Ben Stein Says Get Money or Shut Up

Ben Stein is encouraging us to be BREAD-A-HOLICS.

I normally would find such an article offensive.

But dude is hella funny.

And he makes a point.

Which is. Get money. Get next to money. Get around people that make money.

Watch him boogie.

An even more recent story has been about Brian Hunter, a commodities trader for the large hedge fund called Amaranth Advisors. Mr. Hunter made big bets in natural gas trades and had been getting good returns for his investors. Then the market turned against him and he lost roughly $6 billion — yes, billion — for his investors within a few weeks. He’s no longer at Amaranth, and the fund is being dissolved. However, it was noted that his pay for 2005 would have been between $75 million and $100 million. Yes, you read it right.

That is, Tom Freston, an undeniably great guy, gets $60 million for leading a company whose stock performance was deemed unacceptably poor (although it’s been good lately). Brian Hunter is presumably still a wealthy man despite leading his investors to disaster.

You can be furious about that, and you should be. But you might also think how nice it would be to make that kind of money, or even a small fraction of that sort of wage.

For students slogging their way through school, here are the merest hints of how you can and cannot reach that top 1 percent, that place where you are paid well even if you make mistakes:

• You do not get to it by studying African feminism in the 19th century, whether or not you are at an Ivy League college. You do not get to it by studying Bulgarian poetry. You do not get to it by any field of endeavor or study that is esoteric and has no connection with helping other people either become healthy or make money.

• You do not get to it by being a civil servant unless you are the kind of civil servant — say, a cabinet member or a United States Senator — who can use his or her connections later to lobby for well-heeled clients. You do not get to it by a lifetime of work in any field in which there are government price caps on earnings.

• You do get to it by working in fields in which you can fix your wages, preferably with the government’s help. These include law, where you need a license to practice, and thereby can lift yourself out of working for free-market wages. (Everyone in this country pays homage to the free market, but no one wants to work for free-market wages.) They also include medicine, where a far more difficult license is required, and where desperate patients will pay almost anything to look and feel good. They also include accounting at the C.P.A. level.

• You are always better off working in a field where torrents of money are sloshing through and you can grab a handful as it goes by. That means Wall Street. Finance is the ultimate great business. (Warren E. Buffett famously said that you are always better off being mediocre in a great business than great in a mediocre business, and he easily could have been talking about Wall Street.) Money pours through Wall Street in vast oceans. Even if you take off a tiny helping, you are going to wind up in that 1 percent. If you can do the daily double and work on Wall Street and be in a position to fix your own wage — say, by being in high management at a major Wall Street firm that has such prestige and connections that it can control its fees and other compensation — you will wind up living a great life, at least money-wise. (It is very difficult in many other ways, and I do not envy the people who do it. The tension is just far too much for little me.)

• You make money by making money for people who already have money. This is another reason finance is such a well-paid field. One good day’s work for a man who has a $100 million account you are trading is worth far more than a lifetime’s work at the checkout counter at Wal-Mart. Yet, amazingly, managing wealthy people’s money is far less difficult and stressful than checking out customers at Wal-Mart. It’s not even close. As my smart sister Rachel says, you make money by making money. It’s tricky, but it’s right.

• You make money by learning skills that lead to any of these: making people feel and look better, learning how to draw their wills, learning how to manage their money so they don’t underperform the bogey terribly, learning how to make complex things like computer parts in ways that lead your employer to make money and reward you with stock options. This is by no means an exclusive list. You also make it by manufacturing cardboard boxes and selling scrap metals. But usually, education in finance, medicine, law, accounting, electrical engineering — something in which you learn to add value instead of having fun in school — is the key.

read more here.
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Madonna Got a New Accessory.

What I wanna know is, why she gotta adopt a lil-Malawian kid?

Granted, she has set up a foundation for Orphans, which is an attempt to address
the issue of "the other children" who won't be adopted.

It is an effort that should be commended.
However, the adoption comes across as cheap and contrived. The child was not an orphan. He has a father.

Apparently the childs father is glad that he is being adopted,
as he was an orphan himself.

She apparently violated Malawi Law, which states that children can only be adopted by citizens or those who have resided in the country for a year.

“We are concerned that the High Court has taken a short cut and waived the law. We are registering our concern and will seek clarification from the court, after which we will decide what action to take.”

He said Malawi’s laws do not allow international adoption unless the parents live in the country for a year, during which social welfare workers investigate their ability to care for a child.

Why don't Stars ever Adopt children from Harlem or Eastern Europe?

BL says that n*ggas should just stop mashin' which would reduce the number of potential AIDS cases and pregnancies.

And.

That instead of dropping food, condoms should be dropped. However, if the Men do not WANT to wear condoms, and refused to, then it is a moot point, correct?
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I can't wait to see this new documentary.

The Hip Hop Project. Remember, you heard about it first here.

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So its not just Negros that are not getting married.

Its Americans in general.

indicated that marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or 50.2 percent.

More than 14 million of them were headed by single women, another five million by single men, while 36.7 million belonged to a category described as "nonfamily households," a term that experts said referred primarily to gay or heterosexual couples cohabiting out of formal wedlock.

In addition, there were more than 30 million unmarried men and women living alone, who are not categorized as families, the Census Bureau reported.

Here is another one...

“It’s partially fueled by women in the work force; they don’t necessarily have to marry to be economically secure,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College of the City University of New York, who conducted the census analysis for The New York Times. “You used to get married to have sex. Now one of the major reasons to get married is to have children, and the attractiveness of having children has declined for many people because of the cost.”

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Dope T. Right. Cop it here.

"SHE", Lonnae O'Neal Parker, might have gave up on Hip Hop, but I haven't.However, I enjoyed the article because rarely do Black writers write, in a constructive way, about Hip Hop, their children and the communication gap. Peep her technique.

I keep my CD player filled with old-school tracks and I fill my kids' heads with the coolest, most conscious, most bang-bang the boogie say up jump the boogie songs from when hip-hop and I were young. Sydney says I don't like black voices and I say: Ax Butta how I zone/ Man, Cleopatra Jones .

I make Sydney listen to songs from when rap said something, but my daughter is 12 and she laughs at me. Rap says something now, Mommy, she says.

Lean wit' it

Rock wit' it

Lean wit' it

Rock wit' it

She snaps her fingers and I just nod. Change is gonna come. Meanwhile, her song is catchy. And there are no bitches!

At least not in the chorus.

In another section she discusses the way some women are dealing with the mysogyny in music.

The idea is to get together a couple dozen women to go to clubs prepared to walk off the dance floor en masse if the music is openly offensive or derogatory. "There's no party without sisters on the dance floor," she told me. In New York, hip-hop DJ and former model Beverly Bond formed Black Girls Rock! to try to change the portrayal of black women in the music and influence the women who are complicit in it. "We don't want to be hypersexualized," said Joan Morgan, a hip-hop writer and part of the group, but we don't want to be erased, either.

They would be better off buying shares of Viviendi Universal and advocating at the annual shareowners meeting that the Universal and all other lables therein no longer allow artist to put out mysogynistic music or that they put out and market artists that are different from current mainstream artist.

But I guess folks wanna "protest."

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The A's fired their coach.

They did the same sh*t last year, then turned around and hired him back.

So the fat lady might just be humming right now.

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That was a nice mix and match post.

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