Sick of being offered total bullshit like "Screamers," Peter Weller decided to upgrade his skills. So he went back to school to study art history and now he teaches at UCLA. I swear I'm not making this up.
Incidentally, "Screamers" was a little bit of low-budget Cancon, often available for your viewing pleasure late at night or on boring Sunday afternoons. It was filmed in Montréal, which in the mid-90s was a pretty good stand-in for a deserted, fly-blown nuclear wasteland, at least in parts of the downtown. Now, not so much. The most memorable part of the film for me was how the screenwriters managed to have their main characters smoke in the movie. They dyed the cigarettes red and claimed they were necessary to prevent radiation poisoning. This was patiently explained in a totally superflorous conversation between Weller and his co-star, whoever that was.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Monday, January 8, 2007
The Use of Knowledge in Society
A fascinating, faaascinating article about, uh, ice shortages after a hurricane in North Carolina from Michael Munger. It's got everything you need - a gratuitous mention of the awesomest-sounding cape in America (Cape Fear), rednecks, chainsaws, and the po-lice. Yeehaw!
Sunday, January 7, 2007
"Vegetable Oil Mogul Hit With RPG"
For amazing crime stories, you can't beat the "Crime Watch" section of the Moscow Times. The stories of gangland killings, stabbings, rapes, arson and general calamity are entertaining in themselves, but what really keeps me reading them are the little gruesome details that are uniquely Russian. For your delectation:
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
It's impossible to cheat an honest man
Predictably, the Enron scandal generated more heat than light. A large company with scores of investors went bust, wiping out the savings of little guys and giving big companies who loaned to Enron a scare. The affaire Enron provided a convenient cudgel for populist politicians, who held the company up as an example of cowboy capitalism. Their analysis of the collapse blamed the greed of Enron's upper management, claiming that executives like Ken Lay, Andrew Fastow and Jeffrey Skilling had lied to investors about the financial health of the company and the numerous "special purpose entities" used to conceal a dwindling cash flow. The result of all the fallout was the massive (and massively expensive) Sarbanes–Oxley act, which attempts to smoke out "corporate criminals" by generating massive amounts of paperwork.
This analysis makes for a tidy narrative. It has all we want in a story: the (now lost) state of grace, the evil villains, the clear-cut crime and the well-deserved punishment. However, as this fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell explains, this narrative is totally wrong and the conclusions it draws - about investors as well as executives - is completely misleading.
All the information about Enron's side deals, its "special purpose entities," its cashflow and its liabilities was right there, in black and white. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story of Enron's dwindling cash flow derived all his information from publicly-available filings that any investor could request. There was no real deception- and no heroic digging for the truth. The signs that something was horribly wrong were all there for anybody to see - if they wanted to see it.
Every once in a while, scandals like Bre-X and Enron come along. And we all pretend to be shocked, shocked when the inevitable happens. But who is fooling who? The investors who lost their shirts were looking to make a quick buck without understanding anything about the company they invested in and their curiosity was drowned under a spirit of boosterism and avarice. Their investing behaviour resembled taking a flyer on the ponies rather than a business activity.
"You can't cheat an honest man; never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump."
This analysis makes for a tidy narrative. It has all we want in a story: the (now lost) state of grace, the evil villains, the clear-cut crime and the well-deserved punishment. However, as this fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell explains, this narrative is totally wrong and the conclusions it draws - about investors as well as executives - is completely misleading.
All the information about Enron's side deals, its "special purpose entities," its cashflow and its liabilities was right there, in black and white. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story of Enron's dwindling cash flow derived all his information from publicly-available filings that any investor could request. There was no real deception- and no heroic digging for the truth. The signs that something was horribly wrong were all there for anybody to see - if they wanted to see it.
Every once in a while, scandals like Bre-X and Enron come along. And we all pretend to be shocked, shocked when the inevitable happens. But who is fooling who? The investors who lost their shirts were looking to make a quick buck without understanding anything about the company they invested in and their curiosity was drowned under a spirit of boosterism and avarice. Their investing behaviour resembled taking a flyer on the ponies rather than a business activity.
"You can't cheat an honest man; never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump."
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