It’s been snowing here all day. I just went out to check the mail and the snow is up to the soles of my shoes.

Hah! And some people say I can’t wake up!

Dawn

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Earth and Jupiter Captured In the Same Photograph Taken From Mars

be sure to zoom in…

via Particles

Daniel Gross, at Slate, wrote a Moneybox commentary on Wall Street bonuses. He makes a point in it that I did not realize:

At most companies, bonuses are paid out of profits. No end-of-year profits, no bonuses. But on the island nation of Wall Street, they’re paid out of revenues.

Bonuses out of revenues, what sort of nonsense is that? No wonder they can pull down ridiculously obscene compensation. Let’s see – we are doing a 10 billion dollar refinancing, we want 10% to do it and 50% of that will go into the bonus pool. The other 50% will go to pay for the office building, the corporate jets,  the million dollar salaries; your basic operating expenses. Anything left over would be profit. How do they get away with it?

Since the 1980s, notes Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, it’s been the standard for half of revenues to be devoted to compensation. So long as these outfits were private partnerships, that practice didn’t really matter to the rest of us. But since the 1990s, when investment banks went public, compensation has evolved into a zero-sum game between employees and shareholders. Guess who lost?

Any compensation in excess of the annual presidential salary is not deductible from corporate ledgers and the corporation must pay corporate taxes on excessive compensation.

There was one that kept trying to stare me down.

I See You

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Elaine and I journeyed to Yellowstone a month ago, with one of the big attractions being the elk. Which we didn’t see a lot of or very up close.  We could have just walked down the street.

How many do you see?

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And then it just walked right on by…

Central Park Zoo - Snow Leopard

Took a while to spot this one

Snow Leopard

I was doodling around, as I sometimes do, thinking about the differences between East Coast Travel and Western Travel.  What brought this up is an upcoming trip to NYC and I realized I do not know the relationship of the area airports to the city.  When I lived back in the DC area, I would usually drive to NYC, or take a train.  I never really thought about flying unless there were extraordinary circumstances.

But I worked out some charts to compare a drive from DC to Boston with a drive from Albuquerque to Denver. Both routes by Interstate A-D on I-25 and D-B on I-95, I-84,and  I-90 (I could have taken I-95 all the way but the distance would be different.) Both routes are about 445 miles.

To give some context to the routes, I noted the population of the different MSAs (Metro Statistical Area) each route went through or by.

There are more than 40 million people living along the DC-Boston route.That is a mind-numbingly lot of people.

Out here:

The total number of people living along the Albuquerque-Denver route is less that the population of the Boston MSA. More than half of Colorado lives in the Denver MSA.  About half of New Mexico lives in the ABQ and Santa Fe MSAs.

And the Western route is only in 2 states. The Eastern route passes through 7 states and districts.