Personal Musings category archive

No, not here. You betcha!

Sir Fred Goodwin and Sir Tom McKillop, respectively the former chief executive and chairman of RBS, and Andy Hornby and Lord Stevenson, respectively the former chief executive and chairman of HBOS, apologised to the Treasury select committee for failing to prevent the circumstances that led their banks being taken largely into public ownership.

That is compensation slang for a compensation program that attracts, retains, and motivates persons.

The often unstated truth is that, for most persons, pay in and of itself is not a motivator. If persons believe they are being compensated fairly, they just don’t worry about pay all that much. (Lack of pay, of course, is a motivator of sorts.)

In contrast, perceived unfair pay is a hell of a demotivator.

Wall Street, though, speaks as if pay is the only motivator; that is their defense of their bonus practices.

Dave Weidner considers this on MarketWatch:

If, as you threaten, we lose the so-called “best people” on Wall Street, then so be it.

If these are the same “best people” that former Merrill Lynch & Co. Chief Executive John Thain talked about in defending the 11th-hour bonus payout he made before his deal wit (sic) Bank of America closed, then what happens without the best people? Does Merrill lose double the near $30 billion it lost last year?

The big gray monster in the room that no one mentions is this:

Considering their performance, these were clearly not the “best people.” Indeed, they were clearly not (recalling the classifications in the old Sears Catalog) the better or even the good people.

They are buffons who drove their companies into the damned ground and are pulling the rest of us behind them.

Pay for performance my anatomy.

Calm down all ready, suggests the Booman.

Frankly, I do not think we have a 24-hour news cycle, not here in politically-oriented Blogistan (left or right).

We have a 24-hour hysteria cycle.

Not every event in every day is the life or death of the Republic, for heaven’s sake.

This morning, Joe Scarborough was on Weekend Edition Saturday. (You can listen to the interview here.)

Among other things, he bleated about not expecting Obama to take off the gloves so quickly, as if, somehow, Mr. Obama was being gratuitously partisan.

Combating intransigence requires firmness.

In observing Republicans in their natural habitat, one must watch their actions and discount their words.

Scarborough left out the part about the Republican Party’s party-line intransigence, their insistence on demonstrating fealty to their corporate masters and to clinging to the policies of de- and non-regulation, tax cuts for the rich and big business, and tolerance of lawlessness, so long as it is the rich who are acting lawlessly, policies that have not just failed, but that have proven inimical to the safety and welfare of the nation and its citizens.

Then there’s that Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq.

Yes, quite the upstanding little group of folks.

Once again, disregard their words and watch their actions.

Republicans define “bipartisanship” and “compromise” as getting what they want the way they want it.

Nothing else does for them.

Q. E. D.

A bit of a fuss down the road over a new Hooters (emphasis added):

“We all know what Hootersis (sic) about,” she said. “If it was a family restaurant, it would be called Scooters. The waitresses are scantily clad. They’re provocative, and I don’t know whether that kind of establishment belongs in a neighborhood shopping center.”

Marc Clymer, president of the Meadowood Civic Association that represents the neighborhood behind the shopping center, echoes those concerns.

If it were named Scooters and everything else were the same, there would be less fuss. Hooters is really rather innocuous compared to any Delaware beach in July.

The fuss about Hooters had more to do with its name than with the activities.

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Politics is classically defined as the art of the practical. Republicanism is the art of the intractable.

If Mr. Obama tried to appoint me to something, I’d never survive the headlines.

I’ve been filing income tax returns for 40 years. I’ve made three or four mistakes. All have been resolved with no hard feelings (I won some, I lost some), but my public career would already be toast.

Why the hell any person of honor is willing to subject him- or herself to the pie-throwing contest that passes for public discourse is beyond me.

To hear the Republican Party prattle on about “fiscal responsibility” as if it were something that the party actually understood is sick-making.

Delaware Liberal has another take.

My mp3 player classifies its contents by all this fancy meta stuff, such as “Genre,” “Artist,” “Album,” and several others. Since I use it for podcasts and radio shows and those classifications are for music, they are pretty much irrelevant, except for “Artist.”

But wait! There’s more!

After the fuss over Zoe Baird some years ago, there really is no excuse for persons in public life not to be certain that their dealings with anyone who has done work for them in their homes are squeaky clean. (The Baird case involved undocumented workers.)

At the same time, I wonder . . .

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Every three months I do two things:

• Catch up with my filing.
• Swear that I won’t wait three months next time.

Continuity is a wonderful thing.

I do not know whether it would be good policy, but, oh! man! it would be fun to watch Wall Street bankers try to pay for their golden privies on GS-17 salaries and have to face annual performance evaluations from persons who really don’t like doing evaluations and do them with one eye on the budget and no eyes on performance:

There is a simple alternative, which can be called “bank rationalisation” in order to avoid the “n” word. Under this scenario, the government would take possession of insolvent banks. This is not interference with the market. It is the market. Bankrupt banks go out of business, but due to their importance to the economy, we can’t let them be tied up in bankruptcy proceedings for years.

Dealing with the matter all at once can both allow for a quicker fix to the financial system and also ensure fairer treatment of bank creditors. First, the shareholders of bankrupt institutions must be forced to eat their losses. However, we may not want to honour all the debts of the banks at 100 cents on the dollar, which has been current practice.

Activists of any stripe focus on trivialities so as to distract people from what’s going on and twist the public discourse.

That’s what the Republican fuss over family planning money in the stimulus bill was all about: distracting people.

Full disclosure: Unlike some, I don’t have a position on Tom Daschle’s tax problems. I don’t approve. I don’t disapprove. And I’m too lazy to research them.

I’ve screwed up my taxes a couple of times, and each time I thought I had them right, so perhaps my perspective differs from that of persons who have always filed a Form 1040-EZ and never had to file a Form 1040 Schedule SE.

Some Guy with a Blog suggests taking a larger view:

More below the Fold. Warning: Language

And a game that is not decided in the first quarter is not one of them.

John Cole found it necessary to take an aspirin to protect his heart.

Back to my regularly scheduled reruns.

The competence of sports broadcasters is the reciprocal of the number of sports stations.

Facts are starting to trickle out about the woman who, with the help of implanted embryos, bore eight babies last week.

Now, I’m not going to get involved in any discussion of the morality of fertility drugs, in vitro fertilization, or stuff like that there. For one thing, I haven’t thought it through, because I’m well past the age when stuff like that could conceivably (as it were) affect my daily life. For another thing, it’s just not worth the effort.

But this sentence at the end of the article in today’s local rag caught my eye:

Forty-six physicians and staff assisted in the deliveries of the six boys and two girls.

I know persons with serious health problems who refuse to go to the doctor because they have lousy or, indeed, no health insurance.

Something about that makes my nerves jangle.

Addendum, That Evening:

According to the Times of London, Mama wants to go on a Magical Money Tour.

A dog is man’s best friend. Except when it is man’s most annoying friend.

And there’s no looking forward to the empty nest.

(Wanna dog? Free shipping. Tranquilizers are on you.)

One of the appalling things about modern American conservatives is that so many of them seem to be nasty, unpleasant, hate-full persons.

My brother gave me a cane for Christmas.

No, not because he thinks I’m decrepit. Though he probably does, because I am.

Because he knew I enjoy making useful things of wood and would admire the quality of the woodwork. It’s gorgeous. (Really, follow the link and look at the samples. I think the one he selected is number five.)

I needed it today.

The rain that was forecast to follow the snow yesterday never got beyond a drizzle, so it did not wash away the snow. When the temperature dropped below freezing over night, it just added a nice little one-inch layer of ice on top.

Then, when the temperature nudged above freezing in the morning, a silly little millimeter of water formed on top of the ice.

I had nature’s own Slip ‘n Slide for a front yard.

I needed the cane to walk down the little hill (about a four-foot drop) between my house and the street without falling on my–er, never mind.

(I have another cane that is more functional. Unscrew the handle and it holds five shots of whatever you want to put in the little test tube thingees. I recommend whiskey. It never goes bad. Great for Independence Day fireworks shows.)

One can only hope.