在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — “Bloodshed,” declared the man on the other end of the call. He was panicked. “I don’t know whether this is the end of the road or capitulation or not, but it will be one day of bloodshed or two more — or, or, or, two more days of bloodshed, man.”
The man was not in Misurata or Dara’a or Kabul. The phone call dates to Oct. 6, 2008, a day that was going badly for David Lau. He was a trader at Galleon, the hedge fund of the fallen billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, who was convicted of insider trading this month in New York.
A striking thing about the call between Messrs. Lau and Rajaratnam — and about the latter’s other calls with subordinates, friends and tipsters in the banking-consulting universe — is a certain human need they revealed. In call after call, these characters betrayed a burning desire to give their transactions a martial, bloody quality that they naturally lacked. They were finance nerds who longed to feel like gladiators.
“I’m long 25 and I’m taking the pain, but I’m — you know, I’m a warrior. They can’t kill me,” Mr. Rajaratnam told another associate.
So many of his sentences are like this, taking a profession of virtual buys and sells and breathing an artificial physicality into them: “I wanna blow everything out.” “The only guys who are whipping stocks around are hedge funds.” “It’s very stressful, you know, every day you come in and it’s — I feel like I’m fighting Muhammad Ali.”
Mr. Rajaratnam’s interlocutors do it, too. Instead of saying that they telephoned someone, they say: “I just lobbed a call in to Ronny.” Sports and war metaphors grip them. They talk in the language of “clearing the last sort of big hurdle,” of the “falling knife” of the stock market.
Language is a beautiful thing that makes so many ugly things possible.
Only the most ruthless humans can do bad things and go on with the knowledge of their badness. Language gives the rest of us a way out — a way of rationalizing, explaining, telling ourselves a story about ourselves. We are not terrorists, but martyrs. We are not greedy, we are doing God’s work.
I read through the transcripts of Mr. Rajaratnam’s wiretapped phone calls this week, with a focus on language. I wanted to understand how this crew of rich-people-longing-to-be-richer conceived of themselves, in their own words.
Their need, above all, to inject knives and blood and boxing into their talk was telling. A common criticism of high-flying financiers is that they are increasingly removed from the reality of their deeds — from the cereal and light bulbs and apartment towers that they fund.
Their detachment makes malfeasance easier, the critics say, for they know not what they sell.
The tapes bolstered that impression. Here were men who spoke surprisingly little about the companies they were investing in, the products they made and the like. The companies were nothing but text on the tickers of a triple-screen computer. But in speaking as they did, the ethereality of their work could be grounded by a feeling that they were creators, doers; men who moved things, made things happen.
George Orwell famously worried about the corrosive effect on language of manipulative governments; in later years, adspeak and textspeak have presented themselves as threats. But financespeak is an empire unto itself, and perhaps more influential than is commonly realized.
The tapes were a reminder of how little this particular language of business is tethered to the stuff of real business: inventory and profit and revenue and the like.
That is not what the hopscotching, globe-trotting figures on the tapes speak of. They are ceaseless jumpers from one stock to another, and they have developed a standardized language of “puts” and “holds” and “long” and “short” that lets them smooth the nuances of each business into a strange new whole grasped only by them.
没有评论:
发表评论