Years ago, on the recommendation of my sister, I subscribed to the DVD rental service Netflix.

Netflix is an online catalog of popular movies from which you can select three movies at a time to be mailed to you for a monthly fee.

At the time I subscribed there was a "deal" going on that made the entire prospect quite attractive--except that they had no intention of honoring that deal. When I checked my Visa statement, I had been charged far more than agreed upon and when I called to straighten it out, I was told that I didn't "qualify" because I was wearing purple pants and ate broccolli the day I enrolled. My response was, "OK, you got me, but cancel my account."

Netflix apparently didn't need my business since they went on to become one of the online business success stories, with millions of renters all over the country and spawner of several imitators, yet the sleight-of-hand with their customer base apparently continues.

Netflix typically sends about 13 movies per month to Villanueva's home in Warren, Mich. — down from the 18 to 22 DVDs he once received before the company's automated system identified him as a heavy renter and began delaying his shipments to protect its profits.

The same Netflix formula also shoves Villanueva to the back of the line for the most-wanted DVDs, so the service can send those popular flicks to new subscribers and infrequent renters.

The little-known practice, called "throttling" by critics, means Netflix customers who pay the same price for the same service are often treated differently, depending on their rental patterns.

"I wouldn't have a problem with it if they didn't advertise `unlimited rentals,'" Villanueva said. "The fact is that they go out of their way to make sure you don't go over whatever secret limit they have set up for your account."

What drives me crazy about practices like this is that they are almost always counter-productive. As I said, Netflix has a good business model--they don't need to engage in petty theft, but they just can't resist taking the change from Mommy's purse.

Business is about relationships--every business I ever worked from, including my own, has prospered by clients have had good things to say about it to their friends and associates. I always ask new customers how they heard about my company, and well over half attribute word of mouth. Over five bucks or some such trivial amount, Netflix lost me as a long-term customer and insured that I would never have anything good to say about them.

Dumb.

Some might point out that Netflix has done quite well in spite of that, but what's done well can always be attributed to what they do right, and the reason they aren't even more successful is due to what they do wrong--every company succeeds on its virtues and fails on its flaws. The idiocy here is that the flaw is so petty, so easily remedied.

In the end, like so many of these stories, the blood you leak into the water draws sharks.

Without acknowledging wrongdoing, the company agreed to provide a one-month rental upgrade and pay Chavez's attorneys $2.5 million, but the settlement sparked protests that prompted the two sides to reconsider. A hearing on a revised settlement proposal is scheduled for Feb. 22 in San Francisco Superior Court.

The lawyer's pound of flesh amounts to nearly 10% of their operating profits last year. That's gotta hurt.

Canadian Dale Begg-Smith, who skis for Austrialia, won gold in the men's mogul competition (one of my favorite events) which is nice for him, great for the Australians and probably a little annoying for the Canadians.

The inevitable news stories on the favorites and particularly the medal winners, refer to the fact that Begg-Smith is a Lamborghini driving millionaire at 21 due to the success of his "on-line business", which incidentally he refuses to name.

Given his decision to leave Canada and his business, Begg-Smith has avoided the media spotlight in the leadup to the Olympics. After winning, he chose his words carefully. He didn't want to talk about his Internet ad-tracking business and refused even to give the name of the operation.

"I don't know," he said, when asked for the umpteenth time to name the business he started when he was 13 with his older brother, Jason, who finished 29th Wednesday in moguls. "It was like, so long ago. I haven't been doing much on that the last couple years."

Begg-Smith said he did the work to make money to fund his ski career, but has since all but shut it down to focus on skiing. The domain name he owns, adscpm.com, comes up as "under construction," meaning it is not operating right now.

He brushed aside questions about the business. "I don't know why we're talking about the company. I just won Olympic gold."

His reluctance is understandable.

Begg-Smith is a Spam King.

Canadian-born Begg-Smith is president of AdsCPM Network (a.k.a. CPM Media Inc.), a firm notorious for using "driveby downloads," security exploits, and other cheap tricks to install spyware (including keyloggers and browser hijackers) on unsuspecting Internet users' computers.

AdsCPM.com is currently offline, but an archived version of the site says the company served up 20 million pop-ups per day. Other sites hosted at the same IP address indicate the reach of the company's spyware enterprise. They include two sites infamous for distributing spyware ---FREESCRATCHANDWIN.COM and XZOOMY.COM, as well as one selling pop-up blocking software, kill-pop-ups.com.

That certainly puts Australia in an awkward position--hey look! The rapist won!

I stand by the rapist comment--spam resembles forcible sodomy as much as anything else.

...richer than Ken Lay.

Lay, once worth 400 million, is now estimated by the New York Times to be worth $650,000.00.

He could get even poorer as he faces civil suits, legal fees, etc...

Even if the 63 year old Lay doesn't go to jail, he will have shared the fate of his victims--the loss of his retirement savings.

Take a pen and paper to Walmart if you live in Houston, you might get an autograph from the greeter.

I haven't visited Vodkapundit in a while and had a little time this afternoon, and so ran into Will Collier's post on "Crunchy Consternation".

I hadn't heard of "Crunchy Conservativism" before reading the post, but I have to agree with Jonah Goldberg's assessment:

Crunchy conservatism strikes me now — as it did back when I first heard about it — as a journalistic invention, a confabulation fit for some snarking liberal reporter at the Washington Post "Style" section. It plays upon the Left's stereotype of conservatives and adopts it as its own.

Yet, as is so often the case in the blogosphere, the digression is sometimes more interesting that the initial focus of the post. Collier noted the crunchy moralism that Americans should buy American cars and proceeded to detail his own unhappy experience with several Ford automobiles.

When I answered, "Yes," "service the transmission," and "couple of thousand miles," he nodded and said, "They're tryin' to screw you."

"See all those cars up on my racks?" he said. I looked. They were all Fords--Crown Victorias, a Mustang, another T-Bird. "They've all got the same transmission as your car, and it's a real good transmission--except for the torque converter. Those are crap. They wear out early, and it messes up the whole rest of the transmission. If you'd just gotten that service, the new fluid would have made the torque converter expand, and it'd mask the real problems for oh, two, three thousand miles. Then you'd be outta warranty, and your transmission would still be shot. The dealer figured you'd either pay him a couple of thou' for the repairs, or trade it in for a new car."

He handed me back my keys and said, "Go to another Ford dealer, get them to fix it right, then come see me in a couple of years when it fails again."

So I did, and the transmission failed again, right on schedule, and I'll never pay another penny to the Ford Motor Company. I bought a used Lexus instead of fixing the Thunderbird, and it is still running like a dream, tens of thousands of miles after all my previous cars would have needed four-figure repairs.

Sorry, guys, but the reason Ford and GM are losing business is because their cars suck, pure and simple. Not only are they ugly and uninteresting (the Mustang and Corvette excepted--and what does it say when they're both decades-old designs?), they're also built to break down. Intentionally.

Deciding not to buy a crappy product that's backed with dishonest service doesn't make anybody unpatriotic or 'selfish.' It just means we aren't saps.

I wish I could say it was just Ford, but as a former owner of a Chrysler mini-van, I'll attest to the fact that the conspiracy to screw the American consumer is more generalized in the automobile industry. I put three transmissions into the Gran Caravan in five years, two not under warranty. Compare this with 12 years of trouble-free driving with my old Honda Accord which I sold not because it was junk, but because it wasn't equipped with airbags. Would I buy another Chrysler? Absolutely not. Would I buy another Honda? Inevitable.

I can't think of anything more American than letting automobile companies be judged by the market and making it a political issue is ridiculous in the face of this kind of deliberate rip-off.

I, Cringely relates some of the backstory on the rise of Microsoft.

In the Boys’ Club that was Microsoft in those days, maybe the concept of mortality was too abstract, maybe Allen’s poor health wasn’t as obvious to those around him every day as it was to the IBM team that visited from time to time. To his credit, Allen stayed long enough to finish the job, delivering DOS 2.0 then leaving the company forever, eventually to have a bone marrow transplant that cured him completely.

But during one of those last long nights of working to finish-up DOS 2.0, something happened. I have heard this story from two people, each of whom was a friend of Allen’s and in a position to know. Each told me the same story the same way. I am not staking my reputation on the accuracy of the story, but I am saying I have it from two good sources. Paul Allen certainly won’t confirm or deny it, so I’ll just throw it out for you to consider.

During one of those last long nights working to deliver DOS 2.0 in early 1983, I am told that Paul Allen heard Gates and Ballmer discussing his health and talking about how to get his Microsoft shares back if Allen were to die.

I imagine the boys at PBS are just shocked and appalled by such behavior--I am not. What is missing from this story is the all important context.

Most of you reading this probably have a job. You get paid every couple of weeks, minus withholding and when you want to leave, you give two weeks notice and you're outta there--no harm, no foul. You put time in, and you got money out.

You may be considering becoming a business owner at some point, so it might be helpful to know what that is like, or at least some aspects of it.

You don't get a check every two weeks.

You work for years investing your body, soul and mind (Allen finished DOS 2.0 while deathly ill with Hodgkins disease), never knowing if its going to pan out or not. Meanwhile you buddies from school are getting promoted and buying BMWs.

You risk everything you have and often what you don't have in the hope of getting over the lip and finally making big money.

Even if you are successful, you proceed with the knowledge that you could lose it all at any time because of an economic downturn, a change in technology, government, resource costs, or any other turn of fortune.

From this perspective, it might be a little easier to understand Gates and Ballmer's concern about a third of the company's stock floating around with unknown passive partners. It bears recalling that Microsoft was not the industry titan that it is today--they were on the verge of closing a good deal that would only slightly reduce the ambiguous future the company faced. In new companies, stock in the "bright future" is the only thing one has to attract the talent to drive the company forward. You take out a third of the company and you have a serious problem.

Building a company is a choice to live in survival mode for many years and survival has its own logic and morals.

Bear that in mind when you consider handing over national security to Democrats...

Gas Prices, rising steadily already and promising to reach all-time highs this summer, are already resulting in the usual spate of stories about oil company profiteering.

The retirement package of outgoing Exxon chairman Lee Raymond isn't helping.

Exxon is giving Lee Raymond one of the most generous retirement packages in history, nearly $400 million, including pension, stock options and other perks, such as a $1 million consulting deal, two years of home security, personal security, a car and driver, and use of a corporate jet for professional purposes.

I am not exactly the kind of guy who protests during World Bank meetings, and I am fully cognizant of the economics of gas prices and annoyed at the routine grandstanding of politicians whenever gas prices get a little high. Yet, I find no way to defend the excessive compensation lavished on top corporate officers. In my view, its just plain theft from the shareholders and I just don't know how it manages to continue.

The title of this post comes from an old farside cartoon where one buck deer notes the target painted on the hide of his buddy. I thought of it because if anyone has a big target on its back, its Exxon, the world's biggest corporation, with a monster 36 billion dollar profit last year and recepient of the undying hatred and resentment of Democrats everywhere. They've been to congressional hearings to defend their profits (which are in my view, reasonable), pricing and business policies, but they still don't seem to "get it" that they are in the crosshairs and that this kind of behavior is about as smart as wandering into deer camp with a Boone & Crocket rack on your head.

Nice pension Mr Raymond. Good luck with that.

The Observer tries hard to lionize Sean Penn, and in doing so acknowledges how farcical of a figure he has become in the public mind. Nevertheless, the article does provide some insight into why Sean Penn does what he does.

His father was blacklisted during the fifties (isn't it awful when communists can't find work?), so he's resentful of perceived infractions of civil rights (which of course communists and socialists would dispense with as soon as they attained power...).

In his interview with Larry King, Penn pulled his punches about President Bush and his late response to Katrina. Nonetheless, over the years he has consistently sought to get right up under Bush's chin. For the Chronicle, Penn tried, and failed, to interview the president; in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, he famously paid $56,000 to publish an open letter to Bush on a nearly full page of in the Washington Post: 'Many of your actions to date and those proposed seem to violate every defining principle of this country over which you preside: intolerance of debate... marginalisation of your critics, the promoting of fear through unsubstantiated rhetoric, manipulation of a quick comfort media, and the position of your administration's deconstruction of civil liberties all contradict the very core of the patriotism you claim,' he wrote.

This from a man who has a Ann Coulter doll who suffers various indignities at his hands "just for kicks". From a guy who regularly invites the media on his road trips through dictatorships to see how wonderful everything is. The delusions don't stop there.

In the same letter, Penn invoked his father: 'He raised me with a deep belief in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.' 'My dad was a hero to all of us,' Chris Penn told me. 'I think it's easy to say that Sean wants to be a hero. I see what he does around the world and, you know, I think that his heart's always in the right place. And is some of it wanting to have a little credit as a hero? Maybe. I think there's also a kind of innocence, which my father to a degree had. I think I'm a little too cynical. Most heroes get killed.' Baerwald agreed: 'I think there's a part of Sean that isn't gonna be happy until he gets murdered by the Republican noise machine. Until he finds out what it's like to feel like his dad.'

Murdered by "the Republican noise machine"? I would expect that the Republican party prays daily for him to have a long and healthy life so he can continue undermining the left's credibility with his ridiculous stunts. But wait for the piece de resistance:

'I'm under investigation by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury Department,' he said. 'It's a fiveyear investigation. Did I violate the embargo by going to Iraq under Hussein? Did I spend money? Did I use my American passport to get there? All those things. The answer to those questions is no.' He added, 'We know it came from the White House. My lawyer in Washington knows that.' Penn has been told by friends in the LAPD that he is under surveillance.

Yeah, the Bushies are after him. No paranoid delusion is complete without the men in black.

Penn appears to be suffering from a common ailment of successful actors--they're like lottery winners, endowed with money and adulation with almost no effort on their behalf. Penn got his first job at 19. At 21 he was a star. His wealth and fame has seen him through brushes with the law that would have ruined anyone else. He never had the years of struggle everyone else have before they finally achieve success...or don't. We can hardly blame him for a critical lack of perspective.

More importantly though, Penn has become blind to the effect of his fame.

I saw my father go through something similar a number of years ago. As a successful business owner, he became accustomed to people doing what he said, even what he suggested; afterall, these people worked for him. It was only after he sold his business and confronted the rude shock of telling someone what to do and getting ignored, that he realized that he had been living in a kind of bubble. Penn lives in the fame bubble--the entire world is distorted by the "famous person observer effect".

Most ironically, Penn admits to deep friendship with David Blaine, most recently seen in a giant bubble of water which distorted his view of the outside world as well as the view of those outside of him. Coincidence? Perhaps, but so appropriate.

Ken Lay died this morning, six weeks after being convicted of fraud and sentenced to what was essentially the rest of his life in prison.

The rest of his life wasn't long enough for him to serve even a single day.

Lay wasn't known to be in poor health, but its at least a possibility that the trauma of contemplating spending the rest of his life in prison aggravated whatever problems he was suffering from.

Born into humble circumstances, Lay transformed a small pipeline company into an industry powerhouse and accumulated a reported 100 million fortune, only to see it, and his reputation completely destroyed by accounting irregularities and a maelstrom of bad press. Consider the following subtlety:

Enron became the most infamous financial meltdown in decades, as images were beamed around the globe of thousands of sacked employees carrying their possessions past the company's crooked "E" logo outside its gleaming office tower in downtown Houston.

The magnitude of his fall was truly awe-inspiring. Not only did Lay destroy his reputation and end up a convicted felon, but he beggared and shamed his family. Life so seldom ends up like a fairy tale.

I have instincts about people and while that often gets an eyeroll, they have served me well over the years. If I feel the alarm bells go off, I know to listen to them and will politely decline to do business with the proximate cause of that internal alert.

There is actual research done on these kinds of perceptions, the most common explanation being an unconscious recognition of minutae that in the aggregate produce an instant judgment. Sometimes, after the fact, I'll mull over what it was about someone that pushed the button, but there don't appear to be any hard and fast rules, its rather a matter of someone not "smelling" right--something off about their dress, manner, etc... A calculated aspect of their behavior or appearance.

It just happened again last week and though I have no objective reason to reject the deal, I did anyways. In that context, an article at The American Thinker piqued my interest.

Joe Wilson’s new incarnation as a wheeler-dealer in corruption-rife countries in Africa was a perfect fit for his role as impresario of the massive Clinton delegation to Africa, which brought together corruption-stained individuals on the lookout for future business opportunities.

The investigation of William Jefferson may well shed some unwanted light on him, many others in Congress, the Clintons, Wilson and who exactly the AGOA benefited and how. August 27th is coming soon.

The first time I saw Wilson on television, I got that little tweak. I guess now we are about to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.

According to the article, which draws from Plame-meister site "Just-one-minute" as well as Macsmind and Free Republic, Wilson has commercial ties to some of the most corrupt "business" people in Africa and may have well been instrumental in introducing Congressman William Jefferson to some new "friends" that have led him into his current troubles.

To be fair, all this is circumstantial--but when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas and the Jefferson investigation may elicit a good delousing.

Amy Ridenour notes Tom Borelli's observation that the left is "selling" indulgences for committing environmental sin.

By paying an ideological and financial cover charge to social and environmental causes, CEOs gain admittance to Club CSR and enjoy a host of membership privileges. One major club benefit is protection from advocacy actions such as protests and boycotts wielded by anti-business activists.

Membership requires the creation of a public relations campaign or business strategy that serves the CSR agenda. By feeding into politically correct themes, these campaigns frequently distract the media and shareholders from failed business practices and poor stock performance. Being viewed as socially responsible buys great latitude for struggling CEOs. No longer considered selfish capitalists, these CEOs can finally gain access to elite social circles...

...the giant energy company BP has enjoyed a free ride from activist attacks because of the company’s aggressive advertising campaign promoting global warming concerns, carbon footprints and alternative energy.

Meanwhile, BP’s record includes a deadly explosion at one of its refineries and a major oil pipeline leak in Alaska. Because of these incidents, the company is under investigation by an alphabet soup of federal and state agencies – EPA, OSHA, and DOJ – for possible law violations. More recently, the company has been accused of illegally controlling propane prices, which drove up cooking and heating costs for consumers – many of them poor.

Even though the company is responsible for the tragic loss of life, polluting the environment and potentially ripping off poor consumers, there is a deafening silence of criticism from social and environmental activists.

Instead, BP is heralded as an environmental leader...

That will be seven hail the whales...

The news that Paramount has abrogated their relationship with Tom Cruise's production company is one of those things that makes my eyes glaze over. That I or anyone should care what happens to a centi-millionaire like Tom Cruise is something I can't fathom.

However there is one element of this story that I find fascinating, particularly when combined with Mel Gibson's travails.

You can apparently conduct your life in anyway you want to in Hollywood as long as you can make the call. Drugs, sex, illegitimate children--no problem.

Religion?

A career killer.

To be fair, child pornography will also make you persona non grata, but that only highlights how much religion has become anathema in liberal Hollywood. Now you can have a religion, and many actors do, but you've got to keep it very quiet--very low key--sort of like Rock Hudson's homosexuality.

Both these gentleman are proven rainmakers--capable of producing millions in profit for any project they are involved in. In more than passing strange that Hollywood would turn its nose up on so much money merely because these gentleman have "an overdeveloped interest in religion".

I suspect that Sumner Redstone and others actually find religious aflliation to be a sign of mental instability and they are simply cutting the mooring ropes before these characters sink beneath the waves completely.

They may come to regret that.

My wife called me today during her lunch break to ask me who she can call or write to complain about gas prices.

Complain about gas prices? Isn't she a couple of months late?

Not really. While gas is average 2.50 in the nation, Utah's are still paying 2.87 a gallon of regular unleaded--at Costco--generally the lowest price for gas in town.

Prices are only higher in Idaho. California and New York, typically among the highest gas prices in the country, have lower prices than Utah--this in spite of a wealth of refining capacity right in our back yard.

Governor Jon Huntsman knows a political grenade when he sees one, and jumped on the disparity immediately, promising an investigation by the Department of Commerce.

I doubt he'll find anything untoward, but it seems very bad PR for gasoline distributors and the Utah refineries not to make public statements explaining the high prices.

People have a harder time coming up with alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new research suggests.

Scientists exposed study participants to one brand of soft drink then asked them to think of alternative brands. Alone, they came up with significantly more products than when they were grouped with two others.

I could have told them this for free.

After learning that delivery on its order for 10 A380 freighters would be delayed beyond 2010, UPS joined its rival Fedex in cancelling its order. Airbus now has no orders for the A380F (pictured right).

Airbus has taken employees off the freighters to work on the passenger planes, which it hopes to deliver later this year.

10,000 job cuts have been announced and the unions are getting restive about what they consider to be inevitable attempts at outsourcing.

Things are tough at Airbus, but the decision to sacrifice the freighter order book to focus on the passenger plane was probably the right one.

"We're planning for the largest turnout since the Concorde came in 1974," said Paul Haney, deputy executive director of airports and security for Los Angeles World Airports. "This could be huge, and we're doing everything possible to be ready."

One has to appreciate the irony of the remark. The A380 resembles the Concorde is more than just its public relations impact. Like the Concorde, the A380 was designed as a political statement, and as with that magnificent plane, American aerospace made a hard-headed business decision to take another path. The British and French built supersonic and Boeing built the 747.

History records who won that bet.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Watch me make an options scandal disappear!

Disney's official report is out. The verdict: I'm innocent. No harm, no foul. Were options backdated? Yes. Was I the largest shareholder? Yes. Was I running the company? Yes. Am I to blame? No. Does this make sense? Absolutely.

I’ve always changed the oil in my cars. I’m not a car aficionado; my motivation is to save money. Still, the ability to whip in and out of a lube shop in ten minutes was always inviting.

During my last round of oil changes I felt the time to switch to the professionals had come. Part of this was due to the oil running down my arm after accessing the oil filter on a ’96 Saturn. The engineers decided to put its oil filter in a safe place - fourteen feet from any side and cleverly tucked between the under carriage and tie rods. There is no way this filter comes off without getting oil everywhere.

Today I pulled into the local lube joint; two bays and only one car in each, however, when the attendant came he told me the wait would be 25-30 minutes. This was just to get to the bay. They were going to take an hour to get my oil changed? I think I surprised him when I backed out and headed to Checker Auto.

It took me an hour to change the oil for two cars; this included dumping the oil back into empty containers to be ready to take to the dumping station. I had my fifteen year old help me. After I poured the excess oil out of the old filters and dropped the filters in the trash, he informed me the environmental guest speaker at his high school auto shop said filters should be drained overnight. I told my son that sounded good and he ought to consider that when he changes the oil in his cars.

My son has his permit and he is one merit badge and a birthday away from being cleared for his drivers license. Apparently to solidify his driving privileges (he has two older sisters and a brother to compete with), he told me he would change the oil in the cars. I can't beat that, and neither can the local lube joints.

Circuit City may be paying some employees too much compared to the prevailing market, but this move doesn’t seem wise:

The electronics retailer, facing larger competitors and falling sales, said Wednesday that it would lay off about 3,400 store workers — immediately — and replace them with lower-paid new hires as soon as possible.

The laid-off workers, about 8 percent of the company's total work force, would get a severance package and a chance to reapply for their former jobs, at lower pay, after a 10-week delay, the company said.

Obviously a company that can’t make money won’t be able to pay any employees; but was the situation so dire that a wage freeze wasn’t viable? Last year’s inflation rate was 3.24% and this year it seems to be on the same track. One would think using inflation would have been a better way to bring wages in line.

Circuit City has chosen a path of negative good-will with employees and customers. A couple of years ago Best Buy let go an extended family member under circumstances that didn’t reflect well on that company; no one in the family has been back. Circuit City just created 3400 families with a similar disposition.

The cruise business is booming and its easy to understand why if you've been on one lately, but problems arise far more frequently than the cruise ship companies would have you believe. Some months after my wife and I cruised on the Star Princess, it had a significant fire gut several balcony cabins. Illness still plagues many cruises, and occasionally one sinks.

In one particular egregious case, the Oceanus, a Cypriot-owned ship, sank after her crew loaded up the life boats with their luggage and left their passengers to drown.

News like this gives the cruise industry a black eye, but less so than in the past because cruising has become such a mainstream vacation choice.. Horror stories don't have the same impact when it contrasts so strongly with a positive personal experience.

I have to link to this. As Apple is the least green (most black?) company in the demonology of the Church of Climate Change, Steve Jobs has been hanging upside down in his gravity boots to dream up some answers, such as:

Well, we can use more low-power-consumption chips from Intel. That's not exactly a big breakthrough. We can put a hand-crank on our MacBooks like the One Laptop Per Child machine.

How big of a problem is EADS (the mother corporation of Airbus)?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy waited all of a couple of days to sit down with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss ways and means for France to bail out of its investment and transition the company to private ownership.

Sarkozy looked like a man running with a fire extinguisher. Airbus is a political disaster in the offing and he wanted to be sure that no taint of it touched his administration.

To be realistic though, it almost certainly too late and France is going to take a beating. Sarkozy's actions are about aportioning political liabilities, not really changing course.

France would be prepared to subscribe for more shares in the Franco-German aerospace group if necessary but would look for the exit in the longer term, he said. On a whistlestop tour to Airbus headquarters in Toulouse yesterday, Mr Sarkozy said: "The state will do its task if there is a need for a capital increase, with the aim of one day putting the state's stake on the market. The aim is not a partial privatisation."

Even if EADS returns to a more rational management structure (French and German co-managers look out for their respective national interests in the venture...), the situation is not salvageable. Airbus made fundamental marketing mistakes for political reasons--so intent on showing up the U.S., which has no stake in Boeing as far as I know, Airbus made a 1960s marketing decision in a 2010 marketing climate. With China's announcement of the establishment of its own aircraft manufacturing venture, the prospects for recouping its investment in the A380 has all but evaporated barring divine intervention.

The worst aspect of all this is that it has completely ignored R&D in the more promising markets, giving it nothing to fall back on in an effort to rebuild the company's fortunes.

Its completely ironic that yet another French president finds his primary political task one of finding a way to break the bad news to the public.

Mon Dieu, qu'elle pagaille! [what a mess...]

A funny blog is The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs ("Dude, I invented the friggin iPod. Have you heard of it?"). At the recent, wonderful reminiscence orgy of Jobs and Bill Gates, Gates opened with the line "First I want to clarify, I'm not Fake Steve Jobs" and raised the blog's profile a couple of notches to 50,000 visitors the next day.

So who is Fake Steve if he's not Bill Gates? The answer may be here and I'm more than half convinced despite the denial.