Dinhternet

So there’s been a lot of anger about the AIG bonuses lately. Some­one I know recently Tweeted “AIG = Arro­gance, Incom­pe­tence, and Greed.” The Huff­in­g­ton Post put up this satir­i­cal post about why these bonuses were well-deserved. If you didn’t know, AIG used bailout money to pay “reten­tion bonuses” to mem­bers of its Finan­cial Prod­ucts Divi­sion, which got them into their cur­rent dire circumstances.

AIG has stated that they must pay the bonuses for two rea­sons. First, because they are con­trac­tu­ally oblig­ated to pay. Sec­ond, because the peo­ple who got them into this sit­u­a­tion are the only ones who can get them out again, by unwind­ing their own mess. Yes­ter­day, NPR tore both of these argu­ments apart. First, the con­tract to pay bonuses was shady from the start. Deals to assure bonuses to an entire divi­sion are unheard of. Also, the lan­guage sug­gests that it was signed know­ing that the FP Divi­sion was in trou­ble and they were needed to unwind the prob­lems. As for the sec­ond argu­ment, indi­vid­u­als who have left the com­pany were still paid the bonuses, which seems to negate that defense.

Now, dif­fer­ent parts of the gov­ern­ment are falling over each other to be the ones to fix the prob­lem for the Amer­i­can tax­pay­ers. Obama told his staff to use every legal means to get the money back. AIG CEO Liddy asked his employ­ees to return “at least half” of the bonuses. The New York Attor­ney Gen­eral and the Con­necti­cut Gov­er­nor are both pur­su­ing cases to get the money back. And now, Con­gress is vot­ing to put a 90% tax on all bonuses paid by com­pa­nies sup­ported by bailout money as well as sub­tract­ing the bonuses from AIG’s next install­ment of bailout money.

Wouldn’t this have been a lot eas­ier if we hadn’t bailed out the banks in the first place? If only we had taken more bold action instead of try­ing to put a band-aid on the trauma.

Watch­ing Role Mod­els and <a onclick=“javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/www.rottentomatoes.com/m/taken/’);” rel=“nofollow” href=“http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/taken/” rel=_external”>Taken back-to-back got me thinking…

At the begin­ning of Role Mod­els, Danny is a smart-ass and points out the igno­rance of oth­ers. In Taken, Brian’s daugh­ter tells him that her mother said that his job (first as some sort of Spe­cial Forces guy and then as a high-end pri­vate secu­rity guy) made him para­noid. He coun­ters that it sim­ply made him aware of what the world was really like. Sup­pose that igno­rance is really bliss. Would you rather make the peo­ple around you happy, or well-informed?

For instance, take cov­er­age of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is shit con­stantly going down over there, but we hardly hear about any of it in Amer­ica. There are jour­nal­ists on the ground over there giv­ing sto­ries to their edi­tors and get­ting shot down because some­one in the news org doesn’t think the Amer­i­can pub­lic wants to hear this stuff.

Or take the pub­lic­ity that Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire is cre­at­ing for the poor in Mum­bai. Peo­ple are argu­ing about whether the movie is an accu­rate depic­tion of life there or not; whether it has been over-dramatized for the movie, or per­haps glossed over too quickly instead. But did you hear any­thing about Mum­bai before the movie?

Would know­ing about these and other bad sit­u­a­tions around the world make you unhappy? What if you could know all the good things in the world, too? If we all shared per­fect infor­ma­tion, do you think peo­ple would be more or less happy?

Yes, I know this would destroy the sex appeal of secrets. (From Qwantz.com.)

So to con­tinue what I was say­ing, I hung out with the guys again yes­ter­day. We went to Davis to work on Will N’s car. Why there, I’m still not sure. But I did man­age to con­trol my eat­ing bet­ter. Drank more than I planned on, still, but it’s impos­si­ble to meet my goal when play­ing beer pong.

But this post is actu­ally about the blend­ing of Viet tra­di­tions and mod­ern Amer­i­can liv­ing. Tet, our Lunar New Year, is com­ing up on Mon­day, and my fam­ily was dis­cussing some of the things we needed to do to get ready, and it led to a more gen­eral dis­cus­sion of inter­pre­ta­tions of Viet traditions.

For instance, one tra­di­tion is to invite a per­son with a lucky name to come over, because if “Luck” is the first thing that comes into your house in the New Year, then luck will come in all year. Dong Ha asked if that worked the other way, mean­ing if she went to “Luck’s” house, if she would encounter luck all year? That led to this -

“What if I go to Costco first? Will I be thrifty all year and find whole­sale prices every­where?“
– Dong Ha.

I didn’t know how to respond to that. Later on, she also asked,

“If I have a good hair day on the first, does that mean I’ll have good hair days all year long?“
– Dong Ha.

My mom actu­ally smiled as she yelled at her for ask­ing such things.