Job Inquiry #1:

Hello Mr Or Ms
How Are Your Doing Today
Very Nice To Meet You
My Name Is XXXX 37 Year's Old Male From YYYYY
I saw Web Page And I'm Looking For A Job If Any Open Right Please Let Me
Know
Thank You For Time
XXXX

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Job Inquiry #2:

To whom it may concern,

My current occupational goals are to expand my knowledge and take on new challenges. I am a very organized and professional employee who loves working with others to accomplish tasks and work out problems. I have a deep interest in technology and innovative thinking. I bring with me a wide range of experience and thirst for success.

Sincerely,

XXXXXXXX

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I will grant you that after reading the first email, you want to immediately hire the person who wrote the second email. And I totally understand why you want to do that - after all, the second applicant successfully created complete sentences, with punctuation and everything. And talked about stuff relevant to work even - working with others! accomplishing tasks! innovative thinking!

Girl: Where is the author?
Sharky: Um, right over there. (points)
Girl: Do you know the author?
Sharky: Yeah
Girl: Well maybe you can answer my question. What is sustainability?

vs...

- Muni Rider: Drunk guys with guns and knives had a standoff at the bus stop in the Mission and then got on the bus and pulled out the knife on the bus. I was really scared.
- Commenter: yeah, but what's really deplorable is how you keep bringing that up.

(I live in the Mission, I love the Mission)

After years of populist grandstanding as NY Attorney General during which he lost almost all of the big anti-business cases that actually went to trial (but succeeded in winning many settlements from companies unwilling to risk trial), Eliot Spitzer continued onwards to governor, and had a bright political future ahead of him...oh, except apparently he had a weakness for high-priced prostitutes, and happeend to cross lines with a Federal investigation. Ah well. The world will be a better place without Eliot Spitzer in elected office.

Now. To the extent that the government caused the subprime mess, it is primarily the Federal Reserve that is to blame. The Fed has caused or at least significantly contributed to two bubbles in the past decade by keeping interest rates artificially low. The first time around, Greenspan was concerned that the Y2K problems were going to be a big drain on the economy. So, he cut interest rates to offset the effect of Y2K. Turns out, Y2K wasn't such a big deal, but since interest rates were super-low, we had the dotcom bubble. Sure, it may have happened anyway, but it went much longer and higher than it otherwise would have due to the super-low interest rates.

The dotcom bubble was completely burst by mid-2001. Then of course we had 9/11. After 9/11, the Fed lowered interest rates even further to make the recession as short and shallow as possible. Well, it worked - but then the low interest rates led to yet another bubble, this time primarily in real estate. The endgame of a bubble - in this case brokers telling buyers to lie about their income while everyone looked the other way and then everything was repackaged into CDOs which no-one really understood and banks kept off balance sheet but still put the profits in their P/L - is always the same. Cheap money means that there's lots of money out there, which pushes down returns, which means everyone is doing everything possible to get a higher return, and eventually it goes too far.

My point here is that this had to happen at same point. If the Fed had kept interest rates higher over the past six years (and even raised them yet higher), then the recession that started in 2001 would have been longer and deeper, the real estate bubble of the last five years probably wouldn't have happened, and people wouldn't have spent the last five years living off of credit. Would the economy etc be in a better place right now? Probably, but it's hard to say. The key thing is that there is no free lunch. At some point the days of crazy credit were going to end, and we were going to have to start living within our means again, no matter how painful that might be.

We're all used to the ridiculousness of the Iowa caucases and the NH primaries playing their much much larger-than-deserved roles, but I guess I don't generally pay attention to the actual vote counts in the primaries. If we take as a given that the Democratic candidate will win the general election (it's not a given, but it is by far the Democrat's election to lose) then whoever wins the nomination will be the next President. So, that means that the decisions of four thousand voters in the tiny homogenous state of NH (my homestate as it happpens - "Live Free or Die!") have led to a situation where the Presidency is still a tossup between Hillary and Obama instead of Obama almost definitely winning the nomination. Which is pretty ridiculous.

What do we conclude from this? Either (1) much more of what happens in the world is due to chance than we like to think or (2) it doesn't really matter who is elected either way. I'm somewhere in the middle I guess...I tend to think that electoral poiltics doesn't really matter that much, but then at the same time it's hard not to think that the world would be a significantly different place today if Al Gore was just wrapping up his second term.

A 'digital music' alert today turned me on to the following hot story - "Kiwi firm to end illegal music downloads, revolutionise web".

Here are some quotes from the article:

A New Zealand company says it can stop illegal digital music downloads by completely re-writing the internet/

Really? I didn't realize that it would be possible for a company in New Zealand to actually rewrite the Internet. In fact, I have no idea what that means.

In a nutshell, the Manabars DAPMusic revenue model recognises the pirate as a distributor and encourages him or her to compete with other illegal piracy networks. When pirates upload music onto the DAPMusic platform, they are rewarded each time the song is accessed by another person.

Wow, they are truly turning piracy on its head! Pirates are rewarded! It's amazing that they can actually pay pirates without anyone else having to pay even if they 'access the song'. Incredible.

Manabars in fact has quite the website. Their system has "Zero attack surface area" because "The Emulator utilises Set Theory to achieve computational completeness at a level of scope. This prevents software from attacking new software." Uh-huh.

The Manabars network actually sounds almost exactly like the locked down internet of Verno r Vinge's Rainbow's End.. So maybe the UN will actually try to have Manabars "rewrite the Internet". If that happens, let's just hope then that the company is indeed little more than the confusing wasteland of buzzwords that make up its website.

Then onwards to Paul and Margaux's wedding this past weekend in the Hamptons (no pics yet). The Hamptons is a great place to study the uber-WASP in their native environment - for example, there was one guy at the wedding ceremony who was wearing a blue blazer with bright green pants and a bright green tie. Also, the reception was at the Maidstone Club, and there were at least ten of us there who were Jewish, which I think may be a new record for the club.

And why must airports suck so much? On the way back, I realized that flying from JFK-SFO may be the worst combination of airports in the country - we first had to sit through a line of 30 planes waiting to take off at JFK, then we had to pull *out* of the line for a route recalculation (apparently involving slide rules). We finally took off, got in only an hour late to SFO. But upon arrival, of course we had to wait the requisite 30 minutes before any luggage arrived at the baggage carousel, and when it did arrive, they of course ignored the premium tags.

JFK is just overloaded and the Air Traffic Control system is massively outdated (of course, if it was private...). At SFO, on the other hand, it's just that the baggage handlers are really, really, really slow.

So what does it take to really rock the Greek Theatre? I think the energy level in the crowd needs to be really high - everyone needs to be dancing. This is a challenge, if not an oxymoron, for an indie-rock band. Indie rock is too cool to dance.

Daft Punk will rock the Greek Theatre at the end of July. But a very, very different band.

It's early March. Almost seven years later to the day.

Time to short the housing market.

Today, via Paul Kedrosky, I read about the insane clampdown on residential water use in Australia. Residental use accounts for only 9% of the overall water use in Australia, so a 40% reduction in residential use will reduce overall water consumption by under 4%. Nevertheless, the government has apparently decided that whoever is using the other 91% of the water is off-limits (farmers? did I hear someone say farmers?).

This response to the problem represents everything that is wrong with today's environmental movement and politics. However, there is a big water shortage in Australia due to six years of drought. Obviously something needs to be done. What to do?

Of course, everyone hates privatized water. Corporations shouldn't 'own' our water, blah blah blah. So, if you can't privatize, what can you do? Well, just raising the price of water would do the trick - just remember that you have to raise it for *everyone*. In California, farmers pay $1 for the same amount of water that we pay $10 for in the city. Guess who is using all of the water in CA?

Another option would be to give everyone a water quota based on their current usage and then let people buy and sell parts of their quota. This effectively puts a price on water in a more politically palatable way, since everyone continues to get what they were getting before, and it will lead those using the most water (ie farmers) to come up with cost-effective ways to cut down on their usage. However, if you are using an unsustainable amount of water, this isn't going to fix the problem, so you would have to start reducing the quotas over time. This will be less painful if done gradually as people will miraculously find cheap ways to reduce consumption (or to increase supply - Antarctica isn't all that far away after all).

The problem with all of these solutions is that they won't cause consumers lots of pain. Causing consumers pain is one of the main goals of the modern environmental movement. The movement feels that people should have to sacrifice to conserve, that we shouldn't be able to get it for free or to force it all upon the poor farmers (even though they are in fact the ones using all of the water, and most of them are, in fact, quite wealthy). You can see this in the policies that have been enacted in Australia- more and more command and control, where hosing down your car is now grounds for an arrest.

I think it is safe to say that these policies aren't going to solve Australia's water problems. Let's hope they don't end up with a police state before they figure it out.

But this time will be different. As he starts to relieve himself on the newspapers, the Uniden GMR1038-2CK 22-Channel 10-Mile Two-Way Radio will spring to life. The cat may not understand how it is that my voice is coming through the radio sternly instructing him to move away from the newspapers. But he'll know that, for him, the Transparent Society is here today, and privacy as he once knew it is gone forever.

And after I reprimand him, oh, I don't know, let's say 100 times - he might stop peeing on the floor.

Have they gone insane over there? The article notes that "clients often change advertising agencies because they want fresh talent." Well duh. Let's take this a step further...what if I dump my ad agency because I think everyone working on my account is an incompetent fool? Can I specify in the new contract that no-one from the old agency can work on my account? What if I hire an ad agency in another country?

It would be quite ironic (if not uncommon) if this law had the extremely detrimental, and of course completely unintended effect of actually driving ad agencies out of the UK.

It would certainly have interested futurists from the past. But historians in the future?

If we assume that the rate of technological change continues to increase as it has to date, then today's society will seem pretty stable compared to that of a decade from now, never mind a hundred or two hundred years in the future. In which case the historical interest will more likely be these companies that lasted for almost a century doing pretty much the same thing in the same way . The fact that they went out of business because they couldn't change fast enough will be the most banal aspect of the whole thing.

What will be the fastest way, on average, for you to get to the northeast corner?

Why? When you reach the intersection, you will be able to cross in one of the two directions. You will have, on average, half the time of the light in one direction to get across. The light will then change and you can cross in the perpendicular direction.

If you cross the street diagonally, you will reach the intersection a few seconds later. You only need to cross in the north direction - but if the light just changed, you may need to wait for a full cycle before you can cross that way. If you had waited until you reached the intersection, you would have had the light to continue walking north, and then the light would change and you could cross to the northesat corner. Instead you are stuck on the southeast corner waiting for the light to turn green again.

So, the best case scenario is that you save a couple of seconds from the diagonal, and the light is green when you get to the intersection. But the worst case scenario is that you have to wait a full extra half cycle to get across.

Of course, if you can see the light up ahead and you know the length of the cycle, you calculate which direction would be green when you reach the intersection and then decide whether to cross diagonally based on that calculation. I have tried to do this calculation, but it's very difficult to time everything correctly.