Being from Chicago (fine, the suburbs), I’m denied the chance for much regional elitism. Chicago is in the Midwest, flyover country, I get it. But even we Chicagoans are reserved a smidgen of pomposity – there’s still the South to feel superior to. And last week, New Mexico, that state so self-conscious about its tendency to attract old people that it needed “new” as part of its permanent branding, has again shown Illinois up with its governmental incompetence. We may have had Blago, but at least we never lost 13 computers (that’s just in one year) from a nuclear weapons laboratory. In North Korea and Iran, nuclear weapons information is hard to come by. In the U.S., it’s apparently free to anyone willing to do the legwork and walk away with computers full of the government scientists’ work.
Lacking marketable skills, unemployed bankers get a bailout
It is a truth universally acknowledged that bankers and other Wall Street types have no actual marketable skills. In the boom times, they got their jobs because they were willing to forsake sleep, sanity and social lives in return for inordinate sums of money. They memorized a bunch of formulas, faked a few spreadsheets, possibly did a few lines of cocaine, and were handsomely rewarded.
But never, ever, did they do actual work, the kind that requires thoughtful consideration of alternatives, coordinating with colleagues, or thumb-twiddling in endless meetings. With their jobs disappearing into the ether, however, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has realized that the contingent of now-unemployed bankers roaming the streets of New York, wide-eyed and unskilled in their Armani suits, will require retraining.
This is a phenomenon most often experienced by cities whose revenue stream is dependent upon manufacturing and whose citizens are employed in factories. The thought of bankers, formerly of six and seven-figure salary fame, requiring to be trained in order to land a job is the greatest level of schadenfreude this recession has allowed.
Bloomberg is proposing a plan that will use $45 million of government money, $30 million of it from the federal government, to “retrain investment bankers, traders and others who have lost jobs on Wall Street, as well as provide seed capital and office space for new businesses those laid-off bankers might create,” according to the New York Times.
Bloomberg has guessed that this investment will create 25,000 jobs and add $750 million to New York City’s economy, which is great because the guesses of banker types have played out so well in the real world so far.
The G-7 meeting, the world’s most exclusive bar
World leaders, considering their jobs, have always looked suspiciously too well-rested and composed for my liking. They’re supposed to be spending sleepless nights trying to fix the sum total of the world’s problems, not taking naps and wasting time on things like showers and haircuts. The closer to god-forsaken, disheveled and repulsive a leader looks, the more I’m apt to approve of his job performance.
So when Japan’s finance minister showed up at a G-7 conference yawning, groggy, and nodding off while attempting to talk, it was hard to be surprised. In fact, I’m confounded that more finance ministers don’t behave like this. The economy is boring (being an occasional econ major, I’d know) and the world would appreciate knowing that our finance ministers have been spending their time killing themselves over this material, not resting.
The minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, resigned on Tuesday and now the economic and fiscal policy minister will take up Nakagawa’s duties. The move seems unnecessary: The prime minister’s approval rating was already at about 10 percent and the economy has been shrinking at the fastest rate in 35 years.
First he denied the drinking, blamed it on cold medication, then admitted to sipping wine before the meeting. If he’d just been honest and admitted that even intoxication cannot possibly dull one’s understanding of complex finance-minister things, the citizens of Japan would have applauded him.
Cloning dead puppies made affordable
I had always insisted, when it came up in casual conversation, that South Korea is a developing country, mired in technological backwardness. But it turns out I was confusing it for its not-clone, North Korea, which is the Korea that’s actually unfortunately helmed by a dictator.
With South Korea claiming it has created a new process for cloning dogs that is significantly more effective than previous methods, I will now never again make the same mistake. My earlier confusion was understandable, but South Korea will forevermore stand out as the cooler Korea, in my estimation, for their dedication to increasing the cute-puppy cache of the world.
As the BBC wrote, “South Korea has become a world leader in the lucrative field of cloning pets.”
The new technique, developed in Seoul, has a 20 percent success rate (double the earlier rate) and, according to the firm that developed it, could lower the cost of cloning one’s dog to $50,000 in three years, says the BBC.
In the vernacular of Northwestern students, that’s a year of tuition or 250 North Face fleece jackets. But really, anyone attempting to put a price tag on bringing dogs back from the dead through cloning is just a heartless jerk who’s probably never felt a human emotion in his life, and thus can be ignored.
Personally, I’m waiting for the price to drop to $30,000, which I could just cover with my expected first-year salary (still unemployed, so this is all speculative) to clone my dead dog.