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Topic: Google is the #1 Overall IDEAL Employer for the 4th year in a row among US Undergraduate Students: -- Universum USA announced today the results of its annual employer image survey, also known as IDEALTM Employer Survey. Google is perceived as being an IDEALTM Employer at 14.76%, along with Walt Disney Company and FBI, who increased from #5 to #3 on this year’s survey. Based on the frequency of being selected as an IDEALTM employer, Universum produces an IDEALTM employer ranking, dubbed the Universum Top 100. The rankings reflect the level of employer attractiveness that companies or organizations have on the recruitment market, and consequently the strength of their employer brands. Tracy Lynn Drye, Senior Vice President of Employer Branding at Universum commented on this year’s rankings, “In 2010 students identified IDEALTM employers that exemplified the essence of their employer brand through their commitment to strategic attraction, recruitment and development of top talent while providing job security within their organization”. The first 10 ideal employers, segmented by their main field of study are: Business: 1. Google, 2. Ernst & Young, 3. PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP, 4. Deloitte, 5. Walt Disney Company, 6. KPMG LLP, 7. J.P. Morgan, 8. Apple Computer, 9. Goldman Sachs, 10. Nike Engineering: 1. NASA, 2. Lockheed Martin Corporation, 3. Google, 4. Boeing, 5.General Electric, 6. Microsoft, 7. U.S. Department of Energy, 8. BMW,9. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 10. Apple Computer IT: 1.Google, 2. Microsoft, 3. Apple Computer, 4. IBM, 5.Cisco Systems, 6. Intel, 7. FBI, 8. Electronic Arts,9. Sony, 10. NASA To view the Universum Top 100, go to http://www.universumglobal.com/US-Undergraduate-Rankings If you’d like more information on this topic, or to schedule an interview, contact Kristina Matthews. Email: Kristina.Matthews@universumusa.com Tel: 215-546-4900 x312 ### About the Universum Top 100 Ideal Employer Rankings – Country Edition The results are based on the answers of 56,900 number of students, studying for degrees in Business, Engineering, IT, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Education and Natural Sciences, and 163,246 number of individual employer evaluations. Each respondent is presented with a list of 214 national and international employers, nominated by the target group through an independent and structured nomination and assessment process, which prevents companies unfairly influencing their position. Respondents acknowledge those companies they would consider working for. Of the companies selected as ‘considered employers’, the respondents then select their five ‘Ideal Employers’. The rankings, dubbed the Universum Top 100, measure the level of employer attractiveness of companies or organization on the recruitment market. About Universum Universum is an international company which specializes in the field of employer branding*. Founded in 1988, its goal was to improve communication between students and the employers who want to recruit them. Today, Universum’s mission is to help employers excel in recruitment and retention by ensuring improvements to their employer brand. Universum delivers a full range of services in research, strategic consulting and communication solutions that enable employers to better understand, attract and retain current and future ideal employees. Universum is a trusted partner to 1,200 clients, including many Fortune 500 companies, and co-operates with 1,500 universities worldwide to conduct research on the career and employer preferences of top talent. Last year, Universum surveyed 300,000 students and 80,000 professionals worldwide. For more information, go to www.universumglobal.com *Employer branding is the strategy companies use to appeal to desired current and future ideal talent. …; Added by Jonas Barck at 12:25pm on May 3, 2010

Topic: My Horror Story: The Short and Long of It: ar of the unknown." (Wikipedia) So what could be so horrific in a recruiter’s job experiences that would qualify as a “horror story”? Who would think that such a job, the one of being a recruiter, would have horror attached to it? Well it’s here and there and the stories shared in this contest reflect a variety of aspects of what horror is in certain circumstances for recruiters. For me my horror came in the job itself. Frankly, the horror of dying on the job. No joke. My fear was a combination of the known and the unknown. Allow me to explain—did you know that in California State Prisons there is a “No Hostage Policy”? It is interpreted as: “If you’re taken as a hostage by prisoners in a prison setting there will be NO negotiation for your release.” You’re essentially SLO. My Horror Story: The Short and Long of It Long story short--I left a Civilian Recruiter role in the Army when my enlistment was up in 1974, just after Nixon was impeached, Watergate had the headlines and the recession was on, magnified by the oil shortage crises that started in ’73. Unemployment in California was 11% in many places. Jobs were scarce. However, my professional network directed me to a Federal, State and Minority Community Based Not-For-Profit organization trying to make a recruiting, training and job placement grant work within the California Department of Corrections. A job opening existed for an Administrator with Recruitment, Training, Job Development, Job Placement responsibilities. I qualified, was hired, and arrived at a prison in Northern California with linkage to Folsom, Soledad, San Quentin, Vacaville and Tracy—all famous and infamous State Prisons in California. My job was to interview, select/recruit, coordinate training, help counsel, and help directly and indirectly with job placement efforts of felons scheduled to be released in 1-2 years. My first presentation to an audience of inmates and inmate leaders ended with my life being threatened. I made the mistake of suggesting, “That if you’re not interested in our program which is designed to help you prepare for parole back into mainstream society—thank God you’re locked-up. You belong here.” After that presentation a Chicano inmate leader approached me and said, “Ese, this program can be a big help to those inmates here who need it and want to participate. That’s on them. But if you ever talk to us like that again--we’ll KILL YOU! Mfker!” As the reality of my life being threatened hit me this same inmate then said, “Vato (dude), your heart is in the right place. You want to help us help ourselves and this program is failing because they fired the last set of free people who tried to run it. I’m going to school you on how to survive here so that your program could be a good thing for us. But if it’s BULLSHIT and you’re BULLSHIT. Vamos a tener que matarte aquí o donde quiera que vaya (we'll have to kill you here or where ever you go). He then smiled and we shook hands. He was my mentor in all things related “prison survival” from that day forward. He represented the Hispanic inmates on the yard. I received similar threats from the White and Black inmate leaders as well. Frankly, any job that starts with your life being threatened qualifies as horrific and this truly was. And nothing signifies that better than the statement made to you when you enter a California State Prison as a free person for the first time. As you enter from the outside going in you pass through what is called a “sally-port”. This is the in-between space that you step into from the outside where the gate is closed behind you and just before another gate is opened allowing you to enter the prison proper. It is at that moment, between those two gates, that all free people are read the no-hostage policy, “If you are taken hostage here today, the Governor of the State of California allows us to inform you that there is a no-hostage policy here. We will not negotiate for your release if the prisoners here take you hostage and want to bargin with your life. Do you understand” That’s their on-boarding statement that brings shivers to the toughest men I’ve seen pass through the sally port. Many decided not to enter. I did. Next came the recruitment selection process wherein 100 inmates had to be interviewed for selection and placement into the training/counseling and job placement aspect of the program. Again, one-on-one interviews with murderers, serial killers, crazies, repeat offenders—all criminals with known and unknown backgrounds sit at arms length—face-to-face with me to determine if they are a fit for the program (a program designed BTW by four-time losers who saw all the hurdles paroled inmates faced that contributed to 60%-70% recidivism). This program was brought in to stem that flow. The yelling matches I had with some inmates who were not accepting being rejected put contracts on me on the yard. The only thing that saved me were the inmate leaders who intervened on my behalf for the good of the program. Nevertheless, I was coached by security on what to do if I was attacked and how to signal them. To my good fortune, though there were near hits—I did survive and manged to win most of the inmates over in terms of the good we did on their behalf. During my approx. four years with the program I ended up directing but still with hands-on recruitment, training/counseling/job placement responsibilities. I directed three counselors and three external job developers. We ran a program that actually made a significant improvement resulting in only 9% recidivism, 92% job placements over a three year period with the likes of: IBM, Xerox, HP and many other California employers. The horror of the work there was the occasions when young men would turn themselves in to me to escort them to security for solitary confinement because they were being raped on the yard. The horror of the experience was the threat of violence at a moments notice. Example, Mexican National inmate newly incarcerated made the mistake of removing a salt shaker during chow hall from a Black Gorilla Gang members’ table. It was considered an insult—he was killed and the Hispanics rampaged killing a black inmate in retaliation threatening to kill 2 for every one they killed. We, my team worked in the midst of those gang wars…always on the edge of a violent work environment. The final horror story of my/our experience there at the prison was when the famous and infamous Proposition 13 passed in California—which was the Tax Revolt that defunded many social services type programs like ours. The horror being that we were gaining momentum in minimizing recidivism and getting ex-felons back with their families; back on the job; and contributing as tax paying career minded citizens who prior were rampaging and causing pain in suffering in their wake. I often say I would still be working in such a role and place had Prop 13 not passed and the program survived. Horror experience yes, but on positive impact side of the equation I have nothing that compares to it. …; Added by Valentino Martinez at 11:38pm on November 18, 2011

Comment on: Topic 'Recruiting Scientists News': private ownership and control of the means of production, and I generally agree with his analyses. I couldn’t possibly agree with him more with regard to one of his concluding paragraphs in the Times article entitled: "$1 trillion package has something for everyone." Obama’s appointees to the energy and environmental regulatory agencies will work to prevent new coal plants from being built, and to arrange financial and regulatory subsidies for wind and solar power. Pressure on the car industry will be unrelenting and irresistible. In hock to the government, the big three Detroit automakers will have to respect the wishes of congressmen who have never sold a car, and produce green cars in which consumers have shown little interest. Change there will be, but whether it will contribute to economic recovery and long-term growth, or impede it, is an open question. I would like to add to the above that I have noted that deceptively simple phrases to describe and therefore supposedly to help us to understand complex phenomena are all the rage in our contemporary sound-bite utilizing, attention deficit reinforcing, society. Carl Marx would be glad to know that one of his philosophical/psychological tenets has been adopted by the poorly educated personnel of the media and its punditry; they have discovered that by just repeating a phrase often enough it becomes established for their non-discriminating readers and auditors as the “truth.” We therefore now have “global warming” used to describe not only any rise in average temperature anywhere in the world for a time period selected carefully to illustrate whatever point of view is being professed, but, astonishingly, the same phrase is also used to note cooling and record cold anywhere as somehow predicted by the very existence of “global warming.” I note today that we now have wide use of the wonderfully non-informative and non-descriptive phrase, “advanced batteries”, to describe experimental and frequently peripheral science, i.e., inquiries that are not uniformly reproducible-sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t-that cannot and do not in fact result in an advance over the practical technology in place. The morally undefined philosophical/sociological term “better for the purpose intended” is assumed in all such references to “advanced “technologies of any kind. If you’re skeptical about my point then explain to me please why an atomic weapon is an advance over a bomb constructed with chemical explosives. It has turned out that the rapid changes in technology of the past generation have left journalists far behind in their economic understanding of what is practical and what is advanced. This has spawned a genuine advance, a better form of hucksterism. The scientists and engineers whose agenda it is to get funding for their projects now sell the press, and through it hopefully the public, on the idea that their particular technology or discovery represents an advance and is therefore better. The logic is “all advances are improvements….” Of course there is always the problem of economics, but since economic analysis does not lend itself to sound bites it is ignored by the media. Advanced Nonsense: The Politics of Alternate Energy We live in the age of Harry Potter solutions to economic problems. This means that our politicians and financial elites get to ignore the physical laws that have been discovered to govern, without exception, the utilization and conversion of energy from one form to another. Our leaders also feign complete indifference to the actual measured quantities of, and the accessibility to us of, the natural resources of energy, metals, and minerals which the earth possesses. Finally they claim that the most basic of economic laws, that of supply and demand is too complex to be understood except by a few who are skilled with the use of computers. The popular song asks “Do you believe in magic?” It would be less mellifluous but more accurate to ask “Do you believe in the bullshit coming out of Washington and Wall Street?’ The political bias of the mainstream media (MSM) is so obvious that its readership has nosedived to now be constituted of just those partisans who are true believers in whatever cause the newspaper, magazine, or broadcaster supports. The nonsensical and so-called financial analysis in the same publications has now entered the realm of pure fiction unless you filter it through the political bias already mentioned and a cultural elitism that simply reeks of the philosophy that one mustn’t question one’s ‘betters.’ Once serious, i.e., relatively balanced in their reporting, publications such as Newsweek and Time now have the form and, more and more, the sound bite and snippet style content of graphic novels, the euphemism that has replaced the more accurate term “comic books.” The New York Times, for example, is so incredibly biased, and generally inaccurate as well, as to be unreadable. It masquerades as serious by publishing biased, factually inaccurate, polemics. In my own travels, I once had the occasion to watch Nicolai Ceausescu speak on Romanian television for 6 hours on the glory (accruing to his masterful leadership) of meeting factory production schedules for tractors in a five year plan. The difference between socialist Romania in the 1980s and oligarchic New York in the 2000s is that everyone in Romania knew that the factory production figures were made up to fit the leader’s analysis and that; in any case, the tractors were crap that needed fixing every day. The New York Times thinks that its crap analysis doesn’t stink and so never needs fixing. Why should investors in minor metals care about any of this? Because they are getting nonsensical “analysis” of future supply and demand-the key factors to future price-from the glib ignoramuses populating the airwaves, the press, and the seats of financial and political power. Investors in minor metals need only to look at the results of following the advice of the self-centered greed-driven financial wizards and mining analysts of Wall Street firms in combination with the crisis solution agendas of the single minded, i.e., driven solely by the desire to be re-elected, hereditary politicians and their appointees in Washington to know that not a single one of these elites knows even how to salvage their own assets from the current massive destruction of confidence, credit, and wealth except by gaming the system, i.e., using insider knowledge and connections, and breaking the very rules and laws they themselves have written or sworn to enforce, to take the risk out of the equation even though those actions are always unethical and mostly illegal. I am speaking of men like Christopher Dodd and Charles Rangel. I’m going to give you some short term and some long term investing advice based not on what the political and financial elites say but on the results of what they have done, are doing, and say they will continue to do: Note first that Wall Street and Washington types believe in magic, not science. Even more important for investors is the fact that America’s elites, in particular those who have never worked for a living nor had the need to do so, such as Al Gore or HRH Princess Caroline of New York, only admit into their inner circles, for basking in the radiance of their presences, those who, like them, do not have a clue about the economy that created the America they dominate or the economies that are growing, successfully, in China, India, Brazil, and Russia. The elites believe that it is not important to take notice of the fact that the world’s strongest economies, from the point of view of future growth, are all based on two paramount factors: 1. Domestic self-sufficiency in, or control over, the exploration for and the production of natural resources of metals, minerals, and energy, and 2. The creation and maintenance of a domestic OEM heavy industrial sector that can manufacture consumer goods such as motor vehicles, aircraft, locomotives, ocean-going freight carrying vessels ,construction equipment, mining machinery, and home appliances, and is always ready to produce armaments for national defense. The above two factors are the reasons that the United States entered the 21st century as the world’s largest economy and the only military power able to project sufficient force to win a war to any location on earth. Americans believe that the American form of republican government in combination with our type of free market economy is what put our country where it is today. The BRIC economies believe that the two factors enumerated above are the real reasons that America grew to its present pre-eminence and that therefore if established by them individually will underpin and sustain them as great financial and military powers and that such will not depend on whether or not they are politically monarchies, dictatorships, republics, or democracies, and will not depend on whether their economic systems are free market or command economies or a mixture of both. Incredibly, the American elite and self-perpetuating ruling class has bet against the BRIC economies being right and has chosen until now to bet the wealth and security of the USA on a fantasy globalization based on a fantasy global adherence to free market principles, which principles not only do not operate within the USA but do not operate at all among the BRIC economies all of which are focused only on improving their own positions in the global economy no matter what the consequences to any other states. It may well be fatal to the perpetuation of American power to raise the wall of protectionism at this point in our history. Yet the latest person elected to the office of President represents a party the interests of which are dominated by purchasing through paying above market prices for labor the votes of the self serving unions, and economically as well as historically illiterate elites and political leaders the only interest of whom is in the accumulation of personal wealth or perpetual re-election or both. All of these people are what the Soviets used to refer to as “cosmopolitans” defined as individuals who put the interest of a global polity ahead of their responsibility to the well being of the state in which they live. So, you can make money in the market by watching for the resonance, that is to say the reinforcing, of the intersection of magic technologies and the attention of America’s ruling political elites. Magic technologies are those which solve problems without taking into consideration the availability of the raw materials and engineering processes required to build them or the economics of their production and distribution. In the short term I suggest that you invest in the fantasy alternate energy plays. The market will respond to the Obama alternate energy, “green,” stimulus by bidding up the price of the shares of the companies that claim they are working on ”advanced’ anything such as 1) rechargeable batteries, 2) wind generation of electricity, or 3) solar energy conversion. My model for this advice to you is the immediate reaction of the market to the money authorized to be wasted by the Bush administration, in conjunction politically with the self-serving Pelosi-Reid ‘led’ government, on subsidizing the American owned and operated OEM automotive industry for another month or two. The Wall Street ‘market makers’ responded to this destruction (waste) of wealth by bidding up the price of GM stock over just a few days to twice what it was selling for at the beginning of the phony time period during which the government was ‘considering its options.’ As I am writing this I note that it has already begun to sink in to the ‘investors’ that the long term prospects of the car makers are not really very bright if they say that they cannot survive even a couple of days without massive access to the Federal teat. Of course a cynic might just think that the short sellers are exercising their ‘judgment.’ After all, a swing of 16% in one day, such as GM had late in 2008, can make a Wall Street ‘professional’ a great deal of money. Returning to the discussion of fantasy green energy plays: Get out of investments in the future of companies subsidized by government as soon as it becomes obvious that there is going to have to be a second stimulus package given to them. This will be apparent when there are no results from the ‘advanced’ work and all of the companies say that ‘they are on the right track’ but need more money. This should take about 6 months, but as auditors look into, or make, the cost-benefit analyses of ‘advanced’ or ‘game changing’ technologies the collapse of market interest may occur in a much shorter time. Switch your money at that point, when you smell the need for a second bailout, to those surviving companies specializing in producing the raw materials for existing, workable, and economically practical technologies such as, in the case of the vehicle propulsion battery space, lead-acid (SLI and traction), nickel cadmium, and nickel metal hydride batteries. I would also then invest in lithium-ion (storage) batteries, wind for off grid use, silicon based solar, both crystalline and amorphous, and uranium and thorium based nuclear electric power generation. A final word about ‘advanced’ technology development. As a young man I once heard the best politician ever to come out of Minnesota, Hubert Horatio Humphrey (DFL-Mn) give some legislative drafting advice-I was in law school at the time and I was in a legislative drafting class. Vice President Humphrey, as he then was, said that in the 1950s when he and some other like-minded liberal senators were trying to draft legislation to expand subsidized college education to include not only G.I.s, but also the poor and disadvantaged who were otherwise qualified. The senate majority leader at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson( D-Tx), told Humphrey that if he wished to get the backing of the (Democrat party) majority for a bill that would help not just poor whites but also poor blacks he would need to label it so that questioning the bill automatically meant questioning the patriotism of the questioning senator himself. Humphrey said that Johnson took a copy of the proposed bill and wrote in front of the title word ‘education’ the two magic words “National Defense.” The rest is (legislative) history. Note well that the stimulus package in the Eisenhower administration was the National Defense Highway Act, which created the interstate highway system. Michigan was the first state to spend a billion dollars on the extensions of the interstate highways that went through Michigan and on the state highway “feeder” roads for that system. It was this ‘stimulus’ package not any advances in automotive technology that ignited the boom years for the OEM automotive, construction equipment , and mining machinery industries. The reductions in time necessary to get from the suburb to a job in the city and to get food and raw materials from where they were produced to where they were consumed ignited the dramatic growth of the United States outside of the east and Midwest. This could have been accomplished alternately by building national, intra-city, and intercity railroads as Europe did at the time, but OEM automotive industry politics in the USA overcame railroad politics and both mass transit and freight carrying passed from being carried by durable steel wheels on durable steel rails to being transported on disposable rubber tires on concrete highways that needed constant attention thus created jobs and the need for enormous quantities of raw materials all across the country. What a deal! Consumerism was born, lived long, and prospered. Without further ado, I am going to now list for you a group of companies related by the products which they are trying to develop, their business goals, and their agendas. I think you can make money by investing in them but solely on the basis of their relationship to the political goals of the Obama agenda for alternate energy. These investments are based on the truism that in allocating your investments timing is just as important always as project selection. On December 18, 2008 the Wall Street Journal carried a story based on a press release that day announcing that [L]eading U.S. battery and advanced [emphasis mine] materials companies, with support from one of the country’s largest national laboratories [The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory {just outside of Chicago}], have formed the National Alliance for Advanced [emphasis, again, mine]Transportation Battery Cell manufacture, known as the “Alliance,” to manufacture advanced lithium ion battery cells for transportation applications in the United States. The Alliance is trying to get a lot of taxpayer money to accomplish a completely amorphous goal, the members want to develop some fantasy process technology which will be flexible, so that it is adaptable to the mass production of whichever of the 26 lithium ion battery technologies now being “researched’ turns out to be the one that is safe, durable, long lived, and economical for the electrification of a limited range of passenger carrying vehicles-the electrification of long range high capacity freight carrying vehicles is a topic that is not even whispered about; it is too difficult a task for the foreseeable future. Note well how many times the word advanced appears in just the first paragraph of the press release. Note also that the Alliance is centered upon a U.S. Department of Energy Laboratory operated near the actual home of the soon-to-be sitting President of the U.S., so that the project’s money will flow to and through the new President’s home state. The fact that funding for this particular laboratory has lately been drying up is, of course, coincidental. The fact that the project would make more sense if it were directed by the NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, is also irrelevant. The Alliance is thus founded on that most fundamental of American political practices bringing home the bacon. It will almost certainly get its first allocation of Federal Funding early in the Obama presidency and will get more money as its research advances. The members of the Alliance are: * 3M (NYSE:MMM) * ActaCell (Private?) * All Cell Technologies (Private) * Altair Nanotechnologies (NasdaqCM: ALTI) * Dontech Global (Private) * Eagle-Picher Corporation (Private) * EnerSys (NYSE:ENS) * Envia Systems, (Private) * FMC (NYSE:FMC) * MicroSun Technologies (Private) * Mobius Power (Private) * Silyte (Private) * Superior Graphite (private) * Townsend Advanced Energy (Private) Note well the main reason that companies seek Federal funding; it is because private funding has no political agenda and is therefore not interested in taking the risk of getting little or no return based on 1) the state of development and the quality of the company’s technology, 2) the quality (i.e., competence perceived or demonstrated) of its management, or 3) whether or not the size of the losses incurred by the company so far are such that they can never be recovered in a rational amount of time. Additionally note how many of the above companies are private even the one that has a long and famous history, Eagle-Picher. The fact that so many of the alliance members are private is most likely an indication that they fail all or one of the above enumerated tests that private capital requires them to pass. To be fair some of them may have been ‘taken’ private by a fund in order to fatten them up for an IPO or to consolidate them with another company for a more substantial IPO. No matter how these companies got to their present inability to proceed without an amount of capital that was not available to them as constituted from the private market they are all now in the same boat; they cannot raise enough capital individually to both continue the development of whatever battery technology they have chosen as the one and to engineer a manufacturing process suitable for mass production. Note well that EaglePicher, Enersys, Microsun Technologies, and Superior Graphite are all pursuing or manufacturing other battery types besides lithium based ones. Even so they are in the same boat as the others they do not have nor can they raise sufficient capital to engineer mass production techniques and to build a flexible facility with the capacity to mass produce automotive power train batteries. The Alliance is not the sum of its parts; it is a group of undercapitalized companies, which have come together to grab a piece of the alternate energy pie in the hopes that the pie will be an open ended feast allowing them to keep getting more money even if and when they go down the wrong path or make a mistake. The free market is very harsh and cruel to such supplicants, but politicians allocate money to ensure their own re-election, not to serve a public good, so the Alliance is now on to a good thing. If they get public money they will not have to compete in the market place for it, and if anyone or more of them is successful they will not have to pay back their part of the ‘funding.’ Thus private enterprise as a driver of innovation and economic advantage will be driven out of the market for battery advancement probably therefore killing the possibility of developing an ‘advanced’ battery system. In any case, my advice is simple: If you see that the Alliance is going to receive funding then buy shares in those members of the alliance that are public and then watch the news carefully for mention of positive results by any member of the Alliance, listed publicly or not. Such news will cause the market to rise for whatever play there is in the Alliance. I would sell any Alliance-related shares that I own if they go up by a predetermined amount, say 10%, and then buy them back when the news quiets down and the market loses interest as no news is forthcoming. You will know when the Alliance has run through its funding. This will be when stories begin to follow one another that a breakthrough is imminent but that some further federal lard may need to be spread on the stale bread. The available stock will drop on this negative news. Choose a bottom and buy. When the Department of Energy announces that it will provide the additional funding let the stock rise to your target gain and dump it like an overheating lithium ion laptop battery. I suspect that we will see one or two cycles of this “Advanced Nonsense” this year, 2009. After that it will become obvious that the project is nothing more than An open ended subsidy program, and the DOE will try to get out of it, not by canceling it and admitting an error on the part of the administration but by trying to auction off its ‘share’ of any technology or engineering process development to private equity. The ticking time-bomb for this whole exercise in government mismanagement of the development of “Advanced” technology is of course the progress, if any, being made simultaneously by companies like America’s A123, France’s SAFT [Paris: SAFT.PA], and Korea’s LG [KSE: 066570.KS]. The three companies named above have all been selected by an OEM automotive supplier to develop a lithium ion technology. A123 and SAFT have been paired with Johnson Controls International (JCI), the world’s largest manufacturer of lead-acid SLI batteries in order to have JCI ready to engineer a mass production operation for a successful lithium ion technology should one occur. SAFT and LG have each also been mass producing batteries for many years. None of them even though they may plan to mass produce lithium ion batteries for vehicular power trains in the USA will join the “Alliance,” because they don’t want to share any competitive advantage either in battery technology or battery mass production technology with the small, undercapitalized, jonnies-come-lately. It is therefore very important to watch the press releases and progress of these three. If a car such as the GM Chevrolet Volt is introduced into the market and performs well with a battery from A123, SAFT, or LG or any combination of them and it is announced that JCI or, perhaps, EXIDE will put the battery into mass production then the purpose of the Alliance and all of its work will be perceived as valueless as will the price of the shares of any of the members of the Alliance at that point-even if this is unfair. A123 was supposed to launch an IPO last month; it did not, for obvious reasons. SAFT and LG are both listed on their home country exchanges. For the moment then I would take any profits I made by investing in the Alliance play I have here discussed and buy shares of JCI, SAFT, and LG as a hedge. I have not discussed the relative merits of any lithium ion battery technologies, because they don’t really matter when an investment has become totally politicized and has left the arena of the free market. With “Advanced” battery technology and the Alliance for developing and manufacturing it play the politics. The hereditary political and financial elites of this country do not know and do not wish to know anything about technology; they will throw other people’s money at anything that buys them votes and power. The rest of us may as well make some of our own money back in the meantime.…; Added by Melissa Furtwengler to Wanted Scientists, Energy experts, Engineers at 9:55am on January 12, 2009

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