Bankers aren’t optimistic about those gains. Options Group’s Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.
The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.
“This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”
I haven't said anything about the "occupy Wall Street" protesters because I really don't know much about them. I get the sense that they're angry mostly-young people who want to try and make a difference in the way that money works in the US. Probably they're just working out some frustrations with Obama and to be honest, it sounds like a great way to get out and socialize in nice weather we're having this fall. I think if I lived in New York, I'd be out and about also.. chatting with people, flirting a bit.. you know.. fun stuff.
It's not like they'll have an effect on the way big banks work, nor make any sort of dent in the class warfare that the wealthy are waging with the middle class.
I wonder if the 27 year old Ivy grad has any real concept of what he's whining about. He probably comes from a wealthy family and so his baseline is a high income with goals of extremely high income. He doesn't realize how douchey he is, I suspect.
That's just human nature though. No matter how well someone is doing, if they're the type to whine a lot, they'll whine. I wouldn't say that John is a whiner, but he does sometimes get down about how much he has to work (which is a fuck-ton) and such.. and I probably don't commiserate as much as I should because not feeling well, or having to work 14 hour days over and over really does suck. It doesn't matter if you're making $100 for the day or $1000.. it still sucks.
The trick, I think, is just to have some perspective about it while you're whining. That's a lesson for me as well. Whine away, and when you're done, remember that you're making $1000 a day.. and some days you might make $30,000. The big picture is important.
By the same token, a young guy that makes $100 a day might be stressed about that, or see no reasonable avenue to changing that in the future. I was that guy once. People put way too much stress on themselves. It took me a long time to learn that the things that can make you happy don't cost anything. The only thing money does is improve the quality of the things that you have or experience.. but if you're poor, but have a great family and friends, that really is all you need. Of course, if you have money too.. that's a bonus.
I think John and I need to improve on the family and friends thing... me more than him, but I think that's going to improve over the next 5 years.
Anyway.. I'm rambling. It's 6:00 AM and my sleeping patterns are all fucked up, and so I haven't been to bed. I'll just stay up and sit in on my A.M. meetings and then sleep a few hours early in the afternoon. I really like the evening, and the alone time is nice too. It's not that I don't want to be around people, but I love being in front of my computer.. doing some races in iRacing.. reading.. thinking.. playing silly games. Hours fly by. Riley often comes out to visit me, and he gets his belly rubs or we play with his toys.. then he trots off back to bed with John.
I know I could go to bed at 10:00pm and wake up at 6:00 and have the same amount of time to do the same activities, but there's just something about the night.. the quiet and the solitude is nice. The darkness feels better than the light.
I'm really tired but if I go to bed now, I'll have to be up in 2.5 hours for a meeting. I really need to fix this.. find a happy medium.. I could go to bed at 1am and be up at 9, and that would be fine for work. I should try that.
....
I bought a nice sound card with a headphone amp, and I have it working very well. Playing progressive music in a loss-less format with this equipment is something I've not experienced before. I just don't know how to use the equalizer. I mean.. I know how to get it to work, but I don't know what the proper way to use an EQ is. I've set it up to what I think sounds best to me, but I've got something like 5 different sets now and each sounds good in their own way. Should I just not use the EQ because it's altering the way the artist originally intended it? Not using an EQ is flat sounding though.
I'm old enough to remember listening to albums on vinyl. I remember 8 track tapes and cassettes. I remember when CD's first came out and they were something like $15 bucks for a new album. The entire world was amazed how good they sounded. It was amazing to not have any vinyl pops, or cassette hissing when you turn it up. Now I've got about 80,000 songs on a hard drive. I've got loss-less albums playing through equipment in my living room that would have cost many, many thousands of dollars 20 years ago. The PS3 streams the audio from my computer in the study. It's all so cool.
I read an article someplace where the author proposed that the level of all technology has peaked and that new advances will be much slower then it has been in the last 50 years. That makes sense. How can the sonic quality of music get any better than it is now? What else is as good as it's going to get? Food? Probably as good now as it will ever be. Clothes? Toothpaste?
John should be getting up soon. Starbucks coffee sounds nice.. and one of those cinnamon coffee cakes. I'm sure they're open by 6AM.. right?
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