We’re really sorry about our most recent trading loss. People will say we require more oversight, and, in this case, maybe they’re right. It shouldn’t have happened, and we’ll take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen for a third time.
The $4,000 or so ($4,882) of your money that we failed to bring back from our annual company trip to Hollywood Park Racetrack and Casino will in no way whatsoever impact our ability to pay our promised dividend of .1% on all investments. We remain financially stable, with significant capital reserves — thanks to you, our valued shareholders — and enough gains from our other departments that the latest debacle in our Trading Department will not affect our ability to make more trades in the very near future.
No, it’s not the $2 billion that JPMorgan Chase blew on derivitative bets, but still . . . → Read More: To Our Investors
Originally posted March 18th, 2012
By Michael Konik
In 1969, the Cayahoga River, one of Lake Erie’s major tributaries, caught fire. This provided the kind of visual evidence boring old science never could. Folks got hip: Industry, they realized, was using American waterways as a massive free sewage system for their most noxious waste. Americans got serious about pollution in our water for a minute. Then we all got back to business and tried to forget about the future.
Now our present generation of leaders and decision-makers has its own Compelling Visual to consider as they try to sell the easily sold American public on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which a proprietary cocktail of water, sand, and toxic chemicals are blasted into shale fissures deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The blasting breaks apart the rock formations and causes them to give up oil and natural gas deposits. The Academy Award-nominated (and therefore Good and . . . → Read More: What the Frack!?
Originally posted December 18th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Women, those creatures from Venus, assume that most men, particularly boyfriends and husbands, suffer from a malady known as “selective hearing.” Other forms of this pervasive syndrome include “selective memory” and “selective comprehension.” A rough description: When the Lakers score is coming over the radio, a man hears like a bat; when the wife is asking him to do the dishes – or massage her bunions, or watch cat videos – he hears like Marlee Matlin.
Selective memory usually kicks in when the subject of inquiry involves ex-girlfriends or number of beers consumed.
Selective comprehension usually kicks in when the subject of discussion involves the operation of the pay-per-view function on the remote when the new “Twilight” sequel shows up on cable.
Though it’s not yet entered in the Physicians’ Desk Reference, we’ve recently identified a new and possibly unrelated disease. This one affects both men and . . . → Read More: Selective Smelling
Originally posted November 27th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Friends are fickle. Family is unreliable. But shopping – now that’s something we can all count on to raise our collective Holiday Spirit. This was the primary message of hope we heard during Thanksgiving, which has gradually morphed into a two-day bacchanal. (Day One, Thanksgiving Thursday, features food and football. Day Two, Black Friday, features standing in lines and buying things.) In recent years, a period in which overconsumption has become a symbolic form of American art, the second part of the two-day holiday has threatened to overtake the first part in cultural importance. Indeed, in many places Friday is now beginning at 10PM on Thursday.
Here’s how someone the Los Angeles Times identified as a “retail expert” explained early reports that shoppers were “in a frenzy” of spending: “People have had so many years of recession that they want to spend money and feel good about . . . → Read More: Shopping Our Way to Happiness
Originally posted September 25th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Every time we get into our car, we die a little.
Every time we return safely home, someone else hasn’t. That driving an automobile is a dangerous activity is not open to dispute. We all understand the frequency of accidents, and what happens when cars crash: terrible collisions that ruin (or end) lives. This specter of harm hovers over all our machines, including motorcycles and airplanes, each of which has a long-term expectation to return a predictable amount of mayhem and misery. Cars, though, are America’s default choice for getting from here to there. Our nation is built around them. So, aside from their environmental impact and all the other unpleasantness they cause, cars are also the most frequently used method for injecting danger into seemingly safe lives.
The inevitable injuries and deaths associated with driving a car must then be considered one of the “costs” of operating the . . . → Read More: Acceptable Collateral Damage
Originally posted September 18th, 2011
By Michael Konik
At 25 of the 100 largest U.S. Corporations, at places like Ebay, Boeing, and Verizon, the chief executive earns more than the entire company pays in federal income taxes. These patriotic chaps, who, in their defense, are merely competing in the Financial Olympics according to the official rules established by other patriotic chaps, earned on average $16.7 million in 2010. Gaming the system, you see, does not come cheap.
Meanwhile, as stockholders rejoice (or at least tacitly approve) the fiscal legerdemain, the rest of the country, those who lack the capital to gamble with other people’s money, are bracing for another blow to their dignity and their hopes. The number of Americans living in poverty – surviving on around $22,000 or less annually for a family of four – has surpassed 46 million, more than 15% of us. This is the highest total in 50 years.
Originally posted September 1st, 2011
By Michael Konik
My dear mother is a knee-jerk liberal hippie Democrat progressive pro-labor vegetarian yoga-doing leftie. For most of her adult life she’s served as one of the most beloved and revered elementary school educators in her community. She’s taught across the spectrum of scenarios: inner-city public school with “at risk” students; suburban public school with “smart kids” using all the best learning tools; and private college-prep school with privileged children enjoying every advantage in the world. At every milieu Mom has succeeded: her children learn what they’re supposed to at their grade level and then much more. They leave her classroom prepared for the next grade and for an inquisitive, thoughtful life.
My mother is a great teacher, not just a very good one. Her classroom is a place of wonder and imagination, like a hybrid Children’s Museum-Zoo-Library-Art Studio-Epigram Factory. The bulging file of thank you letters . . . → Read More: Educating Everyone Excellently
Originally posted July 31st, 2011
By Michael Konik
My late father, who left us before the phrase “credit default swap” ever passed the lips of a lower Manhattan swindler, believed that United States Treasury Bonds, or T-Bills, were the safest investment on the planet. “When the Federal Government can’t cover their own bonds, don’t worry about your lost interest. Start stockpiling,” he counseled, “because Armageddon will be next.”
I miss my father. But I’m sort of glad he doesn’t have to witness the mortifying debt-ceiling charade occuring in Washington, DC, because he’d have to put down his book, amass canned food, and build a bomb shelter in the back yard. The end is nigh!
By the time you read this, our representatives in Congress will almost certainly have worked out some sort of unpleasant compromise, explained why they had to do what they did, and get back to their day-to-day business of placating and succorring . . . → Read More: The Big Lie
Our dwindling reserve of human kindness and compassion, diluted and poisoned by nearly constant assault from the corroding force of cruelty, still becomes inflamed by the fuel of outrage when we receive reports of foul play, endemic unfairness, and rank injustice motivated by the eternal and constant tug of noxious human greed. We blanch at oil companies happily accepting — and strenuously lobbying for — $4billion in taxpayer subsidies. We mutter disconsolate platitudes when we learn of Police Chiefs, City Administrators, and Heads of This and That behaving like common thieves. We tsk-tsk at psychopathic dictators treating their oppressed subjects like so many indentured servants. We fret over athletes injecting themselves with chemicals that helps them be more perfect gladiators in our televised circuses. We get upset at those who refuse to play fair.
Yet every day most of us wake up wondering not how we can . . . → Read More: Corruption
Originally posted January 23rd, 2011
By Michael Konik
Los Angeles is lousy with food trucks at the moment. Thanks to a collision of social- and mass-media fawning, they’ve earned all the valuable trend labels (“hot,” “in,” etc.), transcending their utilitarian function and entering the lofty realm of Culturally Significant Phenomena. No longer do these Winnebago-sized mobile restaurants simply serve workers at construction sites and other dusty places where food and drink can be scarce. Now they’re parked everywhere, including directly in front of brick-and-mortar restaurants.
Let us put aside for the moment disucssion of the quality of food they serve, or the “need” they seem to fill. Instead, let’s examine the consequences of allowing these rolling commisaries to operate on our city streets.
Business owners, who pay taxes, purchase licenses, and endure all the other headaches associated with owning a food business, have complained that food trucks largely avoid the myriad responsibilities of owning a . . . → Read More: The Food Truck Scourge
We're really sorry about our most recent trading loss. People will say we require more oversight, and, in this case, maybe they're right. It shouldn't have happened, and we'll take steps to make sure it doesn't happen for a third time.
The $4,000 or so ($4,882) of your money that we failed to bring back from our annual company trip to Hollywood Park Racetrack and Casino will in... Read More-->
If you’re reading this essay on MichaelKonik.com, you know that this is a reliable place to find “me,” the me who shares his ideas with the world, whether or not any part of the world is interested. This is where I unilaterally invade my privacy, allowing strangers...
North Korea is launching rockets, Syria is slaughtering its citizens, and the Filipino community is organizing a massive get-out-the-vote campaign for a crucial election (not for something boring and unimportant like a public office but a cause that’s got folks passionately engaged: the American Idol finals). So...
Sometimes our chaotic, unknowable, seemingly random Universe arranges itself with perfect symmetry. In these moments of bracing clarity, authored by a Creator (in whatever guise or nomenclature you prefer) whose sense of irony is matched only by her/his/its sense of wicked humor, our innate foolishness and learned...
Poet Robert Pinsky. Pianist Laurence Hobgood. Text, music, and the moment -- what we hear on the new POEMJAZZ recording is two giant artists making something greater than the sum of its parts. While Pinsky recites his lovely words with his unlovely (but weirdly attractive) voice, Hobgood, the longtime arranger and accompanist [...]
