Losing Money

In another move to clean up its balance sheet, Sylvan Learning Systems Inc. said yesterday that it will sell its money-losing Aspect English-instruction subsidiary for $22 million - one-third of what it paid for it in 1998 - to an unnamed group backed by investment firm Warburg Pincus. Aspect, which Sylvan bought for $65 million from its San Francisco founders in 1998, has been a drag on Sylvan's earnings for the past two quarters. Its revenue for the first half of 2000 was $20 million, a $5.2 million drop from the first half of 1999.

In November, voters approved a major expansion of Maryland's gambling program on the promise that allowing table games and eventually building a sixth casino would ensure that the gambling dollars state residents spend would go toward funding education here and not in states like West Virginia, Delaware and Pennsylvania. This week, we got the first preliminary snapshot of how that bargain is working out, and it should give us some pause. The Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Commission reported its first set of figures since the Maryland Live Casino in Anne Arundel County added table games.

The Champ is facing his toughest challenge.If New York Democrats reject Clinton, they ought to go back to New Hampshire and start over.Olympia & York, the Canadian property mega-developer, is losing money and may be forced to sell Nova Scotia.When they start cutting the National Guard, they are getting close to home.

Timothy E. Parker, manager of T. Rowe Price's New Era Fund for the past three years, will leave the the Baltimore-based money manager by the end of September, the company said. Parker will be replaced as manager by Shawn T. Driscoll, an energy analyst with the fund. "I had a wonderful 12 years here and learned a lot of things," said Parker, 38. "It's a good organization. Sometimes you need to part ways to pursue different challenges. " Parker said he doesn't have any firm plans at this point.

The NHL's lockout of its players continues into its third day today, with the league and the NHL Players Association planning to resume talks tomorrow, but with few players apparently believing any good news will emerge soon.After a 90-minute meeting among Washington Capitals players yesterday that included a discussion of the issues, the union's position and a letter sent by commissioner Gary Bettman to all players detailing the standoff, several Capitals left for distant homes while others made plans for recreational and family activities.

SAN FRANCISCO - In a concrete tower on San Francisco's Market Street, where employees of such Internet companies as IXL Enterprises Inc. once toiled, developers are building the city's latest hot product: apartments. Tishman Speyer Properties LP is converting the top half of the 40-story building at 575 Market to housing from offices left vacant in the dot-com bust. "Housing in San Francisco so far has been a very, very strong performer," said Ezra Mersey, Tishman's managing director. "We're confident it makes sense."

U.S. Foodservice, the Columbia-based food distributor whose stock price has fallen on concerns about growth, plans to close its San Francisco distribution operation and cut jobs elsewhere as it tries to reinvigorate the price of its shares. The decisions to close the distribution center and cut jobs were both listed in a Feb. 10 filing made with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington and come less than a month after the company's second-quarter earnings disappointed analysts.

NEW YORK -- It's not the players' fault.Not the strike, which starts tomorrow and amounts to baseball's version of the War of the Worlds.And not the game's economic structure, which is the result of collective bargaining, not grand larceny.The owners started this.Fans blame the players, because everyone knows who they are, and everyone knows their average salary is $1.2 million.No one knows what the owners make -- check that, lose. One day 19 teams are losing money, the next day it's 12-14.

The Heart Center of Towson, a catheterization lab, has closed, Raytel Medical Corp., its owner, announced yesterday.The lab had four employees.Raytel, based in San Mateo, Calif., acquired the Towson facility in September as part of its purchase of Cardiovascular Ventures Inc. of New Orleans for $21.6 million. CVI owned eight centers in four states and an 18-physician practice in Florida."At the time of the CVI acquisition, we identified the Towson facility and one other as candidates for either closing or restructuring," said Richard F. Bader, chairman and chief executive officer of Raytel.

Can a TV show be a ratings hit and still lose money?That's what's happening with "NYPD Blue," according to Robert Iger, the president of ABC.Iger told critics yesterday that "NYPD Blue," one of the few new shows to score a hit in the ratings, is losing money for ABC because major advertisers don't want to be associated with its controversial subject matter."

The new organizers of the Baltimore Grand Prix said Tuesday they are prepared to lose money on the Labor Day weekend event, but pledged that no vendor or taxpayer would go unpaid. "My goal for this year is to stabilize the race," said J.P. Grant , the Columbia-based financier heading Race On LLC, which has a five-year contract to put on the city's IndyCar race. "If there's a hit, we take a hit. " The city terminated its contract with the group that put on last year's inaugural race, Baltimore Racing Development, after it failed to pay millions of dollars to vendors, the city and the state.

The $100 million venture capital fund at the center of Gov. Martin O'Malley's legislative agenda faced tough questions Wednesday from state lawmakers, who worried about the risk to taxpayer money. The Democratic governor took the unusual step of testifying personally before Senate and House committees in support of Invest Maryland, a fund that he says would help Maryland entrepreneurs across the so-called Valley of Death they face when trying to find seed money to start a business.

One benefit of living in a rich country is that we can pay psychologists and professors to explain why wealth doesn't make us very happy. It's true. Researchers have found that, once people can meet basic needs, psychological dividends from additional money steadily decrease. Making $100,000 does not make you twice as happy as $50,000. So why does losing money, and the prospect of losing money, make us so miserable? The short answer is that it doesn't have to. If you think about money in the context of what economics says about true fulfillment, having less of it shouldn't be quite so painful.

Among the many rationales used to defend the welfare state, the most powerful is that it is necessary in order to take care of the poor and the downtrodden. But the amount of money required to bring every poor person in the country above the official poverty line is a fraction of what is spent by government on the welfare state. Put bluntly, the poor are in effect being used as human shields in the political wars over government spending, which extends far beyond anyone who could plausibly be called poor.

BURLINGTON, Vt. - For this season, at least, Ray Pecor has dual baseball citizenship in the Baltimore-Washington region. The man whose family owns the ferry boats on Lake Champlain also owns the Ottawa Lynx, the Orioles' Triple-A franchise, and the Vermont Expos, the Nationals' Single-A team. "I'm the local boy who got lucky," said the gregarious 65-year-old with an infectious laugh. "Now, if both the Orioles and Nationals get to the World Series, I have a problem. I guess I'll have to root for the individual players."

He was just trying to contact a long-lost friend, but the process separated Hector Mendez of San Antonio from a chunk of cash and his Internet naivete. Mendez decided to look up his buddy using one of the dozens of for-fee people-finder services that are common on the Web. He had seen e-mail ads such as: "Locate old classmates, missing family members and loves of your past! Find anyone." After paying $30, Mendez realized that all he had purchased was a set of links to free public records open to all comers.

One benefit of living in a rich country is that we can pay psychologists and professors to explain why wealth doesn't make us very happy. It's true. Researchers have found that, once people can meet basic needs, psychological dividends from additional money steadily decrease. Making $100,000 does not make you twice as happy as $50,000. So why does losing money, and the prospect of losing money, make us so miserable? The short answer is that it doesn't have to. If you think about money in the context of what economics says about true fulfillment, having less of it shouldn't be quite so painful.

The waiters all wear leisure suits at this restaurant in the middle of nowhere, this restaurant that serves soybean burgers and little else.The eating establishment, call it Pit's Burgers, is losing money. But the owner of Pit's Burgers doesn't want to move his restaurant from the run-down, bowl-shaped building in the middle of nowhere, to a more uplifting environment in a more populated area.He wants to stay where he is, even if it means losing money, and he wants to stay in business, even if no one in the area cares much for soy burgers.

The quasi-state agency developing Compass Pointe Golf Course in Pasadena expects to lose money on the operation this year - projecting a loss of up to $1.1 million as recently as last fall - and Anne Arundel officials say the county probably will be asked to make up some of that shortfall. In documents given to the county in late November, officials from the Maryland Economic Development Corp. said they planned to ask for $732,000 to help cover the operating shortfall, which the officials blame mainly on bad weather.

North Arundel Hospital's psychiatric ward will remain open for at least another year, a change in plan from late last year when hospital officials threatened to close the 15-bed unit, which they said was losing money. The Glen Burnie hospital's psychiatric unit serves between 60 and 70 patients a month. A decision by a state commission will let North Arundel raise some of the rates it charges patients throughout the hospital and use the increase to pay for psychiatric unit losses. "I can't really say it's going to be [open]