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They’re not in touch with reality…They should really get an average American in Congress who knows how to balance their checkbook. It would be fixed in a week.
—Cheryl Carroll, 51, New Jersey: via bloomberg
We, as investors, do not feel we are at the point yet where it is necessary to ban managers from using experts. Furthermore, we will still invest in managers that do utilise the services of experts. However, it is essential for us to hold managers to a higher standard and demand that they implement specific practices.
—Joshua Barlow, associate director at PAAMCO, underscoring the importance of sharing and enacting robust firm-level compliance policies in the absence of regulator-derived policies: via COO Connect
Once you have a technology ontology, that can serve as a handle to explore that data, and it’s all time-sliced. You can type in a space, explore that space, visualize it, look backwards and see where it is yesterday and model what you’ll see in a day or month ahead.
—Sean Gourley, co-founder at Quid: via NYT
we now know it is amateur hour on Capitol Hill and we don’t want to be painted in this corner again.
—Christian Cooper, head of dollar derivatives in NY at Jeffries, subverting the Republican conceit that Wall Street is in on the joke: via Bloomberg
Why did Gerson Lehrman Group outsource payment and contract management to metratech?
Strip away all the fancy experts, managers, and front-line service-professionals from an expert network, and you see, at the bedrock of the business, payment and contract management.
Why would you outsource that? Why would you give up square one of the organization?
True. Payment platforms are commodities. Click-through contracts are procedural, annoying, and available. It’s tempting to let someone else take care of it. After all, a good cook doesn’t necessarily have a farm. In fact, they rely on others to produce the highest-quality ingredients for their recipes.
But it’s a bad idea.
Gerson Lehrman Group isn’t outsourcing individual ingredients. They’re outsourcing the recipe.
[NB: I’m surprised Integrity Research didn’t cover this.]
It’s sad that Woolworth’s is closing. Where will all the chavs buy their Christmas presents?
—Owen Jones, quoting a tittering dinner-party participant in his recent book, CHAVS The Demonization of the Working Class
Dwight Garner opens his review of Chavs with Jones’ story of the dinner party. Perhaps a dozen people of many walks and both genders, with no obvious predilection toward snobbery, nonetheless quickly and casually snap a whip of derision toward the hapless chav. On which Jones asks, “How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable?”
The word chav has come to convey a thuggish conception of the working class in England. It describes the flash of zirconium-encrusted pendants and track-suits, perhaps dressed up with an edging of Burberry plaid and encircled with a pair of bug-eye, imitation Prada sunglasses, that festoons the imagined ignorant and menacing prole. What may have begun as a criticism of poor taste came to qualify an entire class of individuals, and somehow, it was ok. But why?
Garner collects a handful of answers. He suggests that it may have to do with the increasing degree of wealth and privilege that characterizes the political and cultural elite in England. Much is made of David Cameron’s Concorde-arranged, super-sonic commute to the New York birthday party of Peter Getty, the scion of John Paul Getty.
The Labor Party is no less to blame. Once the guardian of England’s working class and a symbol of upward mobility, they “didn’t really like these people very much” anymore.
But Garner misses the main shift that has cultivated the notion of and the attitude toward the chav. Touching on the culpability of the chav, he quotes Jones: “Those who were poor or unemployed had no one to blame but themselves.” But he doesn’t assign its origin, which sits in the shift toward a market-based meritocracy.
A market-based meritocracy registers one’s merit on the basis of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Wealth will accrue according to one’s merit, and in a market, wealth is the measure of success. Those titans of industry, those John Galts, are each the envy and the measure of success, and success and standing equates to wealth, doled out or denied by the machinations of the market, but in a market-based meritocracy, some poor working slob has only themselves to blame for their station.
What Garner misses is the drastic acceptability of what’s bubbling beneath the surface, “If they were worth a damn, they’d be rich.” There’s no room for respectability among the working class in a market-based meritocracy. The notion of and attitude toward the chav, however appalling, is a necessary outcome. That’s why hatred of working-class people has become so socially acceptable.
It is beginning to feel like the worst days of the housing market are getting behind us. Stabilization and recovery will continue to be a slow and rocky process.
—Stuart Miller, CEO of Lennar, June 23 conference call: via Bloomberg article on surprise increase home-starts
—Citizens’ Semi Centennial, offering the Native American origins of the name Paramus: via Google Books
George Washington happened to encamp in Paramus on many occasions, including following his victory at Monmouth.
A colonial soldier recorded a startling sense of difference in the area in 1778 that persists, though in a different way, to this day. He remarked on the Dutch influences and idiosyncratic architecture. The homes combined two wings through an overhang set on columns and extending to a minor piazza. It gave each home an airy sense to the visitor. But the remarkably level ground, he observed, was almost preternaturally suited for agriculture at the time and would be similarly suited for strip-mall development later – beginning with the Garden State Plaza in the 1950’s.
Modern-day Paramus derives from the “New Paramus Patent,” which was also known, in perhaps a punning-premonition of things to come, as the “Wearimus Tract.” Unlike many concessions, Paramus did not have a colonial origin. It was a gift from the Native Americans.
Albert Zaborowski, having arrived in 1662 via the Dutch ship, Deb Ves, or “The Fox,” became a job-creator and accumulated significant land-interests in Hackensack, which was then called Ackensack, meaning the silent union of two waters. Zaborowski married the Dutch Miss Van Der Linde, who bore him five boys. Their progeny would later be known as Zabriskie, but not before their eldest, Jacob, was carried off into the forests by the Indians while still young.
The Native Americans who had taken Jacob returned fifteen years later with the son and a simple explanation. They had absconded with him if only to teach him their language and ensure their ability to communicate with the colonial interests. Along with Jacob and the explanation, they granted Zaborowski two thousand acres – the New Paramus Patent. This is not to be confused with the Paramus Estate, which was later purchased for a quart of whiskey and a pound of tobacco by Garrit Hopper in 1812, one of three brothers who emigrated from Amsterdam and settled in the area.
another Adam Curtis classic, named after the Richard Brautigan poem, along with a rockin’ soundtrack from Pizzicato Five.
I’m sympathetic to the protest movements and to challenging power in society, but youre not going to do it through self-organizing networks where you all sit around and there are no leaders and there is no guiding vision except self-organization. It’s a retreat, and in many respects it’s a cowardly retreat on the part of the left from confronting the fact that power is getting more and more concentrated in our society, but they don’t have an alternative, and they retreat like bureacrats, like librarians into process…processes of organization, without actually inspiring me with vision of another way of organizing the world.
—Adam Curtis, interview in Little Atoms
Stilltitled 