Here in lovely Austin, a growing bloom of progressive blue America encroaching steadily in to the red blight that has infested the Lone Star State for a generation, it’s not unknown to meet a real, full-blown dellionaire. That term may not be familiar to everyone so here’s a little background: back in the day, IBM had a big plant here. My whole family worked there at one time or another. But a few influential employees got together in the 80s and decided to found a new company focusing on IBM compatible computers, as Big Blue had recently standardized a diverse, chaotic PC market around the Intel 8086 architecture running a neolithic disc operating system from a small start up company called Microsoft. The founders of MSFT are shown above; would you have invested a big chunk of your life savings with those kids? Well, that’s another story.

This merry band of former IBM engineers and proven PC pioneers called their new company CompuAdd. It had every advantage. The best and the brightest designers, veteran quality assurance pros, sales execs with a big swinging book of business shipping the growing reseller channel, the latest in manufacturing methods, all sitting atop a cheap, youthful manufacturing and PC literate clerical workforce like a cherry on a money sunday. But they weren’t the only ones to see the writing on the wall, not by a long shot. There were several others in Austin alone. One IBM PC clone was even started up around the same time by a college kid who dropped out of UT and made a few PCs a week, essentially handcrafted and built to custom order. Which one of those box makers would you have invested in?

Well, if you chose CompuAdd, you lost every dime a long, long time ago. In fact it would have been hard for a retail investor to invest at all, CompuAdd never even made it to the NASDAQ. But if you bought Dell common stock on the secondary market after the IPO in 1988, at about $10-15 a share, and held on to it through the dot-com boom in the late 90s, with splits and appreciation, you bagged something like a 100 to one return. Which made the college drop out, Michael Dell, the first of many dellionaires.

Today Mr Dell has another idea, sort of a repeat, but this one isn’t drawing anywhere near the applause of that past miracle. In fact it’s causing a lot of neurosis and fear, from here in Central Texas to the elite boardrooms of Wall Street and beyond. What is it? Follow me below. [Read more…]

It hit me today just how terrible the last three years have been for me. I came into work earlier and my company was offering a voluntary separation deal, full pay, full benefits, job placement help, for three to six months. It would be perfect for me. But I haven’t been here quite long enough to qualify.

It’s not just that the economy has been terrible for the last three years, it’s that it happened at the worst possible time it could have happened in my life, when a couple of loved ones were diagnosed with deadly diseases, when the layoffs began in earnest and my friends and family and me all lost our benefits when we needed them to literally survive, when I begin to hit age fifty and could count on obvious age bias in trying to find any job that paid a basic living wage, even one far below what I’m used to making, etc. On top of which every goddamn job, relationship, or source of money or happiness of any kind that might have worked out in my favor over the last three years instead fell through completely, or worked out against me in some way, the separation deal above being only the latest such opportunity lost. And when I did have a heads-I-lose tails-you-win decision to make, inevitably it turned out I chose the worst of the two. It seems improbabale my luck could continue being so lousy, but I’ve said that time and time again for several years now and it just gets worse.

It’s just been awful. The worst, most horrible, joyless, agonizing, hopeless, loneliest three years of my life. Nothing that ever came before even remotely prepared me for it.

It looks like First National Bank of Wellston of Ohio has a bigger problem than they thought: Katie Barnett, the lady they ripped off and are refusing to pay full value to, is photogenic and not a minority. Which means even local teatards might sympathize.

The President of the bank is a fellow named Eric Emmert, let’s make sure that incompetent buffoon never escapes the consequences of his greed and stupidity. This all could have been avoided had the bank simply paid Katie Barnett back for what they stole. She was only asking $18,000, the bank refused, demanding receipts for a life’s worth of possessions, receipts the bank had thrown out anyway along with everything else she owned. Click the image to sign the petition.

We finally got some much needed rain here in Central Texas last night. Hopefully more will follow today. The storm that came through knocked out my cable for hours, but now it’s back up. And having signed in, I find the era of corporate malfeasance continues unabated. Check this gem out: [Read more…]