Wall Street firms to pay higher compensation

Wall Street firms to pay higher compensation

From ibtimes.com:

Wall Street is set to witness a record rise in employee compensation for the second consecutive year, according to Wall Street Journal.

About 35 securities and investment firms are expected to pay $144 billion in compensation and benefits in 2010, up 4 percent from $139 billion in 2009, according to a survey, WSJ said. While compensation is set to rise at 26 firms, revenue increase may be seen in 29 of the 35 institutions, the survey showed.

It’s so nice that there’s no one who can stop all this from happening. It’s like we don’t mind our money being taken out of our pockets and put into the pockets of a comparative handful of people. >_<

I think I smell a candidate for effyou.org this week!

Story found via Frederic’s Tumblr.

About Piracy and Why It Won't Always be Piracy... (because it can't be)

Piracy will eventually evolve…

I found this post over at streetvisuals.posterous.com that brings up a great point about piracy. But before I get to it, I’d just like to point out that what piracy literally is has always existed in some form even if it was legally allowed (via libraries or just borrowing/gifting books from/to friends) and will never go away as long as tools exist for making it possible. That said, what can IP (Intellectual Property) owners do about it? Street Visuals suggests we all just chill and treat it as reasonably in expensive advertising.

The blog post mentions a guy called Markus Persson, developer of the game Minecraft who doesn’t like piracy, but understands that: things, they are a’ changin’.

From StreetVisuals:

Persson says in a blog post that the digital world simply doesn’t mesh with an economic system that was designed around physical goods that can only exist in one place at a time, and can’t be easily copied. “We’ve got an amazingly effective way of distributing culture that is extremely beneficial for humanity, but it clashes with our current economical models,” he writes. The ability to quickly and easily make identical copies of movies, books, games and other content is something we don’t want to give up, Persson says, but “to people who want to get paid for their digital works, myself included, that is a bit of a problem.”

On Persson’s original blog post he even says:

All of society and economics is based on an old outdated model where giving something to someone would rid the original owner of their copy, so everyone who wanted a copy had to buy one from someone else who would lose theirs, and the only source of new copies was you.

I love that he calls it an “old outdated model” because, of course, it is—for exactly the reasons he cites.

But what can we do about it? Neither Persson’s post or the post on Street Visuals really suggests any solution to this problem aside from ignoring it—which is essentially what you do when you treat it as advertising. The only thing you need to do, actively, is make sure there are benefits to buying the legit copy—like extra trinkets that come with the DVD or things you can do online only by registering a legit copy. However, this doesn’t begin to approach the bigger problem facing society:

What do we do with this “old outdated model” of economics that we still practice?

The fact that no one has really gotten farther than this point in the discussion (and most folks aren’t even aware that this discussion is taking place) speaks to our sad and near complete lack of cultural imagination.

The only thing I can think of is something like a UK-style NHS but instead of providing national health services, it’ll provide income for content creators. The system would go like this:

The creator produces the content without compensation to start with. After a certain number of downloads they can apply for government sponsorship. From there, tax money gets shunted to the creator.

Sure, lots of folks would be annoyed that their tax dollars are going to pay for someone to make content that offends them, but the way I see it, they should shut up and grow up since, for ten years, my tax dollars have been helping pay for two wars that I morally and logically object to. Everything is a trade-off when you live in a world with adults. I pay for your content, you pay for mine. We may not agree, but we both agree we should all be able to feed ourselves and our families.

And that’s ultimately the point: we all agree that movies, shows, music, games, books, and software applications are important and useful to humanity as a whole, so why don’t we just agree that this is an industry that absolutely needs to exist and support it with our tax dollars?

The idea that this antiquated old system just went through a massive upheaval should give us a big heads-up that shit needs to change. I mean, banks are too big to fail, but thanks to a lack of money, our creative industry is too big and is failing. We’ve got to do something, kids.

The Absurd Disconnect Continues: noticing greedy employers

If you’re not familiar with what I call “the Absurd Disconnect,” in a nutshell, it’s when people look at the sky and tell you it’s green—or when someone tells you it’s safe to go swimming in a part of the ocean that just had millions of gallons of oil dumped in it—like that.  There’s been a lot of this kind of thing going on lately and it’s continuing.

In this instance, I saw a link on Newsweek’s Tumblr to an article on Newsweek’s main site claiming to be “What the JetBlue Guy Says About the Economy” well, it wasn’t that. I was hoping to literally hear Slater’s take on the job situation, but alas, I got some reporter-guy’s opinion of it. Part of his opinion was based on USG docs.  Yeah, yeah, let’s trust USG docs.  They’ve never been wrong before.  Anyway, so here’s the part of the article that pissed me off the most (italics are mine):

For the past year, the U.S. economy has been whipping roughly the same number of workers to do more, produce more, serve more, with each passing week, without much assistance, and without much of a raise. Over the past four quarters, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, “unit labor costs fell 2.8 percent as output per hour increased faster than hourly compensation.” But when the BLS reported the second-quarter productivity numbers on Tuesday, Aug. 10, the results were a little shocking. For the first time in several years, productivity actually fell—at a 0.9 percent annual rate. Workers put in more hours, but output didn’t keep up. They simply can’t run any faster.

via newsweek.com

OH, REALLY? Just the past year?

Since college, I can’t name a single boss I’ve ever worked for who didn’t hire me for one thing who didn’t then pile on extra responsibilities.  Sometimes those responsibilities were tenuously related to the work I was paid to do (so I dealt with them) but *every* time I didn’t get a raise to make up for the extra work.  I finished college in the early 90s, right when the downsizing trend was kicking into high gear.  Shortly thereafter, it stopped being a trend and became business as usual.

Seems like some folks never noticed that. I remember Paul Krugman, not too long ago, saying something about how he was worried high unemployment would stop getting apologized for and would just be assumed to be part of the system.  He hadn’t noticed that it’s already part of the system. But that’s what he gets for being one of those people that base their reality almost entirely on what they are told by “authorities” and not what they’ve experienced or heard from other “grunts.” 

I worked for a company from 1999 to 2006 and held two positions. In that time, the first position never saw a raise. Not for the 7 years I worked there.  In the other position I only got a 75¢/hr raise after I demanded $1/hr.  This was after they tried to get me to become the receptionist for the entire company, sort the company’s mail AND do my original job of running my department (which was something I did only because my boss, the actual head of the department, wasn’t doing it).

That’s just one example. 

It’s amazing to see the media just now catching on that employers are greedy.  What’s next? Choice words for executives for this “new trend” of owning expensive luxury cars and wearing expensive suits?

Yes, that op-ed will no doubt be written by Sherlock Holmes—for only someone as brilliant as the fictional detective would be able to make such profound observations on humanity today.

>_<

Why is the media so slow to do it’s job?  Why are we so willing to put up with being shit on by our bosses?  The last time I had an office job where my boss tried to dump more duties on me, I put my foot down and they survived without me having to do work I didn’t sign up to do.  The work I was not willing to do was absorbed by other employees whose job it already was.  Later they laid me off when all of my duties got folded into other folks’ jobs (d’oh!).  They offered to hire me elsewhere in the company but couldn’t tell me how much more I’d be making but that I’d be working directly for the top executives at the company.  Bleh—not for me.  So, I turned it down.  Turns out the woman who got the job ended up being forced to work 6 days a week without OT. Yep. She felt compelled to not risk the gig because she was a single mom. 

This was three years ago—before the recession.

Well, it was before the officially recognized recession, anyway.

That’s the other falsehood that the media and other “authority” types haven’t noticed yet.  Thanks to a number of factors, our economy is on a downward trajectory and has been for some time.  It was just easier to ignore before.

Shame we can’t all just face reality and do something about it.

What are those factors?

Outsourcing

Offshoring

a money system not based on anything tangible

lousy regulation

corporations having the “right” to “give” as much as they want to campaigns

These five factors, I believe, are behind every problem facing America, and the western world, really.