The problem with bank bonuses

An article in the NYT explains how Wall Street bonuses work:

Though Wall Street bankers and traders earn six-figure base salaries, they generally receive most of their pay as a bonus based on the previous year’s performance.

Of course, the problem isn't so much that they are paid millions of dollars when they make lots of money; it's that they aren't penalized millions of dollars when they lose lots of money. It's all upside, never any downside for those guys. And that's what pisses everyone off.

Yet another cool Flash chart from NYT

Netflix movie queue data.

Forget it Jake, it's Iraq

In a NYT op-ed today, a reserve soldier explains that one of the most frustrating things about her time in Iraq was not knowing whether her efforts were having any impact:

In the fantasy, you know exactly what you’ve done, what impact it’s had, and you’ve put smiles on peoples’ faces. But in reality, you don’t necessarily ever get to find out the true impact of your actions. You’re left with questions instead. Did rebuilding all those schools over there have any kind of lasting impact? Did the Iraqis we tried to assist believe that we were sincere in our efforts?

In my hero fantasies, there are no such loose ends or doubts.

Fog of war and all that, but it also reminds me of Chinatown:

EVELYN
 Tell me something -- does this
 usually happen to you, Mr. Gittes?

  GITTES
 What's that, Mrs. Mulwray?

  EVELYN
 -- Well, I'm only judging on the
 basis of one afternoon and an evening,
 but if that's how you go about your
 work, I'd say you're lucky to get
 through a whole day.

  GITTES
  (pouring himself
   another drink)
 -- Actually this hasn't happened
 to me in some time.

  EVELYN
 -- When was the last time?

  GITTES
 Why?

  EVELYN
 Just -- I don't know why.
 I'm asking.

Gittes touches his nose, winces a little.

  GITTES
 It was in Chinatown.

  EVELYN
 What were you doing there?

  GITTES
  (taking a long drink)
 -- Working for the District Attorney.

  EVELYN
 Doing what?

183  Gittes looks sharply at her. Then:

  GITTES
 As little as possible.

  EVELYN
 The District Attorney gives his
 men advice like that?

  GITTES
 They do in Chinatown.

She looks at him. Gittes stares off into the night.

Evelyn has poured herself another drink.

  EVELYN
 Bothers you to talk about it,
 doesn't It?

Gittes gets up.

  GITTES
 No -- I wonder -- could I -- do
 you have any peroxide or something?

He touches his nose lightly.

  EVELYN
 Oh sure. C'mon.

She takes his hand and leads him back into the house.

184  INT. BATHROOM - MIRROR

Gittes pulls the plaster off his nose, stares at it in
the mirror. Evelyn takes some hydrogen peroxide and some
cotton out of a medicine cabinet. Evelyn turns Gittes'
head toward her. She has him sit on the pullman tile
adjacent to the sink.

  EVELYN
 Doctor did a nice job...

She begins to work on his nose with the peroxide. Then
she sees his cheek -- checks back in his hair.--


  EVELYN
  (continuing)
 -- Boy oh boy, you're a mess

  GITTES
 -- Yeah --

  EVELYN
  (working on him)
 -- So why does it bother you to
 talk about it... Chinatown...

  GITTES
 -- Bothers everybody who works
 there -- but to me -- It was --

Gittes shrugs.

  EVELYN
 -- Hold still -- why?

  GITTES
 -- You can't always tell what's
 going on there --

  EVELYN
 ... No -- why was it --

  GITTES
 I thought I was keeping someone
 from being hurt and actually I ended
 up making sure they were hurt.

  EVELYN
 Could you do anything about it?

185  They're very close now as she's going over a mouse very
near his eye.

  GITTES
 Yeah -- make sure I don't find
 myself in Chinatown anymore --
 wait a second --

He takes hold of her and pulls her even closer,

  EVELYN
  (momentarily freezing)
 -- What's wrong?

  GITTES
 Your eye.

  EVELYN
 What about it?

  GITTES
  (staring intently)
 There's something black in the
 green part of your eye.

  EVELYN
  (not moving)
 Oh that... It's a flaw in the
 iris...

  GITTES
 ... A flaw...

  EVELYN
 (she almost shivers)
 ... Yes, sort of a birthmark...

Gittes kisses her lightly, gradually rises until he's
standing holding her. She hesitates, then wraps her arms
around him.

As an aside, I always thought a cool idea would be to make a show--on HBO, say--about Jake Gittes' days on the Chinatown beat (that are only obliquely alluded to in the movie).

NBC continues its "screw the guy in the 12:30 slot" strategy for late-night

Many years ago, NBC screwed David Letterman--who occupied the 12:30am slot after Carson--out of the Tonight Show. Now, it looks like they're going to similarly screw over Conan O'Brien, by pushing the Tonight Show to 12am and putting Leno back at the 11:30 slot with his own half-hour show.

If I were Conan, I'd say "to hell with this" and go grab a proper 11:30 slot at Fox or something.

Countermeasures

This is pretty great.

Down the slippery slope we go

Sullivan talks torture:

Notice again how far down the slippery slope we have gone. Krauthammer's first position was that torture should be restricted solely to ticking time bomb cases in which we knew that a terror suspect could prevent an imminent detonation of a WMD. His position a few years later is that torture should be the first resort for any terror suspect who could tell us anything about future plots. Those of us who warned that torture, once admitted into the mainstream, will metastasize beyond anyone's control now have the example of Charles Krauthammer's arguments to back us up.

Civil unrest in Iran

In case you haven't already, it's definitely worth it to check out the Iran coverage over on Sullivan. Of course, all the videos, Tweets, etc. are very fragmentary and amount to unconfirmed reports, but you can still get a feel for the atmosphere over there. There's so much energy in those crowds, and confidence.

Now I'm just really curious as to what's going to happen. I don't know much about Iranian politics or anything. I don't know what the likely scenarios are as far as an end game for all this. But one thing that seems certain is that the protests won't just fade away. Something's gotta give. I guess at some point the generals will pick a winner...

Anyway, watch this haunting video. What you're hearing is the sound of thousands of people shouting slogans from their windows and rooftops:



How the hell does the Iranian government get out of this? They're in so deep..

NBA notes

• Ugh. What a terrible effort by the Lakers. And Kobe whining because he wasn't getting the calls he wanted wasn't very fun to watch, either.
  
• Apparently, Stan Van Gundy thinks there shouldn't be NBA games on Christmas, because it prevents the players from spending time with their family. I can't abide this whining. I mean, think of it: these people are paid millions of dollars to play friggin' basketball--the least they can do is work on a holiday. And guess what: there are millions of people who do work on Christmas Day, but who don't get millions of dollars for it. And what about the troops overseas? Not only are they working during Christmas, but they're away from home; and not only are they away from home, but they are in actual life-threatening danger; and not only are they in life threatening danger, but they're doing all this for practically nothing. So, spare me, Stan, and go play some fucking basketball. Lots of people would give their right arm to be in your position--you should just be thankful for that.
• How old do you have to be for it to be meaningful in any way that the Knicks are good? I'm always hearing about how "good for basketball" it is when the Knicks are good, and how classic and legendary and important Madison Square Garden is. But the Knicks never won a ring in the 90s when I was growing up--they were just standard issue Eastern Conference Jordan fodder. And in the 80s they didn't do anything either. And if you asked me to name a great Knick (besides Ewing, who wasn't even that earth-shatteringly great--nowhere near Olajuwan, for example)--I don't think I could. So I don't get what's so special about the Knicks.
  

Merry Christmas!

...and go Lakers! I hope it's a good game..

Decade in review: Shitty Events of the Aughts

The list is unranked. (Edit: on my machine the HTML is kind of wonky, such that the table is placed too low on the page. Apologies if you're seeing the same.)

No.	Shitty event	Cultural corollary	Explanation
1	Terrorists destroy the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/2001	Flag pins	It is worth noting that, for all the awfulness of the 9/11 attacks, their effects on the nation as a whole were primarily psychological. Strictly speaking, the destruction of two buildings in downtown New York hardly constituted an existentially threateneing attack--in a nation of 300 million, a mere 3,000 were killed, and America's infrastructure and capabilities were completely intact. Compared to a country that is actually attacked in a sustained conventional war--e.g., Britain during the blitz, or Iraq during the most recent invasion--the damage done was insignificant. Of course, the real felt threat of the attacks was that it demonstrated that another attack could come anywhere, any time. And it could be worse--it could, for example, involve a biological or nuclear weapon. Americans for the first time in memory felt physically unsafe--and, it seemed, not very prepared for this feeling. There didn't seem to be a protocol for what to do in a crisis like this--there was no tradition, for example, of the stiff upper-lip, "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude as in Britain. So we seemed to be making up our own protocols on the fly. The most prominent and emblematic of these was, of course, the flag pin, which quickly became a ubiquitous accessary on news people and politicians everywhere. Though I think the initial sentiment behind it was a fairly benign one--establishing some sense of underlying national unity in a crisis--it was not long before it curdled into a cynical symbol of heavyhanded jingoism, one more politico-cultural bludgeon at the disposal of the pro-war right. The "death" of the flag pin came during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Barack Obama was criticized for not wearing the pin. Eventually the controversy fizzled when Obama began wearing the pin, but sporadically. By that time though terrorism had faded into the background, with the economic crisis at the forefront of everyone's mind. So the flag pin saga tracked, I think, the rise and fall of the post-9/11 "everything is different" mindset--the psychological effect of those attacks.
2	United States invades Iraq on false pretenses	B.O.B, by Outkast	Maybe this Pitchfork article puts it best: "B.O.B." is not just the song of the decade-- it is the decade. Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title-- aka "Bombs Over Baghdad", a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later-- is only the start of it. In "B.O.B"'s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear an obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance/rock crossovers. We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear André 3000 and Big Boi fire off a synapse-bursting stream of ripped-from-the-headlines buzzwords ("Cure for cancer/ Cure for AIDS"), personal anecdotes ("Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo") and product placements ("Yo quiero Taco Bell") that read like the world's first Twitter feed. We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover's re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black). In a lot of ways, I think, the Iraq War was the real crux of the Aughts--the American establishment's "original sin", as Frank Rich once put it, that revealed its character as utterly wanting, and its fealty to core liberal democratic principles a fiction. If 9/11 was the question posed, the Iraq War was the answer given: an answer that had nothing to do with the question, that was based on false evidence, that was, as Obama would put it during the campaign, "dumb". The Iraq War revealed so much: the failure of the mainstream press to hold those in power accountable; the willingness of the Bush administration to dispense misinformation to achieve its political ends; the utter incompetence of the Bush administration; the spread of torture techniques throughout the military; the failure of the Democrats to stand up to jingoism and demogoguery; the failure of the Democratic establishment in general to identify the war as a mistake at the time. It is no coincidence that the current president was the only serious contender in the primary who was against the Iraq War from the beginning--the war had tainted everybody else. The narrative arc of the Aughts--the crisis, the fall, the attempt at redemption--has, as its central event, the Iraq War. It's tentacles reach into everything, into both parties, into the past and the future. The war, after all, had been prefigured, since before 9/11--since before Bush took office, when the neocons ran think tanks instead of US foreign policy. Saddam Hussein was on the minds of top officials in the White House from literally the first days that the towers came down. The false evidence that was eventually used by Colin Powell to make the case for the war was extracted using the same torture techniques that would spread to Guantanamo and back to Iraq at Abu-Ghraib. The incompetence of Bush's war plan forshadowed the incompetance that would be on display years later in the handling of the Katrina aftermath. And, finally, the Iraq War begat the political career of one Barack Obama, who would bring--or try to bring, at any rate--the conflict to a close.
3	United States tortures detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and US law	24	America's shift to a torture state did not happen in a vaccuum: at some point, it became an acceptable mainstream moral position to support the use of torture in dire circumstances. Out of this mindset was Jack Bauer born--or maybe, out of 24 was America's pro-torture mindset born.
4	Domestic abuses of power by the federal government: illegal wire taps, politicization of the Department of Justice, interference with various regulatory agencies	Dick Cheney shoots a man in the face, and the man apologizes to Cheney	In the heyday of Republican power, the Bush administration seemingly got away with anything, whether it was conducting unconstitutional surveillance on millions of Americans, using Justice Department lawyers to settle political scores, or censoring reports by the EPA to make them more industry-friendly. Not only was there no legal consequences of any of these actions, but the mainstream press--and the US Congress--seemed uninterested in holding anyone accountable for these transgressions. We all knew we were really through the looking glass when, one day in February 2006, we were informed that Dick Cheney had indeed shot a man in the face with a shot gun. For a delerious day or two as confused accounts trickled in and Cheney exhibited odd, guilty-seeming behavior we thought the whole Bush ediface would finally come crumbling down in the craziest scandal ever. But in the end it turned out to be a common hunting accident--and the victims bizarre apology to Cheney for "all the trouble" confirmed the invincibility of the Bush-Rove-Cheney political machine.
5	New Orleans is destroyed by Hurricane Katrina	"George Bush doesn't care about black people."	Katrina was the moment when the establishment realized that Emperor Bush had no clothes--when the idea that the Bush administration was incompetent and reckless finally made its way into the canon of conventional wisdom. The failure of an adequate response to the disaster was not in question whatsoever. In those heartstopping few days after the hurricane struck, the nation shook its collective head in wonder at how there could be people going thirsty and dead bodies lying uncollected in the streets in an American city. Meanwhile, Bush dithered in his response--and it quickly became clear that he had staffed FEMA with a bunch of unqualified cronies. His legendary assessment of FEMA director (and former horse pageant judge) Michael Brown's performance marked the moment at which his administration descended into farce. That outward sign of this state of affairs was when, at some MTV related event, Kanye West went off-script and uttered, next to a memorably flummoxed Mike Meyers, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Now, let me say that I don't think George W. Bush was or is any kind of racist, and that I don't think Kanye West is a very important figure in the grand scheme of things. But this little moment was significant because West's comment gained traction, as opposed to bouncing off Bush without incident. Bush was no longer the teflon president he once was. Katrina marked the beginning of a long downward slide in Bush's approval rating that ended at a record low 22% by the time he left office.

Lamar Odom is a really weird guy

American pantheism

I'd go so far as to confer "must-read" status on Ross Douthat's latest column, which uses Avatar as a jumping off point for the kind of elevated discussion that you don't often find in a newspaper op-ed piece, and offers some pretty cutting observations:

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

Go ahead and read the whole thing.

Like you do

I'm a sucker for caricatures. I'm even more of a sucker for caricaturists who find the time to do Eddie Izzard from Dressed To Kill:

American gibberish!

Just yesterday at a party I was mentioning that one thing I've always wanted to hear was someone who didn't know a lick of English putting together a string of English gibberish. And now today I see a video that features exactly that: specifically, it's an Italian doing American gibberish.

Enjoy!

Only a little arsenic

There's a big feature in the NYT comparing tap water safety all around the country. It seems that San Francisco County is doing pretty good, with the worst of it being just 3 chemicals that are within the legal limit, but above what's considered healthy. However, those 3 are doozies: arsenic, lead, and radon (although how bad can radon be for you? It's inert, right?).