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| Girl: Does your heart still throb when you see me? Does your heart still pound when you look at me? Boy: Let me see.. 4 years of dating and 3 years of marriage.. and we have a diagnosis. If the heart is still beating like that, it would be heart disease. [Ouch] | | |
| Yesterday, I cut out of work at 5pm, and raced to Columbia to hear Jeffrey Sachs speak on the connection between our limited natural resources, rising food prices, hunger and poverty in other parts of the world, and the declining economy. Jeffrey Sachs is a well known economist, Director of Columbia's Earth Institute, UN advisor, often associated with Al Gore, and the green movement. Honestly, I'm not a green person. I prefer Kleenex to recyclable paper towels (it's harsh on the skin!) and I am strongly against spending $300 on a environmentally friendly Patagonia jacket made out of recycled bottle caps (if I'm buying something recycled, it better be damn cheap). By the end of the two hour seminar, though, I was floored. I haven't turned into a total tree hugger, but I definitely want to take more classes/ seminars to learn about economic sustainability. It has been a long while since I found something to be passionate about, and has a purpose. It started last August when I bought a book for my 17 hr flight to Asia on poverty and why developed nations failed so terribly in providing aid. Then, a couple of weeks ago on the news, I saw a 10 second montage of scrawny women and children fighting over a sack of maize in Somalia. Naturally I waved my fist at the TV in utter disbelief that there are people out there who hardly have enough to eat. It's always a small side story- a topic no one wants to talk about since it's not about the sub-prime mortgage crisis and has nothing to do with stock markets. The last major food shortage/ energy crisis was in the 1970s, and our work-around solution to this issue was to develop technologies to reap more from our land in China and India, and to wean our dependence on Middle East oil by exploiting oil resources in other parts of the world. Flash forward 30 years later, and we are in the same position. Only this time, rising food prices are connected to depleted natural resources, resulting from over-use of land in China and India. The amount of food production in the past 30 years increased significantly 8due to production in those two countries, but at the same time, required more fertilizer, ground water, etc., which at this point, are now polluted and close to being depleted. Not only are there fewer natural resources, there are also significantly more people vying for these limited resources. Population control has become a forgotten issue since it most directly impacts poor, developing nations, and it's easy for us to ignore this, since we live in such a well-off nation. We have running water, electricity, gas/electric stoves, and we honestly don't appreciate it as much as we should. In the past 30 years, rather than (1) researching alternative resources for fuel, (2) maintaining the quality of our land/water, (3) controlling our population, we have only focused on exploiting our resources to the fullest, only to realize now, that it is truly beyond out of control. When I hear all this talk about destroying the planet, I used to doubt it since the world is soo huge. How could it be possible that we'd run out of air/land/water? Seems almost implausible. Yet, visiting Hong Kong and parts of China, and only seeing one clear blue sky in the 3 weeks that I was visiting, was enough for me to take note. In the past, all the talk about hurting the environment seemed like one of the tree hugger, hippie philosophies to me. Naturally, as an accountant, I needed things to be quantifiable to determine its impact. Now that it's quantifiable, it's quite scary. These days, you can see the cost of food rise due to shortage and high transport cost. Mr. Sachs makes a convincing argument, which is further elaborated in his book, Common Wealth (which is on my reading list). He made a good point about being against the whole movement/ research dollars spent on corn ethanol, since it absurd to be dumping a food resource into a fuel which is neither efficient/cheap. It seems pretty absurd to me as well. (wasn't sure how to incorporate it into this blog - and yes- these few paragraphs are short and awkward- but just wanted to put it out there). His goal is to propagate this knowledge about our global problem and what we can do. By being informed, and spreading the word, words can turn into action. At this moment, this topic is hardly mentioned during the presidential debates, but hopefully, it can become a priority issue in the next few years before it is too late for us to do anything. "So, let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." -John F. Kennedy | | |
| hi. I've managed to avoid writing anything personal since late January. I forgot how to type, or how to translate my thoughts into writing, or forgot how to think maybe. A big part of it is because not much has changed since then other than the fact that my work angst has died down. Work angst is in direct proportion to amount of hours worked, and for the past month, it's been a 9 to 6, so I've been a happy camper. At one point, I was scared that work would turn into something comfortable, and eventhough it wasn't a dream job, I would somehow waste several years accumulating knowledge I wasn't interested in. Not sure what happened, but I am now comfortable, and not really searching anymore, and not entirely concerned about wasting a few years (I actually don't think it's a waste anymore). I think it has to do with the fact that all the peer pressure from the mass exodus of quitters has died down. Everyone I was friends with has already quit. Most of the people on my jobs is still here, and I guess that's motivation- seeing as people who guided me when I was an intern are now managers, and I have a pool of new jobs to choose to work on. After working with the manager from hell, I did apply to several jobs, only to have HR people from those companies ignore my application or re-route my application to an accounting position I tried to steer away from. I snuck around, did some phone interviews and a live interview, and I felt a sense of guilt for cheating on my company. Sure, of all things to be scrupulous about, I think corporate loyalty should be low on my list, but I don't know why- it just isn't! Damn morals. I needed someone to remind me that my company probably wouldn't think twice about laying people off/ firing them (this is partially true). My loyalty though is to my teams, not company. So unless I suddenly hate everyone I'm working with enough to quit, I'll probably won't. In other news, the apartment search is fun (but unproductive)! It's probably more fun since it isn't a life or death, need a place to live otherwise sleep on the curb type of situation. I am beginning to think NYC has to be the most overpriced place to live. I know I'm stating the obvious there, but it really is insane, seeing two NYU girls try to pass off their closet as a $2,500 a month sublet. I could not be fooled. The sad thing is, within a week, this $2,500 closet was taken off the market, and sadly, such crazy desperate people looking to be manhattanites is what drives such ridiculous prices. On the movie front, I attempted to watch My Blueberry Nights this morning. Norah Jones is a terribly boring actress, causing me to lose interest halfway. Also, Rachel Weisz was way too hot to be the ex-wife of that creepy highway patrol guy. Something about the movie seemed lost in translation, so I think Wong Kar Wai should stick to making Mandarin/Cantonese/Shanhainese language movies instead. I will finish the movie at some point next week before fully judging though. On the museum front, I'd conclude that it was unproductive. I did not go to the Met to see the art exhibit I read about in the NY Times. I also didn't see the butterfly exhibit at the AMNH. I did, however, check out the Takashi Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, which I totally did not get. It boggles the mind how Murakami's cartoonish figures can be placed on an LV bag, and become a best-seller. There were a lot of little kids of hipster parents there. Not sure how those parents addressed the content of these huge 6 ft sculptures of ... well... massive genitals and bodily fluids.  
Finally, I might take on Dragonboating again with the corporate team again, if it starts up. If not, I think I might take sailing lessons or kayaking, and put my corporate fitness reimbursement to good use. Hopefully, next time, I will update with something more exciting. | | |
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this is old, and i've posted it before, but this cracks me up! it's my circus audition tape. | | |
| I'm behind on my news, but just learned that UBS had a negative $20 Billion net worth in November. So based on the stats below, each UBS employee is contributing to about a $1M loss. How crazy is that?!!! i think this is a sign that a finance career is not entirely a safe bet. I was asking my little sister for a job (yes- my little sister in college has connections far beyond my own), and she basically said the last time she kept in touch with her mentors, they were freaking out about being laid off. I guess banks are laying off their dead weight (aka research analysts). So not exactly the best time to job search - at least not in the U.S!! you know, my day job seems much more tolerable in these economic conditions. i mean, things could be much worse. Posted by Dana Cimilluca Investment bankers get paid big bucks to add value to the companies they advise. As far as UBS investors are concerned, investment bankers do just the opposite.  According to a research report today from UBS’ Swiss neighbor, Credit Suisse Group, the company’s depressed stock market value of about $94 billion, courtesy of the credit-market turmoil, implies a negative net worth for the UBS investment bank. That figure comes from taking the current market value of the entire bank and subtracting the value of its other businesses, including wealth management and commercial banking. The result: a contribution of negative 22 billion Swiss francs ($20 billion) for the Wall Street unit.
Bankers at the 22,000-person operation, who already feel underappreciated because of a recent per-banker $750,000 cash bonus cap, are likely to take exception with that market judgment. After all, it puts a minus-$1 million price tag on each of their heads. It also raises a serious question: if the market doesn’t start showing UBS’ investment bank some respect, at what point do its honchos in Zurich start thinking about jettisoning the unit? Credit Suisse analysts Daniel Davies and Rupak Ghose think things have gotten a little out of whack, too. They abandoned Swiss neutrality and upgraded UBS shares to outperform from neutral, which helped boost the shares more than 6% today. They have a per-share price target of 67 francs on the stock. UBS bankers probably will find the $16 billion valuation built into that price target a little more palatable. | | |
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