And you are here why?

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,

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.

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

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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

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?

Remember Ed Whiteacre (ex AT&T CEO) and his hilariously ridiculous statemen t 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.... T

@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 eve

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 woul

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

Really, it took about 40 minutes of prep, and 20 minutes to cook, and it is easily the silkiest Ragù that I've ever made (and I make a mean Ragù 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 Ragù-y aromae, and is clearly the poorer for it. YMMV... Anyhow, without further ado, Pressure Cooker Ragù Bolognese - - Ingredients 1 cup diced Guanciale 5 carrots 3 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

via @AlanHungover

- Scott @ Rosarito Fish Shack ed: From Argentina, of course...

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.

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...

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 , Pep

via @yvessmith

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).

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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 st

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

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 categori

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 mar

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 mi

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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

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

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...