Hateful Greed
I can be self-serving sometimes, to the point of mild greed, but I will never understand the ridiculous amount of greed there is among the people running our largest companies.
Blatant Piggishness
Having worked in Human Resources all my career, I have seen decisions made by CEO's (and the boards they chair) that were so blatantly self-serving, that it was embarrassing beyond words.
Is it any wonder that CEO's, who can practically approve their own salaries and bonuses, have such bloated salaries that are so out of proportion with employee salaries that they should be ashamed of themselves? And that's just salaries and bonuses. I can't tell you how many times I had to help write descriptions of benefit plans that would increase overall compensation to executives through lower medical deductibles, or reducing taxes, or overriding government limits on benefits, etc., etc., etc. Or the CEO I worked for who relocated the entire administrative offices to a location 10 minutes drive from his house (and took relocation benefits for being transferred). To provide one example of the huge difference in how executives are treated compared to their employees, if the minimum wage in the U.S., which was $3.80 an hour in 1990, had grown at the same rate as CEO pay over the decade, it would now be $25.50 an hour, rather than the current $5.15 an hour.
I often wonder what would have happened if I had been more ambitious and aggressive in my career, and had attained an executive level position.
Would I have been caught up in the power-hungry greed, or would I have been more even-handed in the compensation and benefits shared among the employees that make the company function?
It's impossible to tell, but I could only hope that I would have had friends who would have given me an abrupt wake-up call.
Current Spinning
Okay...so I didn't have anything on the wheel for a little while, and then I got a note from Australian knitter, Kerry. He had a friend who had an extra kilo or so of incredibly fine merino top, and would Ted and I be interested in splitting it?
Uh...is that a trick question?
His friend Libby sent me two bumps of some of the nicest spinning fiber (I guess it's fibre, since it's Australian) I have ever seen or touched. Actually she sent me four bumps, but two of them were for Ted, and with the postal strike in Canada, she asked if I'd forward it on to him since I could bring it with me in my travels and post it from Canada.
This stuff is gorgeous. It has a luster like silk, and the individual fibres are so fine and light, they practically float.
Suffice it to say, I couldn't hold myself back from spinning the miraculous fibre, so I dropped all knitting projects this past weekend, and spun up about a half a spool of singles.
When double-plied, it will probably make some of the nicest fingering weight yarn I have ever produced (click on the photo to see that I've been able to find the "sweet spot" as far as the gauge of the single this fibre produces).
I can be self-serving sometimes, to the point of mild greed, but I will never understand the ridiculous amount of greed there is among the people running our largest companies.
Blatant Piggishness
Having worked in Human Resources all my career, I have seen decisions made by CEO's (and the boards they chair) that were so blatantly self-serving, that it was embarrassing beyond words.
Is it any wonder that CEO's, who can practically approve their own salaries and bonuses, have such bloated salaries that are so out of proportion with employee salaries that they should be ashamed of themselves? And that's just salaries and bonuses. I can't tell you how many times I had to help write descriptions of benefit plans that would increase overall compensation to executives through lower medical deductibles, or reducing taxes, or overriding government limits on benefits, etc., etc., etc. Or the CEO I worked for who relocated the entire administrative offices to a location 10 minutes drive from his house (and took relocation benefits for being transferred). To provide one example of the huge difference in how executives are treated compared to their employees, if the minimum wage in the U.S., which was $3.80 an hour in 1990, had grown at the same rate as CEO pay over the decade, it would now be $25.50 an hour, rather than the current $5.15 an hour.
I often wonder what would have happened if I had been more ambitious and aggressive in my career, and had attained an executive level position.
Would I have been caught up in the power-hungry greed, or would I have been more even-handed in the compensation and benefits shared among the employees that make the company function?
It's impossible to tell, but I could only hope that I would have had friends who would have given me an abrupt wake-up call.
Current Spinning
Okay...so I didn't have anything on the wheel for a little while, and then I got a note from Australian knitter, Kerry. He had a friend who had an extra kilo or so of incredibly fine merino top, and would Ted and I be interested in splitting it?
Uh...is that a trick question?
His friend Libby sent me two bumps of some of the nicest spinning fiber (I guess it's fibre, since it's Australian) I have ever seen or touched. Actually she sent me four bumps, but two of them were for Ted, and with the postal strike in Canada, she asked if I'd forward it on to him since I could bring it with me in my travels and post it from Canada.
This stuff is gorgeous. It has a luster like silk, and the individual fibres are so fine and light, they practically float.
Suffice it to say, I couldn't hold myself back from spinning the miraculous fibre, so I dropped all knitting projects this past weekend, and spun up about a half a spool of singles.
When double-plied, it will probably make some of the nicest fingering weight yarn I have ever produced (click on the photo to see that I've been able to find the "sweet spot" as far as the gauge of the single this fibre produces).
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