Ruminations - 3dec2008

George Rebane

Gil Mathew, CEO of ERC, reports that the recently announced ’50 new engineering jobs’ will be confirmed in the new year.  He wrote me that “That was the count approximately 3 months ago from a collection of companies, Telestream, AJA, Thomson Grass Valley, NVision and Ensemble Design.  That number may have been reduced since the August estimate.”  Of course, the whole thing still depends on how the economy will look a couple of months from now.  Our community’s interest is high, since these jobs promise to pull into the county an annual $5M tranche of new money.  The second benefit is that such jobs will move us closer to a critical mass of professionals up here which at some point will become self-sustaining as the word gets out that we’re really a high-tech community.  Maintain crossed fingers.

Google has introduced a remarkable (aka cool) service.  It’s a voice activated free 411 information service that’s particularly useful from your cell phone when you’re out and about.  Just put 800-GOOG-411 into your favorite phone numbers and you’re all set.  When you want to know where something like a store or other business is, you just call that number and talk.  The service will even connect you with the store or restaurant or whatever, and you can talk to them – all hands free.  I tried it out and it works.  For more info go here.

Guess what some financial mavens are now suggesting that we do with our government’s $60T+ unfunded liabilities that come due during the baby boomer retirement years.  During this interval there won’t be enough workers to pay for all the Social Security, Medicare, etc outlays, because the ingrates will revolt if the government takes what it needs out of their paychecks.  So here’s a solution suggested by former undersecretary of the Treasury Peter Fisher, you create a 100-year bond and saddle the debt on the poor bastards who start entering the workforce during the latter part of this century.  Nobody cares about them, they don’t even exist yet.  And when they do, they’ll never know what hit them, while all of us are quietly pushing up daisies.  What a great idea!  And if we wanted to be really nice, we could leave them instructions on how to float a, say, 200-year bond issue if the monthly payments become a tad too much for them.  Truly a gift that keeps on giving. 

Comments

[Jeff Pelline]

Thanks for the news flash, George, but Goog-411 has been around since September 2007. It's been a fixture on the family i-phone for more than a year.

[Russ]

Grass Valley Group just laid off 20 people, some of them engineers. Hope they find one of the jobs that Gil mentioned.