{ The New York Times’ City Room blog reports that Koons is in talks with Friends of the High Line, the conservancy group charged with managing the park, to bring one of his sculptures to the converted greenway. What sculpture would that be? A full-sized replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900 steam locomotive. | Gawker | Thanks Tim }
Weill wasn’t the first or the last Wall Streeter to deal with the pressures of high finance through the performance-enhancing highs of cocaine or with plenty of other stimulants. Just six years earlier, one of the Street’s best-known, self-made stars, Wardell Lazard, the head of his own investment firm, died naked and alone in a Pittsburgh hotel from an overdose of vodka and cocaine, just two weeks before his 45th birthday. (…)
A University of Southern California researcher, who was once herself a Wall Street banker, followed more than two dozen freshly minted MBA’s from the boot camps, or “grind mills,” of investment banks as they clawed their way toward wealth and absolute power. By the fourth year in business, they had succumbed to a litany of out-of-control behavior.
“People working 120 hours a week, for prolonged periods of time, go through harsh psychological transformations,” says Alexandra Michel, a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business, who findings appear in the current Administrative Science Quarterly. (…)
Her research examines how organizations influence white-collar workers’ psychological processes and performance. She is particularly interested in the way knowledge-based workers—not just on Wall Street, but in the media, law, consulting, technology and countless other fields—perceive themselves as autonomous, but in fact they are under unspoken organizational control.
That control is veiled by the perqs offered to white collar workers. “The bank erased distinctions between work and leisure by providing administrative support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, encouraging leisure at work, and providing free amenities, including childcare, valets, car service, and meals,” Michel writes. “Some of the banks’ embodied controls focused on managing employees’ energy and included providing free caffeine and meals during ‘‘energy slumps,’’ hiring young people, focusing on energy as the main hiring criterion, and firing low performers because of their energy drain.”
As they became overtaxed, 80 percent of Michel’s workers said they were struggling to control their bodies. As one vice president put it: “I wouldn’t call it control; I am at war with my body.” They were also at war with their private lives. Michel saw highly educated and highly motivated people willing to miss a child’s birthday or cancel on parents visiting from overseas to instead help with a client’s hostile corporate takeover.
To cope, bankers developed addictions and compulsions, such as eating disorders, as well as embarrassing tics, such as nail biting, nose picking and hair twirling. Normally mild-mannered people flew into out-of-control rages at the least provocation. (…)
To maintain their performance, bankers pushed harder, trying to reassert control over their bodies, writes Michel: “One banker combated her eating disorder by fasting and exercising more, training for a marathon even after midnight.” Bankers sought distraction through compulsive shopping, partying and watching porn to counteract the numbness (‘‘I need something to feel passionate about”), to achieve control (‘‘These are all ways to control something’’), and to escape (‘‘It is a way to escape, so that I cannot even ruminate about my problems if I wanted to’’).
Addiction and self-flagellation went hand in hand. One banker said, ‘‘The only way I can keep myself up nights in a row is through a mix of caffeine pills and prescription meds.’’ She even ignored serious injuries to her body. ‘‘I fell on my way to a meeting,” she recalled for Michel. “The leg changed color and I had pain but I chose not to think about it until after the meeting.’’ Her leg was actually broken in two places. (…)
High-finance intervention specialists, like Curry, have seen an uptick in drug abuse on Wall Street since 2008. It’s not necessarily because these guys are stressed. Just the opposite: It’s because many of them are bored.
photo { Daniel Ribar }
These two charts represent what is arguably the biggest thing that is changing in the U.S. economy these days. Not only is the price of natural gas declining significantly, but it is getting cheaper relative to crude oil by leaps and bounds. And it’s all thanks to new drilling technology (fracking) that has resulted in huge new natural gas discoveries and production in the U.S.
{ Scott Grannis | Continue reading | MoneyCNN }
Oil and gas production in the United States and North America is going to skyrocket in the next 8 years due to strides in natural resource extraction, write Citi analysts in a report published yesterday. In fact, they went so far as to call North America “the new Middle East,” at least in terms of oil production. (…)
Citi economists expect total liquids production to as much as double for the continent in the next decade, and predict that the U.S. could overtake both Russia and Saudi Arabia in oil production by 2020.
{ BusinessInsider | Continue reading }
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed article, titled “Move Over, OPEC — Here We Come,” Ed Morse, a former deputy secretary of state for international energy policy, said: “I’m thinking that actually the U.S. is the fastest-growing oil-producing country in the world, the fastest-growing gas-producing country in the world, and yes, it’s happening mostly on private lands,” he said. “This has happened despite whatever politics have intruded on it.”
quote { Fernandel in Marcel Pagnol’s Le Schpountz, 1938 }
{ Barneys New York logo by Chermayeff & Geismar | “Barney’s” was a long-established New York institution known for medium-priced clothing for men and boys. When the ownership decided to upgrade to a high-fashion, high-priced emporium for women’s as well as men’s wear, an elegant new logo was developed. By eliminating the apostrophe, adding the words New York, and using a classic typestyle, the store’s graphic and verbal identity was transformed. | Chermayeff & Geismar | more }
{ 1. Medical drawing of a cross-section of President Kennedy’s neck and chest, showing the trajectory of the projectile from back to throat. | 2. Diagram showing the trajectory of the missile through President Kennedy’s skull. The skull fragments are shown exploded for illustrative purposes; most stayed attached to the skull by skin flaps. | John F. Kennedy autopsy | Wikipedia }
Consider what the modest justices were debating on Monday: what Americans are allowed to do AFTER they die.
Specifically, the question before the court was whether a dead man can help conceive children.
This odd point of law came before the court after a woman, Karen Capato, gave birth to twins 18 months after her husband died of cancer. She had used sperm he deposited when he was alive, and she was seeking his Social Security survivor benefits for the kids. (…)
“Let’s assume Ms. Capato remarried but used her deceased husband’s sperm to birth two children . . . ” Sotomayor posited. “Would they qualify for survivor benefits even though she is now remarried?” (…) “What if you are a sperm donor?”
In 1986, Guantanamo became host to the first and only McDonald’s restaurant within Cuba.
A Subway sandwich shop was opened in November 2002. Other fast food outlets have followed. These fast food restaurants are on base, and not accessible to Cubans.
It has been reported that prisoners cooperating with interrogations have been rewarded with Happy Meals from the McDonald’s located on the mainside of the base.
In 2004, Guantanamo opened a combined KFC & A&W restaurant at the bowling alley and a Pizza Hut Express at the Windjammer Restaurant. There is also a Taco Bell, and the Triple C shop that sells Starbucks coffee and Breyers ice cream.
All the restaurants on the installation are franchises owned and operated by the Department of the Navy. All proceeds from these restaurants are used to support morale, welfare and recreation (MWR) activities for service personnel and their families.
How did we end up with a drinking age of 21 in the first place?
In short, we ended up with a national minimum age of 21 because of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984. This law basically told states that they had to enact a minimum drinking age of 21 or lose up to ten percent of their federal highway funding. Since that’s serious coin, the states jumped into line fairly quickly. Interestingly, this law doesn’t prohibit drinking per se; it merely cajoles states to outlaw purchase and public possession by people under 21. Exceptions include possession (and presumably drinking) for religious practices, while in the company of parents, spouses, or guardians who are over 21, medical uses, and during the course of legal employment.
photo { Miss Aniela }
What’s happened to depictions of nature in children’s picture books?
A group of researchers led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist J. Allen Williams Jr. studied the winners of the American Library Association’s prestigious Caldecott Medal between 1938 (the year the prize was first awarded) through 2008. They looked at more than 8,000 images in the 296 volumes, and found decreasing depictions of nature and animals. (…)
Specifically, they find images of built and natural environments were “almost equally likely to be present” in books published from the late 1930s through the 1960s. But in the mid-1970s, illustrations of the built environment started to increase in number, while there were fewer and fewer featuring the natural environment.
I missed a great story circulated by my first New York roommates about how our scuzzball landlord is now embroiled in a legal fracas for renting a 1.5 million Tribeca apartment to a guy who runs a basement sex loft out of it offering “flaming massages.” The neighbors are so mad they keep smearing dog feces on the door. I could have lived without this news, but I’m happier now that I have it.
(…)
The messages Facebook hides in an obscure folder labeled “Other.”
“I only remember meeting him once,” she said. “Fred had some of the guys over, and Joe Sims was sitting right here. He was interested in all the Sinatra stuff. Then when he was leaving, he said something to me. He said, ‘The one problem with that collection is that Frank Sinatra can’t sing.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Frank Sinatra can’t sing.’ The hackles on my neck stood up. Literally. I mean it. When Fred came back, I said, ‘He’s bad news, Fred. I can tell you right now, he’s bad news.’ But Fred pooh-poohed it. He said something like, ‘Ah, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
It is the central mystery of the case. (…) By all accounts, Fred Thomas had lived an exemplary life of loyalty and leadership, with a devoted wife, a son nearby, a secure pension income, and a dream home to show for it. Joe Sims (…) was a man of unsavory associations and catastrophic divorces, a man who when he tells the truth, tells it slant, a man who stands accused of raping his stepdaughter in a house with her old swing set still planted in the backyard.
{ On the campaign trail with Mitt Romney. And Bad Lip Reading. | thanks joshua }
The present-day fate of New England goes back to an argument at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the ’50s about that material from which semiconductors, well understood locally from wartime work on radar, were to be manufactured in the years ahead. Dogma held that it would be germanium; silicon crystals would be too difficult to purify to the required degree. Robert Noyce, an MIT-trained physicist, thought otherwise.
When MIT declined to tenure him, Noyce decamped, first to Philadelphia, then to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, in Mountain View, California. Silicon leadership went with him – to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, each of which he co-founded, and eventually to Silicon Valley, centered around San Jose, which the two firms spawned. New England never developed a vigorous industry in silicon chips. By the end of the ’70s, savvy venture capitalists had begun migrating to Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road.
Similarly, when Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard College, in 1975, to found a little software company called Microsoft, he repaired first to Albuquerque, N.M., then to his native Seattle. Plenty of entrepreneurial software development was going on in Cambridge, including the first spreadsheets, but proximity to microprocessor developers in California, Intel in particular, gave Microsoft a decisive edge. Microsoft networking software eventually swallowed whole Massachusetts’ minicomputer industry.
Robotics is a game-changer in national security. We now find military robots in just about every environment: land, sea, air, and even outer space. They have a full range of form-factors from tiny robots that look like insects to aerial drones with wingspans greater than a Boeing 737 airliner. Some are fixed onto battleships, while others patrol borders in Israel and South Korea; these have fully-auto modes and can make their own targeting and attack decisions. There’s interesting work going on now with micro robots, swarm robots, humanoids, chemical bots, and biological-machine integrations. As you’d expect, military robots have fierce names like: TALON SWORDS, Crusher, BEAR, Big Dog, Predator, Reaper, Harpy, Raven, Global Hawk, Vulture, Switchblade, and so on. But not all are weapons–for instance, BEAR is designed to retrieve wounded soldiers on an active battlefield.
Over the last three decades, large cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Toledo have seen their populations shrink, while areas like Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, Tampa, and Phoenix have seen their populations grow rapidly. Examining the policy differences between high-growth and low-growth areas can provide evidence that may help declining cities reverse their fortunes.
In 1980, Austin, Texas, and Syracuse, New York, were roughly the same size. The Austin metro area had a population of about 590,000, and the Syracuse metro area had about 643,000 residents. By 2007, Austin’s population had increased by more than 1 million while Syracuse’s population had been stagnant. That same disparity exists when one examines the growth of employment and real personal income. Another disparity between the two areas is the tax burden. State and local taxes accounted for nearly 13 percent of personal income in Syracuse but only about 9 percent in Austin. Although there are numerous factors that can influence the growth of individual economies, one finds a consistent relationship between low taxes and high economic growth in metropolitan areas, in states, and in nations.
This article details that relationship between taxes and growth for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas.
