Astronomy |
| June 21, 2009 | Rise: | Set: |
| Actual Time | 5:42 AM EDT | 8:37 PM EDT |
| Civil Twilight | 5:10 AM EDT | 9:09 PM EDT |
| Nautical Twilight | 4:29 AM EDT | 9:50 PM EDT |
| Astronomical Twilight | 3:43 AM EDT | 10:36 PM EDT |
| Moon | 2:32 AM EDT | 5:28 PM EDT |
| Length Of Visible Light: | 16h 01m | |
| Length of Day |
14h 57m
Tomorrow will be 0m 0s longer.
|
|
The daily paper has met its demise and I’m kind of nervous about it.
No, I’m not talking about the much panicked over death of print media (here, here (video), and here). I’m talking specifically about the fact that the daily paper will no longer be showing up on my porch every morning.
We’ve had a daily paper subscription in my family, save for the two years my step-father’s Navy career had us living overseas, for as long as I can remember. When DC still had decent print journalism that didn’t entirely revolve around politics, my grandmother actually got two daily papers, The Washington Post in the morning and The Washington Star in the evenings. This sort of explains how I got to be a news junky way before Twitter feeds and RSS and the constantly churning news cycle. It also explains why the idea of not getting the daily paper, even though it was absolutely necessary to cancel it, is making me kind of twitchy.
Cancelling the Post wasn’t just about the rising prices or the shrinking news hole or the fact that to cut costs they seem to have cut anyone in the news room who actually knows how to use a comma or an apostrophe. All those things contributed but what really solidified the idea that maybe it was time to start getting my news somewhere else was the presentation of two stories near the end of May.
You may be aware that there’s a bit of an economic thing happening right now – people losing jobs and homes, the stock markets gyrating like an anorexic on meth – which most deep thinkers attribute largely to something called deriviatives (packages of high-risk investments slapped together with seemingly little regulation).
Now, I know it’s not on a par with the President attempting to fix an election, but don’t you think that if the head of a Federal agency had tried a decade ago to warn both Congress and the Department of Treasury about how dangerous these types of investments were that you might want to write a serious news article about that person? I sure do. The Washington Post, however, put their “profile” of Brooksley Born, former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, on the front page of the Style section.
Friends nudge the woman who saw the catastrophe coming.
They want Brooksley Born to say four words, four simple words: “I told you so.”
Ah, but she won’t — not at legal conferences or dinner parties. Not even in a quiet moment in her living room, giving her first interview with a major news organization since last fall’s economic collapse.
She just smiles, perched ever so properly in an upholstered armchair at her Kalorama home.
“More coffee?” she asks daintily, changing the subject.
A little more than a decade ago, Born foresaw a financial cataclysm, accurately predicting that exotic investments known as over-the-counter derivatives could play a crucial role in a crisis much like the one now convulsing America. Her efforts to stop that from happening ran afoul of some of the most influential men in Washington, men with names like Greenspan and Levitt and Rubin and Summers — the same Larry Summers who is now a key economic adviser to President Obama.
She was the head of a tiny government agency who wanted to regulate the derivatives. They were the men who stopped her.
The same class of derivatives that preoccupied Born — including the now-infamous “credit-default swaps” — have been blamed for accelerating last fall’s financial implosion. But from 1996 to 1999, when Born was the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. economy was roaring and she was getting nowhere with predictions of doom.
So, upstairs in the big house in Kalorama, Born tossed and turned. She woke repeatedly “in a cold sweat,” agonizing that a financial calamity was coming, she recalled one recent afternoon.
“I was really terribly worried,” she said.
Before taking office, Born had been a high-octane attorney, an American Bar Association power player, a noted advocate of feminist causes and co-founder of the National Women’s Law Center. But none of that carried much weight when she crossed over into government; for all her legal experience, she was a woman who wasn’t adept at playing the game. She could be unyielding and coldly analytical, with a litigator’s absolute assertions of right and wrong. And she was taking on Beltway pros, masters of nuance and palace politics. She marched into congressional hearing after congressional hearing — pin neat, always with a handbag — but no one really wanted to listen.
The Wall Street Journal declared that “the nation’s top financial regulators wish Brooksley Born would just shut up.” The Bond Buyer newspaper compared her to a salmon “swimming against raging currents.”
– “Credit Crisis Cassandra: Brooksley Born’s Unheeded Warning Is a Rueful Echo 10 Years On”, By Manuel Roig-Franziam, The Washington Post, Tuesday, May 26, 2009, C01
When this appeared in the Style section I was willing to overlook the lack of gravitas given to the idea that the same people trying to haul us out of this financial mess are the people who ignored warnings a decade ago that this could happen. I’m sure there was other stuff happening, like the California Supreme Court ruling on proposition 8 and whether or not “cancer boy” was going to be found in time to be treated. I get that the editorial staff, such as it is, might have had other priorities.
But then three days later the Post published this:
Today will unfold just like all the other days for Herb Feemster, the suave “Reunited” and “Shake Your Groove Thing” singer from Southeast Washington who rose to international fame in the 1960s and ’70s with Peaches and Herb.
The 67-year-old soul man with the sweet falsetto will scrape himself out of bed and push off from his suburban Maryland home in the still of the night. He’ll pull into a Penn Quarter parking lot between 4:30 and 5. He’ll put on his patent leather shoes, gray slacks, white shirt, red tie and blue blazer. And by 6, he’ll be on the clock at the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, where he works as a deputized court security officer for the U.S. Marshals Service.
Never mind that the first new Peaches and Herb album in more than a quarter-century is being released today. Feemster, who uses the stage name Herb Fame, isn’t planning some wild celebration, despite having finally reunited with his recording career. (And yes, it feels so good, ’cause he understood. Of course.)
The idea of a pop star slumming in the working class isn’t a regular part of the celebrity-culture diet. Stars really aren’t supposed to be like us. They’re supposed to lead glamorous lives, always and forever — unless they’re in rehab or on a reality show, or both. But they’re not supposed to be in the middle, with the rest of us workies.
– “For R&B Star, Day Job’s the Real High Note: Peaches & Herb Reunited, but He Favors Lunch-Bucket Life”, J. Freedom du Lac, The Washington Post, Friday, May 29, 2009, A01
Yes, that’s right, page A01. The front page. The same place that banner headlines and articles about 911 and Obama’s election and the attempt on Reagan’s life, and, more recently, the crazy guy shooting up the Holocaust Museum were published.
Now, admittedly, this article was below the fold but still, this is a puff piece, a profile on a local musician who had some success 30+ years ago and might be poised to have some moderate success again. This is a Style section piece if I ever saw one. And yet…there it is on the front page.
It’s not the shrinking news hole. It’s not the fact that increasingly journalists at all publications don’t seem to understand the basic tool of their craft. It’s the fact that they would insult me by trying to make me believe that I should trust the judgement of “gate keepers” who would position these stories the way they did.
For the first time in my life, we’re down to Sunday only delivery on the newspaper. I’m just glad I don’t have to explain this to my grandmother.
In the work that I do I often get the question “Is it possible to….[fill in extraordinarily complicated idea here]” and depending upon the person asking the question sometimes I actually answer and sometimes I give them the standard, smart ass response: “With enough time and enough money, anything is possible.”
There is an axiom in my field that you can spend time or you can spend money but you can’t not spend both. I’ve talked a little bit about this before. In truth, much of life comes down to the time vs. money quandary.
Those of us not lucky enough to be born with trust funds are forced to trade our time and skills for money on a daily basis. The concept that we’re trading our time for their money is particularly easy to lose sight of if you’ve got an especially keen mind and an overactive work ethic. Your employer generally gets more work than is being paid for because you are driven to finish that project or to do better. This work ethic/desire/compulsion causes acute conflicts in situations where those making the decisions are making decisions that seem non-sensical and anti-thetical to things like an organization’s long-term health, simple, transparent business practices, basic human dignity in the work place. You end up having to remind yourself that they buy your time and if they want to use it stupidly, there’s not much you can do about it if the requests don’t violate your personal boundaries or morals.
Since, for most of us, our relationship with our employer boils down to an exchange of time for money, being given an opportunity to actively choose time or money is a strange, disorienting situation in which to find yourself. I was given just such an opportunity recently.
It turns out that the options for “voluntary measures” my company is offering included not only the ridiculous in concept and even more ridiculous in practice, “pay deferral:”
PAY DEFERRAL:
I am willing to have my pay reduced now with the understanding that I would be repaid by December 2009 provided funds are reasonably available at that time. I would agree to a deferral of: ” $______________ for the time period of ____________to ___________. I would like it to be a fixed amount per pay period, or ” ____day(s) of my salary per pay period.
[Notice how it doesn’t say what the repayment timeframe is if the funds aren’t “reasonably available” by December 2009?]
but also the slightly more reasonable option of “unpaid leave:”
UNPAID LEAVE:
I will take ______________days of unpaid leave (NOTE: you can’t use vacation time)
[Ah, the Naderfication of everything continues: Of course you can’t use vacation time; vacation time is paid leave.]
as well as the opportunity to give up our paltry, but “guaranteed” baseline yearly raise:
RAISES:
I will not take any raise for which I may be eligible from June 2009 – May 2010.
[My company doesn’t give raises based on merit as a rule. No, we give a small, but guaranteed “baseline” raise thereby institutionalizing mediocrity.]
If you look at this long enough, it appears as what it really is: an opportunity to trade money for time.
Not to whine about my job, but I am grossly overworked. Even without major projects I could easily work 50 hours a week every week without breaking a sweat. I serve upwards of 100 internal clients with no idea who is going to be requesting what on a daily basis, and, near as I can tell, I’m the only person in the organization who has to justify how I do my job to anyone who might have a criticism on a regular basis. I will also admit that I am, likely, the only one in the organization who has gotten the mythical merit increase in the past two years.
I sat down and I did the math. Giving up 12 days (that works out to a three day weekend every weekend between June 19th and September 4) works out to roughly slightly less than the raise I received last October. I figure I can live on last year’s salary for three months. So for me, giving up the money was worth getting the time.
I also sat down and did some research and determined that if I’m going to get paid better in my next job, it might help if my title actually reflected my responsibilities: I traded this year’s baseline raise for a bump in title. It may seem silly now, but in a year or 18 months when I’m negotiating salary for a new job my new title will be worth $5,000 to $8,000 a year more in starting pay.
What’s most amusing about all of this is that in our discussion about my “voluntary measures” offer TemporaryBoss’ first question was “How will this affect work flow?” Clearly, they don’t recognize that they can have the time or the money, but not both.
If you haven’t had the absurdity of the experience yet, I highly suggest that you visit a Redbox and try renting movies, preferably with a group of people. Redbox was a genius move by McDonald’s to tap the impulse rental DVD market. Even though you need a credit card to use the vending machine, the movies only cost $1 each/night which makes it financially efficacious to rent a movie for you and the other adult and a different movie to plunk the kids down in front of.
I’m not even sure now what we were looking for when we stopped in front of the vending machine, though the fact that we ended up with Paul Blart: Mall Cop and How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is a pretty strong indicator that we settled in our choices. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People seemed like a good alternate, though. After all, it had Simon “Shaun of the Dead” Pegg in the lead and while Kirsten Dunst can be like nails on a chalk board we were all willing to take the gamble.
The fact that this movie about a British writer who is generally a total prick who ends up selling his soul for what he thinks he wants and throwing “it” all away for love who comes to America to work for a slick, entertainment magazine (think the Vogue of the entertainment world) was at turns cringe-worthy, embarrassing, and generally unfunny and predictable isn’t why I’m writing about it. What has me fascinated is how someone in the entertainment world not only becomes a tastemaker but how the tastemakers decide what the tastes should be.
During the course of the film Sidney (Simon Pegg) must interact with, and ultimately ends up selling out to, Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson who I’m convinced has but two modes: stunned and bitch-on-wheels) a publicist for a young, up-and-coming actress, Sophie Maes (Megan Fox) with whom Sidney is just dying to have sex and for a young director, Vincent Lepak (Max Minghella). We’re never told what it is that makes Vincent so special, just that he is special, a visionary even. It’s vitally important that the magazine Sidney writes for do a puff piece, a profile on Vincent to boost his credibility.
Now, I get that in the real world, if anything pertaining to the entertainment industry can be said to be “real,” an agent or a publicist makes a decision to take “talent” on as a client largely based on how easy it will be to sell the talent (and thus secure commission for himself). But what about the total unknown?
Despite how they’re structured, American Idol and Britain’s Got Talent don’t provide much of a window into who is going to be successful and who isn’t. Indeed, if you look at the past winners and runners-up of American Idol you’ll see that in seven years only two winners and one runner up have gone on to big success and the runners-up, generally, have had only moderate success. So it seems that what is popular in the moment isn’t necessarily what’s going to be popular for the long term, and while an agent or a publicist can milk and dump a client, as a long term income strategy that’s pretty stupid.
What I guess puzzles me really isn’t how the people who are in position to be tastemakers make their picks. It could be something as simple as liking the way someone looks in their clothes, or the fact that the talent made the agent, publicist, or producer laugh. I guess what really puzzles me is how tastemakers get to be tastemakers. Who grows up and says “Hey, I want to be an agent so I can foist the next Heidi and Spencer onto an unsuspecting public!” I’m guessing no one, and yet there are dozens, nay hundreds, of people out there feeding the entertainment machine (and aspiring to become food for said machine).
Part of me suspects that it’s some sort of in-joke, something that the rest of us will never get. But I know it’s paranoia to think that somewhere in a curtained off room room with leather banquettes and dark wood running up the walls the elite of Hollywood and beyond gather and cackle as they try to figure out what crap they can sell us next.
I don’t really have any answers but since I’m bent toward figuring out why things are the way they are, or how they operate (which is really just the why of a system), I imagine I’ll be picking at this question – why is what’s popular picked to become popular in the first place – for quite some time.
I’ve worked at non-profits of one flavor or another for over a decade now. Financial hardship and accounting and budgeting practices that would astound even the quants at AIG are commonplace so I’m rarely amazed at the monetary machinations around me. Right now, I find myself utterly stunned.
My connection to the grapevine is strong at work. My company is going to start doing “voluntary furloughs” in the next pay period. Except, management has no idea what “furlough” actually means.
What they mean is: You defer your salary per a written agreement until the “current financial difficulties” have passed and you keep working full time. Now, as much as I enjoy the tasks that I do at work and I like the people I work with, my relationship with my employer is basically transactional: I need something (money) and they need something (the skills I have + the time of the practitioner of those skills).
My first, gut reaction to this unreasonable request (seriously, is Visa going to “defer” charging me interest until later? I think not.) is to say “You don’t pay me; I don’t work.”
One of my co-workers says this isn’t the first time this has happened and that the last time it did everyone got paid back in full. And that’s fine and all, but something sticks.
If I didn’t need the money I wouldn’t go there every day. And yes, I could live on less than what I make, but that’s not the point. What shocks me is that Management would have the gall to say “Hey, we can’t pay you but give us your time and your skills and your smarts anyway!” That’s called volunteering not employment.
So while I am at the top end of the middle of the pay scale in my employer’s structure, I’m also a one-person department in a critical role: I will be one of the last people they layoff. I don’t want to be selfish – I’d be happy to take a “furlough Friday” every week this summer if that would help – but this time I don’t think I’m taking one for the team.