Tag: favorites

The Fall of AIG and it’s relationship to Drexel Burnham Lambert

This article, Behind Insurer’s Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk in the NYTimes.com has a great rundown of how AIG crashed and burned. It turns out that much of the problem revolved around a unit of AIG known as AIGFP. As the article points out:

‘The insurance giant’s London unit was known as A.I.G. Financial Products, or A.I.G.F.P. It was run with almost complete autonomy, and with an iron hand, by Joseph J. Cassano, according to current and former A.I.G. employees.

A onetime executive with Drexel Burnham Lambert — the investment bank made famous in the 1980s by the junk bond king Michael R. Milken, who later pleaded guilty to six felony charges — Mr. Cassano helped start the London unit in 1987.’

What comes around goes around. No doubt some of the brains behind the subprime meltdown are already dreaming up new ways to leverage us into the next disaster.

Heck of a job, Mr. Cassano.

On appreciation and the importance of showing it

I believe that we underestimate the positive affect our kindness and appreciation has on people. We believe it won’t make a difference, that the effort to do so will be unappreciated, or that it doesn’t matter.

Last week I used the City of Toronto’s web site to enroll my children on some skiing and swimming programs that the City provides. What I used to have to do — really — was get up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and walk over to the community center and line up until 7 a.m. with many other people. I had to do this twice a year: September and January. Standing outside in Toronto in January at 5:30 or 6 in the morning to try and get your daughter in karate is the definition of ‘no fun’. However, the people from the city who ran it were very good, getting there at 6, giving out placeholder numbers to people, and letting them in before 7 just so people could stay warm. At 7, people would take turns working with staff to use the IT system the city has for registering. For high demand choices, you had to get to the system by 7:20, because they filled up immediately (once I tried to register my daughter in karate this way: it was filled by 7:10).

There were two other choices: a phone system (overloaded and not easy for me to use I found) and a web based system. The web based system was HAMMERED at 7 a.m. The first time I tried it a few years ago, it took me over an hour to get in. Needless to say, I went back to the 5 a.m. line up.

However, over the years of trying it, I have seen the web based system improve greatly, and I got in quickly this year (7:05), even though I am sure it still gets massive amount of load at exactly 7 a.m.

I was so impressed, I sent an email to the Mayor’s office (the office of the Mayor of Toronto is fantastic with answering email, usually answering within the hour and with specific responses to my email). I told them how impressed I was with the improvements they have made over time. (And after having stood in the freezing cold at 5 a.m., you appreciate it!). Not only were they appreciative, but they forwarded the email to others within the city, and they were all very appreciative as well. In fact, I was surprised how appreciative they were in the emails they sent back to me.

And so I thought I would write this, partially as a reminder to myself to be more appreciative (it’s a never ending journey and I am sure I have along way to go still). Partially to remind others. And partially to tell people — particularly the IT people I work with — that people do appreciate the work you do to make things better, even if they don’t always say so.

From the ridiculous to the sublime, musically, and places in between

Checking out music on the Transbuddha web site the other night, I came across this!

Yes, not only is Jesus your friend, apparently he is also a Mountie. Okie-dokie, then. That’s the ridiculous. (And likely a comedy sketch, but still….)

As I was listening to it, I thought, hmmm…that sounds like Ranking Full Stop from the English Beat. Of course it’s also on YouTube.

While there are some differences, it is very similar! So, first song, very bad. But it got me listening to something better. And checking out that, I started thinking of their good cover of the classic Smokey Robinson and the Miracles song, Tears of a Clown. So I looked it up, and I came across this:

So, from the ridiculous to the sublime in a few minutes.

As a aside, I thought: man, the Miracles were a pretty subdued group of dancers. I did a check on the Pips, the Temptations and even the Jackson 5, and while all those groups were looser than Smokey’s backups, they were still more focused on singing and not so much on (lipsynching and) dancing.

I also think Justin Timberlake stole this look for his “Lovestoned/I think she knows” video. You can see it here:

Francis Bacon and the representation of grief


Enough blogging about money. Instead, I want to point out a great post in Looking Around – Art – Architecture – TIME on a new show at the Tate Britain museum. It’s a retrospective of one of favourite artists, Francis Bacon. While it his fifth retrospective, it is apparently a great one.

But I think this one passage is an interesting one, especially in light of the attention that artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have been getting lately

“To see this many Bacons gathered together reminded me again how rare it is to see new art that attempts, much less achieves, a genuine tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, also low comedy, puerile cool and industrial strength enigma. But in a time that has its share of tragedy — have you noticed? — where is the art that even tries to strike an equivalent note. What we have almost no language for anymore, at least not in art, is acute pain.”

While Hirst draws on Bacon, you get no sense of any great depth of emotion that Bacon has. He has dark representations without the feeling.

Instead of “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”, it is more “I have nothing to feel and I am painting that”.

Listeria, Maple Leaf Foods, and the design of meat slicers

According to the globeandmail.com, Maple Leaf’s CEO says likely source of listeria found:

“Listeria contamination deep within two meat slicing machines at a Toronto food-processing plant was the likely cause of the recent outbreak of the bacteria that has killed at least 13 people.

Maple Leaf Foods Inc. CEO Michael McCain said at a press conference in Toronto Friday evening that the Formax 180 slicers, on lines 8 and 9 of the company’s Toronto plant, were regularly cleaned but that listeria was found in parts of the machinery “well beyond the [manufacturer’s] recommended sanitation process.”

The slicers, which are about three metres long and two-and-a-half metres tall, have been completely disassembled, and Mr. McCain said that similar measures would be taken with all of the company’s slicing equipment.

He added that despite the discovery of listeria deep inside the machinery, “it’s not reasonable to expect that each piece of equipment has to be disassembled completely prior to use.””

I put the last part of the quote in bold, because I think that is relevant.

I went over to FORMAX site to see if I could get more information on the Formax 180. Given that there is no mention of the particular model on their site, I am assuming that a) it is an older model they no longer support b) it is similar to the newer models.

If I look at some of their new slicing models, like this one, I can see why the CEO of Maple Leaf would say it is “not reasonable to expect that each piece of equipment has to be disassembled completely prior to use”. They look like complex machinery. And I am assuming that complexity allows them to produce sliced meat at a very fast rate.

So, we have machines that are explicitly designed to be highly productive and implicitly designed to be hard to thoroughly clean.

My personal opinion is that I would like the machines to first and foremost be very easy to clean and then be highly productive.

In the meantime, I think I may cut back on my use of processed meat. I’ve already stopped using Maple Leaf Foods meats, but this is not likely a problem associated with just Maple Leaf Foods. I am assuming everyone in this business is using such machines, and all of them have the challenge of being able to clean them.

I also think Maple Leaf Foods and others need to rethink this problem, for their own sakes, as well as that of their customers.

 

Francis Bacon, Karl Lagerfeld, and the importance of living space

Francis Bacon is one of my favourite painters. One thing I have always been interested in is his studio. There’s a good article at the Guardian about how Francis Bacon’s studio reveals about his art (guardian.co.uk). For example,

“Chris Stephens, co-curator of the Tate’s major retrospective this month, remembers Bacon’s doctor once telling him that sometime in the 80s, by which time Bacon had been famous and wealthy for a good few years, he bought a flat around the corner. He wanted “to live more comfortably”, he tells me, “but he just couldn’t bear it – he just ended going back to the one room flat with a kitchen.” “

It reminded me of an article I read and posted on concerning Karl Lagerfeld

“Perhaps the most revealing index to Lagerfeld’s creative mind—to his insistence on keeping history alive even as he professes the need to forget it—was a room on the first floor at the end of a crooked hallway, which he saved for the end of his house tour. Here, Lagerfeld had reassembled his childhood bedroom, using the furniture and art that he had as a seven-year-old in Germany. Hanging on a wall just outside the bedroom was an oil painting that his mother gave to him when he was a boy, depicting Voltaire meeting Frederick the Great of Prussia: a group of eighteenth-century courtiers in velvet coats and powdered periwigs. “This is how I dreamed life should be,” Lagerfeld said. “Can you imagine—at seven?” “

Lagerfeld could have and did live grandly, but settled back into a room he had thought about as a child. Bacon was also highly influenced by his living conditions as a child. They seem to have been locked in these rooms, mentally if not physically. Perhaps locked is too strong a word; they seem to inhabit the same rooms they lived in as a child, regardless of where they physically lived.

 

How Wings are Attached to the Backs of Angels

How Wings are Attached to the Backs of Angels is a wonderful animated (short) film by Craig Welch and the National Film Board of Canada (nfb). The nfb has a reputation for releasing great animation such as this. “How Wings…” reminds me of Edward Gorey, but it stands on its own.

See:

Note: this film comes in standard and high quality. The high quality shows through here, so watch that version.

How to make modern art

1) Pick a political topic that people feeling passionate about (e.g., global warming)
2) Pick an iconic image for this
3) Create a replica of this image, but make it so that it is not ordinary (e.g., give it a different size or other quality)
4) Put it in a different setting

Voila! you have this: Pylon in Birmingham

If there is more to this than what I just described, I am missing something.

Neutron loans, or how the subprime disaster works

Over at bloomberg.com is a very simple explanation of how the subprime problem works it’s destructive effect:

Joe Ripplinger took out a $184,000 mortgage in 2006 and makes his payments every month. Now he owes $192,000. The 66-year-old Minneapolis house painter has a payment- option adjustable-rate mortgage. It allows him to write a check for $565 a month even though he owes $1,300. The difference is added to the mortgage, and when his total debt reaches $212,000, or after five years have passed, he said his monthly minimum could jump to about $2,800, which he can’t afford. “We’re barely making it right now,” Ripplinger said. The estimated 1 million homeowners with $500 billion of option ARMs are beyond the help of interest-rate cuts by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. While subprime borrowers face an average increase of 8 percent or less when their adjustable- rate mortgages reset, option ARM homeowners may see their monthly payments double after their adjustments kick in. “We call them neutron loans because they’re like a neutron bomb,” said Brock Davis, a broker with U.S. Express Mortgage Corp. in Las Vegas. “Three years later the house is still there and the people are gone.”

ARMs are fine for speculators who know what they are doing and can handle the risk. For people like Joe Ripplinger, they are anything but fine. And there are alot of people like him out there. See: Bloomberg.com: Exclusive

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools: Art and Fear

Kevin Kelly, in his list “Cool Tools”, has excerpts of what looks like a good book for anyone who wants to know not just about making art but being creative generally. Here’s a link to the site, and here is a fascinating story from the Cool Tool: Art & Fear

‘The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.’

I hear the Mermaids / IBM 1401 singing.

What is this?

YouTube – IBM 1401, a User’s Manual Part I – IBM 1401 Processing Unit

(Reply) The IBM 1401 was an mainframe computer back in the 60’s. It was this huge beast of a machine that had a small flaw in which it leaked electromagnetic radiation in a frequency that AM radios could pick up. It didn’t take long for the geeks of the day to figure out how to make music out of it! That wierd instrument you hear at the start that sounds kinda like a claironet but isn’t… that the 1401!

Small side note: I have a mint condition hard cover manual on how to program the IBM 1401.

Where Karl Lagerfeld Lives

When I first saw this article in the New Yorker, I thought it was going to be about his apartment in Paris! And in a way, it was. But the subtitle, “In the Now”, describes where Lagerfeld really lives.

I used to have a poor opinion of KL, but after reading the article, I was impressed by his energy, drive and imagination.

See the article here: Profiles: In the Now: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker