To me, the Sabres are mishandling their roster right now.  Word from John Vogl is that Stafford is out tonight, and with their roster maxed out the Sabres are unable to recall anyone from Portland unless they make a move.  Apparently they won’t be making any moves, meaning that either Andrej Sekera or Steve Montador will be in the lineup at forward tonight.

Carrying eight defensemen on the active roster while keeping just 12 forwards will do that to you.  Yet Nathan Paetsch isn’t the one they are moving to forward tonight, so can someone explain to me why he is still on the roster?  Makes no sense to me…

As for No. 20, Don Luce was always one of my favorites.  He frequently centered a line that had Craig Ramsay at right wing, making a great defensive pairing when shorthanded or at even-strength.

Plus, he had a great ‘fro.

Luce is currently Director of Hockey Development for the Flyers, which was almost enough for me to skip over him and make it the Kai Suikkanen open thread, but I decided to give him a pass since he was the one that got canned by the Sabres.

• CentriLogic a Toronto based company that provides outsourced data center services, has opened a data center in the Main Place Tower that is expected to bring 50 to 75 jobs to downtown Buffalo over the next three years.

• Sampla Belting North America, an Italian manufacturer of industrial strength belts opened its first U.S.operations center in Lackawanna. Sampla spent $1.25 million acquiring a 40,000 square foot building and expects to hire 17 workers soon. The company considered opening the plant in Atlanta, South Africa and Milan.

• Robinson Home Products a Cheektowaga distributor of kitchen tools has added 28 people bringing the size of its work force to 109. Due to a 30 year licensing agreement Robinson reached to make Oneida brand flatware and dinnerware, Robinson expects to add about 60 more jobs. The company is investing $16.1 million in its business and expects annual sales to double to $150 million.

Sarah Palin is cheaper and far more effective than all the bullshit factories the Koch Foundation and others have been funding for decades.

And our media elites, desperate for access and a way to fill a 24 hour news cycle, comfortable with their village status, and cowed by decades of being called liberal, rather than calling obvious lies for what they are, will instead sit by and act like play by play announcers and color commentators at a football game, with a he-said she-said approach: “Sarah Palin claims mammogram guidelines are legally binding, Kathleen Sebelius says this is not true. What do you think? Our roundtable next with Stephen Hayes, Karl Rove, and James Carville, where we will discuss what this means for Obama and the 2010 midterm elections.”

Just depressing. On any given day, if you just quickly read a newspaper or watch cable news for fifteen minutes, there is a very solid chance you will leave the experience knowing less than when you started.

For one thing, we don’t do third-party thank-you letters, preferring to allocate scarce space to the public debate of issues. For another, the same sort of letters went to editorial pages and editors all across the country, triggering nationwide warnings of “astroturf,” our industry’s shorthand for fake grass-roots letters. One letter we got even noted that “several organizations” wanted their talking points relayed to newspapers. The mybarackobama.com site seemed to be prominent among them. A colleague at another paper got one that didn’t even bother to fill in the blanks for a representative’s name. We still consider all letters sent to lettertoeditor@buffnews.com . But letter-senders have a better chance of getting published if they’re actually letter-writers, expressing their own views in their own words. Simple agreement with somebody else’s words is not enough, even if it saves work

Hopefully this practice will end on all sides, and people who have a sincere and strong opinion on a particular contemporary topic will put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and write the damn thing themselves.

This is reminiscent of, among other things, the vicious gangs of keep left signs that attacked unsuspecting pedestrians in Bolton, UK in the early 70s.

We can say it now.. add Oklahoma City to the list of favorite USRT destinations, along with places such as Indianapolis, Memphis and Montreal.

This city is fast becoming a true tourist destination, thanks to downtown neighborhoods such as Bricktown, with its historical heritage combined with exciting new entertainment and fun venues. And now Oklahoma City is a true 4 sport franchise destination, thanks to joining the ranks of NBA cities with the Oklahoma City Thunder.

OK, OK, I’m not going into detail as to how the team got here, save to reference that this team was once the Seattle Supersonics. I’ll save that rant for Pete. But a few years back this city became the temporary home of the New Orleans Hornets, when Hurricane Katrina obliterated that city. OKC then showed that they were ready for prime time, and now they have a team to call their own.

Since we last visited here, we see that the Ford Center has undergone tremendous renovations and upgrades. Plush padded seats throughout the building, tiled washrooms, snazzy new 360 degree ribbon boards and HD scoreboard. But what has not changed is the energy in the building. Fans here are passionate, greeters at the top of the stairs leading to the 300s welcome and high five fans and lead them to “Loud City”. Music bumps, cheerleaders, the fierce Bison mascot, and other crazy fun on the court keep the fans entertained and clapping along throughout.

This venue earned a high score when we did the official profile for the OKC Hornets. No doubt the Thunder will retain their status as one of the elite NBA venues in our rankings. Speaking of which, we can now rub the “asterisk” off the Ford Center. Yes we were boasting that we have been everywhere, and we did visit here when the Hornets were in town, but truth be told we had not seen the Thunder play until tonight, and were holding off this visit until we could combo it with the Dallas Cowboys new stadium visit.

As for the game, the Thunder put on an offensive show tonight, with show stopping dunks and great playmaking, and when it was over had themselves a 127-108 win over the Washington Wizards.

Couple side stories here.. Gary and The King were in town once again, Gary actually arranged for the tickets. We all enjoyed a great dinner at Brix sports restaurant in Bricktown. These guys are just the best and they will be heading to Austin tomorrow for the Texas Kansas showdown. We will meet up again come Sunday in Arlington at Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

After the game a young fella who is only known as “Thunderman” no we could not ferret out his secret identity, caught up with us in the concourse, calling us out and saying “Hey you guys are the Ultimate Sports Road Trip!” Turns out he and his mom Neelie are big fans of the USRT and have followed our journeys on our web site. We exchanged pleasantries and emails and took a group photo.

We walked out into the warm Oklahoma night, just shaking our heads. It never ceases to amaze us that there are people everywhere who know of us and what we do and whenever these chance meetings take place we are truly awed and humbled.

Good times! Good times!

Day 2 is in the books… up early tomorrow as we point our car southward back to Texas. It is a 2:30 PM kickoff at Kyle Field in College Station for the USRT, as Texas A&M hosts Baylor in a Big XII showdown. Until then!

We promised Thunderman his moment of fame here at WNYMedia, so here he is, along with his mom Neelie and Gary and Pete.

“If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.” – Paul Graham in his essay “How To Be Silicon Valley”

In many ways, the notion of “imported innovation” is the core tenet of our local economic development strategy.  We strive to identify companies who will move here or we struggle to keep existing companies here, but we do little to help generate innovation and entrepreneurship.

This is odd as Buffalo has a rich history of innovative entrepreneurs who powered the growth of Buffalo and WNY at the turn of the last century.  At some point, we seem to have lost our way, we lost our network effect.

The reason Buffalo struggles to innovate is related to the lack of innovators, a self-perpetuating problem.  We lack a thriving community of innovative and energetic entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks.  There is no center of the city which fosters shared ideas and creative entrepreneurial energy.  Sure, we have a couple of areas in the city chasing the Richard Florida model of huddling hipsters and creatives into small alcoves to create an economic impact, but there is no effort to create an Artspace-like environment for business.

In cities where innovation thrives, you’ll find strong academic universities surrounded by an urban area populated by entrepreneurs with access to capital investors who are willing to fund risky ideas. You need a confluence of wealth and energy to create a network effect.

Chairman Emeritus, IBM Academy of Technology, Irving Wladawsky-Berger had this to say about innovation and network effects:

Throughout history, certain cities and the regions around them have been the major centers of innovation in a variety of different fields as a result of their unique accumulation of talent and wealth. Innovation is very susceptible to network effects – that is, the more talented people you have in close proximity, the more their ideas and their work influence each other and stimulate them to innovate. While talent is necessary to becoming an innovation hub, it is not sufficient. You need wealth, in order to support the talented people and bring their work to market. You also need an open culture that values a diversity of ideas and experiences.

So, we lack a thriving urban area which creates shared energy.  We lack access to innovation capital as most of our local wealth is inherited and descended from the casino capitalism tree (those interested in collecting wealth for the sake of collecting it).  Our talent base is drained each year as they migrate to greener pastures.  Most importantly, we lack people willing to invest in what Keynes called the “real economy”, the economy of production capital, long-term investment and job creation.

So, how do we overcome all of these factors?  The answer from the likes of BNE/BNP and most IDA’s is to keep paying a vig to companies like Geico and Yahoo! to set up shop in our fair region and bless us with midlevel jobs.  Those jobs are designed to create wealth for plutocrats in other regions of the country.  While this strategy has merit as a force multiplier for the local economy, it’s shouldn’t be the primary driver of economic development, it should be a tactic in a wider strategy.

I’d posit that we need to build our own network effect.  No longer should we look to the local “business leaders” for handouts and capital.  We rebuild our culture of innovation from the ashes of closed steel mills and shuttered auto factories.  Looking to ourselves to fund a new wave of innovation, a rising tide of locals who want to build a better future for themselves and their neighbors.  To give this city back the entrepreneurial roar that was heard around the world at the turn of the last century.

We start with a community wide venture capital investment fund.  One in which we all pay what we can to fund the next wave of companies that will employ our friends, neighbors and our children.  Let’s stop looking for someone else to save us when the answer is right in our own wallets.

What follows is a skeleton idea that emerged from discussions with a dozen or so young emerging entrepreneurs over the last couple of weeks (our own pocket network effect).  We figured if we want to empower entrepreneurship, we should start by asking others to help us create the vision.  Which is why we need your help.

Not every idea needs a $500,000-$10,000,000 initial investment.  Most need seed funding for basic salaries, access to technology and office space, time, mentorship and community.  A good example of what this would look like is a community funded version of Y-Combinator.

Y Combinator does seed funding for startups. Seed funding is the earliest stage of venture funding. It pays your expenses while you’re getting started.

Some companies may need no more than seed funding. Others will go through several rounds. There is no right answer; how much funding you need depends on the kind of company you start.

At Y Combinator, our goal is to get you through the first phase. This usually means: get you to the point where you’ve built something impressive enough to raise money on a larger scale.  We make small investments (rarely more than $20,000) in return for small stakes in the companies we fund (usually 2-10%).

Y Combinator has a novel approach to seed funding: we fund startups in batches. There are two each year, one from January through March and one from June through August. During each cycle we fund multiple startups.

We estimate that we’ll need live/work space and an initial funding stream of $2,000,000 to fund 8-10 companies at a maximum of $20,000 in the first year.  Ideally, we want to raise money from the community, in small denominations.  We want everyone invested in the idea of creating innovation and the companies which will employ the people of our region.  Let’s stop thinking of economic development as a top-down planning mechanism and treat it like a grassroots campaign.  When people are invested in the business community, even at a small scale, they become active participants in the local business environment.  Not pawns in a multi-national corporate game of pleasing distant shareholders.  We begin to think locally, we begin to empower entrepreneurs, we begin to see what’s possible.

Is it possible to raise $2,000,000 in Western New York through small donations from Joe Six-Pack in Lancaster and Tom Twelve-Pack in Hamburg?  Maybe.  However, we’d need to identify some larger investors who are not part of the existing power structure to provide our own seed funding and provide the mentorship for these budding entrepreneurs.

Each investor, no matter how small, get a weighted vote on which businesses get funded.  There will be a fund manager and a CEO hired who will report to a board of directors elected by the wider membership.  The board will manage the program, provide leadership and advise the membership.  Everyone is eligible for a leadership position as half of the board would rotate each year.  This would be a corporation, not a non-profit.

During the startup phase, we group the entreprenuers together and they hack away at their projects with legal oversight and receive guidance from guest speakers, advisers, and business planners.  We set them up for success by letting them focus on their business idea while giving them the tools to grow the idea.

So, I’ll leave it to you to tell me what you think.  Add to the idea, tell me what we’re missing or what we have right.  We’re walking the idea around town to people we’ve identified as potential partners and seed investors and I’ll post updates as the idea either blossoms or stalls.

It’s time we took control of our economic future, help make it happen.

However it happened, this faith-based advocacy has led to a streamlined sales pitch that identifies “unbelievers” as ignorant knuckle-dragging “deniers.” The meme goes something like this: “You don’t want to give up your F-250 pick up truck because you don’t believe in climate change.” Or “If you believed in climate change you’d support solar energy subsidies.” Or “Why don’t you compost and reduce your carbon footprint – do you deny climate change?”

Somewhere along the line, “believing” in climate change got lumped into endorsing a specific solution: reducing our carbon, and specifically CO2, footprint. Can’t have one without the other. To question the usefulness, scientific backing, or efficacy of setting an arbitrary 350 ppm CO2 goal is to question climate change altogether. 

Under this tortured logic, may I present to you Al Gore, Climate Change Skeptic.

Newsweek recently ran an extended, largely positive, profile of Al Gore and his current climate change advocacy efforts. He’s written a new book. He’s training others to give the Inconvenient Truth lecture. And he has quietly held summits of experts in various fields and asked uncomfortable science based questions. Some of the results are surprising in their intellectual honesty and non-partisan conclusions.

Here’s one nugget: 40% of our CO2 increase since the 1800’s is attributable to deforestation. Even now, it accounts for more for of the CO2 buildup (23%) than all the world’s cars and trucks. Farmers mulching and not-tilling would sequester 12 percent of all emissions. Further soil management could grab another 15 percent, and reduce our CO2 ppm count by 50. The logical conclusion to this?

“If we feed the biology and manage grasslands appropriately, we could sequester as much carbon as we emit,” says Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, who presented at two summits. 

Why isn’t this solution given more air time? According to Gore’s advisors, who tried to downplay the findings – the political cost. Tell people we can manage our farms and forests to eliminate emissions issues, and they’d stop buying Prius’ and agitating for mass transit. And the tree-huggers wonder why the knuckle-dragging deniers say all this climate change talk is more about controlling behavior than helping the environment. . . .

Here’s another nugget: we’re still figuring out what causes climate change. Or to be more specific, we’re reordering the relative effects of various greenhouse gases. Scientists at the Goddard Institute of NASA reported in Science that methane accounts for 27%, halocarbons 8%, black sooty carbon 12%, CO 7%, and CO2 . . . 43%. 43% of the effect but nearly 100% of the public discussion. Never mind that targeting CO2 is the most cost intensive to reduce, and that “removing one ton of black carbon will have the same effect as removing 2,000 to 3,000 tons of CO2.” Where does black carbon come from? Highly regulatable diesel engines, fixed by a $250 filter. Methane emissions could similarly be cut by filters on highly regulatable oil wells. Forget tax incentives and regulations – the United States could BUY AND GIVE AWAY these filters for every diesel engine on the planet for a fraction of the cost of the climate change package working its way through Congress or at Copenhagen. Once again, is this about changing and controlling behavior, or pragmatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions?

To his credit, it was Al Gore himself  teased out these solutions and contradictions, and let the science, not politics, lead his way. In this he seems quite unlike his fellow climate change agitators.

So let me present you with a more nuanced, thinking man’s skepticism on climate change, that focuses on two related issues.

First, we don’t know as much about climate change as we think we do. My proof of this is the yearly varied reports of the potential impacts, effects, and how long they will take to occur. Climate is complicated. Something bad is probably happening. We don’t understand enough of why or how that is.

Second, we know even less about our “solutions”  to climate change. Hard to come up with a solution if we are still defining the problem. For proof of this, I don’t need to get all Michael Crichton and pull out eugenics. I can simply look to 15 years ago, when corn-based ethanol was being highly touted, pushed, and subsidized as the solution to not only our shortage of foreign oil, but climate change as well. Wait, you mean to tell me we now understand that corn-based ethanol produces MORE CO2 in its lifecycle than extracting oil from the ground? Oops. The Law of Unintended Consequences appears to be on overdrive as our push for corn-based ethanol not only produces more carbon than it saves, but caused riots in the Third World because of food shortages. 

Many climate change advocate politicians like to refer to the “All of the above” approach, meaning we don’t know what the solution is, so we’ll just fund everything. In a fantasy land of infinite resources, this makes sense. But we don’t live in that world. President Obama is testing its limits now, by running a deficit equal to his 43 predecessors combined, but eventually, the government runs out of borrowing ability. Before the world spends tens of trillions of dollars on solutions to stop global warming (a sum that may be able to lift the entire world out of poverty), don’t policy makers have some obligation to know if the funded solutions will work? We don’t need 100% clarity. But we do need solutions that are not proven detrimental only ten years later.

An article in the Gouverneur Times as to the, as of yet uncertified results in the 23rd Congressional District contains numerous false assertions and allegations.

There was no virus in the voting machines on Election Day in the 23rd District or anywhere else. The article is full of inaccurate information and unfortunately quoted a single word from a commissioner who mischaracterized the issue in question.

The State Board has already acknowledged there was a software problem identified during our mandatory pre-election testing regimen prior to Election Day. The problem centered on races which were composed of multi-candidate formats which allow voters to vote for more than one candidate in a given race. For example, in judicial races the voter is often allowed to vote for 3 out of 5 candidates or 2 out of 4, etc., or in a town where there are “at large” districts. The source code did not allow for enough memory in these contests and caused the scanners to freeze during operation. The Counties experiencing the problem were notified prior to Election Day and the voting systems were corrected and re-tested and the corrective action was applied successfully in those areas.

However, the human review of the software problem did not adequately identify every machine that had the problem and, as a result, there were some scanners which did freeze on Election Day. When these scanners froze, the local boards implemented procedures according to state law and Board of Elections regulations. These procedures do not allow for new changes on Election Day, so inoperative scanners were taken out of operation and emergency ballots were cast and counted in those areas according to existing procedures.

This problem was discussed in numerous press reports around the state and was openly discussed at the November 10th State Board of Elections meeting by the Commissioners and the Director of Election Operations.

With regard to the use of USB ports, there is a single USB port on the ImageCast scanner. Pursuant to state Election Law 7-202(t) the port does not permit any “functionality potentially capable of externally transmitting or receiving data via the internet, via radio waves or via other wireless means.” The port is sealed, is not accessible and has no capability for any exchange of information. The scanners do not operate like personal computers. Any device, such as a flash drive, placed in the port will not be recognized.

In addition, from the time the pre-election testing is completed until Election Day morning the machines are in the care, custody and control of the local board of elections. The machines as a group are under lock and key. Individually, the critical areas of the machine are covered in tamper-evident seals which are numbered and logged. Any broken seal will be investigated and the machine re-tested prior to any further use. Any broken seal discovered on Election Day will cause the scanner to be taken out of service immediately. The inspectors then follow long-established procedures to go to emergency ballots, until an alternate scanner can be deployed.

Lastly, any reference to a slot that is accessible to voters and poll workers for stuffing the ballot box is inaccurate information. A gap between the scanning device and the ballot box was discovered during functional testing of the ballot marking devices more than a year ago. Every machine in use on Election Day was retrofitted to completely block access to that gap. Prior to completion of the retrofit last year the gap was blocked by a tamper-evident numbered security seal. As stated earlier, any broken seal would cause the removal of a scanner from use immediately.

In addition, from the time they are created up to and including final storage, all election materials paper and machines are secured and tracked in a chain of custody by the local board of elections. All ballots voted, unvoted and spoiled must be accounted for throughout the election process.

Despite the numerous misstatements of fact in the above mentioned article, the results in the 23rd Congressional District, and all other contests in counties which utilized optical scan voting machines, will have been canvassed and audited pursuant to state Election Law, and will be certified in due course. In the end, the new optical scan voting systems guarantee we have ballots as marked by voters ensuring that every vote is counted.

Here in Oklahoma City, there is a neighborhood on the fringes of downtown called “Bricktown”. It is a mix of historic old buildings, supported by infill development subject to strict architectural guidelines, all connected via a below grade canal which meanders through the district, offering paddleboats and water taxis to ferry visitors around

The buildings are skewed towards fun and entertainment, with nightclubs, brewpubs, restaurants, retail stores, joined by residential uses, hotels, large retail hubs, a movie multiplex, including a (memo to Tim Tielman – please insert high pitched girly shriek here) Bass Pro.

Their AAA ballpark, AT&T Bricktown Ballpark anchors the district, and the Cox Convention Center and Ford Center, home of the NBA Oklahoma City Thunder, are all closeby.

We were astounded seeing how much new development has occurred since our first visit here in 2006. More importantly, Bricktown can offer a plethora of design guidelines and ideas for Buffalo’s Canalside to follow. Here in OKC, they are light years ahead of Buffalo in terms of making their historic district a reality. Here’s hoping we can catch up. Fast.