For a while lately my eyes had been unclouded to the truth that blogging is vain and fruitless. That moment of clarity has passed, and now I’m back!

In all truthfulness, I do believe blogging has some value. It provides a sounding board for ideas and rants, and due to some strange psychological reason, unloading my thoughts, or at least a certain subset of them, onto a public webpage accessible by billions of people (with actual readership likely numbering in the low single digits) gives me a sense of relieved gratification. I see it as ‘talking to yourself in public’ taken into the 21st century. Add to this the fact that I’m posting this on my phone while on a train from New York to Philly, and I can almost convince myself that this is all somehow “cool.”

Anyway, what prompted this post is that I was just reading an article in the WSJ on recent job slashes in the financial sector and came across this quote

“[An attorney] filed an arbitration claim this week on behalf of a former mortgage backed securities salesman at Merrill Lynch & Co. Despite having his best year ever, the salesman’s pay plummeted to about $190,000 from $1.2 million. ‘He couldn’t make enough money to feed his family.’”

Poor guy.