Events

Economist business-travel blogger Gulliver reports on British airline Ryanair's customer-service standards: Jason Roe is an Irish blogger who noticed what he thought was a bug on Ryanair's website. The price of the flights he was trying to book changed when he accidentally went into the voucher section. Thinking he had found a way to beat the budget airline's credit-card fee, he duly blogged about it—and in so doing unleashed hell. The tenth commenter on his blog was "Ryanair Staff #1"... As...

Crain's Chicago Business reports today that the pension liabilities of several prominent employers have exploded just as their assets have imploded: Boeing Co.'s shareholder equity is now $1.2 billion in the hole thanks to an $8.4-billion gap between its pension assets and the projected cost of its obligations for 2008. At the end of 2007, Boeing had a $4.7-billion pension surplus. If its investments don't turn around, the Chicago-based aerospace giant will have to quadruple annual contributions to its...

It's good to know who wears the pants in the Republican Party. This from Democratic Party chair Tim Kaine will clarify: I was briefly encouraged by the courageous comments made my counterpart in the Republican Party over the weekend challenging Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican Party and referring to his show as 'incendiary' and 'ugly.' However, Chairman Steele's reversal this evening and his apology to Limbaugh proves the unfortunate point that Limbaugh is the leading force behind the...

Two (probably related) items via Talking Points Memo: a reversal in a San Francisco death-penalty case, and a release of nine Bush Administration memoranda. In the first case, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey had overruled the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco and pressed for the death penalty in a murder case. New AG Eric Holder has reversed the DOJ's position: The Down Below prosecution has been a searing episode for the local U.S. attorney's office. The original prosecutor on the case, Richard...

From the New York Times the last few days, three articles worth reading. First, the story of AIG: When you start asking around about how A.I.G. made money during the housing bubble, you hear the same two phrases again and again: “regulatory arbitrage” and “ratings arbitrage.” The word “arbitrage” usually means taking advantage of a price differential between two securities — a bond and stock of the same company, for instance — that are related in some way. When the word is used to describe A.I.G.’s...

Through multitasking and some minor process improvements, I'm already through 92 of the re-ripping project I started last week. At this rate...I should be done sometime next month. If the weather were warmer, I should point out, I'd be walking Parker instead.

Via Calculated Risk, unemployment in California crests 10% for the first time in 26 years: The 10.1% jobless rate is the highest since June 1983 and not far below the 11% record set in November 1982 at the worst point of a severe recession, according to the governor's office. Job losses escalated in January, with the state's unemployment rate jumping by 1.4 percentage points from a revised 8.7% for December. The L.A. Times goes on to report a total of 380,743 layoffs in California so far this year....

That's how Douglas Adams described the effect of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. I feel like I've just drunk two, after a phone call I recevied an hour ago from North Carolina. Long-time readers of this blog who know me personally have noticed I actually maintain a certain sense of reserve in my public writings. The actual word is "privacy," but so few people remember what that word means in the context of the Internet that I avoid using it. These long-suffering people (called "friends" and "family")...

Three more photos from my trip. First, AA 657 arriving from JFK: Second, the ruins of the Mullet Bay Resort, destroyed in September 1995 by Hurricane Luis: Finally, another view of that sunset from the 15th:

The Rocky Mountain News, one of Denver's two newspapers, will shut its doors after tomorrow's edition: Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Scripps, broke the news to the Rocky staff at noon today, ending nearly three months of speculation over the paper's future. He called the paper a victim of a terrible economy and an upheaval in the newspaper industry. "Denver can't support two newspapers anymore," Boehne told staffers, some of whom cried at the news. On Dec. 4, Boehne announced that Scripps was...