Brian Gongol

We have two counterproductive patterns at play in American business: One is a tax structure that's punitive towards many otherwise sane and sensible capitalistic behaviors (like distributing dividends to shareholders). The other is a pattern of ratcheting up executive compensation to heights that serve only to stoke the fires of ego and not to demand outstanding performance from the overcompensated.

They're trying to restart the economic market there. One might call it the ultimate experiment in monetarism.

It's known that ash from volcanoes can cause global cooling -- the "year without a summer" proved that. But it really sounds like a dicey thing to try to create artificial volcanic effects in order to cool the planet.

The service really does have a lot of features that are great in theory, but so far there's just very little momentum outside communities of enthusiastic technophiles. At least two forces should be propelling it more than they seem to be: One is Facebook's hubris, the other is Google's increasingly serious need to find ways to make money after the search-engine boom runs out.

The railroads are attempting to get things back together after an awful summer due to Missouri River flooding...not that the media headquartered in places like New York paid even the slightest bit of attention.

...Manageable, that is, if today's methods had been applied. That's good news, considering we still live in fear of another influenza pandemic.

Family ownership within a family that doesn't have a lot of other income-producing assets does tend to keep the team's hands tied, among other problems
