And you are here why?

Big Banks - Aaaaargh!

2012-03-01T07:30:00.001-05:00

Speaking to investors today, Todd Maclin, the bank's chief executive officer of consumer and business banking said that 70% of customers with deposits below that $100K line are not profitable for the bank after new regulations put a cap on lenders' fees.
[...] "Lost revenue has to be replaced with higher share of wallet and customer penetration," Maclin explained. "You have to get your costs and where you spend your time, to the fullest extent possible, more in line with where the opportunity is."

Aaaaargh!
This isn't lost revenue that needs to be replaced. This is revenue they should never have been making in the first place!.
Just because they grew huge and fat based on ripping off people does not create some kind of embedded moral right to suck more money out of people!
And yeah, I know, Free Market, yada, yada.
Except that these are Banks, which are taking advantage of their privileged role in our capitalist society. The easiest way to think about this is that financial institutions are intermediaries between buyers and sellers, (of products, of investments, etc.), and every dollar in profit to a bank is a dollar that is taken out of the pocket of the buyer and seller.
Which is why they have a privileged role in a capitalist system - they need to have some incentive to exist (go ahead, make some profits), but not rapacious profits.
Ergo, "Aaaaargh"

Fix Healthcare - Don't Fixate on Spending

2012-03-01T07:17:00.003-05:00

The CBPP has some metrics out on the growth of "Government Spending", and the numbers are fascinating. Ok, not really "fascinating", its pretty obvious stuff, that unfortunately gets drowned out by wingnut shrillery about "deficits", "big government", "starve the beast", blah, blah, blah.

See the chart above? It basically points out that If you exclude Social Security and Medicare, Government spending has been pretty steadily falling(!) since 1962. At worst, worst, it plateaued out or grew slightly during the crazy Bush years (unfunded tax cuts have a way of doing that).
The CBPP puts it best

The bottom line is that if one measures the size and reach of the government by non-interest spending as a share of GDP, one finds that the government has indeed expanded, but modestly rather than explosively — and that all of the expansion is the result of the impact on Social Security and Medicare of rising health costs and the aging of the population. Federal program spending outside of those two programs is set to decline significantly as a share of GDP when the economy recovers. This is the case even though the continuing increase in health care costs will affect many programs other than Social Security and Medicare: especially Medicaid, veterans' health, military health, and subisidies to help low- and middle-income people afford health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

So seriously, get over the "Government spending is killing us" rhetoric. Its *all* about healthcare - it needs some serious fixing. Other than that, It Just Doesn't Matter. The next time you hear someone blabber about "Government is the problem", and they aren't referring to healthcare, either ignore them, blow a raspberry, or preferably do both...

Oh, by the way, I dropped Social Security from the discussion because it is not a problem. Yes its growing, but the fix is really, really trivial (topic for a separate post)

Minecraft + Cats + Fountain = MinecraftCatFountain

2012-03-01T06:10:00.002-05:00

Nails the under-12 YouTube deomgraphic I'd say, no?

The Horror! The Horror! (Wall Street Bonus Cut Edition)

2012-02-29T09:46:00.001-05:00

Bloomberg has a long, and only slightly snide take on the $200K is not wealthy trope making the rounds. The focus of this piece is, however, those unfortunates in the Financial Sector who have had their bonuses cut, and are consequently up shit creek.

Its absolutely heart-wrenching - take the case of Schiff, a marketing director

His family rents the lower duplex of a brownstone in Cobble Hill, where his two children share a room. His 10-year- old daughter is a student at $32,000-a-year Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn. His son, 7, will apply in a few years.
He wants ... “a room for each kid, three bedrooms, maybe four,” he said. “Imagine four bedrooms. You have the luxury of a guest room, how crazy is that?”
The family rents a three-bedroom summer house in Connecticut and will go there again this year for one month instead of four. Schiff said he brings home less than $200,000 after taxes, health-insurance and 401(k) contributions.
“I wouldn’t want to whine,” Schiff said. “All I want is the stuff that I always thought, growing up, that successful parents had.”

Not everyone is in such trouble though, thanks to their prudence in saving. Consider Scheiner, a head-fund manager who

... spends about $500 a month to park one of his two Audis in a garage and at least $7,500 a year each for memberships at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester and a gun club in upstate New York. A labradoodle named Zelda and a rescued bichon frise, Duke, cost $17,000 a year, including food, health care, boarding and a daily dog-walker who charges $17 each per outing, he said.

Still, he sold two motorcycles he didn’t use and called his Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet “the Volkswagen of supercars.”

There is a lot more in this vein - go check it out...

$500? And a contract? Is Verizon Nuts?

2012-02-29T06:06:00.000-05:00

Ah, the joys of living in a quasi-monopoly for telecom services.
Per BGR, the new Galaxy Tab 7.7 is going to be offered by Verizon for $500.
After you plunk down $30/month on a 2 yr contract.
Yup, you read that right, thats after you shuck out $720 over two years - thats effectively $1220 for the Tab!
On the other hand, you could just buy an imported one for ~$500 on ebay.

Hmmm. $500 vs $1220.

Way to go Verizon!

Update: Looks like I'm not the only one laffing, as Jeff points out that you could buy 6 (!) Kindle Fires for the same amount.

Wall Street, Branch Managers, and Doing the Right Thing

2012-02-28T14:01:00.001-05:00

Or, should that be Not Doing the Right Thing?
A true story from The Reformed Broker...

Ext: Glass office building in January of 2009
Cut to interior of regional branch office of a national brokerage firm, flatscreen TVs line the walls while cubicles are festooned with copies of Tony Robbins books and golf course calendars.
Branch Manager: “Hey Dan*, when you get a moment I just need to sit with you your team for our annual review”
Dan: “I got some time, let’s go through it now if you want…”
BM: “Okay great, so first of all, how did things go with your clients last year? I know it was the worst year for the markets since the crash of ’29 so…”
Dan: “Actually, we did really well, in April right after Bear Stearns went down we got out of most of the individual common stocks, we did some covered calls to hedge the ones we couldn’t get out of outright. Most of the money went into Treasurys, we did some gold as well.
BM: “Wow, nicely done! I’m sure the clients were pleased they didn’t get killed like everyone else, right?”
Dan: “All in all, we actually raised assets on a net basis last year, believe it or not. Our clients were killed elsewhere so they transferred a bunch of accounts in for us to keep safe, we liquidated a ton of stuff for people over the summer, prior to Lehman’s you know what.”
BM: “Yeah, I meant to tell you, you guys were the only team in the office who grew assets in 2008, very impressive. How did you see it coming?”
Dan: “Thanks, you know I really didn’t predict that everything would melt down but I was doing a lot of reading outside of our own research. People talking about the potential losses and instability of the system on the blogs and stuff – it just really resonated with us compared to our analysts who seemed to be looking for reasons to stay invested…”
BM: “Ummm, okay but you’re not reading the blogs from your office computer right? You know that’s not compliant or encouraged or whatever, right?”
Dan: “I mean, I’m just trying to stay informed and I really don’t see how – ”
BM: “Anyway, what I need to talk with you guys about is your payout for 2009. As you know, the grid is based on assets under management and fees and commissions generated. Obviously we can’t count all the assets you went to cash with, you understand.”
Dan: “Wait, I don’t understand…”
BM: “To figure out your payout for the next 12 month cycle, we can only take into account the AUM you’ve got put to work, which means your gross payout is going to have to come down a bit for ’09.”
Dan: “But, I protected my clients – I even raised new money last year and nobody got hurt too badly!”
BM: “I understand completely, but that’s just how it works. It won’t be cut that badly, let me run the numbers coming from corporate and I’ll give you an exact.”
Dan: “I have a better idea: How about, you cut my payout by even one basis point and I call your boss and then his boss. Then I call the New York Times. Then I come to your house and burn it to the ground. How does that sound?”
BM: “Dan, calm down, no need to get crazy, I’m just doing my job as your manager, this is what it is.”
Dan: “I dare you to cut my payout for protecting my clients, just try it and watch what happens.”
*Dan is not his real name, but this exchange took place on the eve of Dan’s final sayonara to a firm he’d given 15 years to. True story

TimeMachine on Mac is brilliant for backups, except when it doesn't work. (which will be when you need it the most)

2012-02-28T13:43:00.002-05:00

That is all.

HTTPS encrypts the channel. Do not use it to make judgements about the endpoint!

2012-02-28T13:40:00.002-05:00

That is all

Phone sizes - Never Underestimate the Idiocy of Cool

2012-02-28T10:32:00.001-05:00

The Mobile World Congress just ended in Barcelona, and as you might imagine, there have been a bunch of new phones announced. Check out the some of the phones

ZTE Era - 4.3"
Huawei Ascend D - 4.5"
Fujitsu - 4.6"
HTC One X - 4.7"
Samsung S3 - 4.8" (ok, this is a leaked spec)
Panasonic Eluga - 5"

Seriously - are we getting a little ridiculous here? Or are we getting a lot ridiculous here? Because clearly, this is ridiculous. The old saw about walking around with an iPad pressed to your ear is becoming more and more likely...
I actually - briefly however - had one of the phones to the right, and it used to be so cool. The point being that one should never under-estimate the Idiocy of Cool

Greece in "Selective Default" - Really Captain Obvious?

2012-02-28T10:05:00.000-05:00

So, it looks like S&P has cut Greece's rating to "Selective Default"
To which, all I have to say is Could you possibly be later to the party? Seriously, as Barry Ritholz points out

When a borrower informs their lenders that they will a) Not be repaying the full loan amount; and b) Not making those reduced payments on time — they are technically in default. When they then fail to make the full payments on time, they are actually in default

Everybody has known for at least 6 months (you could argue for 2 yrs) that Greece was not going to be repaying the loan amounts on time. Everybody!.

Brings up the obvious question - does anybody even care about the ratings agencies any more?
Anyone?
Bueller?
Bueller?

Double Dipping - AT&T Edition

2012-02-28T09:55:00.002-05:00

Remember Ed Whiteacre (ex AT&T CEO) and his hilariously ridiculous statement about "paying for our pipes"? To refresh your memory (italics mine)

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

Lets break down this bit, so that we are absolutely clear about it.
Kittehs!
There, you now have a pressing urge to go hit up YouTube, right? Kittehs!
I'll make it easier for you

You're watching the above Kitteh video, right? Of course you are....
The data came down the pipe from Verizon / Comcast / Charter / whoever to you, and you're happily watching said Kitteh video.
Who paid for the pipe from Verizon / whoever to you? Why, you did, right? Thats what your monthly bill goes to. Simple
Where did that data come from? YouTube, right?
So, what our boy (Ed) seems to be implying is that YouTube isn't paying for this. Remember

There's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using

Thats good, and fair, and the American way, right? Except, YouTube is damn well paying for these pipes!!
YouTube has data centers, big honking data centers, and big honking pipes from those data-centers (ok, teensy fibre pipes, but you get the point), and they're paying huge sums of money to their carriers for their data. Oh, they may be paying less than you and I, but thats what comes with negotiation power.
But there is no Free Lunch going on here.
Remember That.

So, of course, AT&T is trying this again. In an interview with the WSJ, John Donovan (CEO AT&T) floated the same bloody idea again, just in a different guise. Basically, he wants the providers of data services to pay for the data used by those services.
Again, sounds nice and neat and cool, except that they are already paying for that data!
Seriously, the only reason this is an issue is because the U.S. ISPs are imposing bandwidth caps on the consumer end. They need to make more money somewhere, and since
- the costs of providing data services are going down
- there doesnt actually seem to be a spectrum shortage in the wireless world
the only way out is to create artificial scarcity.
So, cut the amount of data people can use (I love the absolutely arbitrary "top 5%" rule), and then charge the provider for that very same data.
Brilliant!

I love living in a quasi-monopolistic world. Services are *so* much better...

Integrating my Phone w/ my car's GPS system

2012-02-28T09:19:00.001-05:00

@tomheinan recently noted that it should be possible to send addresses from ones cellphone to the car's GPS system. Seriously, this is so brain-deadly obvious, its obviously not something that we're going to see soon.
Unless, of course, you're Samsung, in which case it turns out that you are thinking about precisely this.
Or, to be a wee bit more technically accurate, they're talking about creating

... an in-car solution that seamlessly connects Samsung smartphones to Toyota's In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system.

The collaboration will see the integration of a wide array of Samsung's smartphone and mobile communication technologies with Toyota's cutting-edge IVI to add enhanced connectivity, multimedia capabilities and internet services.

Absolutely no more information here. But its been a long time coming, and I, for one, welcome it. Mind you, this does coincide with me (most likely) selling my car since it doesnt look like we'll ever use the damn thing in NYC...

Swapping SIMs when traveling - Obsolete?

2012-02-28T09:11:00.002-05:00

One of the first things I do when I travel (Not in the U.S.!) is wander over to the nearest tabac / tabacchio / mobile store / whatever and buy a local SIM. My Nexus Prime works in pretty much all countries out there (the good news), but roaming rates are insane the world over (the bad news). Consequently, a simple 10 Euro / Pound / whatever SIM gives me enough data to tide me through the trip.

Note: I said data. Thats because most everything I do with the phone consists of Maps / Camera / Email, and quite possibly in that order.

I've built up quite a handy collection of SIMs, and as long as I've been to said country recently, its all good - I can even top up online. But, if I haven't been for a while, I have to repeat the SIM Song And Dance, which invariably involves some combination of passport / address / code fiscale / whatever and other such idiocies. Not even remotely insurmountable, but still Just Enough Friction to be annoying.

You would think that it would be a lot easier to associate a SIM with a person. I mean, why can't they just use my existing T-Mobile SIM from the U.S., and just register it on their network? Pretty much every phone every made has an option where you can "Pick Your Carrier", which should solve all these issues, right?
Turns out, it is really not that simple. Carriers pre-register their SIMs, i.e., deep in the guts of their incredibly complicated - and quite possibly antiquated - provisioning system, there is a list of every SIM that is "official", and it can only be updated through some Very Special Processes that involves high magic, incantations, and pointy (non-Pope) hats.

This is the point at which it turns out that AT&T might actually be able to help. (Wow. Did you ever think you'd hear anybody say that?). They've got a new global platform in play, which allows carriers to do exactly that, i.e., have one SIM that can be registered across multiple carriers. Mind you, when I say platform, I mean Something that the carriers use deep in the guts of their data centers. In short, if the uptake is high enough, the next time I walk into an Orange store in France to get a local data plan for the next 5 days (10 Euro) they'll just grab the number of my existing SIM, twiddle a few bits, and I'll be done. No fuss, no muss.

Mind you, I do see tremendous room for consumer hell here. Imagine the fun when I do the above, and then don't switch my carrier to Orange. The next thing I know, I've got a $5K roaming bill from AT&T. Which, quite possibly is something that they've already thought about, and are chuckling about :-)

Drool. Mercedes Benz 300SL. Drool.

2012-02-27T09:37:00.001-05:00

And I can't even *use* a car (New York, y'see?)

ht Barry Ritholz

Ragu Bolognese. In a pressure cooker. Brilliant. Who knew?

2012-02-27T08:48:00.001-05:00

Really, it took about 40 minutes of prep, and 20 minutes to cook, and it is easily the silkiest Ragu that I've ever made (and I make a mean Ragu Bolognese if I say so myself).
That said, I have to admit that by not having it simmer for three hours, the house has not been filled with yummy Ragu-y aromae, and is clearly the poorer for it.
So, without further ado, Pressure Cooker Ragu Bolognese

Ingredients
1 cup diced Guanciale
5 'baby' carrots
2 celery stems
1 small onion
1 lb. each Ground Beef, Pork, and Lamb
1 cup red wine
4 tbsp tomato paste dissolved in a cup of water
4 cups whole milk
3 tbsp Nuoc Mam (Fish Sauce). Really. Trust me.

(It goes without saying, but get the best damn ingredients that you can...)

Put the pressure cooker on medium-low heat, and toss the guanciale in. While it slowly melts into a puddle of pork-fat goodness, chuck the carrots, celery and onion into a food processor and whir away till its all mush. Toss the aforesaid mush into the pressure cooker with the (hopefully largely melted. If not wait!) guanciale, and stir patiently for the next 20 minutes or so till the mush - technically called soffrito - has lost all its liquid, and changed color to a medium brown. What you're seeing is all those wonderful wonderful maillard reactions that add oodles of flavor. But, be vewy vewy careful, since it - literally - takes no time to go from this stage to the "black and definitely burnt" stage!
Now, chuck in the ground meat, all of it if you please, and poke / mush/ stir around till its
(a) broken up, and
(b) no longer red.
If you want to speed this stage up, you can - just turn the heat up to medium or a bit more. Just be aware though that the higher the heat, the faster/harder you are going to have to poke / mush / stir to prevent the whole mess from burning…
Once it is all browned, add the wine, and keep stirring till the wine has reduced to, well, nothing. You'll know when the amount of steam coming off the meat decreases quite drastically (a nifty trick!). Add in the dissolved tomato paste, and stir the goop for a few minutes.
Now for the secret ingredient - add the Fish Sauce. Don't worry, the odor vanishes within a few minutes, but what it does leave behind is a boatload of lip-smacking umami, which you'll really really appreciate when its all done.
If you've done everything properly, or even reasonably properly, or, heck, basically not burnt stuff to a crisp, you should have taken roughly 40 minutes to get to this stage.
Finally, add the milk, stir it all in till its nicely mixed up, put the lid on the pressure cooker, and cook at the highest pressure for 20 minutes.
Turn off the heat, let the pressure come down take the lid off, and marvel at the silkiest smoothest yummiest bestest Ragu Bolognese that you've ever made and/or eaten in your life.

For even more enjoyment, consume with home made taglaiatelle or spaghetti. Or, take a tip from my friends (Yes Greg and Farhad. I mean you), and just scoop the stuff into a bowl and eat directly sans pasta…

I changed all my passwords to "incorrect". So whenever I forget, it will tell me "Your password is incorrect."

2012-02-27T04:31:00.002-05:00

via @AlanHungover

The Path to Enlightenment begins with Dulce de Leche

2012-02-26T14:04:00.000-05:00

- Scott @ Rosarito Fish Shack

ed: From Argentina, of course...

Our Nation's Greatest Threat - The Dutch!

2012-02-26T11:53:00.000-05:00

From Jonathan Turley ref. Santorum's expose on the Dutch euthanasia...

(It) is good to finally see a politician willing to take on our greatest threat: the Dutch. Dutch propagandists like Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh have already infiltrated our schools and museums. Our leaders (except Santorum) are deaf to the growing sound of their wooden-shoe stomping, marzipan-eating hordes. I for one will be on the ramparts with Rick wearing my do not euthanize bracelet before I eat a single herring from the hands of our Dutch overlords.

The Warren Buffet Newspaper Toss

2012-02-25T14:11:00.000-05:00

From Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway letter to shareholders (page 20)

Late last year, Berkshire purchased the Omaha World-Herald and, in my meeting with its shareholder-employees, I told of the folding and throwing skills I developed while delivering 500,000 papers as a teenager.

I immediately saw skepticism in the eyes of the audience. That was no surprise to me. After all, the reporters’ mantra is: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” So now I have to back up my claim. At the meeting, I will take on all comers in making 35-foot tosses of the World-Herald to a Clayton porch. Any challenger whose paper lands closer to the doorstep than mine will receive a dilly bar. I’ve asked Dairy Queen to supply several for the contest, though I doubt that any will be needed. We will have a large stack of papers. Grab one. Fold it (no rubber bands). Take your best shot. Make my day.

I love the guy...

Big_Tunnel + Limestone + Acid_Rain =:= Oh_Shit

2012-02-25T13:11:00.001-05:00

Ever hear of something called The Delaware Aqueduct?

Yeah, I guessed not.

Its an 85 mile long set of three tunnels in New York connecting the Rondout Reservoir in Ulster county, through the West Branch Reservoir in Putnam county, and ending up in the Hillview reservoir in Yonkers.

Or, for those of you who aren't from New York (or the U.S.), it basically takes water from a reservoir on that side of the Hudson river, and brings it over to New York city, which is on this side of the Hudson river.
See, the thing is, there is this area called The Catskill/Delaware Watershed, which gets a lot of rain. A ton of rain. So much rain that, well, its got more water than you can shake many sticks at. As a result, in the early 20th century, they started building reservoirs there to collect water for New York City which uses that self-same ton of water for all sorts of water-y purposes.

Technically, there are three reservoirs there at Neversink, Ashokan, Schoharie, Pepacton, and Cannonsville, but if you really want to know more, go hit up Wikipedia. For our purposes, water from Cannonsville, Pepacton, and Neversink all end up going through a bunch of tunnels, and end up in the Rondout Reservoir, and that, my friends, is where the fun begins.
The Delaware Aqueduct that I mentioned earlier is a tunnel that takes water from the Rondout reservoir - which is 840 ft. above sea level, and goes waaay down (sometimes almost 1500 feet below sea level), beore making it to the West Branch reservoir. Its huge, huge, being almost 14 ft. wide, and carrying about 1.3 billion gallons of water per day. Which, by any measurement, is a lot of water. Oh, by the way, thats almost exactly half the water used by New York City every day.

And there, my friends, lies a tale. Y'see, its got a tiny leak in it, losing about 35 million gallons of water every day. Ok, maybe thats not a tiny leak. Its the BFG of leaks (a BFL?).
What happened is that way back when they build this tunnel back in the early 1940s, nobody had ever heard of acid rain. So they just dug and dug, and when they hit this huge patch of limestone, they just dug right through it.
Y'know what limestone is, right? Basically calcium carbonate. And acid rain is, well, acidic. You mix the two together, and the limestone basically just dissolves. Heres a nice video that points this out since a video is worth 1000**2 words.

So our brave tunnel diggers sent all that water from the Catskills surging through limestone, which has - oh so helpfully and valiantly - dissolved and sprung innumerable growing leaks with no end in sight. Just imagine 35 million gallons of water suddenly showing up underground. Every day. No end in sight. Not too helpful to anything built above it, e.g. Warwasing county.

The thing is, it isn't trivial to fix this. The height differential in the tunnel reaches up to almost 2400 ft, which means that this hosepipe is under an enormous amount of pressure, which means that its basically not feasible to work in the tunnel. If you somehow managed to be in there, you'd be squashed flat in, well, no time flat. Imagine scuba diving at 2500ft. One...Just...Doesn't. (Ok, technically one *does* at 600 ft to check some of the shallower areas, but lets just leave it at that)

So, enter alternative plan B, which is to dig a second tunnel, and basically shut this tunnel down (and oh, not have the second tunnel go through limestone).
Its supposed to be three miles long, and goes from Newburgh on the left to Wappinger on the right. Once done, they'll hook it up to the aqueduct, and shut down the old tunnel - which will be tricky in and as of itself...
Building it is going to be tricky too, since people will be working at depth - breathing helium, protecting against the bends, oh it'll not be a day in the park thats for sure.
And finally, they're going to start this next year, spend a ton of money ($1.2 billion, sure to rise), and end in 2017.

So, whats the point behind all this?
Thanks to budgetary issues, they've shelved this project. Oh, they might eventually get it back on track, but who knows when. And the thing is, this is exactly the type of project that qualifies as Really Really Useful Infrastructure Spending. Its not a Bridge To Nowhere. Its not Yet Another NFL Stadium Funded By The Public. And its really, really, not some kind of vanity public sculpture.

Sigh. The problem with infrastructure is that we lump it all into the same bucket, and consequently, all the good stuff (like this) ends up getting tarred with the same brush as the idiotic crap.

I weep for our country...

(Watching Greece is like) watching a medieval doctor apply more leeches to a patient that has already passed out from blood loss

2012-02-25T07:04:00.000-05:00

via @yvessmith

Private Equity - Maybe not so heavily leveraged in the future?

2012-02-24T17:10:00.001-05:00

From the ever eloquent Kevin Drum

If a deal makes no financial sense unless Uncle Sam gives you a big writeoff, then maybe it just doesn't make sense. Lowering the writeoff to 50% would still keep moderately leveraged buyouts profitable, but it would probably kill off the most heavily leveraged ones, which are also generally the most destructive. I think I could live with that.

The context being that there is an entire segment of the P.E. industry (if that is the right term. 'industry'. hah) that exists solely because of what can best be described as tax quirks (debt and equity not being on an equal footing).

Suburban Sprawl is Kryptonite to all Mass Transit Powers

2012-02-24T16:13:00.002-05:00

That is all

The Greek "Bailout" (Default, really)

2012-02-24T16:06:00.000-05:00

Why they persist on calling it a Bailout is utterly beyond me, its the biggest non-default Default ever, from what I can tell. Felix Salmon has all the gory details...

The document gives us most — but not all — of the information that bondholders will need in order to be able to decide whether or not they’re going to tender their bonds into the exchange. It’s written in very dense legalese — the first sentence is 70 words long, with only one comma — so let me try to pull out the important bits.
This is complicated, as you might imagine. It makes a significant difference (a) what bonds you hold, whether they’re Greek law or English law, and also (b) where you live, whether it’s in Europe or in the US. (There are also, it turns out, Swiss-law bonds as well, which have their own very special treatment.) But at the end of the day, most bondholders are going to get pretty much the same things when they tender their bonds; you’ll forgive me for ignoring some of the more niggly stuff.
Firstly, they’re going to receive new Greek bonds, maturing in 2042. It doesn’t matter whether the bonds you’re holding mature on March 20, or whether they mature in 30 years’ time — everybody gets the same new long-dated bonds, according to the face value of what they now own. In other words, the value of Greek bonds right now is wholly a function of what their face value is, and has nothing to do with their coupon or their maturity date.
The new Greek bonds have a step-up coupon: 2% through 2015, then 3% through 2020, then 3.65% in 2021, and then 4.3% from 2022 through 2042. Bondholders will receive new bonds with a face value of €315 for every €1,000 of old bonds they hold. (Again, remember that it’s face value which matters here, not market price.) What’s the market price of the new bonds going to be? Not very much; my guess is that they’ll trade at roughly 40% of face value. Which means that the “NPV haircut”, as far as the new Greek obligations are concerned, is somewhere on the order of 87%.
But bondholders will get more than just Greek bonds; they will also get new EFSF notes. The new EFSF notes come in two flavors: one-year notes and two-year notes; their face value is going to be 15% of the face value of the tendered bonds. The working assumption right now is that they’re going to be worth €150 for every €1,000 of bonds tendered: in other words, if you look at the value of what bondholders are going to be receiving in exchange for their bonds, it’s going to be split roughly 50-50 between Greek bonds and EFSF notes.
We don’t know that for sure, however, because for reasons I don’t pretend to understand, the coupon on the EFSF notes is still undetermined; we’re just told that it will be revealed on the Issue Date. (And no, we’re not told what the Issue Date is going to be.) In any event, bondholders in the US won’t receive EFSF notes at all; instead, they’ll receive “the cash proceeds realized from the sale of the EFSF notes they would otherwise have received”.
Finally, bondholders will receive GDP warrants of some description, which are the vaguest thing of all. “The GDP-linked Securities will provide for annual payments beginning in 2015 of an amount of up to 1% of their notional amount in the event the Republic’s nominal GDP exceeds a defined threshold and the Republic has positive GDP growth in real terms in excess of specified targets.” How much are these warrants going to be worth? The working assumption has to be zero, at least until we get some numbers for the minimum GDP and GDP growth that Greece needs in order to pay out on them.

Theres a whole bunch more - go check it out...

Workflow as as Service. WaaS? Well, why not?

2012-02-24T15:03:00.001-05:00

WaaS is basically what Amazon has just released with their Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF). From the blog post

This new service gives you the ability to build and run distributed, fault-tolerant applications that span multiple systems (cloud-based, on-premise, or both). Amazon Simple Workflow coordinates the flow of synchronous or asynchronous tasks (logical application steps) so that you can focus on your business and your application instead of having to worry about the infrastructure

Picture a business process which consists of a bunch of individual tasks that need to be done in some specific sequence based on various inputs. e.g.,

When an order comes in, check to see if we have inventory.
If we do, fill the order.
If we don't, put the order in the "back-ordered" pile.

Each of these tasks is called an Action. A given Action is performed by a Worker. The whole business process is called a Workflow. And the thingy doing all the decision making is called a Decider.
As Amazon puts it, you can use their service to assign Actions to Workers, store these Actions in Queues waiting for available workers, track the progress of Workers, blah, blah, blah
All fair and good, and pretty standard for Workflow systems. What makes this particularly compelling is two simple yet remarkable features

You can write your Workers and Deciders in your language of choice. No need to be stuck with some goofy workflow language that is forced on you (yes, I'm looking at all of you out there)
You can auto-scale your workers and deciders through AWS.

Simple enough right? Except that what it means is that you now have the mechanism to automagically grow/shrink your workflow based on inputs pretty much the way you do the rest of your infrastructure (assuming that you are already cloud-based...)

Nifty. Remarkably nifty. And game-changing for sure...

InfoChimps - Bringing 'Real World' Expertise to Hadoop

2012-02-24T14:41:00.001-05:00

InfoChimps is offering cloud-based BigData platform to provide out-of-the-box (or is that out-of-the-cloud?) Hadoop service. Plenty of details at the link, as well as GigaOm commentary here.

The new Infochimps Platform is essentially a publicly available version of what the company has built internally to process and analyze the data it stores within its marketplace. As Infochimps CEO Joe Kelly puts it, the company is “giving folks … the iPod to our iTunes.”

Me, I think this is the start of something really good.

The thing is, there is a ton of activity in the Hadoop space, with everybody and their brother tossing their hat into the ring providing some set of ancillary services based on Hadoop.
The problem with all of these are that they presume you know what you are doing!
Needless to say, you don't.
Really.
You...Just...Don't.
Let me be a bit clearer - the vast majority of people out there who could use Hadoop-based services fall into two categories

People who are generating a ton of data, need to do something with it, and have no clue whatsoever as to how. (If they don't know what, then they're clearly in the wrong biz.)
People who know how, but don't have the first idea of how one sets up the platform/infrastructure to "do the how"

The beautiful thing about what InfoChimps has done is that they are providing answers to both (1) and (2), and much more importantly, based on real-world experience.

They've already dealt with the pain of setting up clusters, figuring out what actions need to be monitored, how to move data around and partition it, how to track batch jobs, etc., etc. Its all stuff that you'd eventually figure out after a lot of trial and error (and trust me, there will be trial and error), but now you can take advantage of the lessons they've learned!

Its not unlike what Amazon has done with AWS, just at a different level. Kudos to InfoChimps - I hope to see more products and services doing the same thing in the future...

Economists - Not Enough Nerdosity

2012-02-24T14:18:00.001-05:00

Noah Smith asks for Economists to release their inner nerds -

Every field of study has its own peculiar conventions of how "very smart people" are supposed to act. If you're in physics, you should have unkempt hair, juggle or do some other unusual hobby, be sexually promiscuous, and try to make your intellectual achievements look effortless (i.e. you should do a Feynman or Einstein impression). If you're in computer science you should talk like a character out of a Neal Stephenson novel, use hacker jargon, and know every XKCD joke by heart. If you're in math, you should either act genuinely crazy (like Grothendieck or Perelman) or very soft-spoken and mild (like Fefferman or Tao) - i.e., you should convey the impression that you have a lot of very powerful software running in the background of your brain. I'm not sure what biologists act like, but it seems to include wearing a goofy grin all the time.

But all of these disciplines share some common markers of nerdiness. One of these is enthusiasm for new technologies. Another is a love of - appropriately enough - science fiction. the "gee whiz" attitude is an integral part of being a science nerd.

Economics is different. Very few economists read a lot of sci-fi (or, at least, are reluctant to admit it openly). At social gatherings, economists tend to discuss sports, politics, and money rather than augmented reality or driverless cars. They tend to be better-dressed and better-coiffed than natural scientists. In other words, they are a little bit like MBAs. In this way, economists show that they are about Business; that they are worthy of consulting gigs and Congressional testimony.

Personally, I've always felt that it was all about the hair. You can always picture geek hair - it ranges anywhere from full-shaven to full-on-mad-scientist, with stops inbetween for bad-haircut, inappropriate-product-usage, and holy-shit-what-happened-to-your-eyebrows. But economists always, always have CEO level hair. And thats just wrong...

Modern Monetary Theory (Huh? Whut?)

2012-02-23T09:21:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post has a long (5 pages!) article 'bout Modern Monetary Theory, a "coming into the mainstream" school of macroeconomics that emerged in the 90s, and is kinda, sorta, vaguely post-Keynsian.

Mind you, after the entertainment caused over the last few decades by the Chicago School, I'll take shamanism as an alternative, but still MMT does seem to have some nifty ideas going for it.

The article was somewhat (but only somewhat) well written, but it doesnt capture the essential difference of MMT. Now, along comes Isabella Kaminska (of FT Alphaville fame), with a nice writeup on MMT emphasizing this very point.

(the theory) is naturally divisive because most of the time it fails to communicate its message succinctly. Which is weird, since the premise is actually fairly simple to understand. We’d say it’s akin to looking at an autostereogram. Once you get it, you never see things quite the same way again. But at the same time, try as they might, some people will never be able to see the image. Ever.

And it all rests on one key fact (at least as far as we can tell!) . Rather than treating money as an object of wealth or somebody else’s debt, a means to trade … MMT treats money as a claim on wealth, a product of trade.

And in this area, the government acts as the ultimate clearinghouse, as a

clearer and intermediary to the trillions of transactions and trades that take place in its economy every day.

In short, fiat money is basically scrip from the gummit that can be used to standardize all those zillions of little tiny trades that we do as part of our daily lives.

Theres more, much more. Go read it.

TSA "trainees" are part of an elaborate behavioral profiling scheme to see who cracks

2012-02-23T08:16:00.002-05:00

That is all

They still phish this badly? Really?

2012-02-22T16:11:00.001-05:00

This showed up in the Google-Bag just now

It is my pleasure to have this opportunity to offer you a business transaction, which will yield high dividends for both of us.. The following is a brief overview on what the offer entails.. This offer entails you to stand as a supplier of a certain product to my company. I will secure a supply contract deal for you as our supplier of the product.

This product is currently being sold by the manufacturer at a very low price and can be sold to my company at a much higher price.(The margin is over 90%) , getting my company to purchase the product at your fixed price is not a problem, my company is in need of this product. Basically what you are doing is to purchase this product at a relatively low price and sell it to my company at a marked up price, it is a legal transaction and I need you to partner with me on this project.please indicate your phone number in your reply if its different from the number stated above..

So, why exactly am I supposed to fall for this? 'cos I have no clue what they're talking about? Its so bad, I'm not even going to bother fisking it...

Google Transit (Reshaping The World Edition)

2012-02-22T14:28:00.002-05:00

Xconomy has a lengthy yet compelling writeup about the democratization of transit information - and Google's role therein.

The file format that Google invented in 2006 to make all this possible, called GTFS, has become the de facto world standard for sharing transit data. And now Google is pushing a related standard that enables agencies to alert riders about service delays in real time—thus answering that age-old question, “When’s my bus coming?” So far, Google is displaying these live transit updates for only four U.S. cities (Boston, Portland, OR, San Diego, and San Francisco) and two European cities (Madrid, Spain, and Turin, Italy). But it hopes to add many, many more.

The part I find fascinating is that people still want to hoard information, completely explaining why it took so long for this information to become available in NY and DC, two cities that I spend quite some time in

The rise of GTFS has also helped to spur a larger “open government data” movement that cuts across areas like healthcare, energy, and education. And at transit agencies that were initially slow to publish their route and schedule information in digital form, including New York City’s MTA and Washington, D.C.’s Metro system, it has created irresistible pressure to open the data vaults and cooperate with outside developers.

Mind you, this has little to do with "Information wants to be free", etc. etc. Public transit is a classic example of increasing returns, i.e., the more people that use it, the more relevant and useful (and cost-effective!) it is. Similarly, the meta-data around public transit - schedules, routes, outages - is exactly the type of information that you want people to have widespread and trivial access to, something that can be best achieved by minimizing barriers to adoption - a classic win-win situation. Probably something that became apparent to the fine folks in NY/DC eventually :-)

Beer Bikes Banned? Oh Noes!

2012-02-22T10:35:00.000-05:00

I bring you the following from the Christian Science Monitor

Classified as bicycles, they can ride on the streets and park wherever, and they don’t pollute. But on the street, they look like a restaurant on wheels: wide, pedal-powered, multiseat conference bikes taking between 10 and 20 party-goers zigzagging through the most crowded shopping or tourist areas ... Now the “beer bikes,” born in neighboring Holland, are under scrutiny.
Last month, a court in the western city of Düsseldorf formally banned them, saying that the beer bikes are a traffic nuisance. The court case could bolster efforts under way in German cities from Berlin to Münster to ban the contraptions.

I weep for our future...

Macroeconomics - The Streetlight effect

2012-02-22T10:27:00.003-05:00

Noah Smith has rips DSGE a bit of a new one. Mind you, not as comprehensively and as thoroughly as John Quiggins in Zombie Economics (What? You haven't read it? You Must!), but its all the more savage because it is somewhat incidental to his main point, that a lot of modern Macroeconomics is politically motivated.

To quote

By contrast, it's pretty easy to make a DSGE model in which government plays no useful role, and can only mess things up. So what ends up happening? You guessed it: a macro literature where most papers have only a very limited role for government.

In other words, a macro literature whose policy advice is heavily tilted toward the political preferences of conservatives.

Is that bad? Not necessarily. If the facts had a well-known conservative bias - i.e., if the models that fit the data best were the models that implied no role for government - then that would just be too bad for liberals! Liberals would have to accept that their ideas were contradicted by the best scientific evidence available.

But I contend that in the case of DSGE models, conservative policy recommendations don't emerge because they come from the best models, but only because they come from the easiest models. Thus, the conservative slant of modern macro comes not from the weight of evidence, but from the combination of publication bias and the inherent unwieldiness of the DSGE framework.

In short, the reason that most conservative economists believe in the 'No Govt. Rrrrrr' approach to existence is that the easiest models for them to work with is one in which there is No Govt.!
This is pretty much exactly the same as the chap searching for his keys under a streetlight over here, even though he dropped the keys over there, since its much brighter under the streetlight...

The Rise and Fall of the RIMan Empire

2012-02-22T10:15:00.001-05:00

An absolutely fascinating read from The Verge, titled Research, no motion: How the BlackBerry CEOs lost an empire. Its a comprehensive and extremely well documented history of RIM, going into quite gory detail about where they came from, and why they failed (in a word, Hubris).
The key question is - of course - asked at the very end

Michael Mace compares Thorsten Heins to two CEOs who did manage to turn around multi-billion dollar companies. "When you add up all those challenges, it's hard to say that RIM just needs to execute better," he says. "This feels more like a fundamental rethink, along the lines of what Jobs did when he returned to Apple or Lou Gerstner's remarkable transformation of IBM. Is Heins a Gerstner? And does he have enough support from the Board to make that sort of change? I guess we're going to find out."

The article is brilliant - go read it...

Interracial Marriages - a Pew Study

2012-02-22T10:08:00.000-05:00

The Pew Research Center has a study out on interracial marriages, and the numbers are fascinating.
First, the high point (literally), 15.1% of all new marriages in 2010 were 'mixed race', up from 6.7% in 1980.
Or, to put it differently, of all married people, 8.4% are mixed race, as compared to 3.2% in 1980.
And, as you can see from the lines to the left, its pretty much a straight line and shows no realy signs of flattening out.

Now for the wacky number. If you break the couples down, the highest earning couples are White/Asian by a pretty significant amount (almost $8K/yr more than the next highest group - Asian/Asian). Weirdly enough, this pairing is not really all that common, with only the White/Black pairing being less common.

Of course, the best part of the study is that the taboo has most certainly faded. From the study

As of 1987, two decades after the Supreme Court ruling, just 48% of the public said it was “all right for blacks and whites to date each other.” By 2009, that share had grown to 83%. Acceptance has risen among all age cohorts, but it is highest among young adults. Among adults ages 18 to 29, 93% approve; among adults ages 65 and older, 67% approve

The key there from my perspective is that 67% of the over-65 crowd approves. A huge change.

I'll leave you with the section on public attitudes (nutshell - young/liberal translates to "Its All Good")

Being minorities, younger, more educated, liberal and living in the Northeast or Western states are a few characteristics associated with those who think more positively about intermarriage.
[...] Younger adults, especially those under 30, are much more positive about intermarriage than older adults. A majority of 18- to 29-year-olds (61%) think more people of different races marrying each other has been a change for the better for society...

The Ultimate Bigot's Calendar of Europe

2012-02-22T09:44:00.002-05:00

Via Yanko Tsvetkov's Mapping Stereotypes (The Ultimate Bigot's Calendar of Europe)
Go see (and buy!) the whole thing, but fan favorites include

Sylvio Berlusconi's Europe

and Europe According to Americans

though a strong case could be made for Europe according to The Vatican

Godwin's Humor Law?

2012-02-22T09:31:00.002-05:00

From WulffMorgenthaler

The Beatles Work Schedule - An Infographic

2012-02-20T04:47:00.001-05:00

Via Charting The Beatles

never take investment advice from Amazon book reviews if you can possibly help it..

2012-02-20T04:08:00.001-05:00

From Noahpinion

London - A more expensive version of NY, with better beer, and worse food.

2012-02-19T18:44:00.001-05:00

That is all

No Robots!

2012-02-19T04:12:00.000-05:00

No Robots from YungHan Chang on Vimeo.

Does anybody understand the "half" shower concept

2012-02-17T08:23:00.002-05:00

Highly popular in France and other parts in Europe.
Not at all popular with the Paolini-Subramanya family...

Please, please stop with the "$200K/yr is not wealthy" stories.

2012-02-16T15:29:00.000-05:00

The latest is from Toronto Life - which brings you the story of Jonathan Kay who makes only $196K/yr. Poor him.

The exact meaning of prosperous, of course, depends entirely on one’s perspective. Last fall’s Occupy protesters were keen to demonize the so-called One Per Cent—the monocled, yacht-owning multi-millionaires who are now greed personified. However, the threshold for the top one per cent of income earners is much lower than you’d expect: $196,000, in the latest Statistics Canada numbers. That’s no small amount of money, but hardly the means for a life of leisure. In an increasingly pricy city like Toronto, where we pay a premium for everything from milk to car insurance, $196,000 can seem positively middle-class.
Break it down, and it translates to roughly $10,400 a month, after taxes. For many Torontonians, that $10,400 disappears fast. Thousands go to the mortgage. For those with young kids, daycare can cost upwards of $1,500 a month. There are the car and RSP payments, wardrobe refreshes, utility bills and something to set aside for when the furnace inevitably conks out. Plus the cost of the sushi, pad Thai and butter chicken that we order in three nights a week—because we’re all too tired to cook by the time we get home from work.

Right.
You've got a car. Actually, it turns out you have a couple...
"Wardrobe refreshes" - no comment.
"Something to set aside for when the furnace..conks out" - really? Set aside?
"Sushi"?
I seriously wish this was a joke, but it looks like it isn't.

I could go on, but I'll leave it to this gawker rant. Go read it.

The Top 1% Must Stop Insisting They’re Not Rich Right This Instant
Take a deep breath. Relax. Center yourself. Think about your bank account. Now. Are you ready for an article explaining why $196,000 per year is not that much money? Good.
[...] And here we see the fundamental dishonest characteristic of each and every article which advances this particular enraging argument. "Sure, it's an objectively large sum of money," they say. "But it is far smaller after I spend it."
No shit.
Money pays for the costs of life. That is what money does. You can't fucking argue that, hey, your money doesn't go that far after you've already spent it. You used it! Paying taxes and paying bills and paying the mortgage and putting money in a retirement fund and going out to dinner are the things that money gets you. You asshole. Just because you didn't blow it all on jewelry, caviar, and cocaine doesn't mean you didn't get anything out of it. This argument is like a man eating a hearty meal, licking his plate clean, then turning to a starving person and saying, "Look, we're in the same boat. My plate is empty too!"

Resto Rsvns in NY - Manning/Lin edition

2012-02-16T13:46:00.001-05:00

So, Deadspin pretended to be them, and (tried to) make rsvns at a bunch of the 'happening' restaurants in NY. They called 18 of 'New York's most exclusive restaurants' on a busy day. The final tally?

Manning: Two rejections
Lin: Four rejections

I guess Manning wins, eh?

The beauty is, however, in the actual responses. Check out Brooklyn Fare's - by far the best...

^[2] Masa: "No, but we'd love to seat him." [top]
^[7] Brooklyn Fare, in a tone suggesting we're stupid for even asking: "We take reservations weeks in advance."[top]
^[8] The Lion: "Will Mr. Manning be with the party tomorrow?" Deadspin: "Yes." The Lion: "I'm not seeing anything in the book, but our VIP specialist will call back." A few minutes go by. The Lion: "Would you sit on the balcony at 8?" Deadspin: "Eli Manning doesn't do balconies" The Lion: "OK, we could move some other people, and get you a booth." [top]

Slow Walking ... and ... Dementia? Really?

2012-02-16T11:59:00.001-05:00

From the BBC

The speed someone walks may predict the likelihood of developing dementia later in life, according to researchers in the US.
[...] A study, published in the British Medical Journal in 2009, said there was a "strong association" between slow walking speed and death from heart attacks and other heart problems. A Journal of the American Medical Association study suggested a link between walking faster over the age of 65 and a longer life.
Dr Erica Camargo, who conducted the latest study at the Boston Medical Centre, said: "While frailty and lower physical performance in elderly people have been associated with an increased risk of dementia, we weren't sure until now how it impacted people of middle age."

Now, this is frightening! Me, I actually am a slow walker. The question is, am I that slow? Compared to The Nicole (who basically sprints), well, I'm slow, but do I fall into the above category. Urghk...

Measles in Indiana (SuperBowl this time. Not Jenny McCarthy)

2012-02-16T11:02:00.003-05:00

From the AP

Indiana is battling its second measles outbreak in two years, even though its vaccination rate exceeds the national average. Health officials say the cases, traced to a Super Bowl event, illustrate just how vulnerable the public is to exposure from sources at home and abroad.

The 13 cases confirmed this month by state health officials have been confined to two counties, Boone and Hamilton. But all cases are linked to two infected people who visited the Super Bowl Village together on Feb. 3, prompting Indiana officials to reach out to health departments in New York and Massachusetts - home of the participating New England Patriots and New York Giants - for fear that the outbreak could spread across state lines.

Now imagine if that ~~prize idiot~~ well-meaning crusader Jenny McCarthy had actually managed to convince everyone that Measles caused Autism, things could have been worse. Actually no, we don't need to imagine the what-if. There actually was an outbreak there back in 2005 because of a bunch of ~~prize idiots~~ well-meaning parents who decided to not have their kids vaccinated.

"Over a four-week period in May-June 2005, a large measles outbreak occurred in Indiana. While measles transmission was eliminated from the United States in 2001 by high vaccination levels, globally measles causes 30 to 40 million cases and 530,000 deaths annually worldwide. The source of the Indiana outbreak was an unvaccinated teenager who had just returned from Romania where a large measles outbreak is currently occurring. Most of the 34 Indiana cases were children whose parents had declined to have them vaccinated. There were three hospitalizations, including one person who required mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit. Strenuous containment efforts were required to prevent the outbreak from spreading further. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has long-standing recommendations that children, foreign travelers, and healthcare workers should be vaccinated against measles. Had these recommendations been followed, the outbreak would not have occurred."

I guess we still need to ask the question - "Is our parents learning?"

Aaaargh! Mac People! Aaaargh! (Reprise)

2012-02-16T10:46:00.004-05:00

This is the Green Room points out that Mountain Lion's Safari will have a unified address bar.
Check out the image above - see that?
Just the one bar.
No separate bars for URL and Search....

And now, back to the "Reprise" part. Back in 2009, I tried to figure out how I could make Safari act as if it had just the one bar, and promptly got yelled at by - seemingly - half the fanboys on the intertubes. I expect to see a parcel of posts (is that the collective noun? Lipton?) saying either "Brilliant! Apple does it again" and variations thereof...

The original post below in all its misery...

Consider the situation.
You are trying to do something on your macintosh. Doesnt matter what. Something. You just can't figure out how to do it, so you ask....

At this point, the road bifurcates.
The road more traveled (i.e., the way the rest of the world - and clearly, the way any sane person - does it) : You get a response saying "Ah, just do blah blah blah..." or "You can't do that. Sorry mate..."
The road traveled by Apple Fanboys (i.e, you want to do something different. Quel Horreur!) : You get about 38 responses saying "Why do you want to do that?" "Oh, thats not a smart thing to do!" "Don't do that!", "Nobody does that!", etc., etc.
What is it with Mac people?
I *dont* want to use the Search Bar in Safari.
Really.
I..Just..Dont..
I want it to work the way Firefox works - type in your query in the URL bar, and google searches it for you. Is that so difficult to comprehend? Ye Gods, you would think I'd suggested that one have sexual congress with an Eggplant.
Instead, I get a bajillion replies saying "Firefox does it wrong", "Use the Search bar", etc., etc.
Also, a few saying "Let me know if you get an answer", but mostly just implying that what I want to do is wrong.

Apple's new "Messages" App - wonder what it'll break..

2012-02-16T09:04:00.001-05:00

Theres a new beta version of Apple's new Messages app available. Before Lion I'd have been on this sucker, but now, ye gods, I wonder what kind of disaster it'll inflict on my Laptop. Anybody else ~~dumb~~ plucky enough to check it out? From the site...

Send unlimited iMessages to any Mac, iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.*
Start an iMessage conversation on your Mac and continue it on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.
Send photos, videos, attachments, contacts, locations, and more.
Launch a FaceTime video call and bring the conversation face-to-face.
Messages supports iMessage, AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Jabber accounts.

Note: I'm not even getting into what Mountain Lion is going to break. The sad thing is, I'll probably upgrade because, ye gods, it certain can't be worse than Lion, y'know?

I am sick and tired of "The Greek Crisis"

2012-02-16T08:53:00.002-05:00

That is all...

OMG I can cook sideways!

2012-02-15T19:28:00.004-05:00

From Eric Sadun on G+ you have the best in anthropomorphic, well, stuff.

My favorite is the microwave...

Go check the rest out...

Say what? Breast Implants as an Indicator of Social Mood?

2012-02-15T17:32:00.002-05:00

From RTTV, we have this report - based on something Joshua Brown said about this being the new 'Hemline Indicator'

From the (Humorous) World of Economics - Shit Happens

2012-02-15T17:24:00.000-05:00

Brought to you by the inimitable Yoram Bauman, the world's first (and last?) Stand-Up Economist.

Basketball, Banker's pay, and, Economics? Huh?

2012-02-15T17:01:00.001-05:00

John Kay show us why high pay for "stars" makes sense in Basketball, but not necessarily in Banking.

...imagine a world that we think is perfectly just. But then Chamberlain appears, and we all have the opportunity to watch him play. Chamberlain insists that he will only take to the court if everyone puts 25c in a special box marked “for Wilt Chamberlain”. Over a season, a million fans consider 25 cents a small price to pay for this pleasure, and so his box contains a quarter of a million dollars. The fans who put their money in Chamberlain’s box are happier, Chamberlain is richer, and people who are not interested in basketball are in the same position as before. If the distribution before Chamberlain was just, how can you dispute the justice of the distribution after Chamberlain?

[...] Perhaps there is some resemblance between the fans who willingly gave their quarters to Chamberlain and the crowds that sell out every Coldplay concert or the enthusiasts, waiting outside the Apple store as it opens, and have made that company the most valuable in the world. But if you placed a box outside the headquarters of Goldman Sachs labelled “for Lloyd Blankfein”, you would probably not find much in it at the end of the day.

Theres more - I suggest you go read it. The main point being made is that fairness in compensation isn't just about making sure everybody makes (or doesn't!) the same amount, but in how we get to the various compensations. And our current exceedingly non-transparent approach isn't really particularly fair.

Hum Botanicals - A New Favorite...

2012-02-15T16:48:00.000-05:00

Had a cocktail containing Hum Botanicals a few days ago. All sorts of Ginger-Cardamom-y goodness. Must...Have...More...

Oh, this had prosecco in it. Even better...

.NET brings the pain to DynamoDB

2012-02-15T13:37:00.002-05:00

Oh Nifty - for all you .NET developers out there, here is a Step-by-Step Guide to Amazon DynamoDB w/ .NET.
11 short steps to creating a table and setting up CRUD on it.
.
<pause while - hopefully - people go look>
.
<pause>
.
<you're back, right?>

Is it just me? Or does this seem overly complex?
Then again, I don't do Visual Studio, and I *really* don't do .NET (Does one imply the other? I don't really want to know), but this feels, well, pretty painful to me.

Have I mentioned that I hate Java too?

Do I sound like Andy Rooney?

Kewpie Mayonnaise - Quite possibly the world's perfect food

2012-02-15T11:53:00.003-05:00

An ode to Kewpie Mayonnaise at GrubStreet. Which I quite agree with - its pretty spectacular. If you like Mayo that is. For all you mayo-haters out there, well, I suspect this isn't actually going to rock your world...

Kewpie mayonnaise, the Japanese mayo with a baby on the bottle, which you've probably seen in Asian markets, is umami incarnate. It's no wonder chefs love the stuff. In addition to being a satisfyingly rich, slightly sweet version of the world's greatest and most versatile sauce, Kewpie gets a serious boost thanks to its kind-of-secret ingredient: Monosodium glutamate. This stuff makes everything taste better.

[...] You can pick up a bottle for about nine bucks, which might seem prohibitive when compared to regular store-bought mayo, but think of it as an investment: All of your food will taste better because you can sneak Kewpie and its miraculous umami-boosting powers into just about everything. Over the years, I've put it to use in obvious ways, like deviled eggs and souped-up aioli. But I think it's more interesting when used as something other than a simple replacement to regular mayo: Try dosing Caesar-salad dressing with a tiny bit (bonus: Kewpie's industrial-strength ingredients help the dressing stay emulsified) or adding a squirt to vegetable purées and mashed potatoes. Used sparingly, the stuff pumps up the flavor of anything you add it to, without making the end result taste at all mayonnaise-y. If you really wanted to go nuts, I guess you could even use it as the base for Paula Deen's chocolate-mayonnaise cake, but that would also require you actually wanting to make something called a chocolate-mayonnaise cake

The Volcker Rule - A Good Thing. Really.

2012-02-15T09:20:00.000-05:00

Barry Ritholz points out why The Volcker Rule is A Good Thing.
First the Volcker Rule - in its simplest form sez "Banks can not speculate with consumer money". In a wee bit more complicated form, it sez.

Trading restrictions placed on financial institutions. The Volcker rule separates investment banking, private equity and proprietary trading (hedge fund) sections of financial institutions from their consumer lending arms.
Banks are not allowed to simultaneously enter into an advisory and creditor role with clients, such as with private equity firms. The Volcker rule aims to minimize conflicts of interest between banks and their clients through separating the various types of business practices financial institutions engage in.

So, why does Barry think this is A Good Thing. In short, just two words - MF Global.
To quote -->

Recall the basic facts of MFG: Management engaged in leveraged speculations with monies — whether it was their own or clients became irrelevant as the losses were so great as to wipe out much more capital than the bank actually had. Billions in losses meant MFG was insolvent and was wound down. On the winning sides of those trades were folks like JPM and George Soros. It is neither their duty nor obligation to verify whose money is on the other side of the trade — the clearing firms make sure the trade settles.

Those trade settlements are the only possible outcome. Why? Imagine a burglar robs a house of cash, goes to a casino and loses the money playing Roulette. The Casino settles that bet, it clears — and the burgled homeowner can never recover the money. Exchanges work the same way. They simply cannot validate the capital sources of every transaction. In the case of MFG, he money wasn’t even burgled — it was simply entrusted to an entity that became so insolvent thru excess speculation that even money in “Segregated accounts” was highly compromised.

And therein lay the dirty little secret of modern banking: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SEGREGATED ACCOUNT. It is simply a helpful way to think about money and banking; it does not exist in the real world.

And that is why, the next time you hear some talking-head saying "The Volcker Rule" goes too far, or the otherwise usually smart Andrew Ross Sorkin spouting a Wall Street talking point, just repeat to yourself "MF Global".

Yelp Ads. Relevant? Not So Much...

2012-02-15T06:04:00.000-05:00

Rocky Agrawal takes Yelp Ads to the cleaners, and the result is not too pretty.
A few prize results

I searched for mesothelioma, which is Internet advertising gold. (It’s an asbestos-related disease.) I got an ad for a bankruptcy attorney. Those are very different problems.
a search for flowers returned an ad for mattresses.

Theres more - go check it out

The ultimate watch? Or joke? Art! Thats it, its Art!

2012-02-15T05:24:00.001-05:00

Check this out. Its the Haldimann H9 Reduction watch.
Notice anything missing?
Yup, no hands. Or dial. Or face, for that matter.
From the marketing material...

While the hours and minutes are displayed and combined with a superb complication – a proprietary central triple-barrel flying tourbillon – they are nonetheless not visible. Concealed by an opaque glass, time can thus be imagined, dreamed, invented. Independent watchmaker Beat Haldimann thereby raises his H9 to the rank of a truly exceptional creation testifying to the ephemeral nature of time

On the other hand, its made of solid platinum, and costs $150K. Bet the folks up on Wall Street love it....

Documents as the single source of truth - Telephony Edition

2012-02-14T17:46:00.003-05:00

Paul Hammant has an interesting article up about The document as the single source of truth - which made me think about How We Do Things.

Aeons ago, we wrote the first version of our telephony platform, and it was State Of The Art, and It Was Good. It had turbochargers and coffee-grinders, and a honking huge database into which we dumped all of our data, but first the data was broken up so that it fit well into various tables and columns and it was fast and well thought out and It Was Good.

Well, maybe Not So Good, because pretty early on we realized that it would be useful if we had some record of changes - when a user calls up and sez. "I never turned on Call Recording", its useful to be able to say "Why yes sir, you did indeed, it was on the 17th at 3:30pm, and by the way, Yes, we *are* Big Brother thank you very much".

So we added _changes tables that logged the updates to user's addresses, and profiles, and parameters, and, well, pretty much everything. Which was great, except that the more we logged, the bigger a nightmare it was to keep track of what changed when. The reason, of course, was that whenever any data was entered into the system, we took great to break it apart into chunks so that the appropriate data went to the appropriate place. User's email here, account settings there, phone numbers way over there, etc. etc. But trying to recreate these changes, and god-forbid, figure out an audit-trail of what happened when, aaaargh. And thus it came to pass that It Was Not Good.

Fast forward to a few years back, when we rewrote our entire platform from scratch, but this time it was all erlang and web-scale and distributed and cloud and It Was Good.

And, *this* time when we got around to persistence, we decided to leave all the incoming data well enough alone. The original documents - JSON - were dumped into a bigcouch backend (couchDB! w00t!), where we had a variety of views that we used to get at pretty much anything we need. A view for email addresses, another for account settings, yet another for phone numbers, etc., etc.. Old data never gets deleted, the documents just get versioned - giving us a pretty spectacular audit-trail for most everything that goes on in the system, and trust me, when you're doing anything with telephony, audit-trails are key.
Its ridiculously effective, its useful, and it makes our life vastly simpler.

In short, count me in on the "Document as the single source of truth" bandwagon…

A Comprehensive Fisking of the SEC's "Vocker Rule"

2012-02-14T11:17:00.001-05:00

Its by Occupy The SEC, and it is spectacular.
Go read it. Seriously.
And if you can't be bothered, go check out the commentary by Felix Salmon.

"...the Volcker Rule simply removes the government’s all-too-visible hand from underneath the pampered haunches of banking conglomerates”

GeoSpatial BigData Analytics (ok - "Buzzword Bingo")

2012-02-14T10:17:00.000-05:00

SpaceCurve just scored $2.7M in new funding.

And, why do you care?

Well, you may not, but they are doing something interesting vis-a-vis the merging of BigData and Spatial Data. And yes, that is a deliberately vague description, but thats pretty much how things work in the BigData world nowadays, don't you think?

Seriously though, think of it this way -

Spatial data is not inherently easy to deal with in traditional terms (think How do I get the distance between two points? How do I find all the data-elements in this cube? etc.). The big SQL players all have Spatial extensions to their DBs, as well as some of the NoSQL players (CouchDB, MongoDB, and Cassandra).
Now, add in "Location Services" - where you need to keep track of not just data scattered in space, but time too. e.g., Your Foursquare check-ins last week, your GPS readings last week, etc.
And *then*, add in connections between the entities generating this data. e.g., Your Foursquare social graph, the FBI agents who are monitoring your GPS readings, etc.

Its suddenly gotten awfully complicated, hasn't it? And what this means is that the ability to comprehend, analyze, and make sense of this Even Larger Fire-Hose is going to make someone a ton of money.
Quite possibly SpaceCurve.

And *now* you know why you should care...

Krugman on SQL

2012-02-14T09:44:00.003-05:00

New Trade Theory is a pretty good explanation of how MySQL / PostgreSQL / Oracle / SQL*Server can all co-exist

Seriously - they're all pretty identical (for the vast majority of use-cases), but if you factor in increasing returns to scale, and network effects, it all makes sense...

SQL vs NoSQL - Scooters vs Motorcycles

2012-02-14T09:10:00.001-05:00

There seems to be a pretty potent Meme floating around right now viz. The Future Of NoSQL - To Be Borged. The general argument seems to be some combination of

Databases are complex beasts
We've spent eons simplifying access to these data stores (SQL)
BigData revolves around an even more complex set of problems
Everybody is building custom solutions to these problems
Regression to the mean will result in them all becoming somewhat similar
SQL stores will just add these common features
All your bases will belong to them

As you might imagine, I quite disagree with this.

Oh yes, I fully expect SQL DBs to incorporate some NoSQL features over time, but it really isn't the same as when Object Oriented Databases went to the Great Dustbin In The Sky. As I've mentioned before, NoSQL stores are more solution-oriented - there is a huge and thriving ecosystem, and the vast majority of them are designed around specific types of solutions. Can they be used inter-changeably? Oh yes, but only for extremely general problems (and odds are that in many of those cases, you could just as well have used a SQL store). But in truth, a graph-oriented DB is really, *really* not the same thing as a Key-Value store :-)

Yes, these data stores are increasingly taking on features from each other - but frankly the vast majority of these shared features tend to be build around general concepts like administration, backups, sharding, and the like. And these are good things to take, and ones that, frankly, the SQL community could learn from (Joke! Bad one, but still a joke!)

However, and this is critical, this does not negate the inherent difference between NoSQL stores. A key-value store has very little in common with a columnar database, and building out a kitchen-sink version of a datastore that can be used to do both, while theoretically possible (and given the state of the world, quite probably something that theoretically already exists in Oracle) is not exactly something that actually adds value to anyone's life.

SQL DBs, on the other hand, are generalists. As I've described earlier, you can pretty much use PostgreSQL / MySQL / Oracle interchangeably (money-willing), and largely because in the vast, vast majority of implementations, there is nothing unique to a SQL store that is being utilized. Face it, virtually everything goes through some sort of ORM nowadays, and if you take scaling out of the picture, with the exception of syntax (sometimes), most people don't know and don't care about the database implementation. In fact, if anything, these have gotten too complex, with a significant chunk of implementation consisting of figuring out what you don't want!

Seriously though, SQL stores are generalists. To use two-wheelers as an analogy, SQL stores are Scooters - perfectly reliable all-purpose transport that can be used for pretty much anything, are all pretty identical, and that Just Work. NoSQL stores, on the other hand, are like motorcycles - a bewildering array of shapes, sizes and types, each of which has a very very specific target (rebels, crotch-rockets, touring, urban transport, stylist, investment bikers, whatever).

By the way, do not take the Scooter analogy to mean "underpowered". Have you looked at the Gilera GP800? 75bhp, 120mph - not exactly puny...

Red State vs Blue State - who Gives and who Gets

2012-02-13T18:03:00.000-05:00

Nice chart, right?
So, what the heck is it? And how d'you read it? And why d'you care?
Ah, I'm glad you asked - let me explain.

Its a chart representing the Awesomess that is the United States of America, and its a wee bit complicated, so bear with me.

The Green square in the middle is the Average (W00t! Average!)

The further to the right of the green square you get, the more conservative the states get - defined as an increasing ratio of conservative to liberal voters.
The further above the green square you get, the more you are on the receiving end from the other states. i.e., The total amount of money you pay into the Union is less than the amount the Union gives you (taxes, highway funds, blah, blah, blah)

And, as you probably suspected by now, the Red square is the "average" of the conservative states, and the Blue square is the "average" of the liberal states.

So, notice anything interesting? Hmmm?
Yeah, yeah, the Reds are to the right of the Green, and the Blues are to the left. Well d'uh, thats how we defined it right? As in, conservative is to the right and liberal is to the left? (See? Funny? "Right" and "Left"?) No points there, go to the back of the class..

D'you see how most of the red dots are *above* the Green square? And most of the blue ones are *below* the Green square?
What that means is that all those pesky left-winger liberal states actually donate more money to the union than they get back.
And those strong sturdy self-reliant conservative states? Hmmm, looks like they suck in more than they hand out.
Who would-a thunk it? Hypocrisy? *Never*!!!

On that note though, lets hear it for Nebraska, Utah, and Wyoming - the three conservative states below the Green square. They actually practice what they preach - perhaps a model for the rest of the red-states to aspire to, y'know?

Hat Tip: Aaron Carrol (of the Incidental Economist) and Paul Krugman (of, well, Nobel Prize fame I guess)

Austerity Now! Austerity Forever (Screw Greece Edition)

2012-02-13T17:38:00.005-05:00

Pictures from the Atlantic with the people's reaction to the votes in Parliament.
Go check the rest out - I, literally, have nothing else to say...

Magazines for the "Better than the Rest" crowd

2012-02-13T17:20:00.003-05:00

I've always had a sneaking admiration for "Departures", the magazine for the American Express Platinum Card crowd. Its crazy, but there has always been just a little bit of tongue-in-cheek in it, especially the over-the-top bits (Today's man prefers his lapels to be a light notch at 32 degrees, instead of a medium notch at 34 degrees). And, strangely enough - a-la Playboy? - the articles do tend to be pretty good. Go figure.

And then you have Bloomberg's entry in this league - Bloomberg Pursuits. Its aimed at the discerning tastes of the top 375,000 of us, and in case you might have been concerned, they aren't "worried that the conspicuous consumption celebrated in the magazine might seem tone-deaf".

Speaking for myself, I say Bring it On!. What this world needs is a couple more magazines celebrating conspicuous consumption - after all, one can never have enough stories about $32,000 birthday parties for kids!

Verizon Ads (Jumping The Shark Edition)

2012-02-12T06:57:00.000-05:00

You know you've got it bad when SNL is skewering your advertisements.
Witness the awesomeness as Hader & Arminsen take down Verizon's 4G LTE Ads.

Taxation - what "liberal" vs "conservative" used to mean

2012-02-11T12:38:00.004-05:00

Bruce Bartlett (Heritage foundation, Reagan/Bush Sr. administrations, etc.) has a new book out "The Benefit and the Burden - Tax Reform - Why We Need It and What It Will Take". Its a great (if short) read, and one that I couldn't recommend higher.
I know, I know, why would I be recommending what could very well be partisan hackery?
Because it isn't. Really, surprisingly, and shockingly, it isn't.
But I'm not here to talk about the solution(s) in the book, as much to discuss the recent history of taxation in this country, one that has for all intents been completely forgotten by all and sundry.
But fear not - I'm here to remind y'all.

Consider your income, wherever it might come from, and whatever it might be. And no I'm not talking about your salary, i'm referring to all your income in every possible form. Salary, gifts, inheritance, tips, quarter on the sidewalk, ill-gotten gains from mugging strangers, whatever.

There are basically two things, and only two things you can do with this. You can save it, or you can consume it. I say "consume", because the difference is that if you burn them-thar dollar bills, you aren't actually spending it, but you certainly are consuming it :-)

Based on the above, it is pretty obvious that there are only three possible things that can be taxed

Only Savings
Both Consumption and Savings
Only Consumption

Everybody, but everybody assumes that taxing Only Savings is a remarkably stupid idea.
Why?

Because your Saving is the foundation of capitalism. At a first approximation, its the money that you put in your Savings account in the bank, and which the bank then lends out for investment, promoting the virtuous cycle of capitalism (the good sort, that is). If you tax only this, and leave Consumption alone, you are incenting people to Consume instead of Save, thus decreasing the amount of private investment, and thus clobbering capitalism. Bad policy that. Really bad policy all around.

Ergo, that leaves only options (2) and (3) for taxability.
Historically, option (2) Both Consumption and Saving was considered the Liberal option, and option (3) Only Consumption was considered the Conservative option.

Think of it this way. When we say Only Consumption, in its strict from (which is what we are using) we mean that you are using up stuff in the economy. e.g. You bought vegetables and ate them, thus removing it from the economy, and depriving it from others. That is optimal taxation material, i.e., you think twice about what you consume...
When we say Both Consumption and Savings, what we mean is Stuff you took out of the economy (as Consumption) plus the amount that your net-worth grew by. The second part is important, it means that if your net-worth grew by <pinkie>1 Million Dollars</pinkie>, then you get taxed on this growth, since this is the amount that you could have taken out of the economy without affecting your net-worth **

Did you know that? I bet you didn't. In fact, a close look at the current state of Liberal vs Conservative tax options doesn't seem to resemble options (2) and (3) at all, its just a whole bunch of weird tax schemes, loopholes, breaks, and god knows what else. What it does not seem to have is any relevance to (2) and (3).

Hence Bruce Bartlett's book - read it, its a good primer on all this, and an eye-opening one at that.

** - Yes, assume inflation adjustment. Also, do recall that we are referring to marginal rates. So you are taxed on the <pinkie>1 Million Dollars</pinkie>.

Mobile Users - Not necessarily "mobile"

2012-02-11T08:09:00.000-05:00

Stephanie Rieger writes about Mobile Users, and largely debunks some of the most obvious arguments about what to put in (or not put in) your mobile app.
The article is well worth the reading, but to summarize

Mobile users are not always on the go. Just because its called a "mobile" phone doesn't mean that its only used when you are mobile! Think about how you use your phone - in fact I bet that you are reading this either on your phone, or as you read this on your computer, your phone is sitting right there next to it. It is not now, and arguably never has been, only a "I'm in a hurry" device.
KISS everywhere: Given the form factors, it behooves you to design your mobile apps so that they are simple, easy, elegant, blah, blah, bah. But then again, you should do the same for your desktop apps!
Complexity isn't going away: Yes, there are some things that are just too complicated to be done easily and simply. Thats ok, life is like that - use the opportunity to look at alternatives. There may be different ways of doing the same thing (heck, its a phone, call customer support!), or you might be able to do away with the feature altogether.

The last point is worth going into - we are so used to trying to satisfy everybody all the time, we usually end up satisfying nobody. Adding in those extra radio-buttons so that you can add just a little bit more flexibility into what your customers can do might help those two edge-case customers, but it quite probably adds immeasurable confusion to the remaining 99.99% of your customers, who are now unhappier. And an unhappy customer is, well, not going to be a customer much longer.
Ergo, think about who you are trying to satisfy in entirety, and make your decisions across your entire user-base. Finally, and for gods sake, don't confuse yourself with your user-base!

The demise of Football in the U.S.A.

2012-02-11T07:36:00.001-05:00

As y'all know, I took the year off of Football, and a merry time was had by me, with plenty of snarky comments, holier-than-thou-ness, and some serious free time on weekends that was appropriately used to not just spend quality time with the Fabulous Nicole, but also get some serious weekend traveling done.

All good stuff.

And then along come Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier presenting "What Would the End of Football Look Like - An economic perspective on CTE and the concussion crisis". Its a fairly compelling take on the future of football here - or the lack thereof - based on concussions and the concomitant concerns (hey, I can alliterate too!)
As they put it

The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits.¹ Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. Coaches, team physicians, and referees would become increasingly nervous about their financial exposure in our litigious society. If you are coaching a high school football team, or refereeing a game as a volunteer, it is sobering to think that you could be hit with a $2 million lawsuit at any point in time. A lot of people will see it as easier to just stay away. More and more modern parents will keep their kids out of playing football, and there tends to be a "contagion effect" with such decisions; once some parents have second thoughts, many others follow suit.
[...] It may not matter that the losses from these lawsuits are much smaller than the total revenue from the sport as a whole. As our broader health care sector indicates (try buying private insurance when you have a history of cancer treatment), insurers don't like to go where they know they will take a beating. That means just about everyone could be exposed to fear of legal action.

Its not all that implausible - in fact I'd say its quite probable at that. Concern about concussions is certainly rising, and barring some significant rule changes akin to converting the NFL to the NFFL (National Flag Football League), there really isn't much of a chance of solving this problem with "better equipment". And before you go there, certain risks just can't be signed away with a contract - "Yup, its ok to hit me upside the head with a 2x4, I give you permission" Just Doesn't Work in our society. Foxconn maybe, but here, not so much. (I know. Cheap Apple shot. But its so easy...)

Size, of course, is no protection. Nokia, RIM, and Nortel are just three examples from our recent past that have either vanished, are on a surprisingly short slope to irrelevancy.

So heres to the end of Football - may more of you be like me :-)

A field guide to private placements

2012-02-11T07:19:00.002-05:00

Jo shua Brown tells you about Private Placements so that you don't need to do the hard lifting yourself. As it turns out, its really quite simple

Because I'm in the business of helping people, I thought I'd offer up my own 3-step guide for stockbrokers when conducting due diligence on private placements:
Step 1: Make sure you have a copy of the Private Placement Memorandum (also referred to as the PPM). You're going to want to light this PPM on fire and drop it into a Hazmat dumpster at least five miles from your office.
Step 2: Tell the banker/firm owner/branch manager or whoever brought it to you to go fuck himself.
Step 3: Head over to Dunkin Donuts, get yourself a Coffee Coolatta. Yes, I know they've got hundreds of calories - but you're worth it. You've done some good this day.

And seriously, having been on the receiving end of too many of these pitches, I can pretty much concur with Josh. As he puts it

I've seen hundreds of private placements touted to brokers, never once have any of them resulted in smiles.
I don't mean most privates didn't work - I literally and actually mean that I've seen a zero-percent success rate and a one hundred-percent failure rate.
The company that raises the cash burns through it or steals it. Then the updates stop coming and the brokers are left taking calls from customers wondering what's up. Then the phone line at the company is disconnected. Then the customers go to the regulators and the brokers get jammed up.
Every single motherfucking time. It never fails.
I've seen fast food restaurant privates, home improvement privates, luxury resort hotel privates, Chinese privates, celebrity media company privates, clothing company privates, oil and gas privates, coal mining privates and on and on and on. The one thing they all have in common is that they failed. You've probably had the same experience.

So yeah, the bottom line is -

Private Placement? Just Say "Fuck No".

My next laptop (seriously - why?)

2012-02-11T07:11:00.002-05:00

Its the EUROCOM panther 4.0
12.1 lbs of 17" goodness, in a case that hearkens back to the glory days of the 90s.
You can slap in 4 (count them! 4!) hard drives, and by the way, its about infinitely upgrade-able, but starts at around $2.5K

Snark aside, I am kinda baffled - why would I want this? About the only reason I can think of is that I'm going to end up somewhere without a (functional) network connection, and don't have access to well, any of the cloud services that I use.

Then again, maybe its aimed at folks in the DoD? Security restrictions, etc.?

Puzzled...

The Insanity of the XaaS world

2012-02-11T07:01:00.002-05:00

XaaS - where X can be Platform, Infrastructure, Software, and now Backend.
Ok - "Insanity" may be too strong a word - its not that any of these are inherently wrong. Its just that the entire ecosystem is proliferating like, well, rabbits in Australia.
Then again, this is all good - creative destruction at its finest, right?
Check out this map prepared by kinvey

Do note that I am quite admiring of kinvey - they do seem to be onto something with their "BaaS" approach, even if it is a bit fuzzy...

The Pain of being a Comic Book Fan

2012-02-10T08:59:00.001-05:00

John Kovalic sez it best

Heels! with LEDs! and a Remote!

2012-02-10T07:32:00.000-05:00

Over on Etsy, you have the following work of, well, whatever...

What you are looking at is a pair of custom made to order Heels. Each pair is unique. The heels come with a switch on the bottom to turn them on and off. Power is provided by a replaceable 9 volt battery in each heel.

if Ordering the white, they can double as a flashlight in the dark. they are VERY BRIGHT.

Did you get that? They can double as a flashlight in the dark.

It even comes with a remote! And different colors!

and Lastly. each Heel has LED lights throughout. these are controled by a remote, Yes! a remote control.

you can remotely turn them on and off, select over 16 colors and 5 different actions such as a slow/fast fade of the colors. or a Strobe feature. the Brightness can be controled from dim to "light saber"

Be still my beating heart...

A History of Ireland in 100 excuses

2012-02-09T10:10:00.000-05:00

Frank McNally of the Irish Times brings it to us, and leaves me in tears. Go see the original - its a work of (staggering?) genius, and well worth it. But, to cherry pick (and I am so doing it a dis-service)

1. Original sin.
2. The weather.

13. No-one shouted stop.
14. Johnny made me do it.
15. Oh no! 'Twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning/That made me love Mary the Rose of Tralee.

18. I have to see a man about a dog.
19. Don't mind me - I haven't been myself lately.
21. Lehman Brothers.
22. The Christian Brothers
33. And that's the cruel reason why I left old Skibbereen.
36. "Your health!"
37. "Cheers!"
38. "Sláinte!"
39. "Is it your round or mine?"
40. "Last orders!"
41. "I suppose we might as well have one for the road, so."
42. Ah, you're drunk you're drunk, you silly oul fool, still you cannot see/That's a lovely sow that me mother sent to me.
43 - 48. See 42, excuses relating to drunken nights two to seven, inclusive.
49. I can resist anything except temptation.

58. This Bill seeks to provide an Irish solution to an Irish problem.

69. I had to attend my grandmother's funeral
70. No, not that grandmother, the other one.

How to make 10 drops of coffee

2012-02-09T08:44:00.001-05:00

From Design Buzz

Minuscule as it may be, the hand crafted pot requires a pinch of coffee powder and ten drops of water to produce one tiny, tiny cup. We haven’t had anyone vouch for the quality of the brew just yet, but we’re sure there would be plenty of people who wouldn’t mind showing off their dexterity with the tiny pot. The 54 years old Pavia province native created the thimble sized contraption after months of hard work. The one inch tall coffee maker is a one off novelty for now though the goldsmith intends to make a bunch of them for a limited edition run that would be studded with all kinds of gemstones (or even diamonds) and would be made entirely in gold.

Espresso - whats wrong with America?

2012-02-09T08:36:00.001-05:00

Espresso at casa Paolini-Subramanya is made in one of these

Its the Elektra Micro casa a Leva, a pump-espresso beast which is finicky, temperamental, and explodes every now and then. But, it makes some of the best espresso in Williamsburg, which you would think is surprising but really isn't, since as best as I can tell, Americans don't understand Espresso.

Incidentally, when I say Espresso, think Coffee if you are Italian.

Its very weird really, you can get single origin coffee, beans that have made their way through civets, pretentious coffee, basically pretty much anything, but you can't get a good espresso anywhere.
You'll get espresso with the consistency of tar, espresso thats sour, espresso thats bitter, espresso in paper cups (dont' ask), espresso that smells like dishwater, in fact, espresso in pretty much any form you want, except one that tastes like espresso!

Hence the Elektra Micro casa a Leva - the Fabulous Nicole picked it up a long time ago, and with just a bit of experimenting I started getting fairly decent espresso out of it. Not great, but certainly good, and always decent. And miles better than anything I've had anywhere in the U.S. of A. Go figure...

Note: Don't get me started on Starbucks. Just...Don't...

You - Dear Sir/Madam - are a Terrorist. Sorry. But you are...

2012-02-09T08:17:00.000-05:00

From The Big Picture (Barry Ritholz) replicated in full below. It may seem alarmist and over-the-top at first pass, but the links/citations are accurate. You read the individual articles here and there, but then when they are all collected in one place, the totality is not just alarming, it is deeply frightening.
Sigh.
I feel like one of the wing-nuts who goes around talking about the Tri-lateral commission, black helicopters, and the like, but as has been said before, Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you.
Then again, its all for our protection right? Think of the children, blah, blah, blah.

Any American Who Criticizes the Government May Be Labeled a Terrorist
I noted in 2009:
The Department of Homeland Security and police forces label anyone who they disagree with – or who disagrees with government policies – as “terrorists”.
Don’t believe me?
Well, according to a law school professor, pursuant to the Military Commissions Act, “Anyone who … speaks out against the government’s policies could be declared an ‘unlawful enemy combatant’ and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.”
And according to an FBI memo, peace protesters are being labeled as “terrorists”.
***
Anyone who disagrees with the “acceptable” way of looking at things is a terrorist.
How is this different from Stalin or Mao’s use of labels such as “enemy of the state”?
This may have seemed over-the-top to some, but events have proven it true.
For example, the following is considered terrorism or suspected terrorism in modern America:
Protesting anything
Questioning war (even though war reduces our national security; and see this)
Criticizing the government’s targeting of innocent civilians with drones (although killing innocent civilians with drones is one of the main things which increases terrorism. And see this)
Asking questions about pollution (even at a public Congressional hearing?)
Liking online privacy
Paying cash at an Internet cafe
Asking questions about Wall Street shenanigans
Supporting Ron Paul or being a libertarian
Being anti-tax, anti-regulation or for the gold standard
Holding gold
Creating alternative currencies
Stocking up on more than 7 days of food
Investigating factory farming
In fact – since 9/11 – virtually all dissent has been equated with terrorism.
As Paul Joseph Watson notes:
Of course, the vast majority of people who visit Internet Cafes use cash to pay their bill. Who uses a credit card to buy a $2 dollar cup of coffee? A lot of smaller establishments don’t even accept credit cards for amounts less than $10 dollars.
Other examples of suspicious behavior include using a “residential based Internet provider” such as AOL or Comcast, the use of “anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address” (these are routinely used by mobile web users to bypass public Internet filters), “Suspicious communications using VOIP,” and “Preoccupation with press coverage of terrorist attack” (this would apply to the vast majority of people who work in the news or political blogging industry).
Searching for information about “police” or “government” is also listed as a potential indication of terrorism, as is using a computer to “obtain photos, maps or diagrams of transportation, sporting venues, or populated locations,” which would apply to virtually anyone who uses Google Maps or Google Earth.
People who may wish to keep private the contents of a personal email or an online credit card purchase by attempting to”shield the screen from view of others” are also characterized as potential terrorists.
Business owners who spot patrons engaging in these types of activities are encouraged to call the FBI’s Joint Regional Intelligence Center (JRIC), after first gathering information on license plates, names, ethnicity, and languages spoken.
In total, there are 25 different CAT flyers aimed at businesses from across the spectrum – everything from hobby shops to tattoo parlors.
As we have documented on numerous occasions, the federal government routinely characterizes mundane behavior as extremist activity or a potential indicator of terrorist intent. As part of its ‘See Something, Say Something’ campaign, the Department of Homeland Security educates the public that generic activities performed by millions of people every day, including using a video camera, talking to police officers, wearing hoodies, driving vans, writing on a piece of paper, and using a cell phone recording application,” are potential signs of terrorist activity.
The CAT program again underscores how federal authorities are empowering poorly trained citizens to become terrorist hunters, stoking fears that America is sinking deeper into a Stasi-style informant society.
In modern America, curling up in a ball to avoid police violence may also be considered “active resistance” … justifying the use of more force, including baton strikes.
And even pointing out tyrannical trends may be grounds for harassment.
Note: Some also claim that copyright infringers are terrorists, and swat teams have been deployed against them. See this, this, this and this. I’m not condoning copyright infringement, but merely citing to the all-pervasiveness of the “terror” label. And given that even grandmas and children might innocently and unwittingly download copyrighted content, any tendency to use the terror label is troubling.

Washingon legalizes same-sex marriage - SOTU seems ok...

2012-02-09T05:55:00.001-05:00

Outsourced to John Scalzi

The latest state to legalize same-sex marriage! That is, as soon as the governor signs the bill, which she’s said she plans to do.
Meanwhile, back at the Scalzi Compound:
Me: Washington just passed same-sex marriage! How is our marriage?
Krissy: Last time I checked, still pretty solid.
So, that’s, what? Seven times my marriage has been threatened by same-sex marriage? And yet it’s still managed to survive each time. Somehow. And that’s not even counting Washington, DC!

6 years and counting here - we seem to be pretty happy too. Thats two data-points!

Imagining The Paige in this...

2012-02-09T05:39:00.000-05:00

Its a ~~hamster~~ dog wheel! Its a generator! Its, well, something!

Is that sopressata in your pocket, or ....

2012-02-08T17:22:00.002-05:00

Hat Tip Eatocracy, via Dave Singer

Put the "cute" in charcuterie and the sexy in saucisson sec when you bestow a meat bouquet upon your beloved this Valentine's Day. You surely could arrive on your paramour's doorstep with a song in your heart and a hunk of knockwurst in your sweaty mitts, but we suggest you leave it up to the professionals at Portland's famed (yes, that was them on Portlandia) Olympic Provisions.
KPTV reports that for the bargain price of $75 for a three-stem salami bouquet, or $100 for six, the salumeria will dispatch owner Tyler Gaston - the lead singer of local band The Tumblers - to hand-deliver the "Salamigram," along with a smoking hot rendition of his original song, "Love Is Where the Meat Is."
Should you fear that the troubadour's carnivorous charms might outstrip your own, you're still in luck. Portland locals may opt out of the song or pick up the porky package at Olympic's retail store, and those outside the delivery zone may order online and devise a meaty little ditty for their darling.
We'll get you started. "Roses are red, violets are blue, there's a sopressata in my pocket and..."
You're on your own from there. Post your best meat-related love song lyrics in the comments below and we'll share our favorites in a future post.

HeartPart - Knife + Fork + Scoop

2012-02-08T15:37:00.000-05:00

Who comes up with these things? Really?

Many more details at Cool Hunting

Best Disclaimer Language Ever...

2012-02-08T15:31:00.002-05:00

Hat Tip Barry Ritholz

Lawyer Stuff
The future is unknowable. We have good intentions but all of our projections and estimates will be wrong, and could be materially wrong. Wildcat exploration is expensive, speculative and potentially dangerous. An offshore spill or explosion would be enormously expensive. We have insurance but it may not be enough. You could lose your entire investment. Don’t be lazy – read our 10-Q’s, 10-K’s and press releases, and if you lose money – please no tears.
“Don’t forget about risk-free T-bills in your portfolio…After inflation and taxes you’ll likely only lose 5-10% of your investment.”
- Contango V.P. Investor Relations

From the Contango Oil & Gas (MCF) quarterly earnings report...

Food Trucks - Atlanta Edition

2012-02-08T14:59:00.001-05:00

Walked by a Rolling Reubens truck on the way back from the gym, and having just worked out, assumed that it would be acceptable to sample one of their reubens (yup. needed an excuse. really).
Its supposed to "make people excited about sandwiches again"
So?
Its not quite Austin.
Really.
Don't get me wrong. Its not bad, not by a long shot, but it was - marginally - better than the deli in the building next door (which actually isn't all that bad, come to think of it).
Sigh....

You are not your user-base

2012-02-08T11:50:00.001-05:00

Jeff Atwood has a writeup about listening to your community. Its a great article, and worth perusing in its entirety, and broadly boils down to the following

Most feedback is crap : However, 10% is awesome. Filter it out, and use it!
Stick to your mission : If you're building a car, build one. If its a truck, build that. But, for heavens sake, don't build a hybrid (Subaru Brat! W00t!)
Be honest : Tell people what you will - and won't - do. Feedback is critical, and immensely appreciated even if it is negative
Listen well : Determine the underlying need in the requests. Its not what they're asking for thats important, its what they actually need.
Be there for the community : The very act of listening publicly, and interacting creates a virtuous feedback loop that immeasurably improves goodwill.

That said, I'd add one additional item : You are not your user-base

Seriously, this is one of the easiest traps to fall into - one where you end up designing the product for your own needs, because after all, you know what the user's want, right?

You came up with this earth-shattering idea, its your vision, your baby, so of course you know exactly how it should work, right?
Well, yes, you do. Till you actually start building it and everybody, *everybody* starts "contributing". It is the most basic trap of all, and one that we all fall into with astonishing regularity

Aeons ago, we were building out a Queueing feature for our PBX platform. The original requirements were really simple

Incoming calls get queued. Whenever users were free, they could hit the Send button, and the next call in the queue got sent to them.

This, unsurprisingly enough completely, absolutely, and utterly satisfied a *huge* chunk of our client base.

And then we got involved - the "we" being our sales department, support group, management - basically everyone - and it turned out that "Queueing" would be perfect for internal use by "we", if we just added a few features.

Automatic call distribution : Because, our customer support reps sometimes slack off and don't hit the Send button. And it should be easy, right?
Wait time whispered on the call : Because sometimes our hold times get long, people get tired of waiting, and it should be easy to calculate some kind of adjusted mean wait time right?
Rollover between queues : Because if our reps get slammed, we'd like to have our sales guys take the calls, and come on, its so simple to just have the calls just roll over to.
Hold Music : Oh we have to have customized hold music, so that we can have different marketing messages for the different queues, and it should be simple, right?
Weird billing schemes : Because no one ever bills for queueing on a per-user basis, absolutely no one, trust me, I'm the V.P. of Sales, I've sold telecom for ever

and so on.

So we built this Bradley Fighting Vehicle of a product that satisfied all of our internal needs, it took a year longer than expected (really!), was ridiculously complicated to setup, and needed an advanced degree in CRM to manage.

And our customers? Well, we had uptake - quite a bit. But instead of something that everybody would use, it ended up being a really niche product.

The bottom line? Your requirements are not necessarily (ok, almost certainly not) that of your user-base. Don't mix the two up! You are not your use-base!

And you are here why?

Big Banks - Aaaaargh!

Fix Healthcare - Don't Fixate on Spending

Minecraft + Cats + Fountain = MinecraftCatFountain

The Horror! The Horror! (Wall Street Bonus Cut Edition)

$500? *And* a contract? Is Verizon Nuts?

Wall Street, Branch Managers, and Doing the Right Thing

TimeMachine on Mac is brilliant for backups, *except* when it doesn't work. (which will be when you need it the most)

HTTPS encrypts the channel. Do *not* use it to make judgements about the endpoint!

Phone sizes - Never Underestimate the Idiocy of Cool

Greece in "Selective Default" - Really Captain Obvious?

Double Dipping - AT&T Edition

Integrating my Phone w/ my car's GPS system

Swapping SIMs when traveling - Obsolete?

Drool. Mercedes Benz 300SL. Drool.

Ragu Bolognese. In a pressure cooker. Brilliant. Who knew?

I changed all my passwords to "incorrect". So whenever I forget, it will tell me "Your password is incorrect."

The Path to Enlightenment begins with Dulce de Leche

Our Nation's Greatest Threat - The Dutch!

The Warren Buffet Newspaper Toss

Big_Tunnel + Limestone + Acid_Rain =:= Oh_Shit

(Watching Greece is like) watching a medieval doctor apply more leeches to a patient that has already passed out from blood loss

Private Equity - Maybe not so heavily leveraged in the future?

Suburban Sprawl is Kryptonite to all Mass Transit Powers

The Greek "Bailout" (Default, really)

Workflow as as Service. WaaS? Well, why not?

InfoChimps - Bringing 'Real World' Expertise to Hadoop

Economists - Not Enough Nerdosity

Modern Monetary Theory (Huh? Whut?)

TSA "trainees" are part of an elaborate behavioral profiling scheme to see who cracks

They *still* phish this badly? Really?

Google Transit (Reshaping The World Edition)

Beer Bikes Banned? Oh Noes!

Macroeconomics - The Streetlight effect

The Rise and Fall of the RIMan Empire

Interracial Marriages - a Pew Study

The Ultimate Bigot's Calendar of Europe

Godwin's Humor Law?

The Beatles Work Schedule - An Infographic

never take investment advice from Amazon book reviews if you can possibly help it..

London - A more expensive version of NY, with better beer, and worse food.

No Robots!

Does *anybody* understand the "half" shower concept

Please, *please* stop with the "$200K/yr is not wealthy" stories.

The Top 1% Must Stop Insisting They’re Not Rich Right This Instant

Resto Rsvns in NY - Manning/Lin edition

Slow Walking ... and ... Dementia? Really?

Measles in Indiana (SuperBowl this time. Not Jenny McCarthy)

Aaaargh! Mac People! Aaaargh! (Reprise)

Apple's new "Messages" App - wonder what it'll break..

I am sick and tired of "The Greek Crisis"

OMG I can cook sideways!

Say what? Breast Implants as an Indicator of Social Mood?

From the (Humorous) World of Economics - Shit Happens

Basketball, Banker's pay, and, Economics? Huh?

Hum Botanicals - A New Favorite...

.NET brings the pain to DynamoDB

Kewpie Mayonnaise - Quite possibly the world's perfect food

The Volcker Rule - A Good Thing. Really.

Yelp Ads. Relevant? Not So Much...

The ultimate watch? Or joke? Art! Thats it, its Art!

Documents as the single source of truth - Telephony Edition

A *Comprehensive* Fisking of the SEC's "Vocker Rule"

GeoSpatial BigData Analytics (ok - "Buzzword Bingo")

Krugman on SQL

SQL vs NoSQL - Scooters vs Motorcycles

Red State vs Blue State - who Gives and who Gets

Austerity Now! Austerity Forever (Screw Greece Edition)

Magazines for the "Better than the Rest" crowd

Verizon Ads (Jumping The Shark Edition)

Taxation - what "liberal" vs "conservative" used to mean

Mobile Users - Not necessarily "mobile"

The demise of Football in the U.S.A.

A field guide to private placements

My next laptop (seriously - why?)

The Insanity of the XaaS world

The Pain of being a Comic Book Fan

Heels! with LEDs! and a Remote!

A History of Ireland in 100 excuses

How to make 10 drops of coffee

$500? And a contract? Is Verizon Nuts?

TimeMachine on Mac is brilliant for backups, except when it doesn't work. (which will be when you need it the most)

HTTPS encrypts the channel. Do not use it to make judgements about the endpoint!

They still phish this badly? Really?

Does anybody understand the "half" shower concept

Please, please stop with the "$200K/yr is not wealthy" stories.

A Comprehensive Fisking of the SEC's "Vocker Rule"