None!

None!

whaaa

None!

please tell me that photo is real

None!

gosh i would get so bored

One hint that Marlboro College may not be for everyone: the 6-foot-high wooden poles sticking out of the ground, lining the walkways. They’re guides for the snow plows, an ominous sign of the coming winter.

“I didn’t even know what a proper winter jacket was until I came here,” said sophomore Alex Quick from Pennsylvania.

Marlboro was founded in 1946 on an old farm in southern Vermont. It was built to be a different kind of college, where students direct their own learning. There are no core course requirements or traditional majors. Students spend their junior and senior years on a self-designed independent study.

“We’ve got this very small community that’s very close, with all people who are very invested in what they’re doing,” said Alessandro Pane, a sophomore from Maine. “It can make it a very intense environment.”

Marlboro is meant to be small – ideally 250 to 300 students. This year the college fell far short of its enrollment target. There are only 182 full-time students.

“Yeah, ouch,” said Brigid Lawler, the dean of admissions.

Marlboro is among many small colleges fighting for survival in a changing market. Private colleges have expensive campuses to run and tenured faculty to pay. At the same time, due to changing demographics, they’re competing for a shrinking pool of applicants, not to mention students who have started to question the value of an expensive liberal arts degree. Over the past 10 years, around five small colleges have closed each year, according to Moody’s Investor Service. In the next few years, analysts expect that rate to triple.



Alessandro Pane, left, and Alex Quick, both sophomores, are among just 182 full-time students enrolled at Marlboro College in Vermont. (Amy Scott/Marketplace)

When Lawler surveyed admitted students to find out why they’d chosen not to attend Marlboro, they cited two main factors. One was the expense. With financial aid, the average student pays about half of the $50,000 sticker price, but many said they still couldn’t afford it. The other reason, Lawler said, was the size.

“It just felt too small,” she said. “To change that, we had to do something that was audacious.”

What the college came up with was the Renaissance Scholars program. Next fall Marlboro hopes to bring in 52 new students on full scholarships — one from every state, plus D.C. and Puerto Rico. The college will also increase financial aid for all current and future students.

“The choice the trustees had was either just let things continue to go as they're going, or invest in this Renaissance program,” said Phil Steckler, a trustee and business broker based in nearby Brattleboro.

To pay for that investment, the board decided to do what’s become almost unthinkable in higher education.

“We’re going to dive into our endowment to the tune of probably $8 to $10 million over the next four or five years,” he said.

The idea is to bring in enough new students that the college will become more attractive to future students who can afford to pay. If it works, the scholarship program could be expanded to other countries.

“I think it’s an expensive move,” said Jeff Denneen, a higher education consultant with Bain & Company.

Marlboro is lucky, he said. Its roughly $40 million endowment is rare for small colleges. But it faces the same pressures as other tuition-dependent colleges: high costs and the perception that liberal arts degrees aren’t marketable.

“If I were them, I think I’d be looking more at, first of all, how do we do a better job of retaining the students that we have, and secondly I’d look at how do we make sure that we are really delivering what students value,” he said.

The college is working on retention. It’s teamed up with other colleges to offer more courses and internship opportunities. John Sheehy has taught writing and literature at Marlboro for 17 years. The board’s move has inspired the faculty to rethink the curriculum, he said.

“The faculty right now are really mobilized to make necessary changes in Marlboro that will make us a better college,” he said.

The students are mobilized, too. Marlboro is governed by a unique New England-style town meeting, where students, staff and faculty vote on proposals to, say, revise the sexual misconduct policy or extend the hours at the coffee shop.

At a recent meeting, a professor stood before a large map of the country, taking volunteers to recruit new students for the Renaissance program. Sophomore Helen Pinch adopted Massachusetts. Marlboro has been on the brink before, she said. There are legends about professors working for no pay and students doing maintenance work.

“Living on the edge just kind of seems to be in the Marlboro tradition,” she said.

It’s one tradition the school wouldn’t mind learning to live without.

None!

kev you should buy some spanish bonds. good investment. no risk.

None!

sorry phil you need to click through and listen

None!

i need a fireplace.

None!

poppin' that collar

None!

and shitty airport food.

You've probably heard the statistic that 90 percent of restaurants fail in the first year. That's not true. It's actually more like 60 percent in the first three years. But the sentiment still holds. It's really hard to open a successful one and even harder to make one last.

So how did an immigrant with no high school education, let alone a culinary school degree, become the most famous chef in America and build an empire worth over $400 million? It's a harrowing story that involves poverty, abuse, child labor, a firing or two, an attempted suicide and huge heaping helpings of gumption, drive and stick-to-itiveness.

Wolfgang Puck is widely considered the first modern celebrity chef. But don't say that to his face.

I hate the term celebrity chef. That's not who I am. I don't walk around in a Brioni suit. I don't look out for the money first. I like to make projects as good as I can and hopefully we make money off of it.

And money off it he has made. Puck has an illustrious portfolio of 27 fine dining restaurants, more than 80 Wolfgang Puck Express locations, a line of cookware, six cookbooks, prepackaged foods and a catering business that handles the Oscars, the Emmys and the Governors Ball.

But it may be his influence on culture that has been his crowning achievement.

When we opened Spago (in 1982), we were the first restaurant with an open kitchen. I went to the farmers market, I went to the fish market. Before, you had all these fancy restaurants that poured your seafood on an iceberg and some ketchup with horseradish and everything. That was the traditional thing, and maybe they cut a steak in front of you. But there was no imagination because it wasn't a chef who ran the restaurant. It was some owner or a maître' d or a director of the restaurant. So when I started Spago, and Paul Prudhomme started Portmanteau in New Orleans and with Alice Waters up in Berkeley, we were really the first chefs who controlled the destiny of the restaurant. We cooked whatever we felt like. Not what somebody told you.

Spago also pioneered the gourmet pizza movement. And Puck's cultural reach has spread far outside of the U.S., to restaurants from Bahrain to Istanbul to Dubai. Despite all his success, the 66-year-old continues to work six days a week in his Bel-Air Hotel restaurant and is on the road more than 100 days a year, checking in on his businesses.

When you love what you do and you have passion for what you do it's easy. My wife said, 'You should slow down,' and I said, what am I going to do then? I always tell people I'm only at the beginning. The beginning was all right so far.

None!

booo no one wants a wall

None!

mmm champagne with lime...

None!

we went from 2007 renting out a hotel, live band, tons of food and booze, to 2008 using the conference room, handing you a warm Heineken, with pre cut cheese squares. fuck cheese squares.

None!

doesn't this defeat the purpose?

None!

i dont like the house but i am a fan of office cottages. Think i could build one in our yard?

None!

WHAT

None!

phil what would happen if we did that in the U.S.? you would be back in school?

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen told lawmakers Thursday that the central bank is getting close to raising interest rates, as part of a generally upbeat testimony before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress. But as the prospects for a rate hike grow here in the U.S., the European Central Bank is taking the opposite approach.

Thursday, the ECB unveiled its latest measures to stimulate the lagging European economy, partly by cutting its already negative deposit rate to minus 0.3 percent.

If you thought interest rates couldn’t go below zero, so did a lot of economists – until central banks in Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland proved otherwise. For more than a year now, instead of paying interest, the ECB has been charging banks to hold their cash overnight.

“What they’re trying to do is motivate these institutions to lend more to the private sector,” said Bernie Baumohl, chief global economist with the Economic Outlook Group. “Certainly one way to do that is sort of to penalize these banks for having their money simply sit idly.”

There are some signs that it may be working, said Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed economist now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Bank loans are growing in Europe again, he said.

“What people point to more than anything is it’s pushing the Euro down, because international investors have gotten out of euros and they’re putting their money in dollars where they can get at least a small positive interest rate instead of a negative rate,” he said.

That is good for European exports. But so far the tactic has not worked well enough for ECB President Mario Draghi. Many were expecting an even larger rate cut Thursday.

The question is, just how negative can rates go.

So far, banks have been reluctant to pass on their costs to regular depositors, said Francesco Papadia, former director general for Market Operations at the European Central Bank with the Bruegel Institute in Brussels.

“This has not reached bank depositors in any significant way as yet, but at a certain point, if this would go on, they would be forced to do it,” Papadia said.

At that point, the mattress at home starts looking like a better option. If customers start pulling their money out of banks in droves, Gagnon said, we’ll have learned how low rates can go.

None!

https://i.imgur.com/Ncl6RXj.gifv lol oh man

None!

there we go

None!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjXZvcgHIXY

None!

sorry kev.
On Wednesday, Yahoo announced that it would not spin off its stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba group, citing tax concerns. Instead, it will create a separate company to hold the rest of its assets. It’s a big decision to boil down to taxes.

But taxes determine how companies are born, how they grow and how they die.

“It begins at the beginning,” said Steve Rosenthal, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, “with the choice of entity and structure.”

Start as a corporation, partnership, sole proprietorship, the choice a company makes will have a big effect on taxes. So will where a company starts or moves to in the case of inversions.

“In the current global economy, companies have a lot of choice,” said Ryan Dudley, with accounting firm Friedman LLP.

It’s not just that the world is smaller, it’s that the nature of a lot of businesses these days makes them more mobile, and therefore more sensitive to the fact that different places have different tax rates.

“The modern economy is much more driven by intangible property," Dudley said.

In in a manufacturing economy, companies choose where to locate factories — how close to market, how close to resources. And it’s hard to move a factory. Today’s economy is much more about patents, software and IP. All a company needs to move those assets to a low-tax country is an accountant and a lawyer.

“It’s the basis for Google and Microsoft and other tech companies to transfer of all their intellectual property to Irish companies,” said Steven Bank, who teaches business law at UCLA.

And of course, taxes play into little things like mergers and acquisitions.

“Take the most recent financial crisis and the bailout. Wells Fargo would not have acquired Wachovia Bank if the IRS hadn’t issued a notice suspending limits on the ability to use losses in acquisitions,” Bank said.

By the way, Congress hasn’t undertaken a major tax reform in almost 30 years.

None!

great stock photo

None!

yeah but the quality control has to be shit

For a $200 billion industry, the American consulting business is mysterious to most. Clients tell consultants to keep quiet about what they’re doing. And their work is kind of hard to explain anyway. You may know someone in consulting, but do you know what they actually do all day?

In any case, the consulting industry remains a pricey help line for giant companies and a powerful career magnet for elite college grads and MBAs. But the business of recruiting is changing. Consulting careers are known for long hours and endless travel. Top graduates these days think very differently about work-life balance, so they may not find consulting worth the tradeoffs, especially when their skills are in demand at growing tech companies with lavish perks. And for those who are committed to consulting as a career, going freelance—once a path reserved for consultants with many years of experience and contacts—is becoming more of an option.

Carlos Castelán is on that path now. With a Harvard MBA and previous professional experience at a big retailer, he’s the type of candidate consulting firms go after. And they did. But he chose a different path out of business school. He now offers up his service directly to corporate clients. It’s something he greatly prefers to the life of a first-year consultant, when there’s little choice over the types of projects one can work on and being on the road every Monday through Thursday is a near certainty.

“It would be very tough for me to go to a big company at this point,” Castelán explained. “Having a family is very important to both my wife and me, so that travel element really is difficult to manage.”

He does travel for projects, but he has the choice of which projects to take on, including those that allow him to stay in the Minneapolis area. Castelán says he’s making more money than a typical starting consulting salary at a major firm.

He gets these projects by offering his services through a company called HourlyNerd, a startup that connects businesses to freelance consultants and takes a cut of the fees. The idea is a space where companies that don’t need seven-figure consulting engagements can find experts to help them with small and medium-size problems. It’s proving popular with businesses and consultants, not to mention venture investors, who have poured in more than $11 million into the company.

HourlyNerd is based in Boston, a city which is in many ways the cradle of consulting. Several of the biggest firms began here, and all of them flood campuses every year to recruit Harvard and MIT students in bulk.

The ex-consultants working there sometimes talk about the industry the way Uber execs talk about the taxi business: bloated, inefficient, incumbent, all the startup swear words. But for the most part, they’re not really competing for the same projects.

“Their model is so expensive that they can’t be working on the 30, 40, 50-thousand dollar projects that we are, so it’s not necessarily all that attractive to them to pursue,” said Rob Biederman, one of HourlyNerd's founders.

He added that some big-name consultants have even referred business to HourlyNerd, projects too small for them to bother with. The company sees itself as expanding the potential market for consulting, by generating new business from companies that don’t have the budgets to hire giant consulting firms. Big businesses are coming on board too.

While much of HourlyNerd’s work at this point is projects on a smaller scale than the big consulting firms, it does compete directly with them for consulting talent.

Right now, MBA students at elite schools are prepping hard and for high-stakes interviews that’ll determine whether they get coveted summer internship offers. Many of them will be gunning for Bain & Company, where partner Keith Bevans leads global consultant recruiting. He and his team have been pitching Bain to MBAs for a long time.

Whether the competition is tech companies, banks or freelancing, when candidates ask him about long hours and travel, he’s clear there can be some of that. But he makes the case that it’s part of a bigger overall experience that pays off for employees. And like any good consultant, he cites data.

“Every other month, every case team gets surveyed on a couple of different metrics to understand how satisfied are they, how much of an impact are they having, do they feel like they’re learning, do they feel like they’re developing,” he explained. “Time and time again, what we see is that doesn’t correlate with hours and it doesn’t correlate with travel.”

That may sound like a slick sales pitch from a 20-year Bainiac, and it is. But there are independent data. In Glassdoor’s latest report on the best U.S. companies to work for, Bain comes in second, beating out Google, Facebook and Apple.

It may be that HourlyNerd and platforms like it enable sorting that wasn’t possible in a pre-Internet era. With on-demand consulting increasingly an option, people with analytical minds and a taste for problem solving may not have to sign up with a big consulting firm if they aren’t interested in the travel. And those who are can still go to work for places like Bain.