The end of the week.

Made it to another Friday.  Pretty nice and relaxed by Friday night and that's a good thing.  Missed most of Dollhouse, although this looked like a pivotal episode.  You know, the kind that takes the subtle layers of the story that they're gentle revealing and pushes them aside to reveal further layers.  In a different direction.  But I really can't say because I didn't catch the whole thing!  Good tv though.  I missed that stuff because of my youngest son was playing with his friend down the street and didn't get back until after 9pm.  Pretty late for that little guy - he was asleep before I finished the second page of his story.  Nice to be able to just climb into bed and then bam - sleep.

The bailout maelstrom continues.  The CBC tried to link a retention bonus plan approved for Nortel to the AIG bonuses.  Not really a strong correlation since Nortel is in bankruptcy and is supervised by its creditors and the courts, whereas AIG just 80% owned by the government...  I appreciate the point that the retention bonuses were only for Nortel execs ("key employees") at the expense of severance for all the laid off employees.  The logic for the retention plan makes sense, a bit, in that the company and creditors want to make sure the people that know what's going on at Nortel stay long enough to keep it going and make money again.  I would be bitter, though, if I didn't get any severance because I was laid off during the restructuring.  Let's see though - if they gave $10,000.00 to each of the 5000 employees, that's 50 million dollars.  That's about what the pool of retention bonus money is.  I would like 10 grand if I were laid off.

Playing with compensation numbers is why this xkcd comic is so funny, although definitely 18a for the punchline.  TV and radio coverage of the AIG bonus situation shows the bailout numbers (180 billion) and bonus numbers (165 million) together, making it appear that most of the money given by the gov't went to bonuses.  Not true - the values are vastly different - but I think this still misses the point.  The amount of money paid as salary to some of these people is mind-boggling.

The average income in Canada, in 2006, for families with 2 earners was $81,700.00 (values taken from the first line of this Statistics Canada table).  That's 2 or more related people living in the same house, pooling their money.  From the same table, a two parent family with children under 18, one earner: $66,300.00.  That's before taxes.  Now the AIG bonuses range from $1000.00 to $6.5 million, so let's pick a nice value of $2 million.  If you took $2 million dollars and just gave the money to families, you'd keep 24 families going for one year.  Plus you'd get to collect tax from them!  You'd keep 33 average families with 2 parents, some kids under 18 and one wage-earner going.  With the total AIG bonus pool of $165 million, you'd keep 2019 average families going for a year.

Now let's compare $165 million to the $180 billion bailout.  The last GIC I renewed, I counted myself lucky to get a return of 4% per annum.  If I had invested the $180 billion in one 4% GIC, I'd make $7.2 billion in one year, or $600 million in one month.  Which is why the AIG bonus money looks ridiculous compared to the bailout itself.  With the interest from the bailout, we could keep 88, 127 families going for a year.  That's 352, 508 people, assuming 4 people per family.  That's the interest at 4% on $180 billion.  If we used the $180 billion, that's 8.8 million people (assuming 4 people per family).

Anyway, you can see why people are so upset.  The average family with one earner makes about $64,500.00/year before taxes.  It would take 31 years to earn $2 million dollars.  This is the kind of magnitude that gets people upset when they hear about the AIG bonuses.  I hope those that say "I didn't think we could break those contracts" think about that because when people get made, more than contracts get broken.  Not to mention that if people get mad enough, laws change.