A Quote by John Thain
To model correctly one tranche of one CDO took about three hours on one of the fastest computers in the United States. There is no chance that pretty much anybody understood what they were doing with these securities. Creating things that you don't understand is really not a good idea no matter who owns it.
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When I became successful as a model in the United States, I knew that my chance to be heard had come and so I took it.
The collateralized debt obligation, the CDO, is a structure which allows you to more or less continuously choose how much risk you want to take in a whole batch of securities. And the reason why they got us into so much trouble is that it's hard to figure out how much risk you really are taking.
I really love Japan, and I liked living there very much, and there are so many terrific things about Japan. However, I do think what's amazing is that Japan really prides itself on being monoracial. It doesn't have the same kind of idea as in the U.K. or Canada or the United States, in which the idea of diversity is a strength.
When I was really little, I wanted to be our first woman president. I always knew I want to be the kind of grownup who makes people's lives better. And since that's pretty much the job of the President of the United States, it seemed like a good idea.
Now, the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments. And that is, when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use.
I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math.
The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don't understand computers.
I think in the early part of my career, the roles were so disparate that it never gave anybody an opportunity to understand my essence and what I would be good at doing, as opposed to what I would not be good at doing, so these little moments of beautiful things that were happening to me were consistent, but very few and very far between.
The idea the president of the United States was warned that Al-Qaeda was going to attack the United States and did nothing about it - really? Do you think any president of the United States, if he had even an inkling there was going to be an attack, they wouldn't have moved heaven and earth to try to stop it?
In the United States, securities markets are much more developed than they are in Europe.
'Good Times' was with a live audience, three camera, and that was really intimidating. Because there were people on both sides, moving from set to set, and it was pretty scary. As I say, I didn't have a foundation in Hollywood. I hardly knew anybody. Just at the social level. I felt pretty isolated here, I really did.
I've done and said a lot of things when I was younger that I don't know if I even understood what I was doing or why I was doing it. There's a lot of compassion in understanding what people go through and even in trying to understand why a person would act the way they do. I was a very reactive person, and I did things that were just really bizarre; I don't think people understood it at all.
It's good to have an idea about what you want to do with your life before just doing things. If you have goals and dreams, it doesn't really matter if you achieve them, but if you have them it's much easier to not get lost. It's easier to make decisions.
One of the best things I ever did was to train in a practical skill. I love computers and they've become such a part of life, especially to the world of design. But it's important to understand that they are a tool, as much as a hammer or a saw is a tool. Computers don't help you design. There needs to be more emphasis on training young designers in how to build things. A good writer needs a good vocabulary. A good designer needs to understand his materials and processes. You can't, as a successful designer, pretend to get any respect if you don't know how things are made.
I don't have a problem doing interviews. It's not punishment. There's things about it that I don't like. No one else is really saying these kinds of things, so someone has to. I don't think that it's the most humbled thing to talk about yourself for hours and hours and hours.
One of the great things about being a grandparent is you get to redo what you didn't or couldn't do as a parent. Oftentimes we forget that even while the parent is parenting, they're still a growing person. They're still trying to fix themselves. They're still out there not doing everything a hundred percent correctly. I had the best parents I could ever have, but the kinds of things that they were capable of doing, the things that they said and did, were very destructive to my sister, brother, and me. But they're so much more than those things.
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