Colts 35 Patriots 34
Score was Patriots 34 Colts 28 with slightly less than 2 minutes to go. Patriots have the ball on their own 28 and are on 4th down with 2 to go. They go for it, don't make it, the Colts take over and then score to win the game.
It seemed like a gamble and my first thought was that their chances would have been better punting - but given that man who made the decision was a professional football coach (and considered one of the smartest) I figured that there may be more to the story. There may be a reason. The reason was not hard to find:
http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/articles/2009/11/17/percentages_say_coach_made_the_right_call/
Finding that took about 2 minutes of searching. Statistics indicate that in that situation there was a better chance of winning the game by going for it on 4th down (79%) vs. punting (70%). OK, so it was not so stupid after all. Didn't work but not stupid.
Yet much of the media is filled with howls of outrage against this decision and the coach who made it (Bill Belichick) and much of the criticism seems oblivious to the statistics. It's like there are two utterly different planes of reasoning. Much of the sports media is just filled with hyperbolic "What was he thinking!?!?" stories. Stories filled with sarcasm, emotion and exaggeration. A few stories where the author colorfully claimed to have searched far and wide looking for a rationalle for the decision - but failed to find any. Bob Kravitz of IndyStar is typical. Concludes the the decision must have been based on "arrogance" and "hubris" because he can find no other explanation:
http://www.indystar.com/article/20091116/SPORTS15/911160369/1034/SPORTS15/Kravitz-Belichick-helps-Colts-win
The lead story in the Boston Herald sports section is titled "Brain Cramp."
Do these guys not know about the statistics or do they not care. Both? Are they playing to a public that is mathematically illiterate and does not especially like to be enlightened?
Some pundits even disparaged Belichick for "not playing the percentages" obviously ignorant as to what the percentages actually were!
OK, At first blush it does *seem* like the wrong decision and 'a gamble.' The thought process probably goes something like this: "if the 4th down conversion fails then the Patriots lose because the other team is deep their end and can score easily, but if the Patriots punt the Colts have to go practically the whole field so the Patriots will probably win, hence punting is the correct option."
That was my first thought.
But this just isn't accurate. You have to think things through like a chess game in order to see why the statistics back up the 4th down try:
- Making the 4th down means the Patriots can run out the clock and win.
- Failure to gain the first down does not guarantee a loss. A first and goal on the other teams 22 yard line does not always result in a score and even if it does:
- Scoring as a result of a drive from the opponents 22 yard line is likely to take less time than from farther away (after receiving the punt) and hence more likely to give the other team time to come back. In this case the Patriots would only have needed a field goal to win even after being scored on.
- Going 60 or 70 yards (what the Colts would have had to do) was more likely than it seemed because it was "4 down territory."
When these factors are considered and numbers run, the statistics show the best chance of winning in this particular situation came from attempting a 4th down conversion - and not punting. Two independent computer programs have come up with the same result. The first one is discussed above and the second is called Zeus:
http://www.indystar.com/article/20091117/SPORTS03/911170346/1058/SPORTS03/Opinions-vary-on-Belichick-s-decision
So it's a pretty open and shut case: the correct decision was to go for it on 4th down.
But the national sports media is overwhelming in in condemnation of the decision and the condemnation is largely emotional. "You know it's wrong", "In football you just don't do things like this." Some commentators have dug in their heels even in the face of clearly knowing the statistical evidence and just re-iterated their emotional arguments in the face of the math.
Part of it is that the decision is is easy to criticize because it didn't work out but there is something more going on here. The opposing camps are really occupying two different planes of reality. Dealing with truth in two very different ways. One looks for truth in the physical/mathematical sphere - and typically keeps an open mind, the other seeks to establish what I would describe as "social truth". It's the kind of truth based on "everybody says so" kind of reasoning. People do not seek this second kind of truth they aim to establish it. In the Patriots 4th down decision case, it is probably an example of an opportunity to trash someone many people didn't like. The decision looked bad at first blush and many don't like Bill Belichick. Hence there is an opportunity to construct a social truth that he screwed up. In this case it runs headlong into a more substantial mathematical truth that he made the correct decision. It's not a judgment call like drafting player X vs Y. There is clear math on the side of the decision. But that does not matter to people engaging in constructing social truths - which occupy a different plane of reality. In the social truth plane of reality if everybody says so, it's true. People engaged in constructing social truths typically use in heavy doses of emotion. Social truth is not necessarily at odds with physical/mathematical truth but it often is and in this case it is.
This truth dichotomy exists in many spheres other than football. I think it's an important distinction in the real world in many places.
In my opinion, this episode exposes (as if we need more evidence) American anti-intellectualism. I noted above that Bill Belichick is "not well liked". He isn't. He's considered one of the smartest coaches in football and probably one of the smartest of all time. Much of the sports media and fan base throughout the country does not like them man. If this was an isolated case you could chalk it up to factors other than intellect, but (sadly for America in my opinion) it's not an isolated case. The criticism of Bill Belichick bears a similarity to criticism of Al Gore who was trashed on a personal level vs. the "likable" -and obviously un-intellectual George W. Bush. Same thing with Mike Dukakis. The intellectual Republican of recent times has been Newt Gingrich. He got the same negative treatment. This is not limited to sports and politics. Unfortunately it goes pretty deep in America right now and Bill Belichick is just the latest "smart guy" to receive the ire of the American "yahoo" mobs.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Wall Street Makes It Hard to Earn Legal Living
What follows hits the nail on the head. The bold/italics are mine:
Wall Street Makes It Hard to Earn Legal Living: Alice Schroeder
Commentary by Alice Schroeder
Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- A group of university students I spoke to recently asked if it was possible to make a living on Wall Street without compromising your values. I had to tell them no.
Wall Street has many decent, honorable people, but they work in a system that fundamentally compromises people’s ethics. The high pay is like an anesthetic that numbs you from feeling how you are being corrupted. Not only that, many honest people who work there would agree with an even more extreme statement: It’s hard to make a living legally on Wall Street.
The goal of investing is to get an edge, whereas the securities laws presume all investors should have the same information at once. If ever there was a recipe for a system rife with abuse, this is it. The harder that money managers, traders and analysts must work to get information that gives them that edge, the more likely some are to cross a legal line.
This week, Manhattan federal court dealt with a case of insider trading when Michael Koulouroudis pleaded guilty to charges that he traded on secret tips from UBS AG investment banker Nicos Stephanou, who previously took a guilty plea. Joseph Contorinis, a former money manager for Jefferies Group Inc.’s Paragon Fund, was indicted by a federal grand jury last week for his role in the scheme.
People who are looking from the outside at the Galleon hedge fund insider-trading case may also be thinking, “How could they have been so stupid?” Admittedly, naming the ringmaster “Octopussy” wasn’t the brightest move, yet the reason insider traders create networks to exchange illegal information isn’t because they are dumb. It is because so few money managers outperform market averages over time.
Not Enough Alpha
There is only so much alpha -- that excess return above a baseline average -- to be had in an efficient market. The incentive to create some artificial alpha one way or another is very high. Those who bend the rules successfully post good numbers, which adds to pressure on other Wall Streeters to push the gray boundaries of legal information flow.
One had to wonder if that’s what happened when the volume of 3Com Corp. call options surged to the highest level since September 2007 before Hewlett Packard Co. said it would buy the computer-networking equipment maker for $2.7 billion this week.
Investors also form an “us against them” mentality of sleuthing by whatever means is necessary to counter the stonewalling and obfuscation of company executives. A lot of inappropriate blabbing on Wall Street takes place by people who are outraged at some atrocity that is being committed by a company whose stock is overvalued.
Lying Managers
The tippees feel self-righteous about using the information, no matter how it was obtained. They see themselves as leveling a playing field skewed by lying company managers who are aided and abetted by cynical investment bankers and invertebrate analysts who (still) do bankers’ bidding out of concern for their careers.
Beyond that, big money managers feel entitled to even more information by virtue of clout: the first phone call from analysts; a heads-up that a salesperson thinks a downgrade on a stock may be coming; preference in a hot banking deal. This is simple economics. It goes without saying (because it can’t be publicly acknowledged) that the millions of dollars of business that an institutional client is doing with an investment bank means they will be treated much better than a small retail client who is paying a 1 percent wrap fee on a $50,000 account.
The better class of financial advisers tries to make up for this crooked system with creativity and pride in the way they serve their clients. They resist pressure from their employers to sell products only because they are profitable.
Over Legal Line
They have another, bigger problem, the same one faced by the large institutions. There is only so much alpha to be had in the market, and they are chasing it along with everybody else.
The aggregate number of people trying to carve fees out of investor returns simply overwhelms the potential gains for stockholders. It is this oversupply of overhead that creates so much pressure to cross the legal line.
Victims of their own success, the banks have severely aggravated this situation by going public, then taking on too many masters to “diversify” earnings: institutional money managers, retail investors, investment-banking clients, prime brokerage clients, “financial sponsors” (private-equity and buyout funds), their own asset-management arms, and proprietary traders. It is all but impossible for people at investment banks to serve all these clients -- whose interests conflict -- while doing their real job: to satisfy the quarterly earnings expectations of the banks’ investors.
Incentives to Cheat
Breaking up the banks into their constituent parts and forcing them to return to privately funded partnerships might reduce the apparatus that provides all parties with the incentives to cheat.
Even in the very unlikely case that this happened, it would still leave a shortage of alpha. As long as working on Wall Street is the most prestigious and financially rewarding job in the U.S., too many mouths will show up every morning to be fed.
Here, I sense a breath of change in the air. Kids who left college to import crafts made by women war refugees in Sudan are beginning to be envied by junior bankers who toil 80 hours a week creating spreadsheets. That’s a trend to be encouraged.
Aspiring young bankers and hedge-fund managers, be assured of this: The more of you who choose to import crafts from Sudan, the easier the rest of you will find it to make a living legally on Wall Street.
(Alice Schroeder, author of “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” and a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
Click on “Send Comment” in the sidebar display to send a letter to the editor.
To contact the writer of this column: Alice Schroeder at aliceschroeder@ymail.com.
Last Updated: November 12, 2009 21:00 EST
Wall Street Makes It Hard to Earn Legal Living: Alice Schroeder
Commentary by Alice Schroeder
Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- A group of university students I spoke to recently asked if it was possible to make a living on Wall Street without compromising your values. I had to tell them no.
Wall Street has many decent, honorable people, but they work in a system that fundamentally compromises people’s ethics. The high pay is like an anesthetic that numbs you from feeling how you are being corrupted. Not only that, many honest people who work there would agree with an even more extreme statement: It’s hard to make a living legally on Wall Street.
The goal of investing is to get an edge, whereas the securities laws presume all investors should have the same information at once. If ever there was a recipe for a system rife with abuse, this is it. The harder that money managers, traders and analysts must work to get information that gives them that edge, the more likely some are to cross a legal line.
This week, Manhattan federal court dealt with a case of insider trading when Michael Koulouroudis pleaded guilty to charges that he traded on secret tips from UBS AG investment banker Nicos Stephanou, who previously took a guilty plea. Joseph Contorinis, a former money manager for Jefferies Group Inc.’s Paragon Fund, was indicted by a federal grand jury last week for his role in the scheme.
People who are looking from the outside at the Galleon hedge fund insider-trading case may also be thinking, “How could they have been so stupid?” Admittedly, naming the ringmaster “Octopussy” wasn’t the brightest move, yet the reason insider traders create networks to exchange illegal information isn’t because they are dumb. It is because so few money managers outperform market averages over time.
Not Enough Alpha
There is only so much alpha -- that excess return above a baseline average -- to be had in an efficient market. The incentive to create some artificial alpha one way or another is very high. Those who bend the rules successfully post good numbers, which adds to pressure on other Wall Streeters to push the gray boundaries of legal information flow.
One had to wonder if that’s what happened when the volume of 3Com Corp. call options surged to the highest level since September 2007 before Hewlett Packard Co. said it would buy the computer-networking equipment maker for $2.7 billion this week.
Investors also form an “us against them” mentality of sleuthing by whatever means is necessary to counter the stonewalling and obfuscation of company executives. A lot of inappropriate blabbing on Wall Street takes place by people who are outraged at some atrocity that is being committed by a company whose stock is overvalued.
Lying Managers
The tippees feel self-righteous about using the information, no matter how it was obtained. They see themselves as leveling a playing field skewed by lying company managers who are aided and abetted by cynical investment bankers and invertebrate analysts who (still) do bankers’ bidding out of concern for their careers.
Beyond that, big money managers feel entitled to even more information by virtue of clout: the first phone call from analysts; a heads-up that a salesperson thinks a downgrade on a stock may be coming; preference in a hot banking deal. This is simple economics. It goes without saying (because it can’t be publicly acknowledged) that the millions of dollars of business that an institutional client is doing with an investment bank means they will be treated much better than a small retail client who is paying a 1 percent wrap fee on a $50,000 account.
The better class of financial advisers tries to make up for this crooked system with creativity and pride in the way they serve their clients. They resist pressure from their employers to sell products only because they are profitable.
Over Legal Line
They have another, bigger problem, the same one faced by the large institutions. There is only so much alpha to be had in the market, and they are chasing it along with everybody else.
The aggregate number of people trying to carve fees out of investor returns simply overwhelms the potential gains for stockholders. It is this oversupply of overhead that creates so much pressure to cross the legal line.
Victims of their own success, the banks have severely aggravated this situation by going public, then taking on too many masters to “diversify” earnings: institutional money managers, retail investors, investment-banking clients, prime brokerage clients, “financial sponsors” (private-equity and buyout funds), their own asset-management arms, and proprietary traders. It is all but impossible for people at investment banks to serve all these clients -- whose interests conflict -- while doing their real job: to satisfy the quarterly earnings expectations of the banks’ investors.
Incentives to Cheat
Breaking up the banks into their constituent parts and forcing them to return to privately funded partnerships might reduce the apparatus that provides all parties with the incentives to cheat.
Even in the very unlikely case that this happened, it would still leave a shortage of alpha. As long as working on Wall Street is the most prestigious and financially rewarding job in the U.S., too many mouths will show up every morning to be fed.
Here, I sense a breath of change in the air. Kids who left college to import crafts made by women war refugees in Sudan are beginning to be envied by junior bankers who toil 80 hours a week creating spreadsheets. That’s a trend to be encouraged.
Aspiring young bankers and hedge-fund managers, be assured of this: The more of you who choose to import crafts from Sudan, the easier the rest of you will find it to make a living legally on Wall Street.
(Alice Schroeder, author of “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” and a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
Click on “Send Comment” in the sidebar display to send a letter to the editor.
To contact the writer of this column: Alice Schroeder at aliceschroeder@ymail.com.
Last Updated: November 12, 2009 21:00 EST
Monday, November 9, 2009
So close and yet so far
I stumbled on a link to a talk given by someone named David Icke today.
In my opinion he really hit the nail on the head with part of what he was saying but -in my opinion- was pretty far from reality on other things.
His basic message:
a) People are controlled and manipulated by fear to serve an agenda that benefits the few at the expense of the many. Conflict is manufactured to generate a mindset that factors out higher level thought, creativity, and wisdom from the minds of most of us and puts us in a subservient and exploitable position.
so far so good.
b) He claims that a group of "reptilian" beings connected with Aliens, The Illuminati, jews, royal families etc. is behind this and has been 'pulling the strings' for thousands of years.
Fruit loops.
OK so here's my opinion: humans have been more often than not controlled by fear for essentially our entire existence. Controlled by the few at the expense of the many. By fear. But I really don't think external "boogeymen" are involved. No aliens, no Illuminati (in the sense of world control), the jews are not behind it, nor royal families.
It's just us. Doing it to ourselves. I think fear based control of the many for the benefit of the few is an emergent property of human existence. Some people find themselves in positions to exploit fear for their advantage and they do it. From Ancient rulers to Dick Cheney.
We are perpetually exploitable by fear because our brains are wired for fear having "trump card" power over other brain functions. See "The Three Pound Universe" by Judith Hooper for a great explanation of this wiring. The human brain's wiring evolved this way because during our evolution it was important for our survival. If we were digging out a mud hut or discussing where the buffalo were moving it was important that we drop that to deal with the Sabre tooth tiger lurking in the bushes. Fear needed to have trump card status in the brain or we were going to get eaten.
"The Three Pound Universe" goes into detail about how the higher functions of the brain are shut down by fear. Reason, abstract thought, complex language all fly out the window.
If you want to control people against their own interests it's essential to use fear. When fear is used strategically people will be unable to reason through what is being done to them. I think this has been known by power hungry people since the dawn of time. What evolved as a defense mechanism in the natural world is now exploited in the social context.
Why do people like Icke seem to get half of this right (control using fear) but don't get the other half right. IE that it's just us controlling each other as opposed to some over the top external force. Why the need for a grand conspiracy. I think the idea that we let other mere mortals control us this way just makes us feel bad about ourselves and we reject it. If this is engineered by other normal flesh and blood people then what does that say about us, who submit to it. What does that say about our country, our city, our family. It says were not all that we think we are. It says we are really kind of pathetic. We don't want to be pathetic.
But if our condition is the result of a grand conspiracy of aliens, Illuminati, royals and well placed jews then our condition is is not so sad. It's a bad position but not a sad and pathetic position. It's understandable. "Gee, given all that our condition might be even worse!" And we can get involved in a heroic struggle to overthrow our tormentors! Now we are feeling better about ourselves.
Similar in my opinion, is the conspiracy stuff surrounding the assassination of JFK. Despite there being no credible evidence emerging in 45 years of looking, many (most?) choose to believe that it was a conspiracy as opposed to Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. People just don't want to believe that the world is so chaotic and capricious that a nobody, a dreg of a human being acting alone could kill the most powerful man on the planet and change the world. We don't want to live in such a world. Such an arbitrary and uncontrolled world. So we insist on grand conspiracies to make the equation add up in our heads.
If you look at what is called "progress" - social progress, technological progress, etc. it's based overwhelmingly on reason. The Manga Carta, the Declaration of Independence, Calculus and so on. So reason does intrude into the regime of fear but in my opinion the journey forward has just begun. Fear still trumps reason in relations between nations. The league of nations/united nations has so far gained little traction. They have been irritants to those who want to exploit fear to start wars but no more. The few control this world economically and do so largely at the expense of the rest of us. There is no such thing as "corporate democracy" at the moment.
A small slice of goodness (based on reason) has been carved out with a lot of effort and bloodshed but the journey is at an early stage.
In my opinion he really hit the nail on the head with part of what he was saying but -in my opinion- was pretty far from reality on other things.
His basic message:
a) People are controlled and manipulated by fear to serve an agenda that benefits the few at the expense of the many. Conflict is manufactured to generate a mindset that factors out higher level thought, creativity, and wisdom from the minds of most of us and puts us in a subservient and exploitable position.
so far so good.
b) He claims that a group of "reptilian" beings connected with Aliens, The Illuminati, jews, royal families etc. is behind this and has been 'pulling the strings' for thousands of years.
Fruit loops.
OK so here's my opinion: humans have been more often than not controlled by fear for essentially our entire existence. Controlled by the few at the expense of the many. By fear. But I really don't think external "boogeymen" are involved. No aliens, no Illuminati (in the sense of world control), the jews are not behind it, nor royal families.
It's just us. Doing it to ourselves. I think fear based control of the many for the benefit of the few is an emergent property of human existence. Some people find themselves in positions to exploit fear for their advantage and they do it. From Ancient rulers to Dick Cheney.
We are perpetually exploitable by fear because our brains are wired for fear having "trump card" power over other brain functions. See "The Three Pound Universe" by Judith Hooper for a great explanation of this wiring. The human brain's wiring evolved this way because during our evolution it was important for our survival. If we were digging out a mud hut or discussing where the buffalo were moving it was important that we drop that to deal with the Sabre tooth tiger lurking in the bushes. Fear needed to have trump card status in the brain or we were going to get eaten.
"The Three Pound Universe" goes into detail about how the higher functions of the brain are shut down by fear. Reason, abstract thought, complex language all fly out the window.
If you want to control people against their own interests it's essential to use fear. When fear is used strategically people will be unable to reason through what is being done to them. I think this has been known by power hungry people since the dawn of time. What evolved as a defense mechanism in the natural world is now exploited in the social context.
Why do people like Icke seem to get half of this right (control using fear) but don't get the other half right. IE that it's just us controlling each other as opposed to some over the top external force. Why the need for a grand conspiracy. I think the idea that we let other mere mortals control us this way just makes us feel bad about ourselves and we reject it. If this is engineered by other normal flesh and blood people then what does that say about us, who submit to it. What does that say about our country, our city, our family. It says were not all that we think we are. It says we are really kind of pathetic. We don't want to be pathetic.
But if our condition is the result of a grand conspiracy of aliens, Illuminati, royals and well placed jews then our condition is is not so sad. It's a bad position but not a sad and pathetic position. It's understandable. "Gee, given all that our condition might be even worse!" And we can get involved in a heroic struggle to overthrow our tormentors! Now we are feeling better about ourselves.
Similar in my opinion, is the conspiracy stuff surrounding the assassination of JFK. Despite there being no credible evidence emerging in 45 years of looking, many (most?) choose to believe that it was a conspiracy as opposed to Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. People just don't want to believe that the world is so chaotic and capricious that a nobody, a dreg of a human being acting alone could kill the most powerful man on the planet and change the world. We don't want to live in such a world. Such an arbitrary and uncontrolled world. So we insist on grand conspiracies to make the equation add up in our heads.
If you look at what is called "progress" - social progress, technological progress, etc. it's based overwhelmingly on reason. The Manga Carta, the Declaration of Independence, Calculus and so on. So reason does intrude into the regime of fear but in my opinion the journey forward has just begun. Fear still trumps reason in relations between nations. The league of nations/united nations has so far gained little traction. They have been irritants to those who want to exploit fear to start wars but no more. The few control this world economically and do so largely at the expense of the rest of us. There is no such thing as "corporate democracy" at the moment.
A small slice of goodness (based on reason) has been carved out with a lot of effort and bloodshed but the journey is at an early stage.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
What we pay for
From "Celebs shell out big bucks for security"
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/11/06/celebrity.security.costs/index.html
"This week, rapper 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, admitted that he spends $20,000 a week on security at his Farmington, Connecticut, mansion."
and
"That cost can rise by a premium of $20,000 a month the second a celebrity stalker enters the equation."
Seems like there might be an easy way for security companies to jack up revenue if they ever get into a pinch: invent a stalker. I'm only half joking here.
This article illuminates some of pathologies in our society. And we are not lacking for pathologies at present are we.
The Wikipedia entry for him reports that:
- "50 Cent is one of the richest hip-hop performers, having a net worth estimated at US $440 million in 2008.
- Born in South Jamaica, Queens, 50 Cent began drug dealing at the age of twelve during the 1980s crack epidemic.[3] After leaving drug dealing to pursue a rap career, he was shot at and struck by nine bullets during an incident in 2000. After releasing
- On June 29, 1994, Jackson was arrested for helping to sell four vials of cocaine to an undercover police officer. He was arrested again three weeks later when police searched his home and found heroin, ten ounces of crack cocaine, and a starter gun.
His music glorifies violence, talks a lot about money for the sake of money and like most rap is filled with misogyny. You can listen to his first big hit here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/80/How_To_Rob.ogg
He made movie called "Get Rich or Die Tryin"
Basically he started out as a criminal selling drugs (and not just pot but crack cocaine) and has made quite a bit of money for himself in glorifying the criminal lifestyle. He's not alone. Is he a good entertainer? I guess so,when you listen to his stuff (and that or others like him), it's like the "id" run riot, like the call of the wild and there is a certain appeal to that, but that's not my point here.
My point is that regardless of what we say we want our kids to do and grow up to be, this is what we pay for. We may say we want our kids to say in school and acquire skills and so for forth but that's just talk. 50 cent has 440 million dollars. We get what we pay for. Our urban school systems are in chaos with violence and drugs are rampant. 100 school kids shot down in Chicago last year. We get what we pay for. We pay athletes millions per year and guys like 50 can accumulate fortunes. Kids in inner city schools overwhelmingly tell us they want to be rappers and professional athletes. We get what we pay for.
Are people in this country really surprised at how criminal, hoodlum, violent and corrupt we are? We get what we pay for.
And even if you cannot make to to the 50 cent level, there is a lot of money to be made in protecting people like him. From the aforementioned article: "..paying each security guard between $500 and $1,000 a day while away from home." That rate comes to between $135000 and $270000 per year. That's a lot better than McDonalds. In fact, that's a lot better than being an accountant. And there no college degree required and no crushing student loans to worry about.
As has been noted by numerous CEO's, pundits and others defending huge salaries for CEOs and Wall Street traders and such: income is a means of keeping score and keeping score is important in capitalism (and in life). The process of keeping score helps to keep people motivated and focused and informs them of whether or not they are doing the right things.
Come down to any inner city Chicago public school and take a look. We get what we pay for.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/11/06/celebrity.security.costs/index.html
"This week, rapper 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, admitted that he spends $20,000 a week on security at his Farmington, Connecticut, mansion."
and
"That cost can rise by a premium of $20,000 a month the second a celebrity stalker enters the equation."
Seems like there might be an easy way for security companies to jack up revenue if they ever get into a pinch: invent a stalker. I'm only half joking here.
This article illuminates some of pathologies in our society. And we are not lacking for pathologies at present are we.
The Wikipedia entry for him reports that:
- "50 Cent is one of the richest hip-hop performers, having a net worth estimated at US $440 million in 2008.
- Born in South Jamaica, Queens, 50 Cent began drug dealing at the age of twelve during the 1980s crack epidemic.[3] After leaving drug dealing to pursue a rap career, he was shot at and struck by nine bullets during an incident in 2000. After releasing
- On June 29, 1994, Jackson was arrested for helping to sell four vials of cocaine to an undercover police officer. He was arrested again three weeks later when police searched his home and found heroin, ten ounces of crack cocaine, and a starter gun.
His music glorifies violence, talks a lot about money for the sake of money and like most rap is filled with misogyny. You can listen to his first big hit here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/80/How_To_Rob.ogg
He made movie called "Get Rich or Die Tryin"
Basically he started out as a criminal selling drugs (and not just pot but crack cocaine) and has made quite a bit of money for himself in glorifying the criminal lifestyle. He's not alone. Is he a good entertainer? I guess so,when you listen to his stuff (and that or others like him), it's like the "id" run riot, like the call of the wild and there is a certain appeal to that, but that's not my point here.
My point is that regardless of what we say we want our kids to do and grow up to be, this is what we pay for. We may say we want our kids to say in school and acquire skills and so for forth but that's just talk. 50 cent has 440 million dollars. We get what we pay for. Our urban school systems are in chaos with violence and drugs are rampant. 100 school kids shot down in Chicago last year. We get what we pay for. We pay athletes millions per year and guys like 50 can accumulate fortunes. Kids in inner city schools overwhelmingly tell us they want to be rappers and professional athletes. We get what we pay for.
Are people in this country really surprised at how criminal, hoodlum, violent and corrupt we are? We get what we pay for.
And even if you cannot make to to the 50 cent level, there is a lot of money to be made in protecting people like him. From the aforementioned article: "..paying each security guard between $500 and $1,000 a day while away from home." That rate comes to between $135000 and $270000 per year. That's a lot better than McDonalds. In fact, that's a lot better than being an accountant. And there no college degree required and no crushing student loans to worry about.
As has been noted by numerous CEO's, pundits and others defending huge salaries for CEOs and Wall Street traders and such: income is a means of keeping score and keeping score is important in capitalism (and in life). The process of keeping score helps to keep people motivated and focused and informs them of whether or not they are doing the right things.
Come down to any inner city Chicago public school and take a look. We get what we pay for.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)