The Subprime Thing For Dummies

December 7, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I like simplified explanations of complicated economic stuff I don't understand. The more pictures and fewer words, the better. So I was very please to find this graphic flow chart created by Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com to explain CDOs, RMBSs, tranches, and the whole subprime mortgage fiasco.

I can’t figure out how to get Blogspot to print the graphic as large as it needs to be for you to read the text box. But you can find the whole show here.

This Takes the Cake

December 6, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I'm not sure what the sociological import of this is, and you may have already seen it as it whirls around the Internet. But since my previous post ended with a ritual cake, this is sort of a follow-up.

Apparently someone phoned the bakery at Wal-mart and ordered a customized cake for a co-worker who was leaving. When asked what message was to go on the cake, the caller probably said something like, “OK, here's what I want: 'Best Wishes Suzanne' ; underneath that, 'We will miss you.'”


Here's the cake:


Sweat Equity and Magical Thinking

December 3, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Remember the Seinfeld episode about wiping the exercise machine at the gym?  (To see it, go here, push the slider to 16:30 and watch for 50 seconds.)


Elaine and Greg at the health club. A sweaty Greg is exercising on a leg machine. 
ELAINE: Hi, Greg. 
GREG: Hey, Elaine. I'll be off in a second. Another guy approaches the exercise machine. 
ELAINE: I got the machine next, buddy. Greg finishes up his workout and gets off the machine. 
GREG (to Elaine): It's all yours. Walks away. Elaine looks at the machine, then George runs over. 
GEORGE: What happened? Did he bring it up? 
ELAINE: Never mind that, look at the signal I just got.
GEORGE: Signal? What signal? 
ELAINE: Lookit. He knew I was gonna use the machine next, he didn't wipe his sweat off. That's a gesture of intimacy. 
GEORGE: I'll tell you what that is - that's a violation of club rules. Now I got him! And you're my witness! 
ELAINE: Listen, George! Listen! He knew what he was doing, this was a signal. 
GEORGE: A guy leaves a puddle of sweat, that's a signal?
ELAINE: Yeah! It's a social thing. 
GEORGE: What if he left you a used Kleenex, what's that, a valentine?

There I was at the gym in Florida on the elliptical machine (the machine that won’t come right out and say what it means), sweating and thinking about sweat. The fitness room at the condo enclave in Sarasota where my mother lives has a spray bottle (disinfectant? soap?) and paper towels, and everyone sprays and wipes the machine when they finish. I guess it’s so you don’t contract what they have, which seems mostly to be old age.

But I think Elaine had it right. Sweat is about social contagion, not medical contagion. It’s part of magical thinking – the idea that a person’s essence, spirit, power, mana, or whatever you want to call it can be transmitted physically by touch and by those things that were once part of the body. Hair is often the medium of choice, whether for voodoo or lockets. And wasn’t someone selling some celebrity’s hair on eBay? But we can also use fingernail parings, clothes, breath, or especially, precious bodily fluids

So sweat can be gross or it can valuable, depending on the source. If it’s just another struggling exerciser, we spray and wipe lest we be touched with their mundane germs. But if it’s someone whose magic we want to capture or someone we want to be connected to, that sweat is just what we need.

I kept pedaling, going nowhere fast, following this train of thought, and watching MTV. In the afternoon, viewing choice at the gym is limited, and I wasn’t up for the stock market channel or the soaps. “My Super Sweet Sixteen” was just coming to a close. A girl at the party was holding up a CD of the rap star who’d been hired for the party. “I got him to wipe some of his sweat on it,” she beamed ecstatically. The sweat transmitted his superstar magic to the CD. By touching the CD, she was now touching him and acquiring some of that magic.

Birthday parties themselves follow this same logic of magical thinking. We make the birthday girl or boy superstar for a day. We invest her or him with this magic power, and then we capture it. How?

After the sweaty CD moment, the camera panned over to the birthday girl leaning over her cake. With one long, sweeping breath, she blew out the sixteen candles. The show ended before the cutting and serving of the cake, but here’s the point: Suppose someone invites you to dine. You finish the appetizer and main course, and then your friend says, “I want you to have this wonderful pastry for dessert. But before I serve it to you, I’m going to breathe heavily all over it at close range.” He proceeds to do just that and then hands you the pastry.

Under most circumstances, we’d resent the offer as unsanitary. But at a birthday party. . . .


UPDATE, Feb. 2013:  In Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council has issued guidelines recommending that children not be allowed to blow out the candles.  (Time has the story.)

More Worlds in Collision

December 1, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I posted something recently about the new problems of “audience segregation” created by Facebook and other social networking sites. I had forgotten about a Washington Post article from last June that Eszter had linked to.

The students at a Bethesda high school had a worlds-in-collision experience when they opened their yearbooks and found pictures that the yearbook editors had downloaded from their Facebook pages. The yearbook staff weren’t trying to be stalkers. But they hadn’t taken enough photos themselves, and they were pressed for time, so they went to the Internet and grabbed Facebook photos off friends’ pages. (If this scenario sounds like the one usually associated with plagiarised papers, that’s because it is. Essays, photos, whatever.)

Facebook users can restrict who has access to their pages, an arrangement which sounds like it ensures some degree of privacy. But on second thought, it means that you have entrusted your privacy, your audience control, to all those you designate as friends. It takes only one “friend” facing a yearbook deadline to shatter that wall of privacy. And suddenly the world can see that picture of you and your friends, with your goofy poses and red plastic cups.

“We grew up with the idea that you can share anything you want with your friends through the Internet," said Amy Hemmati, 16, a rising Walter Johnson junior. “I think we're very trusting in the online community, as opposed to adults, who are on the outside looking in.”