My condolences to you and your family.

It's being selectively enforced. I'm a Navy Federal customer, and I go into their branches all the time (although not in California, MD). And I'm literally ALWAYS wearing a ball cap. And I've NEVER been asked to remove it. But then again, I'm a white male and presumably less scary than a Muslim woman.

Unless this policy has come about very recently such that I haven't been exposed to it, there's discrimination happening here.

@Tbrax:

good luck managing your finances later on after you've burned everybody with any actual knowledge of the industry at the stake.

Dude, apparently you haven't been paying attention to current events... "everybody with any actual knowledge of the industry" fucked up our economy so badly that it likely won't recover for years. Apologists for the financial industry have claimed for years that their skills are rare and valuable, which means they deserve obscene, outrageous levels of pay. So much for that idea - it appears that randomly recruited bums of the street could have done this well.

So yes, bring on the stakes, rope, and flammable liquids. If anyone deserves to burn at the stake (figuratively speaking), it's the Wall Street crowd.

@Natethegreat:

If the determination is made that a certain person has exactly the necessary skillset to perform a function crucial to AIGs longterm solvency and profitability, than AIG needs to be able to go hire that person. They can't do that if everyone thinks that AIG won't honor its contracts with employees, or that as AIG employees their compensation will be subject to the whims of the mob, or if we hamstring AIG so that it can't offer salaries capable of competing with private funds and baznks that didn't take bailout money.

Sorry, I'm not buying it. We have been told for years that we HAVE to pay enormous salaries, bonuses, stock options, commissions, benefits, etc, etc, etc; to these people, because their skills are so rare and valuable. That theory has been conclusively proven to be false. I absolutely guarantee that there are tons of out-of-work budget analysts, accountants, salesman, financial planners, and other folks; who although they're not members of the Wall Street privileged class, would do at least as good a job as the current crowd of bozos... who, let's not forget, utterly flushed the entire global economy down the toilet. And they'd do it for significantly less money.

So suffice it to say that I'm not real confident that AIG and similar companies can even IDENTIFY people with the exact right skill set to solve their problems now. Nor can they be trusted to figure out what these people should be paid.

... but seriously, why do you need a program to do this? Just hit the little AirPort status link at the top of your screen, and turn off your network connection. Done. You're off the internet until such time as you turn it back on. You can do something very similar with on a Windows machine, in the control panel's networking applet. Also, many wireless routers come with built in parental control functions, which can be set to disable internet connectivity altogether, or on a computer-by-computer basis, during certain time periods.

I find the idea of an application whose only function is to disable networking to be more than a little baffling.

Others have already brought this up, but... cougars: beautiful, powerful creatures who know what they want, and aren't afraid to get it. What's not to like?

I do think there's a certain "yuck" factor in the way that our entertainment-centric culture has taken the concept and gone hog-wild with it. I think the cougar has jumped the shark.

@Paul in KY:

If Mr. Friedman thinks he & his well-heeled friends can set up a floating city 'in San Francisco Bay' & not have the state of California and/or the city of San Francisco pass laws to regulate/tax it, then he's been smoking some better stuff than I.

Exactly true. San Francisco Bay is part of the internal waters of the US, and is legally US territory. You can bet that the IRS would laugh off any attempt to avoid taxes based on the fact that their floating city was "sovereign". At a minimum, they'd have to get offshore to the 12 mile limit, and even then, I think it's likely that they'd be arrested for tax evasion if they ever set foot ashore. And depending on how much money was involved, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that their "floating city" could be boarded and they inhabitants hauled off to tax court no matter where in the world they were. This whole thing is all so much pie-in-the-sky, which is too bad in a way... I'd be happy to see them all go.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. I graduated from college in 1986, and even in the mid-80's, it was pretty common to hear expressions like "geez, I really got raped on that exam". Which is not to say it's ok... but it's not particularly new either.