“Summer always feels endless until it suddenly ends…September is the Monday of months.” —
Jeff Scher, in “Summer Retreat” for New York Times’ The Animated Life blog (via britticisms) (via beautifulordinaire)
—
I got this feeling the first time I wrote today’s date.
“Don’t be a hero. Don’t have an ego. Always question yourself and your ability. Don’t ever feel that you are very good. The second you do, you are dead.” —Paul Tudor Jones
Not only is Jones an amazing trader and reader of the financial markets as well as a class act all around, but many of his trading philosophies translate well into everyday life. (More here.)
I feel like such a tourist.
loving the new theme, “not quite”. still think i need to lighten up the background a little though
[video]
jgh:
In the film, Shia LaBeouf attends my alma mater.
hate to burst your bubble, but as i understand it he attends princeton, which is comprised of shots of penn and at least one scene in a well-known yale lecture hall. apparently penn just didn’t have the necessary brand name. as if that’s not bad enough, his character apparently attends a frat party at the castle, which as we all know makes him an insufferable douche by default.
(n.b.: i’m still going to see it, conscientious objections aside)
(original article here, dealbreaker commentary here)
as a wharton undergrad, i’m convinced the nyt managed to find the 3 stupidest and more boring people here, or at least to edit their comments down to cliched soundbite-worthy drivel. i’m sorry, but you were only planning on going into finance because your parents were pushing you into it? seems like (a) an awful reason to work 80+ hours a week for 2 years, and (b) somebody needs to grow up, ween themselves from the teet, and stop letting mommy and daddy choose what you’re going to do with your life. seriously, who are these people?
I agree with dealbreaker commenter #32, who said:
As a Wharton student, I feel the down economy had many positive benefits in that my peers and myself have been forced to rethink our values, consider alternative (possibly more fulfilling paths), but still ultimately land good finance jobs if we REALLY want them.
Sure the economy’s made things rougher, but it’s mostly just made people think a little bit harder about whether or not a job in finance is what they want, and to consider the myriad (often more interesting or fulfilling) options they have coming out of undergrad with a top tier business degree that is useful in almost any industry (or at least as useful as the average liberal arts degree). in fact, the recession has done good things for wharton by reigniting the entrepreneurial spirit we’re known for by pushing students to make blaze their own paths and consider where their real competencies lie.
in short, the nytimes article is cliched, myopic, and misleading (like most of their articles). those students are probably antisocial nose-to-the-grindstone keep-your-head-down “follower” types unwilling to make their own opportunity who would have ended up going into i-banking just because everyone else does, rather than taking the time to consider the wide range of options open to them.
There’s nothing inherently evil about an earmark. Suppose a bunch of people write to a Senator saying that the street they live on needs to be widened to reduce congestion. There is already a bill before Congress to do that sort of thing, so the Senator throws in an earmark to make sure that some of the money gets directed to the place where his constituents think it is particularly needed. Congress is writing the bill—and can decide whether it’s going to decide how the money gets distributed or whether to delegate that to somebody else. In the case of an earmarks, it’s making part of the decsion for things Congress considers important and delegating the rest.
Unless a Senator decides to slip an earmark into a bill that gives a lucrative contract to a private company that may or may not have donated to his campaign. Or perhaps the Senator decides to build a museum or something that doesn’t seem to have much to do with interstate commerce? Or perhaps an earmarks benefit only communites that voted overwhelmingly for the Senator. These are problems.
In between there are a whole lot of gray areas. An earmark might be added as a compromise to get a Senator to vote on a bill he or she did not think was in the interests of his or her state. A Senator might ask community leaders where federal funds would be useful, which might both identify where money could be productively spent and encourage those same leaders to stay in the Senator’s good graces. An earmark could be immensely large and bring a disproportionate share of federal money to a specific state. Like Alaska.
And when we talk about government waste, earmarks may be part of the problem, but they’re only a relatively small part. In the current spending bill, under 2% of the bill is earmarks. That’s still a lot of money—and it’s a good place to investigate if we’re looking for wasteful projects. But aggressive earmark reform isn’t going to transform the government into a lean, mean, efficiency machine.
It’s unclear that eliminating earmarks entirely would actually benefit anybody. On the other hand, eliminating earmarks that benefit specific companies or increasing transparency in earmarks or ensuring that earmarks can be discussed and debated.
My question for you: if these are defensible, “good” projects that are worth the government’s money, why not send them through the authorization process? Why do they have to be stuck in as an earmark?