The Game of Smash and Recovery

The Game of Smash and Recovery

By Kelly Link (excerpt)

Something is wrong with Oscar. Well, more wrong than is usual these days. Well, more wrong than is usual these days. Down in the warehouse, he keeps getting underfoot. Underhand, in the case of the Handmaids. When Anat extends all sixteen of her senses, she can feel worry and love, anger and hopelessness and hope running through him like electrical currents. He watches her – anxiously – as if he were a vampire.

There is an annotation on one of the charts. It is believed to be in this region the Come What May was lost. The thing in Anat’s head annotates the annotation, too swiftly for Anat to catch a glimpse of what she is thinking, even as she thinks it. She scans the rest of the chart, goes through the others and then through each one again, trying to catch herself out.

As Anat ponders charts, the Handmaids, efficient as ever, assemble a thing out of the warehouse goods to carry the other goods that they deem interesting. They clack at Oscar when he gets particularly in their way. Then ruffle their hair, trail fingers down his arm as if he will settle under a caress. They are agitated by Oscar’s agitation and by Anat’s awareness of his agitation.

Finally, Anat gets tired of waiting for Oscar to say the thing that he is afraid to say to her. She looks at him and he looks back at her, his face wide open. She sees the thig that he has tried to keep from her, and he sees that she sees it.

When?

Soon. A short-cycle from now. Less.

Why are you so afraid?

I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen.

Game of Smash and Recovery. Photo by Elena

There is a scraping against the top wall of the warehouse. Vampires. Creatures of ill omen. Forever wanting what they are not allowed to have. Most beautiful in their departure. The Handmaids extend filament rods, drag the tips along the inside of the top wall, tapping back. The vampires clatter away.

Oscar looks at Anat. He is waiting for something. He has been waiting, Anat thinks, for a very long time.

Oscar! Is this her? Something is welling up inside her. Has she always been this large? Who has made her so small? I call Endgame. I claim your makers.

She projects the true location of each. Smash and Recovery. She stirps the fake markers of their coding so that he can see how his trick has been uncovered. Then she’s off, fast and sure and free, the Handmaids leaping after her, and the vampires after them. Oscar last of all. Calling her name.

Modern Portfolio and Capital-Asset Pricing Theory

Modern Portfolio and Capital-Asset Pricing Theory

… Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribber of a few years back. (J.M. Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money).

I have attempted to explain the theories used by professionals – simplified as the firm-foundation and castle-in-the-air theories – to predict the valuation of stocks. As we have seen, many academics have earned their reputations by attacking these theories. While not denying that these theories tell us a good deal about how stocks are valued, the academics maintain that they cannont be relied upon to yield extraordinary profits.

As graduate schools continued to grind out bright young economists and statisticians, the attacking academics became so numerous that it seemed obvious – even to them – that a new strategy was needed. Ergo, the academics community busily went about erecting its own theories of stock-market valuation. That’s what this part is all about: the academic playground called “the new investment technology.” Some people prefer to name it “capital-asset pricing theory,” or its related cousin “arbitrage pricing theory.” None of these titles conveys the heart of the matter, which is that when all is said and done, risk is the only variable worth a damn in the market.

Modern Portfolio. Photo by ElenaB.

Academic research, remember, has taken a random walk. The stock market is such an efficient creature that nothing and no one can predict its future in a superior manner. And, because of the actions of the pros, the prices of individual stocks quickly reflet all the information that is available. Thus, the odds of selecting superior stocks or anticipating the general direction of the markets are even. Your guess is as good as that of the ape, your stockbroker, or even mine.

Hmmmm. “I smell a rat,” as Samuel Butler wrote long ago. Money is being made on the market: some stocks do outperform others. Common sense attests that some people can and do beat the market. It’s not all chance. The academics agree: but the method of beating the market, they say, is not to exercise superior clairvoyance but rather to assume greater risk. Risk has its rewards. Risk, and risk alone, determines the degree to which returns will be above or below average, and thus decides the valuation of any stock relative to the market.

We’ll deal with the new investment technology and its somewhat tarnished star performer, beta. Being an academic, I hold to the biased viewpoint that this material is important and that every intelligent investor should be acquainted with the theories and models it includes. They explain how to reduce risk through diversification and present some of the ways to measure it. Even the investment professionals have latched on to much of the new investment technology. So, sit down in a straight-backed chair, prop your eyelids open, and read on. There is a lot to do and, as was the case before, necessarily the discussion must be a bit more formal than before (that mens it could put you to sleep). The wide-awake reader will be rewarded, however, with an understanding of a good deal of modern financial theory and of what lies behind some of the specific prescriptions for the investment strategy.

Burton G. Malkiel. A Random Walk Down Wall Street, including a life-cycle guide to personal investing. First edition, 1973, by W.W. Norton and company, Inc.

City of Ash

City of Ash

By Paolo Bacigalupi

The thought filled her with relief. The dream of escape… She could still see Papa flying, proud and strong, free of all the tethers that kept them trapped in Phoenix. This broken city wasn’t the last stop as Maria had feared. It wasn’t their dead end. She and her father weren’t going to end up like all the other Texas refugees, smashed up against the border controls of California, which said it already had too many people, and Nevada and Utah, which seemed to hate people on principle – and Texans in particular. They were getting out.

Smiling, she drank from the water jug. She tried to keep a disciplined eye on how much she had, but she was so thirsty, she ended up draining it and feeling ashamed, and yet still drinking, convulsively swallowing water until there was nothing except drops that she lapped at, too, trying to get everything.

Never mind. It’s not like it was before. Papa’s got a job now. It’s okey to drink. He said it was okay to drink.

She remembered how it had been the day after Taiyang International hired him: him coming home with a five-gallon cube of water and two rolls of toilet paper, plus pupusas that he’d bought from a pop-up stand near the construction site – but most of all, him coming home smiling. Not worried about every drop of water. Not worried about… well, everything.

“We’re all good now, mija,” he’d said. “We’re all good. This job, it,s a big one. It’ll last a long time. We’re gonna save up. And we don’t just got to go north now. We can buy our way to China, too. This job, it opens a lot of doors for us. After this, we can go anywhere. Anywhere, mija.”

City of Ash. Photo by Elena.

He kept saying it, over and over again: We can go anywhere.

Papa had a job again. He had a plan again. They had a chance, again. And for the first time in months, he sounded like himself. Not the scared and sorrowful man who kept apologizing that they didn’t have enough food for the night or the medicine that Mom needed, or who kept insisting that it was possible to go north when it clearly wasn’t. Not that man who seemed to crumple in on himself as he realized that the way the world had ben was no longer the way the world was.

It had all happened so fast. One minute Maria had been worrying about what her mother would say about her B on a biology test and the dress she’d have for her quinceanera, and the next, America was falling apart all around them, like God had swiped his hand across the map and left a different country in its place.

You weren’t supposed to get turned back by militias at the border of Oklahoma or see people strung in the margins of the interstates. But she’d seen both. Her father kept saying that this was America, and America didn’t do these things, but the America in her father’s mind wasn’t the same as the America that they drove across.

America wasn’t supposed to be a place where you huddled for safety under the shield of an Iowa National Guard convoy and woke up without the, – waking with a start to desert silence and the hot flapping of a FEMA tent, realizing that you were all alone, and that somewhere out in the darkness, New Mexicans were planning to make a lesson of you. In Papa’s mind, that shit didn’t happen. On the ground, it did. There was America before Cat 6 hurricanes and megadroughts, and there was after – with everyone on the move.

This was all past now, though. Papa finally had a plan that would work, and a job that paid, and they were getting out.

Maria settled back on her matters and dug out a language tablet. The Chinese gave them away free to anyone who asked, and people hacked them to get access to the public network. To make up for her greed with the water, she decided to study instead of watching pirated movies.

The screen lit up, and a familiar Chinese lady started the lesson. Maria followed her prompts. The lady moved on from numbers to other words, tricky games that highlighted the tonal differences between “ma” and “ma,” “mai” and “mai”.

Different language. Different rules. Tones. Tiny differences to Maria’s ear that turned out to make all the difference in the world. If you weren’t trained to listen for them, you didn’t know what was going on. You were lost.

The Diminishing Value of Degrees

The Diminishing Value of Degrees

Even four year at college doesn't guarantee you a running start

The stories are told on every college campus. An Ivy League graduate is folding T-shirts at the Gap, someone who wrote a senior thesis in economics is now delivering Domino's pizza, and a Phi Beta Kappa history major is still living with her parents, praying for even one response to the dozens of résumés already sent out.

A college diploma no longer guarantees job placement and success. Recent college grads currently outnumber the available jobs that require a degree. Employers aware of this surplus are demanding more than just a sheepskin from ther prospective employees, and more recent grads are being left behind. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the trend will become more pronounced in coming years, with a dramatic increase in unemployment or “underutilization> after graduation, forcing grads into fields that require no college diploma.

Which recent grads will have the edge? Experts advise that smart students will start thinking about their careers long before they actually march in cap and gown. That means coursework tailored to a specific career, meaningful on-campus activities, and summer internships with hands-on experience. Majors in engineering and the sciences are in the highest demand and will be rewarded with the highest wages.

A chemical engineering major is not a viable option for everyone, but there are ways that every college student can improve his or her career outlook. Basic computer proficiency is a must, and computer programming skills are an added attraction to employers. Those with fluency in a second or third language will also have an advantage, given the new international focus of many corporations, and knowledge of non-Romance languages like Japanese or Czech is especially desirable.

Without the degree – without the learning and problem-solving skills that it certifies, without the web of connections that comes with it – a young person today begins work with a handicap so large as to be almost, but not entirely, insurmountable. Photo by Elena, the Soldiers Tower on Toronto University campus.

Willingness to relocate is an important factor, according to college recruiters, and job applicants should seriously consider smaller cities in the South and West that will offer the most job growth in the upcoming decades. Candidates should also consider small to medium-size companies, which will be hiring the most workers. Fewer of the big-name corporate recruiters are visiting campuses nationwide, according to the College Placement Council in Bethlehem, Pa.

Recent college graduates face a tough market, but the situation for those without degrees is even bleaker. Because of radical changes in the structure of the U.S. economy in the past decades, career outlooks are dismal for workers without a college education. Moreover, many of the jobs that don't require a degree will nonetheless be taken by 'underutilized” college grads, leaving even fewer jobs for the high school grads.

College grads also receive the majority of high-paying jobs overall. Median earnings for college grads  are almost twice as high as for high school grads, and the average unemployment rate for college grads  is twice as low as unemployment rate for high school grads. That college sheepskin may not be worth as much as it once was, but you're still a lot better off with it that without.

Finally, remember as your mother may have told you, a liberal arts major just won't pay the bills. And do not forget, and start spreading the news: the biggest new-job markets are not in the Big Apple. Cities in the West and South will be offering more opportunities than the more traditional grad-magnets of the Northeast.

Internships

Internships: Getting Your Foot in the Door

The FBI wants you, and so do others – it could lead to a real job!

Many American presidents were once interns (Bill Clinton was once an intern in Senator J. William Fulbright's office, and Obama interned with the Senate Finance Committee. Most famous TV-anchors were interned at radio-stations. Future basketball stars, politicians, spiritual leader have an even wider variety of internships to choose from. Good jobs with good wages may be sparse in today's economy but internships aren't. You can do time with the FBI, run copy for CNN, or pound the gym floor for Nike.

And you'll gain more than experience. In fact, if a company has two candidates that are equally qualified, except that one has a six-month internship experience, who would it hire?

Boeing hires 50 to 70 percent of its interns as full-time employees. Hewlett-Packard's manager of college recruiting says that her company hires about half of its interns. And Marvell Comics estimates that 20 to 25 percent of its staff were once interns. A recent survey by North-Western University found that about 30 percent of those hired by a variety of corporations had been interns – up from 20 percent in 2000. You can't get hired at CNN Sports without having been an intern there.

Internships can also have down sides. About half of them pay little if anything, though some offer academic credit. And interns often are exploited by employers who benefit from their cheap labor, willingness to endure rotten working conditions, and tolerance for boring assignments. Of course, any job has its share of mundane tasks, but prospective interns should take care when selecting an internship to get a commitment that the majority of their time won't be spent in such a manner.

Interns cheerfully accept busywork in the beginning since many employers use it as a means of assessment. Once you've proved you're competent and diligent, you should then diplomatically request more substantive, challenging work. If the internship doesn't offer more rigorous work,the intern should bring the problem to the attention of his or her supervisor. If that fails, try speaking to the internship coordinator.

Tom Hanks was a Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival intern. Photo by Elena.

Some former interns and where they interned:

Dave Barry, well-known syndicated columnist – Congressional Quarterly.

Hillary Rodham Clinto – Washington Research Project.

Sandy Grushow – Fox Entertainment.

Tom Hanks – Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival.

John F. Kennedy Jr. - The Center for Democratic Policy, a Washington, D.C. Think-tank.

Henry Muller, former editorial director of Time, and former managing editor of Time magazine – Life Magazine.

George Stephanopouls – Former Ohio Rep. Mary R. Oakar.