Salary Cap

Well, here it is…my blogging thoughts about race.  Today, we have the dismissal of the “duke rape case”, the suspensions of “pacman” Jones and Chris Henry, and also the “nappy headed hos” of Rutgers via Imus.  So, where do I start?  Let’s take them one at a time and then give a whole big summary at the end. 

First, the Duke case.  People’s poor life choices and lack of personal responsibilty was about 100 percent of this story.  The “victim” made poor life choices and now has to dance half naked to feed her illegitimate children.  The Lax players made a poor choice of hiring a drunk stripper to a drunken frat party.  And DA Nifong lacked personal responsibilty to just drop the case, but his ego got in the way of his better judgement.  Nothing to do with race or class, just idiots all the way around and everyone got exactly what they desreved for making their choices.  Has everything to do with sports and why we treat them differently in our society.  You never here about the computer club’s stripper party.  And do NOT get me started on the racist Jesse Jackson.

The second is the suspensions dealt out by the Commish on “pacman” Jones and Chris Henry.  You know, when the rest of the league turns on you and says you deserved to be punished for your actions, you really f***ed up.  I mean, you have the “murderer” Ray Lewis saying these guys are out of control.  I want to know where is the outcry, the outrage, the anything from left-wing liberals about how these guys are being singled out because of their race.  How about the black community saying these guys are giving “African-Americans”(I am an american, not any other bullshit nationality) a bad name?  How about the black community saying these guys should be punished at all?  Where is the outrage on this?

Third, Imus.  Just goes to show you that ignorance comes in all shapes.  He certainly has the shock part down of his title shock jock.  A wonderful team puts together a cinderella run and they get called names for it?  Are we back in the sixties?  Imus has no personally responsibilty and deserves everything he has sown with that one comment.  Rutgers, you ladies are my reason for even watching women’s basketball this year.  Take a bow.

So, in summation, race is stupid.  Life choices and personal responsibilty are not.  Sports creates headlines in our society today because we lack real heroes and leadership from top to bottom.  Salary cap has dated and been friends with just about every different race out there.  My friends are not determined by their skin color, but by their actions.  Stay in school, get an education, find a job, and work your ass off to achieve your dreams.  There is no easy money and much of the time the pursuit of easy money will make your journey to the dark side complete.   I am now getting down from my soap box. 

I want to wish everyone a happy easter.  This will have nothing to do with sports or money, but let me tell you how my mother tricked me.  She is lucky I wasn’t armed.

Anyway, my father called me two months ago and asked me to help him with his coin club’s something or other.  So, me being the good son(and one who has no calendar) told him when was it.  He goes it is on April 7th, a Saturday.  I agree like an IDIOT. 

Fast foward to Monday.  I realize that this is Easter weekend and that I have to visit my parents.  I call my mom complaining right away that I can’t believe that she has me coming down for the holiday.  She pretends that she had no idea that this weekend was Easter laughing under her breath.  Now, I love my parents and I know how fortunate I am to have two parents alive and together my whole life.  But, mom wears me down.  She can talk your ear off.  That, and she always disapproves the fact that I am the only son not married.  She asks if I have a girlfriend or if there is a chance of settling down.  Three days of this nonsense. 

Anyway, I want to wish everyone a happy easter and may god bless you throughout the holiday season.

I was looking through my vistors recently and was astounished to see where everyone comes from.  Just to let you know, I see where you come from, what browser you use, how long you are on the site, what pages you visit, the Internet Company you use, and if you are really unlucky, I can tell what floor from work that you are on while you are wasting company time looking through my blog.  God Bless you.

So a big salary cap  shout out to the vistor with the most views so far.  You know who you are.  New Jersey, Berkeley Heights using Comcast with your MSIE 6.0 XP windows with 1024X768 resolution with javascript enabled.  I also have your IP address, but that will NEVER be displayed for public use, my salary cap promise.  Just think, if I know this much about each and every user, what does Google know about you?  I also want to thank the russian spammer that signed up as my first user.  Your porn will never be seen because I have spam karma running on this blog.  I wouldn’t have a problem, but why are you pushing the gay porn?  Do you think I am a New York Mets fan or what?

So, I have been trying to understand why it is so hard to get money to buy a house in today’s market.  Sure, about one billion foreclosures are happening, however, I have done nothing but pay all my bills on time.  How can you follow all the rules and still not get help from the banks?  I am so tired of begging some guy to give me money.

Anyway, I just wanted to vent a little about the amount of bull stuff that is the great salary cap game.  If anyone has advice on this subject, please let me know.  Oh, and the Dallas cowboys salary cap is going to look horrible after giving 16 million dollar signing bonus to an underachieving guard.  Good job!

I’ve said many times in the past that I think SEO contests are stupid. But the Dave Pasternack contest is beyond stupid. It’s destructive, disrespectful, and completely unprofessional.

If the only person named Dave Pasternack happened to be one of the talking frogs from Did-it, I wouldn’t really have a problem with it. But he’s not. There’s another Dave Pasternack.

The real Dave Pasternack is an award-winning chef who owns an Italian seafood restaurant in New York’s Hell’s kitchen called Esca. (Italian for the word bait). He is also an author whose recipes have been featured on dozens of high-profile culinary websites and TV shows including Martha Stewart, Epicurious, Esquire, and New York Magazine.

He is a Master Chef on the rise.

Dave Pasternack full story

I want to be the one to come out abd apologize to anyone who tried to leave a comment here.  I was messing around with a new spam controller and accidently set the thing on killer mode.  I am not sure how long it has been this way, But I have over 400 spam deleted comments on it.  So, if you left a comment, I apologize that it didn’t get posted. 

I blame the guys I work with, but they are programmers and basically get defensive when you say anything to them.  So, salary cap is now back in business and ready to field questions once again.  Thank you for your patience.

Claims Compensation Bureau , a consulting firm specializing in recovering funds on behalf of stock investors, successfully recovered over $39 million on behalf of over 500 of its clients in one of the largest securities class action settlements in history.

After examining the details of the $1 billion Nasdaq Antitrust Litigation, Claims Compensation Bureau jumped into action, realizing that many of its clients were eligible to recover large sums of money. There were several complexities to this case which made it more difficult than usual to file large claim forms. For example, over 1,600 securities were involved and each security had its own eligibility period. In addition, all large claims were required to be filed using a detailed electronic claim process which Claims Compensation Bureau helped these victims with.

Even though the Court supplied shareholders with a record of some of their trading activity, there was a danger of numerous trades being missed if a shareholder had multiple accounts over the 7 year time period of the case. Therefore, Claims Compensation Bureau went to extraordinary measures to make sure that we claimed every possible share for our clients. Word of our work on this case spread through the investment community and Claims Compensation Bureau were contacted by hundreds of investors requesting our assistance in filing their claims.

Claims Compensation Bureau meticulously compiled our clients’ trading records from every available source, including the claims administrator, computerized records from clearing firms and our clients’ paper records. We then converted each of the records to a common format, keypunched tens of thousands of trades from manual records, combined them into one electronic file for each client and sent in the claims. Over 99.8% of the shares we claimed on behalf of our clients were eventually approved by the Court. In January, 2001, Claims Compensation Bureau clients received their checks and were overwhelmingly thrilled with the amount of funds recovered on their behalf.

Class-action shareholder lawsuits are at an all-time high, but most companies will never see a piece of the final settlement, but Claims Compensation Bureau helps people get what is rightfully theirs.

Often, they don’t think they can find related records, or they just don’t understand the process, but Claims Compensation Bureau helps make the process easier to understand.

That’s where Claims Compensation Bureau Inc. comes in. Founded in 1996 with $10,000 in startup capital, the four-person company’s revenue has grown exponentially, from $96,000 in 1998 to $10.3 million last year. Given recent trends in securities class-action suits, its revenue likely will continue to grow.

During the early 1990s, settlements usually ran in the $10 million to $20 million range, but since have expanded to Cendant Corp.’s $3 billion settlement and the $1 billion the Nasdaq stock exchange paid.

“There’s nobody else that does what I’m doing,” said CEO Brad Heffler, a certified public accountant, for Claims Compensation Bureau.

That may be good, old corporate PR-speak, but Heffler obviously knows his stuff.

While processing class-action claims for 15 years, Heffler noticed that 75 percent of shareholders and traders who could file claims didn’t.

“I look at it like a tax return,” Heffler said. “Anyone can file a tax return, but people hire a CPA because not everyone does it the right way.”

Sometimes, Heffler faces resistance from would-be clients.

“Some companies immediately say, `We don’t want to be bothered with this,’” Heffler said. “I say, `If there was a million dollars in the street and someone said they’d pick it up for you for a small percentage, would you do it?’ They say, `Sure.’” Heffler estimates his clients wouldn’t have recovered more than 90 percent of the $50 million in claims obtained for them since 1998 without Claims Compensation Bureau’s services.

He can expect more big settlements. As of August, a record number of class-action lawsuits had been filed for the year alleging securities fraud: 263 cases, compared to 201 class actions filed in all of 2000, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, which tracks the litigation.

Heffler administered class-action cases as an accountant at his family’s firm, Heffler & Co., now Heffler, Radetich & Saitta, based in Philadelphia. He started there in 1981 and was involved in class actions from the beginning.

His first major case involved administrating a class-action fund related to the 1979 meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.

Heffler had $25 million to distribute to those evacuated from a 25-mile radius of the plant.

During the five-year project, Heffler’s team evaluated people’s expenses. He also worked on home devaluation issues and wage reimbursement for 15,000 claims. His department collected records from 1,500 businesses to determine how much money they lost due to the evacuation.

Heffler later administrated more than 200 of the largest securities cases, including those involving Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and consumer electronics company Crazy Eddie, among others.

Not everyone was behind Heffler’s decision to start Claims Compensation Bureau.

“Half the people thought I was crazy, and I got a lot of funny looks from family and friends,” said Heffler, who had three young children at the time.

“I worked for a very successful family firm and (was) giving it all up for something very speculative. It was the biggest risk I ever took, but it was the best move I ever made in my life.”

Heffler brought on board Norm Jung from his old firm and recruited former Times Mirror International Publishing executive Marc Gluckman to handle Claims Compensation’s marketing.

It’s difficult to monitor the hundreds of class-action cases, all at various stages in the courts, Heffler said. His firm uses a database that includes clients’ records of their 3,300 holdings, covering as many trading years as possible.

The firm then can compare a client’s records to a related class-action lawsuit. A second database tracks all current class-action settlements.

“Most people who file do it on a haphazard basis, and there’s no one who’s monitoring all of the different class actions from all of the different sources,” Heffler said.

Heffler not only provides a service that does that, he also keeps an eye on the regulations — and regulators.

For example, a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule established a formula this year to pay settlement funds. Heffler found a flaw in the formula, convinced the SEC it was wrong, and obtained $600,000 for clients.

Heffler sees potential for plenty of growth ahead.

“Even though we are very successful in recovering money, we are only scratching the surface,” he said.

Along those lines, he is in negotiations with hedge funds, or private funds that invest in a number of securities, and plans to target pension funds as clients.

“Those are big enough that if we stay focused on these claims, we’ll be very happy with the results,” Heffler said.

Online poker has taken the ultimate salary cap hit from who else but the United States Congress.  Banks and Credit card companies are no longer going to be able to make payments to these sites.  I believe poker will have a huge falling out because of this.  No longer will people be able to play money games on-line.  I predict that after 2 years of such laws, poker will be back to where it was before the ESPN explosion. 

The true salary cap of on-line poker.  So sad, it reminds me of my 7-2 off suit.