Check these people out. Though, as the Buddhists say, you would be wise to “guard the gates of the senses” so as not to get any crazy on you. I do recommend clicking down into some of the stories if you have the time.
As it says in the bible (Acts 24:8): By examining him yourself you will be able to learn the truth about all these charges we are bringing against him.”
It’s like a slow motion trainwreck, but not the good kind.
You know what rankles me? The financial houses just don’t get it.
Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.
Actually, they do get it. Until we change the rules – they can do exactly what they’re doing. There is no morality or decency – there is only “take what you can, when you can.” So, even as the companies go under – supported briefly by a surge of taxpayer largesse – greedy individuals continue to write themselves checks for double and triple their annual salaries.
Mr. DiNapoli said the average Wall Street bonus declined 36.7 percent, to $112,000. That is smaller than the overall 44 percent decline because the money was spread among a smaller pool following thousands of job losses.
Every argument that I’ve heard in favor of these practices focuses on the letters and specifics of the contracts and rules. It almost reminds me of those idiots in online games who make a career out of exploiting glitches and bugs in the games. “It’s a legitimate strategy,” they cry, as they ruin the game for everyone.
Here’s the thing – individuals are making these choices. Individuals talk it over and decide to declare bankruptcy; ask for a government bailout; or go ahead with bonuses. We were willing to roll with it as long as we all got flatscreen TVs. Now that we see that it was all a lie – we want them to be a bit more circumspect. I understand that for these managers it’s not unreasonable to take the last couple of $mil on the way out the door. I mean, otherwise someone else would get it – right?
I’ve thought a lot about incentive plans recently. My company has written a couple of them. We’ve had long conversations about why you have such a plan at all. Here’s the thing: You don’t want to give bonuses for working long hours, for traveling a lot, or more generally – bonuses for suffering. As a business, you use incentives to motivate certain behaviors that are in the best interests of the company. The core axiom ought to be “incentives are linked to making us profitable.” That’s the corporate side, as an individual, I want to be rewarded for doing things within my control, and at which I succeed.
More generally: Salary is for behavior. Bonus is for results.
The financial houses have utterly failed on the “results” side. Unfettered greed, short sighted planning, and outright lies have put the nation in a massive economic slump. Real people, lots of them, are losing real and tangible quality of life because of these idiots. Management from the lowest to the top has put their company and the nation in this awful position.
To write themselves bonuses under these circumstances isn’t criminal, and it’s probably impossible to stop them by either legislation or regulation. We’ve made banking the best paid industry – so our very smartest people go there. We’re not going to outsmart them or out-play the players.
We can, however, be irate and shame them in public. I want these people raked over the coals on CSPAN. It’s quite likely the only satisfaction I’ll ever get on this one.
What did I like about early Battlestar Galactica? (and don’t give me any of that medieval crap, I’m talking about the new BSG):
1) “Smart” is the currency of the realm. Whether you’re Baltar or ZereK … if you’ve got a couple of decades of getting crap right under your belt, people just do what you tell them to.
2) Starbuck. Starbuck runs the fighter pilot shop because, until she loses her edge, she’s the hottest pilot, the best poker player, and the toughest roughhouser in the fleet. I mean seriously, long hair is what gets grabbed and stepped on in a fight! No serious fighter would walk around with a ponytail!
3) Adama. A man lives with his choices. Every day. Yes, he’ll kill a hundred to save his ship. And yes, he’ll make his XO pull the trigger in order to maintain his authority. He’s Adama. He fought the toasters once, and beat them. He’ll beat them again. His crew love and fear him because he’s right, time and again.
4) Roslin is doing her best, but it’s the best of the Nth in line. She has authority because it’s right and its the law, not because she’s particularly good at what she’s doing. Once she goes all high-priestess on us … things go downhill.
5) God has a plan, and that plan is the Cylon plan. The idea I love most that humanity is on the run from their created species – and that God loves that new creation more than the original. The Cylons seem to have this direct tap into a supernatural will. They don’t know, really, what they’re doing any more than the humans. However, their theology still works where ours died ages ago.
Called the doctor this morning and convinced them to tell me my diagnosis. Torn medial meniscus. They recommend surgical repair, which is supposedly a 20 minute procedure from which I can walk out of the hospital, take it easy a couple of weeks, and then be back at the gym.
Having observed
On the other hand, apparently these things don’t heal on their own, and aromatherapy isn’t really making much of a dent in it.
–UPDATE–
Re-posted since the pictures ought to stay put now.
–/UPDATE–
I got the raw data from my knee MRI on a CD. They gave me the full DICOM data, which is the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine standard. The vast majority of medical imaging devices produce DICOM formatted files … which means that, basically, there’s no need for the radiologist interpreting the results to be physically close to the machine. Now, there are still advantages to physically seeing, touching, and smelling the patient – but in terms of an upgrade from “ink on plastic,” it’s pretty awesome.
OSIRIX is a piece of software (for apple) that reads and displays DICOM data. Until yesterday, I had not realized quite how powerful this stuff is:
this is about to get geeky, contain some big images, and have pictures of slices of my thigh
That last post was heavy, this is less so:
My MRI was totally relaxing. They gave me a selection of CDs to listen to for the half hour I was in the tube. I picked coldplay.
There were signs up all over the hospital indicating that patients own their own medical information, and that we could request a CD with our imaging results. So I did … and it took them about three minutes to burn a CD for me. I got home, opened the envelope, and I have two CDs … one with x-rays from yesterday .. and the other with MRI data from today.
Here’s the best part: I got the raw DICOM data … which is the standard by which medical imaging types toss around full resolution medical data. I downloaded OSIRIX, which is a free and open source DICOM viewer … and now I’m busily scaling intensities up and down on these 6.5MB images of my knees.
Of course, it was a total buzzkill when I opened up the “metadata” portion of the files and found my social security number in there. Bummer! Of course, they do have a “confidential” sticker on the envelope … I guess that’s par for the course.
Now, if only I knew what any of this crap meant!
I finished up Pathologies of Power today, over lunch. It’s a hard book to read. The language is dense, and the reader is expected to think for themselves. However, the stories are crisp and to the point. I excerpt below (totally without permission) the section of the “Afterward” that grabbed at my heart and inspired these thoughts. As Farmer himself says “This book isn’t harsh, the realities it describes are harsh.”
I’m not sure of the point, exactly, except to look hard and honestly at the realities of life for the less fortunate billions in the world … and then perhaps to judge and act for myself.
Tuesday, I hurt my left knee at the gym. Yesterday, I saw a doctor at a hospital, and this evening I’m getting an MRI. Perhaps in a few weeks I’ll have minor surgery. One thing that sticks with me is that that both me and the kid in this story (Manno) hurt our left legs. More than that: Where I am now, and where little Manno was when he hurt his leg, these are differences of birth. I can’t take credit for being born to educated parents in Virginia. I can’t take credit for my current comfort relative to his discomfort – and I certainly can’t blame little Manno for being unfortunate enough to be born and to live in Haiti.
The fact that I get an MRI and he gets an offer of amputation is not attributable to our life choices. There is no amount of hard work and perseverance that would have turned him into me, or me into him.
I am no better or worse than him – but I would hazard to say that I am considerably luckier. I am beginning to feel that leaving this level of difference in life experience to the luck of the draw is to fall considerably short of our human potential. Certainly, no existing law demands anything of me, and I’m not suggesting pure socialism, but perhaps raising the bar for the least fortunate billions would be a better use of our time than advancing the opulence of the most fortunate millions. I have no problem with social classes. Work hard, eat better, be more important. It’s all great so long as the result is not “early and preventable death for billions.”
Farmer points out that billions today live without benefit of the discoveries of Pasteur or Salk … while the focus of 1st world pharmaceuticals is on impotence and baldness. “End of life” care is an ethical issue in the first world when it occurs in the 80th year, but not when “end of life” happens at age 5 – from starvation or malnutrition – just a short airplane ride from Miami.
Farmer goes further: He calls this situation a “crime” against Manno. Not just the bullet … (and notice that we leave un-wept the woman who died in the street that day) … but the entire social situation that he must endure. A complex, violent, and subtle crime – with so many individual choices and players that there is no good word for it except perhaps Farmer’s “structural violence.” It is said that without a victim, there is no crime. Well here we have victims aplenty. Is there a cause? Certainly. Is this situation within human control? Without a doubt.
Most troubling: If the violence is in the structure, and I am at the lucky top of that structure, then are we, am I, perhaps guilty of at least a crime of neglect here? Certainly I didn’t pull that trigger – nor did I underpay the nurses in Port-au-Prince – nor did I, nor did I. Yet I cannot help but notice that I’ve voted in this great democracy of mine since I was 18 – since before Manno was born – and still the structures persist. I have the power in this great power disparity. Is this not mine to own? To fix?
I have consistently seen what little charity I do as something above and beyond. I take great and vocal pride in being able to not only fend for myself – but also to give a little bit back. Look how generous I am! But what if, perhaps, I am called to these things not out of some desire to do more than I have to – but because I am culpable of these structural crimes. Each one is small, but the mass of preventable suffering in the world is large.
Here’s the excerpt:
Snippets and observations from a day:
* Woke and fought the alarm, as usual with alarms.
* Coffee. Sometimes you need coffee before you go downstairs to get coffee.
* Solved technical problems by social means. Primarily public shame and an unwillingness to just let it go. Labelled the goddamn wires so it’ll be hard to claim ignorance when they get screwed up again.
* Solved technical problem by technical means. Damn the tape robot. Damn it to tape robot hell.
* Found a local judo club. Called ahead. Got nervous about grappling with these people
* Lanced a social issue at work. Sat very, very still while said social issue worked itself out. Washed hands.
* Rode mass transit for 1.5 hours to get to workout. Read first half of The Watchmen
* Felt calm on the ground and standing. Saw the opportunity to apply a choke, and applied it. Opponent tapped. Noticed flaws in technique, worked on them.
* Rode mass transit for 1.5 hours to get back to a hotel. Nearly finished with The Watchmen
* Decided to go to Hampton, VA tomorrow evening rather than stay here. Save myself a whole trip by sacrificing a day.
* Hotel restaurant closed. Restaurant kitchens close at 10pm. Bars are open later. Asked the front desk for local kitchens open late. TGI Fridays. Ick.
* Ate dinner surrounded by waitstaff having a beer after their shift. Nice folks. Foul deep fried dinner. Foul.
* Heard lyrics in head – “Bartender” by Dave Matthews Band. Next song on the radio was “Satellite” by the same. I was thinking Bartender please, fill my glass for me, with the wine you gave Jesus that set him free after three days in the ground., but instead I got satellite, strung from the moon, and the world your balloon.
* Set up travel for tomorrow. Dependencies: Train, Flight, Car, Hotel. Car depends on flight, since I need to know where to return the car. Hotel totally doesn’t matter, since “recession” means “lots of hotel rooms.”
* Posted to LJ.
Competed in my first post injury judo tournament today, and it went pretty well. My division (over 30, under 185lbs) consisted of me and this other dude. The first match went the full four minutes. I won on points (one “wazari” to his “flat nothing”). At one point I had him in what felt like a really tight choke, but he toughed through it.
The second match, he pinned me after a minute or two, and won by holding me down for 25 seconds.
So, won a match, took second (in a small division), and survived without injury or undue fuss.
Now: A celebratory glass of wine with assorted LJ folks.
–UPDATE–
I have no idea if these will work for you, but they play for me in Quicktime on my apple. Your milage may vary:
Match 1 in which I choke all but the tap out of my opponent at the beginning (I mean, seriously, he lifts me off the ground using his own lapel around his neck!), get very, very lucky (2:00), toss him with a left footed tai-atoshi (2:25) and proceed to run the clock down holding him off in my guard for a win. Yes, I knew that there were only 30 seconds left when I dropped to my back and pulled guard.
Match 2 in which I start off strong, but wind up getting pinned. I think I do a great impression of a chinchilla resisting being caught. To quote justkidding_nr No!no!no!no!no!no!no!no!no!
