Compensation - Microscopes - A Quote From Geithner And Horton

This housing complex typical and fascinating - it is near the Tempelhof Airport and one can  feel the goose stepping. 

We know Big Government to mess with Wall Street compensation and here is what Treasury Secretary Geithner says: "The simple proposition should be that you don't want people being paid for taking too much risk, and you want to make sure that their compensation is tied tolong-term performance."  This quote everywhere today, including front-and-center in the New York Times.  I think Geithner has the second half right - compensation should be connected to long-term results.  His opening statement, however, wrong: any entrepreneur knows that one's reward intimately connected to a risk (I learned this lesson first hand from 1999-2002 when my millions of equity became worth almost zero pretty quickly).  Wall Street is capitalism and people should be rewarded for taking risk and the more the better, as long as they somehow cannot flip their exposure onto an institution, another entity or a clueless public.

I get Madeleine on the phone who tells me, rather breathelessly I should add, that she has caught a bug from our pond: "I put it in a jar and named him 'Bugsy.'" Madeleine loves all creatures great and small and Sonnet and I muse upon her future, which could be as a vetrinarian.  I do feel she would love such a profession.  So my first stop after finishing this blog to buy a good, solid microscope by Bausch & Lomb, just like the one I had as a youngster. It was heavy and felt scientific.  I remember the week end hours creating slides of blood, saliva, pond or lake water.  While my attention span always short, I managed the lens and - wow! - seeing the micro-flotsam awesome.  A totally different world before me. 

"A person's a person, no matter how small."

--Horton