WRIT340 ramblings

  From: Thomas Beaudet, Research and Development To: Clark Hansen, CEO Subject: The Dirty Dozen Date: February 22, 2023 Summary You asked me to recommend a business worthy of receiving a divestment from Anima Mundi Development Partners. After extensive research, I recommend AMDP divest from 12 megabanks, commonly referred to as “the Dirty Dozen.” This dozen includes Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Toronto Dominion, Royal Bank of Canada, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Mizuho Bank, BBVA, and Credit Agricole.  I call for the divestment of this set of assets, for the reason that they do business with a destructive disregard for the “planet” strand of the triple bottom line we do business by, which will also lead to a fall in their “profit” over time, so our returns, to refer back to the model. For your convenience, I go into more detail below, starting with the terminology. Terminology Triple Bottom Line: The triple bottom line is a method o...

Brel, the Monument I still remember my 8 year old self regularly waking up to the sound of my father’s “old french music”. Once awake, I’d get out of bed to go and listen to these antiquated songs. Calmly stood in the kitchen, enveloped by Jacques Brel’s “chansons”, my father would absorb the weight of the lyrics, and then watch my reactions to them. If I was indifferent, which too often I was, he’d try to reason me. “Listen carefully” he’d go, “these words are pure poetry”. If this failed, which too often it did, he’d invoke history, culture, and fact. “This is Brel” he’d add, “a francophonic master”, “a wizard of words”, “who inspired Bowie”, and “made a young me fall in love with music, performance, and french.” Selfishly, I thought my father was living in the past. I was growing up, looking towards the future, and here he was, telling me about this old music no one had ever heard of. I dismissed his infatuation as melancholic nostalgia, and paid no attention to these dated tunes. A...

  Creativity: For Ages 1-99 To many, creativity means using your imagination to create a “thing” of an artistic nature. To many, creativity is found on a canvas, within the pages of a book, or across the keys of a piano. While that may be true, and certainly is as time passes and some select works prevail, to many, finding the time, grit, and existential strength to conjure up such a work is simply not an option. In an era defined by its fast pace, amidst fleeting feeds, 5 minute Uber rides, and one night long relationships, who has the time to write the next War & Peace? There is a rift of misunderstanding between the act of creation and the ordinary modern man, the one who works from 9 am to 5 pm every day, 5 days a week, until the age of 65, after which he tries to hold on to both his life and wife, having let go of his 2 kids long ago. But, there needn't be a rift between him and creativity. In fact, creativity is about doing meaningful and fulfilling activities, fuelled by...

  I have never lived, let alone immersed myself, in the United States of America. Yet, I find myself amidst them right now, following a series of personal and professional decisions that led me first to the US, then to California, and finally USC. As I was reading through this class’ book selection, I fell upon America Ferrera’s “American Like Me”. The blurb explained that it provided “a vibrant and varied collection of accounts about the experiences” of growing up between cultures, immigrating to the US, and adapting to unfamiliar spaces, and people. This resonated with me, as a mixed race child who, by following his international parents around, struggled to ever call a place, or people, “home” and ended up leaving the closest thing to it in order to move to the distant US. Goodreads writes that this book “will appeal to anyone with a complicated relationship to family, culture, and growing up”, and they couldn’t be more right. “American Like Me” was an obvious choice, and up to ...