February 2012
30 posts
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Monetary policy: hard as rocks
If Americans love anything they love cars. January light vehicle sales were just over 913,000, an increase of 11.4 per cent from January last year. This is a good thing. The now maligned auto bailouts were proposed in December 2008, when Ford shares were selling for under $3.00 a share and GM was bankrupt. Ford now sells for over $12 a share, an increase of at least 400 per cent, and GM meanwhile...
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US wages: hard to budge
Marx is rolling in his grave. The agony uncle column in this weekend’s Financial Times has a reader claiming his new $2,000 carry on bag is inconvenient to open and asking whether the columnist has a suggestion for something else. The solution is to buy a Goyard bag, which run for about $4,000 used. Something is wrong.
Recent payroll figures reported to the Social Security Administration show...
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A fairytale love
Love hold me by the tale’s romance is in the mind- neurotic. May peace be unto you. Who the fuck is that ghost? Holy or Holly? Does it matter? A tale is a tale in the mind of living life by the mind. What is neurotic? I want the love of fairytales. Kiss me now, sweet Macintosh—you tease you have no holes. Fuck it, man.
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Modern love: Tumblcore
Hey. I love you. Or so goes many Tumblr posts, at least. It seems to me the internet is replacing human contact, but whether it is seems not to bother many other people. If it did this site wouldn’t be so popular. The internet is here, and people love it, and they love loving people through it. So I should love it too.
And love is always a good thing. It’s hard to be cynical about photos such as...
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That dude's face is dressed
asubeardandstache:
thejamescolumn:
To advance the beard and stach society we should think of some word, related to beards and staches, that can have the same superlative use as swag now has.
If a guy jumps off an 8 floor building to pick up a scarf a women dropped walking below, instead of saying he’s bold or courageous, we can say That muhfugger’s wearin a beard.
Alternatively, as m.hip...
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ASU salaries: inequitable and obscene
It’s a sign of the times. Last week Michael Crow told students assembled to hear him speak that faculty will go an additional year without a salary adjustment. This, ostensibly, is a sign of budget constraints: Look, Mr Crow is tellings students, Times are so tough that faculty isn’t getting a raise. This guy makes me sick.
Times couldn’t be better at ASU. Annual revenues since 2007 are up $400...
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Valentine’s day: mixed messages
What she wants she doesn’t get, and what she doesn’t want she gets. That desire and actualization can have an inverse relationship is odd, especially in the era of positive thinking. But that they are inverses seems certain. Up to a point, at least.
Freud noticed such. In a brief part of Totem and Taboo he speculates on why it is women dream of dream husbands while living what the women consider...
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WatchFernando is a badass. He’s the one dancing. He’s graduated and smart and can do anything, really, but has taken the artist’s life to do transborder interpretative dance.
The thesis is powerful: Life has a sort of mysticism to it and humans, no matter how different we think we are, function with some connectedness.
And the connectedness doesn’t have to be spiritual....
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Yayoi Kusama: love at first sight
She sees the world as she sees it, and that’s why I love her. Freud said a person should see who she is and go with it instead of bending into artificial shapes to fit into a particular group or society: Doing so will bring happiness and success. Caveat emptor, though, to Freud’s thesis: Sometimes being who you are is lonely.
It certainly has been for Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese avant garde artist...
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ASU Foundation: Investing change
With an extra day to change the world, how will you be a changemaker? That’s the innocent though banal question posed by the ASU Leap Day Challenge. The website gives two options: solve, or invest. Click the solve button for a chance to win $2,900; click the invest button to donate money to the ASU Foundation. The visual rhetoric couldn’t be clearer: Yes, the buttons tell us, having ideas is...
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The wealth gap: Treating symptoms
Don’t confuse symptoms for diseases, or so goes the old saying at least. It’s easy to see why there’s so much anger at the richest 1%. But such a widening gap is a symptom of something larger, not a causal disease.
Of course, it seems as though the richest 1% are the problem. Indeed, the richest 1% own one third of US net worth and average CEO salaries have risen from $822,000 to $4.9...
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Creative Destruction: Let's make the New American...
What follows is an email I sent to every dean at ASU, and also Mr Crow. Let’s take back our university.
Hello dear Deans, who I trust love ASU very much.
I have a plan to invigorate ASU—to inspire competitiveness in students, to help solve budget shortfalls, to demonstrate to the world that ASU is not a traditional money sucking corporation college. I have a plan to show the world...
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Internet companies: time is money
Tumblr is for posers. From pictures of cute girls in cut off shorts and bohemian themed bedrooms, to pictures of tea cups and bookshelves: pictures of people living life are put up by people not living life. Freud would say the amount of time humans spend on line is a tragedy. Investors, however, say it’s money.
And a lot of money. This week, Facebook is expected to file for an initial public...
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The Person Consumer Shift
The only thing that matters to corporations is money. Loyalty, duty, and honor have no place. Consumers fails to see that. That’s why it’s easy to trust Allstate by trusting an Allstate agent: a consumer believes in loyalty, duty, and honor, and assumes an otherwise nice agent acts by moral and intellectual standards.
But the agent is just a front. She’s a working person like anybody else....
January 2012
23 posts
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Occupy the Future: Where is the rhetoric of the...
Provocative photographs are alluring but do nothing to change natural forces of life
Eat or be eaten. Jack London’s rule of life from White Fang may not be the Occupy movement’s call to arms, but it’s a realization displayed by their rhetoric nonetheless. The critical difference, however, is How to know when to stop competing. For the idealists at Zuccoti Park in New York and elsewhere,...
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Benefit corporations: a love connection
There is a disconnect. A current Occupy Wall St flyer urges people to “shut down the corporations” with the sophomoric rationale that to shut down corporations is to “create a society that is organized to meet human needs….” Meanwhile, the once venerable Forbes magazine this week asks the question “Is Obama a Socialist,” only to answer: “yes, Obama is a Socialist.” Somebody should lock...
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Apple: Too cool for school
Dude, you’re getting a Dell. The once ubiquitous computers now sit unloved in school libraries and closets. The argument why seems clear: Apple products are sleeker, run with far fewer complications, are hipper: in a word, Apple products are better. And such is why in 2000, when the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” campaign began, Apple shares were selling at just $21 per share while Dell was...
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Can ASU be UC Berkeley?: Unjust Pay Schemes at ASU...
Pay a person what she’s worth, and if she’s worth it she’ll work magic, or so goes the old business logic. It was popularized by Henry Ford, who famously paid his best employees two and half times more than their calculated value. Employees make a company. Such is why CEOs and successful hedge fund managers make so much—because, in theory, they add incalculable value.
But sometimes the...
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Insider trading: Humans are animal on the inside
A version of this is published with ASU’s State Press here.
You get what you pay for. The old adage cautioning against suspiciously inexpensive merchandise also applies to the grotesquely overpriced. Seven hedge fund traders were charged yesterday with making $62m profit from insider information. In one instance, a rather shadowy character called “Individual 1” paid $175,000 for information...
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US Housing: Mad props to the banks
A version of this was first published with the State Press newspaper, here.
Veni, vidi, vici. Julius Caesar’s rather boastful comment after his battle with Pharnaces II must be something similar to what the CEOs of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup will be saying this weekend, once negotiations with the US government to help distressed homeowners avoid...
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The problem with ASU and what can be done about...
If university presidents function as CEOs and students are branded products—that is: if universities are more profitable as corporations—then why are students unable to demand a refund? Products are always refundable. Students are said to be the products of universities: a student graduates then shows off her wonderful education, inspiring other people to attend, as though...
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Swiss National Bank: Boys will be boys
Philipp and Kashya Hildebrand. Photo: Reuters
Girls just want to have fun, or at least the chairman of the Swiss National Bank argues. Philipp Hildebrand resigned last week after accounting documents surfaced that show his wife traded Swiss francs for roughly US $500,000. Sounds like no big deal, except that the trade happened last summer when the Swiss franc was rising against the dollar and...
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