his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the New York Senate race, also included her in that package.

''Thanks for the Hillary sign back there,'' he told someone in the Danbury crowd as he prepared to leave the stage. ''If you get to New York, help her.''










http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=flight-of-the-intruder

Springfield! Springfield!


Flight Of The Intruder (1991)


Well, today's your lucky day. The only A-6B qualified crew, Jackson and Greeves, were scrubbed because they didn't have a day trap. So your BN volunteered you for SAM suppression. Ever pull Ironhand duty? You fly the B?

No. Wait a minute. I'm not B qualified. I've never even sat in the damn thing.

Well, it's a good thing Mr. Cole has. Besides, you're all we got.










http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=1348

The American Presidency Project

William J. Clinton

XLII President of the United States: 1993 - 2001

Remarks at a Reception for Hillary Clinton in New York City

September 11, 2000


And I realize that so many times, people like me in positions of responsibility just mess it up for them, if people play games with power and create illusions in the minds of people about false values










http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/28/business/is-wall-street-ready-for-mayday-2.html?pagewanted=all

The New York Times


IS WALL STREET READY FOR MAYDAY 2?

By LESLIE WAYNE

Published: April 28, 1985

MAY 1, 1975. The day that changed Wall Street forever. Mayday.

At precisely 10 A.M. that Thursday, deregulation came to Wall Street. Fixed brokerage commissions were abolished and, from that, venerable houses crumbled and inestimable fortunes rose. Money flowed into Wall Street on a scale not known before, creating huge financial powerhouses. If someone had fallen asleep on Mayday, only to wake on its 10th anniversary this week, he would find a restructured Wall Street where the rules of the jungle prevail as never before, and only the fittest have survived.

It is a Wall Street now dominated by the very big and, in the view of many, headed to be bigger yet. Competition has demanded strength, and strength on Wall Street is measured in capital. Those with the will and the money expanded into new products and new services; those that failed to adapt have fallen by the wayside. Once-proud names like Weeks, Hutchins, Shields and Faulkner no longer grace Wall Street pediments. In their place are such newcomers as Sears, Roebuck, American Express and Prudential Insurance.

And, there's a new breed of broker in the land. The discount broker. Undercutting full-service houses like Merrill Lynch or Dean Witter, these upstart competitors have established a secure base and are luring away valued retail customers with low-cost, no-frills stock trading. Discount brokers have become formidable foes that have forced the giants to cut fees and to fight harder for their market.

For the investment firms that trade big blocks of stocks for institutional clients - pension funds, mutual funds and insurance companies - Mayday has meant new competition, too. And for the institutional firms that do the bulk of the nation's stock trades, Mayday, Part Two, is about to unfold. Since Mayday, institutional rates have plummeted from 25 cents a share to 8 cents a share and institutional brokers say they cannot make money at that level. There is much confusion over what should be done - and some say they may even abandon the business entirely. Indeed, the only thing clear is that something is about to crack.

''Mayday of 1975 took the easy profit out of simply having a stock exchange franchise,'' said George L. Ball Jr., chief executive of Prudential-Bache Securities Inc. Added Laszlo Birinyi, a brokerage industry analyst for Salomon Brothers: ''Mayday has made the market more predatory. You don't have the subsidies of the fee structure, which allowed the weak sisters to maintain positions just because they were members of the club.''

Before Mayday, brokerage commissions were fixed by the New York Stock Exchange, based on a multi-tiered pricing schedule that had many distortions and loopholes. But as institutions sought to evade the high tariff, the system crumbled and the Securities and Exchange Commission did the inevitable. It unfixed commissions and fired the opening volley of deregulation. This has been good news for institutional investors, who have benefited from plummeting brokerage rates, and as trading volume rose, new life came to the New York Stock Exchange. But it has been bad news for the small investor, who has seen rates go from a pre-Mayday average of 30 cents a share to about 40 to 42 cents a share at full service brokerage firms today.

And Mayday brought risk to an industry that was once the coddled child of regulation and forever altered the economics of Wall Street's core business, the buying and selling of stocks. Competition, especially for institutional trades, took the fat out of most stock commissions and made equity trading a break-even business, at best, and a money-loser for many. Indeed, the brokering of stocks is becoming a shrinking activity as more firms scramble for new lines of business to take up the slack. In 1975, for instance, brokerage commissions accounted for nearly 50 percent of all Wall Street revenues; by the end of 1984, the Securities Industry Association estimates that this had fallen to less than 23 percent.

To cope with this turbulent environment, many brokerage firms traded their independence for cash, selling out to large public corporations that can raise cash from millions of shareholders. As a result, the size of Wall Street's capital base has swelled from $3.4 billion at the end of 1975 to $16.8 billion at the end of last year - from retained profits and from the deep pockets of the new parents. And much of this has been used to finance new ventures. Whether it is zero coupon bonds or cash management accounts, stock index options or CATS and TIGRS, Wall Street has invented all sorts of new products to grab the investor's dollar and to provide itself with new financial instruments to hedge against the increasing risk.

''Mayday made us earn our rights of survival,'' said Benjamin F. Edwards 3d, chief executive of A.G. Edwards & Sons, a St. Louis brokerage house. ''Mayday made us make decisions and take mangement more seriously.'' Added Sanford I. Weill, president of the American Express Company: ''What happened was good. Wall Street broadened its understanding of a whole array of products. You have high basic fixed costs and a volatile income source. Broadening the product line has been good for the customer and for the industry.''

AND Mayday has been very good for some on Wall Street who became richer than their wildest expectations. These are the lucky partners of privately held firms who became millionaires many, many times over when their firms were sold to large public companies, like Phibro or Equitable Life. Those days are not likely to be repeated as the number of major private firms on Wall Street that are potential sales has diminished; Only a handful, like Goldman, Sachs and Kidder, Peabody, remain.

''You've seen wealth formation on Wall Street that you won't see again,'' said John Phelan, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. ''A small number of people made an incredible amount of money.''

It is on the institutional front where the next battle of Mayday should be fought. And it is certainly a big battleground. Big block trades dominate the stock market. The institutions themselves account for 60 to 65 percent of all trading on the Big Board, while big investment houses trading with their own money - a growing form of institutional representation - account for another 25 to 30 percent of volume.

Investment banking houses say they cannot make money, or much money, at current institutional rates. In fact, many view the institutional equity business as a loss-leader - a way of building a distribution network of institutional buyers willing to buy the securities, usually at very profitable markups, that come out of an investment house's corporate finance department.

''After Mayday, institutional rates came down like a stone,'' said James Balog, senior executive vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. ''And the firms are finding that there's no money in being a full service broker to institutions at 6 cents a share.'' Added Richard H. Jenrette, vice chairman of Equitable Life and former chief executive of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc.: ''If you've got volume, you can make pretty good money at 8 cents a share. But if the volume falls to 50 million shares a day, you are going to lose money.''

Right now, the institutional equity business is in a three-way struggle. Institutional buyers and sellers - the pension funds, mutual funds and insurance companies that have hired outside professional money managers to invest their billions - are pushing for still lower rates. Upstart ''third-party'' discount houses are sprinting into the fray. And, major investment houses say rates have been driven so low that they are beginning to discuss the once-unthinkable proposition of closing their doors as a broker to others and trading stocks only for their own portfolio.

WHAT has brought this discussion to the forefront is the rise of ''third-party'' brokers, akin to the discounters on the retail side, who offer to do routine institutional trades at, essentially, rock-bottom prices. The names of these ''third-party'' brokers are not well known outside Wall Street - the biggest are Rochdale Securities, the Abel/Noser Corporation and Autranet - but they send shudders up spines at the big full-service houses like Goldman, Salomon, Morgan and First Boston.

Third-party brokers often work in a circuitous way. They will get the same 8 cents a share from an institution to execute a stock trade. But the broker returns a portion of this fee, perhaps half, either as a cash rebate to the pension fund or in the form of goods and services to the pension fund's money manager. For instance, a third-party broker might pick up the tab for costly portfolio analyses or economic forecasting that the pension fund manager needs to do his job. In some cases, the rebates have become somewhat more controversial. Third-party brokers have used the rebate to pay for investment junkets to exotic locales for the pension fund owners or its money managers, a practice that has caused many raised eyebrows on Wall Street.

And, third-party brokers have been putting a wedge between the pension funds and the managers hired by the pension fund to invest its billions. The money manager has historically decided which investment house to use. But now, third-party brokers have been peddling their services directly to the pension fund. The offer of a direct cash rebate to the pension fund - or to the corporation or union that set it up - has encouraged many funds to tell their money managers to go to third-party brokers rather than full-service firms.

''Our primary client is the pension fund sponsor,'' said Eugene A. Noser Jr. president of the Abel/Noser Corporation, which does trades as low as 1.5 cents a share. ''The pension fund sponsor is interested in good execution at a low rate. He doesn't want to pay for bad execution and he doesn't want to pay for some of the life styles that Wall Street has become accustomed to.''

Currently, institutional commission rates are about 8 cents a share from most firms, although they can range from 7 to 10 cents depending on the institution and competitive pressures. The fee is generally a flat one, the same regardless of whether the trade is easy or difficult to execute.

An easy trade is one in which the firm acts only as a middleman and does not risk any of its own money to get the trade done. The most common example is the ease with which a firm can trade 10,000 shares of A.T.&T. Generally, moments after the seller contacts the firm, the firm most likely whisks the shares into the portfolio of a buyer, and then collects a fee for this minimal effort. The job is easy because there are always enough buyers and sellers of A.T.&T. in the marketplace.

A difficult trade is one in which the firm often has to put up its own money. In this case, the firm takes the shares from the institutional seller - 90,000 shares of a stock, for instance - but finds a buyer for only 80,000 of them. As a result, if the firm wants the business, it must buy the remaining 10,000 shares itself and keep them in its own portfolio until it can unload them - usually at a loss.

Institutions usually get the same commission for easy and hard trades: The reasoning is that the easy money from simple trades will offset the high costs and potential risks of the hard trade. This is what is known as an unbundled approach to fees and, as part of that package, full-service houses throw in stock research to institutional clients to help them make investment decisions.

But, the full-service firms say the third-party brokers have made life difficult for them by skimming off easy trades and leaving them with the hard trades. They say their cost structure makes them unable to compete on price: Because they do so many hard trades, they risk more of their own money, and they have an expensive distribution network of high-paid salesmen plus electronic links to all stock exchanges. And now they are fighting back.

Goldman, Sachs & Company and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette recently commissioned an independent study that concluded the third-party brokers do not get the institutional clients the best ''execution,'' or price, in the marketplace. It also said that whatever institutions may save in commissions is more than offset by poor execution - having to pay more for a stock it is buying or getting less for a stock it is selling. And this is true even on easy trades, the report said.

According to the study - now being distributed to institutional money managers and pension funds - institutions lose, on average, about 4 cents a share from poor execution when using a third-party broker instead of a full-service firm. The exact amount varies according to the type of trade, but the study found that easy trades suffered from the poorest execution: It found that institutions lost about 9.7 cents a share on easy trades.

''We and Goldman are both seeing less and less of the really easy trades and instead we are working more on the hard trades and the capital-intensive trades,'' said Robert M. Dewey Jr., managing director of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. ''We're getting the high-cost trades. I had always suspected poor execution on all trades from third-party brokers. But this study now shows it.''

SEVERAL options are now before the industry. Some propose that institutional brokerage commissions should be further unbundled - that the firms should charge more for hard trades and less for easy ones. Already, some institutional clients have moved in this direction, paying varying amounts for different trades.

''We believe that commissions ought to be fully negotiated in each and every trade,'' said Joseph S. DiMartino, president of the Dreyfus Corporation. ''A lot of people are focusing on the lowest commission. But what they are missing is the best execution.''

Others are opposed to unbundling. They say the line between an easy, moderate and difficult trade is often fuzzy. They wonder how to price such ancillary services as research that are now included in the bundled package. And they question whether institutional clients who say they like the ease of paying a single fee will be willing to negotiate every commission - and, at what price.

''If institutions would pay 5 cents for easy trades, they are not going to want to pay 14 cents for hard ones,'' said Donaldson's Mr. Dewey. ''They might pay 9 cents, but they are not accustomed to big spreads.''

Some say a way out might be for the firms to close shop as a broker to clients and trade solely for their own account. This takes more capital and entails more risk, but can bring higher returns. Instead of being a middleman for institutions and collecting a fee for this effort, investment houses would act more like a dealer of securities, earning money on the spread between buying and selling. The investment house would buy stocks when it feels like buying, sell them when it feels like selling and - with luck, would make money on the difference.

''If there's no money to be made, I'll trade stocks that I want to trade,'' said Drexel's Mr. Balog. ''We'll use our own research more for the support of the firm and if we're smart, we'll make money.'' Added Richard B. Fisher, president of Morgan Stanley: ''At some point the trading firms will say: 'That's it.' '' He predicts that once the change takes place, if it does, all of Wall Street will move in lock step - ''it won't be gradual.''

This would be a major change on Wall Street and one that would pit institutional clients against institutional brokers. Many say it would lift transaction costs, provide less of a market for unpopular stocks and pricing would be more scattershot.

''I don't want to get into a contest with my brokers,'' said Austin George, head of the trading department at T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund company. ''And if he's trading for himself, he's not going to be dedicated to move heaven and earth to keep me happy. I hear about this possibility and I worry about it.''

THESE unresolved issues on the institutional side have already been played out on the retail side of the business. For retail houses, Mayday not only changed rates; it also changed the composition of stock ownership in a way that hurt the big retail houses. Mayday accelerated the trend toward greater institutional ownership of stocks by making it cheaper to trade and helped push the little guy out of the market.

It became cheaper for the institutions to trade, and trade they did. The short-term swings caused greater stock price fluctuations - volatility, in stock traders' parlance - which made the stock market less of a sure bet and more of a roller-coaster ride. This caused the small investor, who typically holds stocks for a longer term than institutions, to flee to the more stable ground of fixed-income investments, further undermining the market's stability. Individuals now account for a mere 10 percent of all shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, down from 31.1 percent before Mayday.

''When you cut transaction costs, you can have the big institutions blowing in and out of the stocks for pennies,'' said Michael Thomas, a writer and former investment banker. ''It's made it cheaper for institutions to buy in size and that has helped drive the retail customer out of the market and has hurt any firm highly dependent on retail customers.''

It is more than a shrinking market, though. The biggest irritant to big retail houses has been the discounters, which now command 20 percent of the market. Discounters are the children of Mayday: They came into being in the late 1970's and matured in the 1980's. Unlike big firms, they do not have high-priced salesmen offering investment advice, only low commission rates. Not surprisingly, they have lured the full-service firm's best customer - the sophisticated, active trader.

In the near term, it is likely that the lines will blur between discounters and full-service firms. Like the full-service firms, discounters are now offering a broad array of products - from cash management- type accounts, to I.R.A.'s to money market funds. Similarly, many full-service firms are spawning two tiers of service - account executives who offer advice and service representatives who just take orders. Full-service firms have also been forced to discount to their better customers to keep them in the fold.

''We're moving upstream,'' said Hugo W. Quackenbush, a senior vice president at Charles Schwab & Company. ''And they are coming downstream. You will probably see the big brokerage firms get bigger and further consolidation among the smaller ones. It will also become more competitive to stay in business.''

And that competition has meant a lot for the retail business. It has forced internal efficiencies on full-service giants; it has resulted in more products and services for retail customers, whether they wanted them or not. That, many say, is good. ''The customer has benefited,'' said Donald B. Marron, chief executive of Paine Webber Inc. ''And it's brought a marketing focus the industry didn't have before.''

Whether a firm does retail or institutional trades, the trend toward bigness should continue as Mayday unfolds. Bache's Mr. Ball predicts that in the next decade Wall Street will be dominated by two dozen of what he calls ''Megagoths'' - firms with at least $25 billion in capital and offering more services than anything today. Others agree. ''I see bigger firms, although I don't necessarily see new firms,'' said Perrin Long, an analyst with Lipper Analytical Services.

Post-Mayday deregulation has already encouraged that. Such events as the the S.E.C.'s controversial Rule 415 - which essentially bypasses the lengthy registration process for corporations that regularly issue securities - favors cash-rich firms. Since the rule allows firms to buy up entire securities packages for re-sale without forming a broad syndicate, it means only the rich can play.

Perhaps most important for Wall Street, the citadel of free enterprise, Mayday has meant less Government regulation, not more. For all the pain and suffering that deregulation has brought, some on Wall Street say it was worth it, if for no other reason than to keep the Government at bay and let the capitalists battle it out without restrictions.

''Is Wall Street better off for Mayday?'' said Mr. Marron of Paine Webber. ''That assumes two choices - a pre-Mayday status quo or what we have right now. It would be wonderful, if I thought the old way would have been maintained. But, that would have led to Government regulation in one form or another and no one here would have liked that.''

THE BIG BOARD WINS BIG

The New York Stock Exchange came to Mayday kicking and screaming. Yet once dragged into deregulation, it has been a major beneficiary.

Before Mayday, institutions sought relief from the high brokerage rates set by the Big Board. In increasing numbers, they began to funnel their business to firms in the so-called ''third market,'' which are not members of the exchange but still trade stocks listed on the Big Board. These firms, not bound by the exchange's fixed brokerage rates, would undercut Big Board member firms that had to take their trades to the floor.

By allowing competition to push down brokerage rates, the S.E.C. dealt a blow to the third market. Mayday took away the price advantage offered by these firms - and eliminated any temptation for Big Board firms to consider quitting the exchange.

''Mayday is one of the best things the New York Stock Exchange has going for it,'' said Robert Sobel, professor of business history at Hofstra University. ''The big investment banks are still member firms.''










http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=1348

The American Presidency Project

William J. Clinton

XLII President of the United States: 1993 - 2001

Remarks at a Reception for Hillary Clinton in New York City

September 11, 2000


about false values










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 19:55:39 -0800 (PST)

From: "Kerry Burgess"

Subject: Re: extreme situation

To: "Kerry Burgess"


Kerry Burgess wrote:

I also remember a couple key moments of all this. The first one was when our new director started working in our group. She had us all meet together and the first thing she wanted us to do was stand up and take 30 seconds to describe a little about ourselves. Later I would reflect on a couple things about that request. One was that the first manager to stand up, whom I think was also the first person, spent a whole lot more than 30 seconds talking about himself. I brought this up to her later right before I left because I had been hoping that she was demonstrating a concept that I started thinking of as "time awareness." The reason we weren't logging labor with enough precision was because we kept getting distracted because we had customers that wanted us to be there at their beck and call, instead of being planned out resources. A few months ago I got an email from a former colleague about that manager not being with the group anymore, and I wonder if that is why they were telling me, to make it look like he was the whole source of the time awareness problem, but I knew that was BS, getting rid of people didn't solve anything, we need people to create a better solution, as I did provide before I left, which was to eliminate the labor deliverable altogether. So anyway, the second key moment was when I was speaking to the director in those last few days and she agreed on something with me about "subjectivity." I forget the context of that conversation, I think it was a secondary point about how performance reviews were tainted by inaccurate labor reports, but that of course raised another big issue. Performance reviews made a big difference in people's movement throughout the company, so if someone gets a good review based on faulty information, that is really unfair to other people. She agreed with me that reviews were subjective, so I didn't really understand that. But she also obviously didn't understand what I was talking about when I brought up the Resource triangle one time too.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 27 February 2006 excerpt ends]





JOURNAL ARCHIVE: Posted by H.V.O.M at 9:20 PM Thursday, September 15, 2011


I remember when this miniseries premiered on television in December 2003. I was stressed out about people following me but I enjoyed my work as an Application Development Consultant in Microsoft Premier Support. I had a very interesting project going on around that time that I hoped would lead to a job in the Visual Basic product team and I was using Microsoft.Net with Visual Basic to convert Microsoft Word documents to a different format. The customer had a lot of files to convert and there was a lot of detail associated with my efforts to automate the conversion process. The software I crafted would convert as a batch the documents and would not require users to do any manual conversions, which was a feature the customer requested.

I cannot recall if I finished that project. I was also concerned that Microsoft was going to become the next Enron and that was because I could easily cite examples of multi-million dollars of customer fraud that Microsoft would be blamed for. Across hundreds and hundreds of customers of Microsoft just in my division alone - a division marketing claimed would save those customers money by paying more for our services - the customers were being fraudulently charged in the millions.

Sure, sure, Robert McKenna is all over that. Jay Inslee is screaming every day at Bill Gates to shape up and do right by all the people Microsft Al-Qaida screwed over because of their greed and because of the perverts that run free anywhere they want to inside Microsoft Corporation.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 15 September 2011 excerpt ends]





JOURNAL ARCHIVE: posted by H.V.O.M at 7:26 PM Thursday, August 17, 2006


Coercion

Coercion

the use of express or implied threats of violence or reprisal (as discharge from employment) or other intimidating behavior that puts a person in immediate fear of the consequences in order to compel that person to act against his or her will

1: the act of compelling by force of authority 2: using force to cause something


Laura Longcore was very clear when I told her that something was wrong at Microsoft that I needed to quit talking. For instance, earlier I had complained to her that Microsoft was overcharging customers with the Microsoft Premier service contracts. A standard service contract included 4 annual subscriptions to the software package Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) and it was a popular feature of the contracts among my customers. I pointed out to her that she was not offering the renewal discount of $500 per subscription. I estimated that Microsoft Premier was overcharging its customers by at least one million dollars per year. I expected an immediate correction to that policy because Microsoft Premier Support for Developers was marketed as a service that was supposed to save these customers money. But yet, if those same customers went to another Microsoft website and purchased the MSDN separately, they could get a $500 discount for each subscription. We added absolutely no value for the extra $500. I thought it was just a simple oversight that would be quickly corrected. It was also the kind of suggestion I thought she would appreciate. Not much earlier, she had given me the so-called "Bulldog Award," the second I had received in that group, and referred to me as a "rising star." I was also one of the lowest-level persons, in terms of pay grade, so I expected to at least receive a promotion for my due diligence. Instead, she told me to keep my mouth shut. I put in my notice after that and quit about 2.5 weeks later. I was hoping she would tell me that they were going to make the necessary corrections and I then would not have quit. I felt like I had a future at Microsoft.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 17 August 2006 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: Posted by H.V.O.M at 12:08 AM Sunday, October 21, 2007


From 7/16/1963 to 7/16/1979 is: 5844 days
From 3/3/1959 to 6/3/2005 is: 16894 days
5844 / 16894 = 0.3459

'34-59'

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/nyregion/03vilar.html?ex=1275451200&en=63a1abdb4f49f5f5&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Heiress Is Identified as Victim in Case Against Arts Patron

By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: June 3, 2005
Correction Appended

The investor whose money prosecutors say was stolen by Alberto W. Vilar, the philanthropist and investment adviser, has been identified as the 67-year-old widow of a California millionaire.

The investor, generally identified in a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint as "L. C.," but on two occasions as "Cates," is Lily Cates, 67, of Manhattan, supporters of Mr. Vilar said, clearing up one of the mysteries surrounding his arrest. The original charges, unsealed on May 27, gave no details about his accuser, who has been identified in unrelated court cases also as Lily Cates Naify.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 21 October 2007 excerpt ends]



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 6:10 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Tuesday 05 January 2016