Numbers

From NPR, A Puritan View Of The Crash by Dick Meyer:
But it wasn’t OK when midlevel, 30-year-old workers in big, corporate investment banks were routinely making over $5 million a year. It wasn’t OK when the top hedge fund operators could make a billion a year.
“In 1960, the ratio of CEO pay at large companies to that of the president of the United States was about 2 to 1. In 2007, it was more than 20 to 1,” wrote Harvard scholars Rakesh Khurana and Andy Zelleke in The Washington Post. “In 1980, executives at large companies made about 40 times what the average worker made. Last year, CEOs made about 360 times more than the average worker.”
“On the NYSE today, the average share is held for less than a year, as compared to about five years in 1960 and two years in 1990,” the authors wrote. “What matters isn’t what the companies are actually doing but the expectation that the shares can be unloaded to a ‘greater fool’ at a higher price. In the prevailing business culture, little has been meaningfully valued by either executives or shareholders beyond the short-term accumulation of wealth.”
The rise of both the financial services sector and executive compensation contributed to a deeper and more important shift in the economy: the growth of income inequality.
Economists gauge differences in income using a measure called the Gini index. According to the U.S Census Bureau, the index went from 0.38 in 1968 to 0.47 in 2006, a rise in income inequality of 24 percent.
In 2004, the top 10 percent of earners made 42.9 percent of all the income Americans earned, accorded to a well-known study by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. The top 1 percent alone swallowed 16.2 percent of total American income. By the way, to get into that top 1 percent in 2004, you needed to earn $20 million a year or $385,000 a week. Good luck with that.

Outing, First With Cat

I was dreading it, yesterday’s visit to Mr. Fluffle’s vet, but as it turned out, there was no need to anticipate the worst.
His former owner, a friend, and I brought him to the vet a week ago for a check-up and blood work. We got a call a couple of days later that the lab dropped the sample, so I had to schedule a second appointment.
My friend had offered to help me get him in his carrier. This sounds silly, he’s only 15 pounds, but this early in our getting to know each other, he can be unpredictable: the other day, he bit me while I was brushing him.

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The Friday Five

It’s back, courtesy of Live Journal.
What activity can you not believe you survived in your childhood?
Hospitalization for not one but two hip surgeries.
What activity can you not believe kids get away with today?
Playing video games constantly.
If you could be anyone else in the world live or dead, who would you choose to be?
Thomas Jefferson – rich, brilliant, successful, lived to a ripe old age (83). Jefferson, obviously, was not perfect: I would like to think that I would have been moral enough to develop an alternative to slavery and would not have committed adultery with Sally Hemings.
A lot of people think they’ve been in love at 15 or 16 years old, do you think you now look back and think you were a stupid kid or do you believe that you were old enough to know what love is?
I think I knew what love was then, but haven’t a clue now!
Do you think it is possible to remain in love with someone you once loved, but haven’t seen in a year?
Of course.

Mr. Fluffles

I will be having a little guest this weekend, Mr. Fluffles and I are going to give each other a try-out.
His owner brought him to the vet today, and I tagged along to ask questions. The vet is doing a blood test for kidney disease, which he told us is the most common problems in older cats. Mr. Fluffles is 14, and could live to be over 20.
The vet said he’s in good shape as far as he could tell from an exam. He has certainly lived in a very good home: his current owner has a degree in agriculture and used to run a farm.
I’ll take some pictures, but in the meantime, he looks somewhat like this: grey, fluffy and markings between the eyes.
He seems to have a very mellow disposition, which suits me very well, and maybe we already have a vibe: on the way home, I stopped at the supermarket and without giving it much thought, picked up two kinds of fish. Cat ESP.

Milton

Recently, I’ve met two interesting, high-profile people who live in Milton, author Suzette Martinez Standring and Laura Fitton, social media guru aka @pistachio.
They live in parts of town different from the one in which I grew up.
In those days, Milton was balkanized: you might visit other parts of town, but your identity was firmly fixed by your address. Which means that even if those interesting ladies and I were in Milton simultaneously, it’s unlikely we would have met.

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Mid-Winter

It was so cold that even our hardy town naturalist canceled yesterday’s scheduled walk in the woods.
We had more snow last night and might get more today.
I’m sick of winter, and while it’s only January, this splendid piece of prose from the February page of the 1983 Old Farmer’s Almanac still resonates.

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Let Us Define Your Terms

Some corporate cultures in these parts propogate like pestilent hybrids of the imaginary poor white trash from Dogpatch and West Po’kchop.
I had the bad luck to run into a Daisy Mae type a couple of years ago who claimed that because I’d used the phrase “curry favor”, I had accused a manager of sexually harassing another female employee.
The upshot of this is that Daisy eagerly took on the role of Defender of the Company, at my expense. And evidently her handlers were as ignorant as she about the meaning of the phrase, because you could have counted my remaining days there on one hand.
If the young lady or her masters should happen upon this blog, then I direct their attention to the following comments about the British Foreign Secretary and Barack Obama from a recent article in the online version of the London Times:
“Having stood closely by George Bush’s America these last few years as a trusted member of Tony Blair’s inner circle, and then as Foreign Secretary, David Miliband yesterday chose the last 120 hours of Mr Bush’s presidency to say what a disaster his foreign policy had been. ….
Interestingly, if it’s an attempt to curry favour with the incoming US President, it may be as misjudged as the Foreign Secretary’s faint-hearted putsch against Gordon Brown last summer.”
Daisy Mae might think that’s an ackyewzayshun of hanky-panky between a British politician and the next American President, but it ain’t.
Ignorance is forgivable. Stupidity and corruption are not.