Bollettino

Pigs, pigs, pigs

Over at Junius, Chris Bertram briefly notes an article in Capitalism magazine criticizing Forbes and Fortune for giving in to the "socialistic" idea of reducing CEO pay. The Capitalist magazine rehearses a familiar idea: CEOs are like movie stars or athletes. Extraordinary pay is necessary to attract talent. This argument is a foolish disguise for a situation that is anything but laissez-faire. Movie stars and athletes commoditize an impression. If you go to a movie because you like x, or a basketball game because you like y, then x and y have successfully extracted a certain amount of money from you -- which is why they are paid the prices they are paid. Winning is nice, but a star on a NY team that doesn't win a championship will probably make more than a star on a team from North Carolina that does, because of the economics of the above. CEOs aren't in the impression business, give or take Oprah and Martha. Nobody bought GE products because of Jack Welch. There are moments when equities depend on name CEOs -- when they are hired, or when they leave -- but these are epiphenomenal events.

The star analogy simply disguises a traditional inefficiency in the job market. This inefficiency has been created in the traditional way: a guild exists, composed of CEOS, who protect each other's compensation. CEOs usually make up the compensation committees that decide CEO salaries. As long as this continues, CEOs will be grossly overpriced. The effect of that overpricing is disguised by various dodges to make it look like CEO compensation is not a cost to the firm. It is a cost to the firm.

There's no magic here.

So, what does LI suggest? The problem could be solved in two stages. First, the compensation committees cannot be composed of CEOS. Second, saving money to the firms all around, the compensation experts who will take the place of the bigwigs don't really have to be paid more than twenty bucks an hour. Why? Because really, CEO compensation could be determined pretty much by computer program. To make this program, take the list of the CEOs of the Fortune 500. Find those with the lowest total compensations. Use them as your anchor points. Mixing a set of variables that track company performance against those salaries, you create something like a career series. Then plug in the CEO candidate. Track his performance at other companies against your base performance rates. Depending on how the candidates do, you allot extra compensation -- or you subtract it. Because certain sectors might be special, your anchors could be shifted to these sectors -- but the standard would always be the lowest paid CEO. Presto chango, you have an objective compensation program that plugs in competition. The rises in CEO pay that might come as the bottom level rises will be compensated for by new companies which appear, setting new standards.

The CEO salary then becomes a standard for other higher exec compensation. Crazy, huh?

Simple or what? And I give it to the world free. Cause I'm such a nice guy.

Bollettino

For the Devil can work upon stagnating filth to a very great degree.
For I prophecy that we shall have our horns again.
For in the day of David Men as yet had a glorious horn upon his forehead.
For this horn was a bright substance in colour and consistence as the nail of the hand.
For it was broad, thick and strong so as to serve for defence as well as ornament.
For it brightened to the Glory of God, which came upon the human face at morning prayer.
For it was largest and brightest in the best men.
For it was taken away all at once from all of them.
For this was done in the divine contempt of a general pusillanimity.
For this happened in a season after their return from the Babylonish captivity.
For their spirits were broke and their manhood impair'd by foreign vices for exaction.
For I prophecy that the English will recover their horns the first.
For I prophecy that all the nations in the world will do the like in turn.
For I prophecy that all Englishmen will wear their beards again.
For a beard is a good step to a horn.
For when men get their horns again, they will delight to go uncovered.
- Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno

LI recommends an essay in the Glasgow review on Chris Smart, with whom Samuel Johnson once kneeled in prayer on the street ("I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone," he famously remarked to Boswell). The author, Ross King, recounts some interesting bits from Smart's hectic life.
Smart was a typical eighteenth century literatus, in some ways -- for instance, he flattered Alexander Pope as a young man, translating some of his poems into Latin, which earned him a little patronage. He then attempted to float his own literary broadsheet, much in the style of Addison and Steele. It was in this framework that he first designed a satiric female figure, Mrs. Midnight, who seems to have exerted a peculiar fascination upon her creator, according to King:

"...it is interesting to consider the figure which Smart presents to the public ten years previously at the Castle Tavern in Paternoster Row and the New Theatre in the Haymarket. For beginning in December 1751 Smart dresses in petticoats and acts onstage the transvestite role of `Mrs Mary Midnight' a grotesque old woman whom he invented a year or two earlier in the pages of his threepenny monthly journal The Midwife. Variously called `The Old Woman's Oratory' and `Mrs Midnight's New Carnival Concert', the performances display carnivalesque inversions whereby more `serious' literary, theatrical, and musical practices are parodied by players in masquerade, by musicians with salt-boxes and wooden spoons, and by troupes of performing dogs and monkeys - all presided over by Smart's grotesque female figure of misrule, Mrs Midnight. Smart is attempting during this time to establish a serious literary reputation for himself by publishing imitations of classical verse, but, despite various learned allusions in the orations, these popular entertainments are enthusiastically plebeian, dedicated to the amusement of the rabble. As such they exemplify the debased literary palate which Pope condemns some years earlier in the first lines of The Dunciad when he laments the spread of the `taste of the Rabble' manifested in the shows and entertainments of Barthomomew Fair.[2] Smart's performances therefore subvert both the gender distinctions which Jubilate Agno would enforce and the literary and cultural practices in which, simultaneously, he hopes to establish his own career as a man of letters. What then is the nature of the relationship between Mrs Midnight and the poetic voice of Jubilate Agno a decade later?"

The question of whether Jubilate Agno is attempting to "enforce distinctions" is an interesting one in itself. Smart's most ardent fan in recent years has been Christopher Hawes, who has argued that Smart's poetics has to be viewed in the perspective of a rhetoric of mania, spawned during the great years of the English Civil War, developed by Ranters and Levellers, and persisting in the eighteenth century in an increasingly secularized form within literary culture. The key transformation between the millenarianism promised by the Ranters and the task of prophecy that poetry takes up is, according to Hawes, pictured, satirically, by Swift, in his Tale of a Tub. This tracing of a secret geneology, which is also Marcus Greil's project in Lipstick Traces, is an attractive project to LI. All of these projects are influenced by The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill's marvelous history of the English Civil War's "infantile left," which rediscovered such figures as Abiezer Coppe, whose Fiery Flying Roll might have been known to Smart. In this tradition, the difference between man and woman is archetypal for all the boundaries between Heaven and Earth that will melt away at the Last Judgement. And the Last Judgement is taken from sacred history and reconfigured as a terminus in one's internal history -- a history that can only be understood through a form of sacred poetry. Here's a nice bit from Coppe. He is reporting a vision:


Upon this the life was

taken out of the body (for a season) and it was thus resembled,

as if a man with a great brush dipt in whiting, should with one

stroke wipe out, or sweep off a picture upon a wall, &c. after a

while, breath and life was returned into the form againe;

whereupon I saw various streames of light (in the night) which

appeared to the outward eye; and immediately I saw three hearts

(or three appearances) in the form of hearts, of exceeding

brightnesse; and immediately an innumerable company of hearts,

filling each corner of the room where I was. And methoughts

there was variety and distinction, as if there had been severall

hearts, and yet most strangely unexpressably complicated or

folded up in unity. I clearly saw distinction, diversity,

variety, and as clearly saw all swallowed up into unity. And it

hath been my song many times since, within and without, unity,

universality, universality, unity, Eternall Majesty, &c.

Bollettino

Yesterday, in Britain, GlaxoSmithKline shareholders actually voted down the compensation package for
its directors. The package was rather notorious even before the vote. Here's a BBC description of it:

"GSK shares, for instance, have lost about one-third of their value in the three and a half years since chief executive Jean Pierre Garnier took over, amid concerns that the firm has failed to develop new best-selling drugs. This poor track record steeled investor opposition to a pay deal which would have given Mr Garnier a pay-off of up to �22m ($35.7m) if he was dismissed."

The Guardian has a fuller story and the background.


"The stage had been set for a rebellion at GSK after the Association of British Insurers (ABI), which represents the big insurance companies and which controls about 25% of the stock market, marked the company's remuneration policy as a so-called "red top" - a rarely used indicator intended to show serious concern to its members. The National Association of Pension Funds had advised its members to abstain."

Garnier, of course, is a privileged loser, one of those new generation of CEO-Pigs who use corporations as convenient troughs to root in:

"The row was not so much about the �5m Mr Garnier earned last year but more about the �22m he stands to receive if he loses his job. The French-born chief executive told the meeting he hoped never to receive the pay-off. He repeatedly defended his decision to live in Philadelphia rather than the UK, where GSK is based."

In a more colorful Guardian report about the meeting, it appears that Garnier's ordeal was personal and devestating. Shareholder after shareholder stood up and denounced the board, and the pay committee (made up as they all are of wheezing, greased CEOs of other companies, always willing to help each other out). We particularly liked this episode:

"One referred to a comment Mr Garnier once made that "if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," waving a bag of peanuts and accusing the chief executive of not deserving his salary.

Mr Garnier opened the meeting by giving an upbeat slide presentation of Glaxo's corporate performance, showing pharmaceutical sales up 9% and trading profits up 23% in the first quarter; but much of the discussion in the hall was focused on the terms of his contract, instead of the performance of the company."

Over at BusinessWeek, there is another article about union activism to attack CEO pay packages:

"Delta Air Lines (DAL ) pilot Michael H. Messmore was incensed at the $28 million golden parachute handed to former Delta Chief Executive Ronald W. Allen when he resigned in 1997. To stop such excesses, Messmore, with the backing of the Air Line Pilots Assn., submitted a proxy resolution in 2000 demanding shareholder approval of such deals. The initiative was rejected three years in a row. But at Delta's annual meeting on Apr. 25, widespread shareholder anger over revelations of bankruptcy-proof retirement packages for current executives put Messmore's resolution over the top, with a 54% majority. Another pilot-sponsored proposal calling for the cost of stock options to be deducted from earnings racked up a 60% majority. "Executive compensation is out of whack," says Messmore."

Of course, BW asks the 22 million pound question:

"But will companies get the message? Shareholder resolutions, after all, aren't binding, leaving management free to ignore them. Still, the current spate of shareholder votes is likely to spur a fair amount of reform. For example, both companies that lost proxy battles over executive pay last year, Bank of America (BAC ) and Norfolk Southern (NSC ) Corp., eventually adopted the measures. "Everyone's a lot more sensitive to majority votes now," says Rosanna Landis Weaver, an analyst at the Investor Responsibility Research Center in Washington."

The use of shareholders, here, reminds us of the early days of the consumer movement, when acquiring stock in a company was preliminary, for consumer advocates, to attending shareholder meetings and criticizing the company. This often worked. However, with repeated use, companies built up an immunity to criticism. Right now, this is the best weapon to cut CEO pay down to a reasonable size, but the real answer is making top executive positions competitive. Contrary to Garnier, there are probably thousands of executives of his calibre who would even be willing to live in Britain to take the reins of GSK. The first step in making a competitive environment is ceasing to disguise the effect of outrageous compensation packages on companies. A nice instance is coming up: the union pension fund holding shares of PeopleSoft have introduced a resolution to expense stock options. The CEO of PeopleSoft, Craig Conway, is your standard issue pay porker. Here's what he said:

"Employee stock options have no economic impact on a company," PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway said in his letter to shareholders, filed Monday as an amendment to the company's proxy."

Later on in the article, we get another, gentle reminder that economic impact, for Craig Conway, is a strange thing indeed:

"PeopleSoft, one of Silicon Valley's heavier users of employee stock options, said in a recent filing that it would have had a 2002 loss of $403,000 rather than its reported profit of $38.5 million, if it had used the fair-market method to expense employee share options."

And of course the inevitable piano drops on our head:

"Stock options make up a large portion of PeopleSoft's compensation to top executives, AFSCME said in PeopleSoft's proxy filed April 28. In 2001, Conway's cash compensation totaled $3.3 million, while the value of options he was awarded was between $13.2 million and $33.4 million, depending on the return assumption used."

So, what do we have here? We have a man who is in charge of a national company who has the balls to tell us that the cost of paying for employees has no economic effect on the company. This is a little bit like an airplane executive who doesn't understand gravity. Here's a brief from TheStreet about the oily Conway:


"Then there was PeopleSoft (PSFT:Nasdaq - news - commentary - research - analysis) CEO Craig Conway. While stock in his company dropped 53% in 2002, his compensation soared, largely on the strength of a $14.6 million restricted stock award. Conway's salary stayed flat at $1 million, his bonus dropped from $2.32 million to $1.92 million and he was granted 4.1 million options, compared to 1 million options the year before. I"In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, PeopleSoft's compensation committee praised Conway's "outstanding" performance as a leader, cited the company's overall performance and said it considered equity grants made to CEOs of other similarly sized companies. Asked about Conway's compensation, the company said it had nothing to add to the information contained in the filing."


The outstanding independence of the compensation committee -- can't you just feel it? Which consists, by the way, of the CEO of Rite-Read, who paid himself a million six in 2001, the CEO of AskJeeves, and the CEO of Symyx Technologies, who paid himself only 478 K in 2002, when company revenues and earnings dropped precipitantly, but who supplemented his meager income by exercizing options for an equal amount last year.

Bollettino

Ah, the weekend. Suicide bombing is the new bungee cord jumping sport throughout the Middle East, the dollar is quietly plummetting in the background as the Bush administration, which argues that its tax cut will raise stock prices, shows that it could care less, and the Private Jessica Lynch rescue turns out to have been a little less dangerous than your average frat party.

Where to begin?

LI talked to D. -- okay, I talked to my brother yesterday, and he was full of outrage about the faking of the taking of Jessica Lynch, pfc. Since the networks were full of her story two weeks ago and she has been figuring heavily in the national press, we expected a story about the BBC report in the NYT or the Washington Post. So far, we haven't seen one. Since much of the rightwing blog community, leaking into much of the rightwing communitiy, is always on guard against media manipulation, we decided to visit spots we usually touch on very gingerly. There is a general blogger indignation that the BBC is putting out anti-American propaganda, since 1. The BBC claim blanks were used for the filming, and soldiers wouldn't have agreed to use blanks; and 2. blank ammunition has a different profile than real ammunition, and usually requires a modified weapon to fire it -- and, to quote a source I've avoided on this site,

So how do blank rounds work in the movies? Well, the weapons used are not real. They are specially produced replicas, often based on the mechanism of a real weapon, with the barrel partially sealed. They cannot fire live ammunition under any circumstances whatsoever. This is how film makers create realistic scenes of automatic firing without attaching a BFA to the end of the weapon.Clearly, no one will be carrying that sort of a �weapon� into a combat area.

The tone, here, is very interesting. It assumes that the American Military is always honest; would never risk troops for a stunt, and that the only reason a story claiming it was a stunt could possibly be aired is that any deviation from the Gospel version of the War must be motivated by malice.

This shows a certain shift in the way the Military is considered, at least in this sub-culture. It is a shift that is, perhaps, facilitated by the evident lack of acquaintance with the military. Having a volunteer army, which I think is a mark of civilization (rather like abolishing the death penalty) comes with its disadvantages, one of which is that military matters become subject to romantic illusion. The Military has not been particularly reticent to express its view that the truth is merely one strategy in the process of achieving victory. Stunts are pretty much the m.o. of American intelligence. Who would dare to broadcast entirely fake news of a mercenary army on the march to the capital in order to unseat a government? The CIA, in Guatamala, in 1956. This became a standard trope in CIA lore, and one bragged about, discretely, by the Company. In fact, if you hypothosize that the Lynch rescue was faked, would it have military value? Of course. It did. It was a morale builder. It is interesting that the war cannot, however, have fake moments in it for its most ardent fans. It is as if a bunch of wrestling aficianados were appalled to learn that some of the jumps from the ropes were practiced.

It is surprising how little is being made of the Lynch assertions, but we think that the NYT and the Washington Post are being particularly careful not to offend their thin-skinned American readers about their cherished stories. As Jack N. says, however, the Truth? You can't take the truth!
The military motto of our time.

Bollettino

Why is it that we don't like James Wood?

He is to fiction criticism in America what Danto is to art criticism, and what Anthony Lane is becoming to film criticism. One knows that he will be wise about contexts, and his dips into the novel he is reviewing will be, if not typical of the book, at least well chosen enough to make his version of the book plausible. But his grand enthusiasm for Saul Bellow seems, frankly, incredible -- he has never written about Bellow in such a way that I would want to read Bellow -- and his grand aversion for Don Delillo seems incredible -- he has never conveyed his allergy to Delillo in such a way that I would want to avoid Delillo -- and on the greats he seems to aim at that tone mixing just a hint of pop memory and desire -- of that great child's desire to go through the book, to eat it up -- that Trilling could sometimes bring off so that his reading actually haunts the writer. It takes some time to read Babel, for instance, after Trilling, because Trilling has interposed his own Babel so strongly, so carnally, between oneself and the stories. 



Wood does a reading of James' high period novels -- The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age -- for the Atlantic. Of these, he only finds What Maisie Knew great. He says little about the Awkward Age. We think he is right about Maise, but very wrong about the Spoils. Awkward Age is not great, but it is very fast, and very enjoyable.



Wood does bring out how much What Maisie Knew depends upon knowing -- and how knowing attaches in unexpected ways to the knower. And he also sees how James is dealing the scene painter -- the laborious Zolas, immersed in the rotten fruit of Les Halles -- a deadly blow by doing much with a minimum of brushwork. For Wood, this is a grievous thing -- he's often expressed his nostalgia for the great 19th century novels, and he still believes that the Tolstoyan standard is the right one for fiction, underneath it all. This isn't an impossible belief -- James was the engineer of the too ready conciliation between fiction and its medium, reading, where you don't really see what you see, but we all know this can have terrible consequences, just like the too visual penchant of film that abuts in the dumb action movie, where all contradictions of character are resolved by contemptuously speeding past them, as though the viewer who expects intelligence to pervade the spectacle were being a gull, an utterly pre-MTV anachronism. This is just stripping our narrative sense, and it doesn't take Adorno to figure out just how compliant such an aesthetic must be with the most reactionary politics.



But we digress. Spoils of Poynton is a little gem in the James oeuvre.

Here is what Wood thinks: "The Spoils of Poynton, a work of real penetration, is marred, I think, by an inadequate sense of the motivations of its heroine, Fleda Vetch."



Wood spells out what he means by this, after canningly canning the plot:



"Fleda, a young woman of considerable insight and intellect, is the new friend of Mrs. Gereth, the owner of Poynton. James got the idea for this novel�what he habitually called the donn�e�at a dinner party; he dined out frequently and used these evenings to truffle for rich stories. His neighbor at the table had told him about a "small and ugly matter" in which a Scottish widow was suing her son over the fine furniture he had inherited, which she would not let him have. Mrs. Gereth, like the Scottish widow, has become embroiled in a struggle with her son, Owen, who is about to marry the vulgar, nouveau riche Mona Brigstock. Under English law, once Owen marries, he and his wife will become master and mistress of Poynton."


"In general, James's characters divide into gentle but weak men; formidable and finally monstrous manipulators (mostly women, but sometimes men); and those whose innocence needs to be protected (sometimes young women, sometimes young men, sometimes children). Mrs. Gereth is one of the manipulators, like Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady and Aunt Maud in The Wings of the Dove. She cannot bear the idea of the brash Mona in charge of her beautiful objets, and determines to act. Her weapon�at first unwitting, and then unwilling�will be young Fleda, whom she takes under her wing. Mrs. Gereth becomes excited when she hears that Owen and Mona have not yet agreed on a date for the wedding, and assumes that something is amiss with this detestable union. She sees that Fleda is attracted to her son, and soon hears that Owen returns the attraction. She decides to use Fleda as a wedge..."



Now, at this point a New Historicist would remember that women in England had only recently had their property rights given equal, or at least less equal, parity with men. Wood can't see why Fleda would find Mrs. Gereth ultimately a person whose fight for her place was worth, if not sympathy, at least pity; and then he cannot see why she would betray her.

We think that Fleda's resolutions are coherent. Fleda is overwhelmed at first by Mrs. Gereth, who, while being a manipulator, is not like Madame Merle. Merle is in love with a man, Mrs. Gereth in love with a position and a life. Her own life. Manipulation arises, in both cases, out of what both characters want, but Mrs. Gereth is a much less evil character. She does not operate against what she thinks would be Fleda's interests; she simply thinks those interests are a tepid version of her own.

Here is Mrs. Gereth getting down to brass tacks with Fleda:

Why, Fleda, it isn�t a crime, don�t you know that?� cried the delighted woman. �When I was a girl I was always in love, and not always with such nice people as Owen. I didn�t behave as well as you; compared with you I think I must have been odious. But if you�re proud and reserved it�s your own affair; I�m proud too, though I�m not reserved � that�s what spoils it."

Bollettino

We recently expressed a wish to see to what baroque tergiversations Hitchens would be forced in justifying the usurpation of power in Iraq by one of Henry the K's minions -- since Hitchens credibility is wrapped up in being anti Henry the K. This isn't mere ideology, it is his bread and butter -- it allows a news organization to present him as a man of the left as he spouts reactionary slogans, making it seem as if we are getting that magic thing, balance, and making Hitchens an irresistable sell. Well, he hasn't gotten to it yet, but he does have a hilarious column about Chalabi, his bud, in Slate. He goes to the very bottom of the barrel in this one: in supporting his friend, he even becomes (gasp!) modest about his own abilities. Those abilities have to do with understanding bank fraud. Pauvre H. apparently finds it a matter of some difficulty, not just for himself but for all of humanity (hence, the modesty is transitory). This is truly creamy stuff:

"Yet every journalist feels compelled to state, as a matter of record, that Ahmad Chalabi was once convicted (by a very bizarre special court in the kingdom of Jordan) of embezzling money from a bank that was partly controlled by Iraq. I am not an accountant, and I admit that I don't know what happened at the Bank of Petra in 1972. I am not sure, after exhaustive inquiries, that I know anybody who really does know. But I do know what happened at the Iraqi Central Bank a few weeks ago, and I don't have to be an accountant or auditor to understand it. As with everything else, it is the sheer ruthless criminality of the ancien r�gime that staggers the mind and makes some people flinch and change the subject."

Welll, if he knows what happened there, do tell -- there are at least a dozen versions of the story, some of which have Uday piling billions of dollars into trucks, and some of which don't.

We do like the phrase, "exhaustive inquiries." Ah, he searched the Net one night. As always, when Hitchens practices to deceive, he is so clumsy that one feels he might as well not. Apparently his exhaustive inquiries never took him in the direction of the LA Times for May 10th, where he could have found partial solace for his learned ignorance in re: Chalabi.

The man is a hoot.

Bollettino

In a previous post, I recommended checking out the New Yorker profile of Zizek. In this season's Critical Inquiry there's a heated joust between Zizeck and Harpham. I must admit, as is often the case, I only read one side: Zizek's defense of himself as, to quote Harpham, a "symptom." In the course of doing so, he quotes this beautiful line from Deleuze, which is especially apropos at this moment:

�There�s no democratic state that�s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.�

We would almost like to make that a motto, but it would be unfair to the serpentine weight of the phrase -- serpentine because the weight of it is redistributed in unexpected ways as one repeats it.

However, in keeping with one version of the phrase, let's talk kingship.

It seems that the Pentagon mini-Metterniches are lusting to do for the rightful heir to the Peacock throne -- that's right, his solemnity, Prince Reza Pahlavi -- what they have done, so abundantly, for Ahmad Chalabi -- provide him with a little uniform, a little stipend, and a cohort of blackshirts.

Well, since we are lusting to restore ancient kingdoms, why don't we act on an abuse that we can cure right here at home? I mean the unlawful annexation of Hawaii, of course. LI is presently engaged in writing a review of Van Tilburg's biography of Katherine Routledge, the Easter Island anthropologist, so we've been interested in all things 19th century and Polynesian. There's a nice article about the downfall of the Hawaiian kingdom in Counter Punch.

And there is an Hawaiian independence movement. It has a nice collection of articles about the abuse to which Hawaii has been subject since the wily Yankees illegally annexed the place, way back in the 1890s. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it long ago, in the South Sea Letters, speaking of a native Hawaiian who was marooned by his captain in the Marquesas (back in the old whaling days, Captains often marooned crew members in order not to pay them), and had petered out in Samoa, longing for home: "I wonder what he would think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its guards, and the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their unifroms and outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see the brown faces grown so few and the whtie so many; and this father's land sold fro planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and the cliffs on Molokai. So simply, even in the South Sea islands, and so sadly, the changes come."