Filthy Lucre

Monday, December 18, 2006

Boomtown?

Crazy ForeignersFilthy Lucre

Newsweak is reporting that Iraq’s economy, despite all the bombings and blood and death, is booming.  According to one measure, 17% this year and projected for 13% next year.  Amazing, really.  I would imagine that a fair chunk of that healthy growth rate is the result of starting small - the first part of the growth curve is easy.  Still and all, the fact that things are getting together enough for this sort of thing to happen is encouraging, especially in the face of the constant reminders that things are very, very bad indeed. 


Posted by Buckethead on 12/18/06 at 09:15 PM
Crazy Foreigners • Filthy Lucre • Permalink

Thursday, November 16, 2006

A tip for success as a venture capital-backed entrepreneur

Filthy Lucre

It’s not listed in the article as the biggest determinant of success, but it seems to play a large part, and it’s a concise, if not particularly easy-to-follow suggestion:

Be an immigrant

The article’s actual title is “Immigrants Have Founded 1 in 4 Public Venture-Backed Companies in the U.S. Since 1990”, but mine’s shorter, pithier, and more memorable.

I guess that means that unless the Democrats are successful at undoing the pretend-planning that’s been done on the southern border fence, we’re going to see a dearth of new venture-backed startups.

And yes, that’s called “leaping to a possibly unintended conclusion”.


Posted by Patton on 11/16/06 at 02:55 AM
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Thursday, November 09, 2006

Early predictions of election fallout

Filthy Lucre

From a WSJ dispatch delivered to my inbox 5 scant minutes ago:

Big Pharma Catches a Chill
Fears that Democrats will tackle drug pricing caused shares of pharmaceutical companies to slide, even as analysts cautioned that Democratic control of the House is unlikely to bring much immediate change for the industry.

My initial thought was “Good”.  My next thought, really just an amplified version of the first, was “Fuck ‘em”.  But defining “‘em” isn’t necessarily as easily done as you might think.

A wise reader could intuit that I don’t own any pharmaceutical stocks. That wise reader would be wrong, as it turns out. I own shares in Pfizer. But my view of Pfizer or any other pharmaceutical stock is separate from my view of the the economic relationship between the citizens of the US and their drug pushers.  There are good companies with bad stocks, and vice versa.  I presently like Pfizer’s stock, but may not continue to do so.  I don’t like the industry, however.

If, by some freak of useful government action in the 110th Congress, our legislative overlords were to attempt to remedy the fact that US citizens pay exorbitant prices for drugs, I’d be hugely in favor.  Do I think the drug companies make too much money?  Nope, not overall.  Do I think they make too much money from US citizens?  Yep. 

Part of that is the fault of some combination of drug company marketing and a peculiarly American desire to do with drugs what others do without.  But a meaningful part of the mismatch is an indirect subsidy levied on Americans to pay for rock-bottom prices granted to other countries’ citizens.  No, it’s not done out of the goodness of the drug companies’ hearts - they negotiate prices with virtually all of their customers.  All, it seems, except those in the US.  The fact that they don’t generally have to negotiate much at all inside our borders frees them to enter into aggressively negotiated deals elsewhere without shedding too many tears.

If it takes an act of Congress to get the rest of the world to pay the market rate, then so be it.  If this results in other countries’ citizens paying more for their drugs, then tough shit (though I’m sure there’s a drug for that!). And if that market rate, or market resistance to it, has some initial detrimental effect on the drug companies, so also be it.

A large component of the differential between US health care spending (as a portion of GDP) and that of the rest of the world is comprised of us paying for their drugs.

I hope the “analysts” referred to in the Wall Street Journal article are wrong. Godspeed, Pharma-bashers.


Posted by Patton on 11/09/06 at 02:36 AM
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Thursday, October 05, 2006

An introduction to the concept of “Employer-Employee Relationship”

Filthy Lucre

Well, about damned time, I’m thinking.

Oct. 5, 2006
Tribune Co. said Los Angeles Times Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson has resigned, amid disagreements over the future of the paper. Johnson had defied the company’s demands for what he considered potentially damaging staff cuts.

All due respect to what I’m sure were good and strongly-held intentions on the part of Mr. Johnson, but when your boss tells you to do something, you can either do it or quit.  Johnson’s been taking the imaginary middle ground, to date, and invoking the Nancy Reagan Defense.

He may even be right in claiming that requested cuts at the LA Times would hurt the paper’s viablity, and who am I to contradict him?  Nobody, that’s who. I’m not contradicting him, I’m just saying that he should have been fired the minute he refused a direct order. That’s the way life works, and even though he’s now “resigned”, let’s not kid ourselves - he was fired, rightly so.

Based on the shirt-rending hue and cry of the past month in Los Angeles on this matter, the cries of indignation seem likely be broad and loud. If so, they’ll all be sadly misplaced.  Local groups in and around the metropolis have made noise about buying the Times from Tribune, but haven’t made meaningful headway yet.  Over the past month, it’s sounded, in fact, as though they were trying to insist that the Tribune Co. sell them the paper, but on their terms.

Here’s another tip as to how things work: You can insist that, for the good of the community, the paper be sold to local ownership, and you can insist on your own set of terms for that sale.  But in America, you can’t do both.

And thus, the LA Times, for now, remains the property of the Tribune Co., and with that ownership, they can take whatever management & personnel actions they feel are required.  If those actions turn out to be ill-advised, the LA Times, Tribune Co., and their stockholders will suffer, also rightly so.

That, too, is how things work in America.


Posted by Patton on 10/05/06 at 05:07 PM
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Tuesday, October 03, 2006

The Queen’s English as a Second Language

Crazy ForeignersFilthy Lucre

About 2 months ago I had a phone interview with an organization in the UK.  More precisely the interview was with an HR firm that organization had hired to conduct this particular search.  I didn’t believe anything would come of it- a belief that was borne out as it happens- and that’s not really my point.  My point is that it was funny getting past the language barrier.

The woman running the search was supposed to call at 11 local on the designated day.  Her assistant called instead, and explained that the boss was running late with other calls and, if it was quite alright, she would like to call back in 20 minutes.  That’s the translated version. 

At that moment though I was having trouble:

“Yes?” [Me, in standard by-God Amurrican English.  Since I was expecting this call, I wasn’t as abrupt as I usually am.  But I still answered like I had just eaten a rare steak.  I’m not sure why, but that was an important image to convey telephonically.]

“Hello, is this Geeklethal?” [Him, with the Queen’s diction, polite and helpful with just a wisp of priss.]

“Yes.”

“Geeklethal, this is Mott Hooply with Frothingsham Limited.  I gribniff the eltra docalax for katy in the hibell and foralently.”

“...?” [The ellipsis, here, means near total incomprehension: face pinched; eyes shut tight; lips frowning with grim tension like I was a mathematician working on fucking Enigma and the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic hung on whether I could just get the damned key and I knew I was close, but I couldn’t get my mind working on the problem because all I had going on in my skull was my own voice yelling ‘FUCKING *WHAT* did he just say!?’ So, that’s what those three dots meant there.  Moving on.]

“If that’s alright...?”

“Ah, ok...” [As I slowly worked on a general sketch of comprehension, with growing awareness of an awkwardly long pause over what was probably a very routine and undemanding question.]

“And shall she criff at this number, or friddle theraflu alta?”

“....Ahhh, this number’s............ffffine?” [Near-total guess, there.]

“Splendid!”

Phew, this is going to be harder than I thought, um, I thought.

When she did call 20 minutes later, it again took a few minutes to shift my eargears into British but more surely and with less grinding than with her assistant.  At first it was like I was speaking to her on the Moon, with a gap between her question and my answer.  But the gap was due not to distance but me “translating” what she’d asked me.  I had to listen carefully, wait for my on-board translation matrices to filter it, re-understand it in American, and go from there.  Later I realized that my brain does precisely the same thing, in the same way, when trying to navigate a conversation in German- starts out ok, readily grasping the first few words in the sentence, then falls off a cliff, then comes many seconds, sometimes minutes, to recreate in my mind what that was all supposed to have meant- if I ever even get an answer.  Funny it was the same in unfamiliar English too.  It smoothed out after a bit, and by the end was cruising right along, but never quite got the ease of comprehension we all have with each other as native American speakers.

So I basically had to blather about how dynamite I am, which if you’ve never done it on the phone in this manner is hugely awkward.  It is in such a situation that we realize how much we rely on body language, eye contact, and a dozen other physical cues from our audience that we use in turn to modify our speech.  Such body language is probably not so very culturally distinct as speech. 

Compounding that awkwardness was the distinct sensation that the more I spoke, the more I felt that what she heard on the other end was not my disciplined, thoughtful responses to her questions- themselves the result of careful reflection on a brief but respectable career - but more like “UUU HUH HEEILK YES’M I SHO’ NUFF AM DA MAN FO’ DA JOB”.  I felt as if I was from the deepest piney woods of Fuckbuckle, Arkansas, was applying for the presidency of Harvard, and any second would ask the women on the hiring committee who was keeping the house all day if they were here?

Well, since I wasn’t subsequently invited to England for a real interview, I didn’t have to figure out how I was going to communicate with them on their home turf in their own language.  But after that call I could see some QESL (Queen’s English as a Second Language) coursework in my future. 


Posted by GeekLethal on 10/03/06 at 11:04 AM
Crazy Foreigners • Filthy Lucre • Permalink

Friday, September 22, 2006

No, the options backdating scandal’s not yet over

Filthy Lucre

For those lucky souls who know nothing about the current options backdating scandal, please skip to the next post, because I’m not willing to bore you with the details.

I am, however, willing to bore you with this:

This morning’s WSJ contains an article entitled ”Cablevision Gave Backdated Grant To Dead Official“

Cablevision awarded options to a vice chairman after his 1999 death but backdated them to make it appear they were awarded when he was still alive. Cablevision restated its results as an options probe escalated.

I’m trying to picture the response from the PR person at Cablevision.  Something like, say, ‘Oh, don’t worry - they were way out of the money, since we didn’t figure he’d complain’ or ‘We spoke with his lawyer and were informed “No, no, ‘e’s uh,...he’s resting.“‘

Yes, this scandal has officially become Pythonesque.


Posted by Patton on 09/22/06 at 03:06 AM
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Monday, September 11, 2006

It’s the 419

EntertainmentFilthy Lucre

Episode One, In which our hero taunts and humiliates the villain, and discovers that not all Nigerian widows are lying.


Posted by Buckethead on 09/11/06 at 06:44 PM
Entertainment • Filthy Lucre • Permalink

Monday, August 14, 2006

Blogging as a money making venture

Filthy Lucre

Selectively true at best, I’m sure. 

But some allegedly smart money seems to think so:

HuffingtonPost.com – New York, NY; a provider of a left leaning political news and blogging site; $5 million; Series A; Greycroft Partners, Individuals, Softbank Capital Partners.

Go “Zsa Zsa”!  Or would “Eva” be the more apt analogy? (I don’t remember Magda well enough to know whether the caricature is still fitting)


Posted by Patton on 08/14/06 at 04:53 PM
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Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Tuesday’s Heavy Thought

Filthy Lucre

I’ve been doing some number crunching and the results are...discouraging.

I’ve looked at my current debt load and played it against potential earnings.  I’ve used historic earnings data, leavened with broader industry trends, as the core of my prediction models.  Then, not feeling quite down enough, I put all that against actuarial data: height and weight, lifestyle, hobbies, career, etc etc. 

I have determined that, barring some sort of ridiculous and unforeseeable windfall (and knowing that there’s no real-life equivalent of a “Community Chest” card coming my way), I will not live to see the day I’m out of debt.  From now until the day I die, I will be servicing debt.  Sure everyone has their own financial woe and worry to contend with.  I get that.  But I never put things in quite this perspective before, that I’ll be dead before I’m free. 

It’s sobering.  It’s heavy.  It’s Tuesday. 

And it’s Tuesday’s Heavy Thought.


Posted by GeekLethal on 07/25/06 at 09:07 AM
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Monday, July 10, 2006

Scumbags under the microscope

Filthy LucreUnmitigated Gall

Take a look inside the world of spyware.  Those fuckers cost me at least thirty hours of my life over the last month.


Posted by Buckethead on 07/10/06 at 04:04 PM
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Thursday, July 06, 2006

Ken Lay takes easy way out

Filthy LucreLead Pipe Cruelty

Clearly worried about becoming someone’s bitch, convicted Enron founder Ken Lay decided to die to avoid prison.  Perhaps we will see nigerian email scam letters from Mrs. Lay in the near future.

[Wik] Geeklethal reminds me that that’s “Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.”


Posted by Buckethead on 07/06/06 at 12:44 PM
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Friday, June 30, 2006

Behind the badge, does the heart of a revenuer beat?

Filthy Lucre

A long time ago, I studied the monetary and cultural cost of certain aspects of the Imperial-era British penal system.  I learned alot about how graft, social forces, governmental pressure, and random circumstance can shape not only the process of the justice system, but its punishment as well.  And it didn’t stop there.  Oh, no.  European legal thought and tradition are fundamental in many ways to our own, even as late as the development of our penitentiary system.  And while I answered the questions I set out to adequately, I would have liked to take the work deeper.  Perhaps, in the best tradition of scholars past, I ended my work feeling like I had posed still more questions, and opened doors on lines of inquiry I could pursue to make a lasting contribution to my wallet.  Daah, my field.  Lasting contribution to my field. 

One topic that I wish I had thought of then but is on my mind lately is: what did cops do before there were drivers to ticket?

Seriously.

Because, over time, the police have become a guaranteed revenue stream into their city and state.  An awful lot of them appear to be running radar; in certain regions of my domain, ensuring the safety of the larger commonweal one ticket at a time is the apparent raison detre of the State Police.  Yes, they have other missions- they are the 911 for remote areas of the state; they have a kick-ass crime lab; they have really cool dogs- but really, they’re primary mission seems to be to write tickets.  I don’t know the percentages of how many officers are out pulling people over, as opposed to the total number of officers on duty, but by casual observation it seems somewhere in the neighborhood of all of them.

So as a historically-minded cat, I have to ask myself how long that’s been going on.  Does the growth of the police force mirror the growth of the population, or more closely the growth of car ownership (if indeed the two are even distinguishable)?  What was the pre-automobile analogue of police-generated revenue?  Was pre-industrial society safer, since more police ought to have been available to fight crime?  When did we decide it was ok for agents of the state to generate income for the government?

And no, I didn’t recently get a ticket- I actually drive like an old lady.  Well, an old lady who knows where she’s going and how to drive.  But in my daily travels I see folks bagged by the state cops hand over fist, and just have to ask whether that’s really the best use of their time for the mission of maintaining peace and order for the citizenry, or the best use of their time for a rapacious state government?



Posted by GeekLethal on 06/30/06 at 04:44 PM
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Here’s one for Mapgirl

Filthy Lucre

Mapgirl is on a quest to become more frugal, save lots of money, learn about finance and take over the world.  To help her (and any other frugal wannabes amongst our readership) become more frugal, I offer this tutorial on dumpster diving. 

[Wik] Added note for Mapgirl: knit sweaters are not appropriate for dumpster diving.  Nor are open-toed sandals.  Dive away!


Posted by Buckethead on 06/30/06 at 04:02 PM
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Sunday, June 11, 2006

¡Venceremos! ¡Venceremos! ¡Mexico, Mexico, ra ra ra!

Crazy ForeignersFilthy Lucre

I love cable television. I love that we live in the future.

I am about to watch a world cup soccer match between Mexico and Iran. There are a dismayingly large number of people in America today willing to believe that the populace of one of these nations is conspiring to overrun us and tekurjobs, and the other is full of people all working in concert to make New York into a glowing crater.

Both those assertions are, of course, bullshit. Bigotry and economic illiteracy aside, the United States does need to get a handle on all the people who want to come to this country, but not by sealing the borders tight. And surely there are many nuclear engineers in Iran working on things that mean bad news for us. But the main body of the populace of each of these countries are just people like people everywhere.

Right now, as I watch the Mexican announcers on Univision flip out as Mexico prepares for its opening match against Iran, all I can see is a bunch of people really happy to be from where they’re from, and ready to pin their national pride on a silly game. Some of you may know that I spent some time in Guanajuato as a teenager, and really dig Mexico as a nation, as a people, and as a state of mind.

I love that I can watch Mexican world cup action in Spanish, get the flavor of their fanaticism, soak in the love of the game, and launch myself off the couch screaming “GOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL! GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAL!” in support of my peeps to the South.  And given that the USA is hard pressed to make it out of the first round in a group that’s absolutely stacked with talent including a juggernaut of a Czech team and the Italians and Ghana besides, I might as well go ahead and throw my Cup support behind nuestros vecinos del sud.

¡Luchemos! ¡Luchemos! ¡Vencermos! And similar sentiments!

[Wik] Advertisements for Nexium (the purple pill) are just as silly in Spanish.

[Alsø wik] Latin American soap operas are priceless entertainment.

[Alsø alsø wik] Mariachi music is oddly compelling. Much like polka, which I find to be a balm to the hung-over mind, mariachi is somehow comforting yet energizing. I clearly have brain damage.

[Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Aside to Buckethead: you should know that I’ve started playing pickup soccer at lunchtime, hence my sudden interest in the game. I have realized that it’s as poetic as baseball and as exciting as football. The only drawback, the one thing that seems wrong to this American mind is this: no professional sporting event should ever end in a tie.

[See the løveli lakes...] Strikeouts, as Crash Davis said, might be fascist, but ties are socialist.

[The wøndërful telephøne system...] Unlike my esteemed coblogger Patton, I love our freedom. And I hate ties.

[And mäni interesting furry animals...] Patton likes ties, value-added taxes, international condom-size harmonization standards, national shoe production quotas, and Volvos.

[Including the majestik møøse...] Iran’s national anthem is quite lovely. I have no idea what the words are.

[A Møøse once bit my sister...] Evidently, the lyrics in English run

Upwards on the horizon rises the Eastern Sun,
The sight of the true Religion.
Bahman - the brilliance of our Faith.
Your message, O Imam, of independence and freedom
is imprinted on our souls.
O Martyrs! The time of your cries of pain rings in our ears.
Enduring, continuing, eternal,
The Islamic Republic of Iran.

So there you go.

[No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: “The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist”, “Fillings of Passion”, “The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"] Wait’ll you get a load of the lyrics to the Mexican anthem! Iran is all about submission to Allah and martyrs: Mexico’s is about fucking rivers of the blood of their enemies.

CHORUS:
Mexicans, when the war cry is heard,
Have sword and bridle ready.
Let the earth’s foundations tremble
At the loud cannon’s roar.

May the divine archangel crown your brow,
Oh fatherland, with an olive branch of peace,
For your eternal destiny has been written
In heaven by the finger of God.
But should a foreign enemy
Dare to profane your soil with his tread,
Know, beloved fatherland, that heaven gave you
A soldier in each of your sons.

CHORUS

War, war without truce against who would attempt
to blemish the honor of the fatherland!
War, war! The patriotic banners
saturate in waves of blood.
War, war! On the mount, in the vale
The terrifying cannon thunder
and the echoes nobly resound
to the cries of union! liberty!

CHORUS

Fatherland, before your children become unarmed
Beneath the yoke their necks in sway,
May your countryside be watered with blood,
On blood their feet trample.
And may your temples, palaces and towers
crumble in horrid crash,
and their ruins exist saying:
The fatherland was made of one thousand heroes here.

CHORUS

Fatherland, oh fatherland, your sons vow
To give their last breath on your altars,
If the trumpet with its warlike sound
Calls them to valiant battle.
For you, the garlands of olive,
For them, a glorious memory.
For you, the victory laurels,
For them, an honoured tomb.

CHORUS

So, I guess the lesson is, never date Mexico’s sister.


Posted by Johno on 06/11/06 at 12:30 PM
Crazy Foreigners • Filthy Lucre • Permalink

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Dear.  God.  In.  Heaven.

Filthy Lucre

From the Llamabutchers, just click through and play the video.

[Wik] While we’re on the subject of Llamavideos, they have another one as well.  While I am not generally speaking one for wishing others ill, I can’t help but admit to a funny feeling in the tummy when I contemplate the demise of Zarqawi.  Triumphalism is not a virtue, but in this case, I think not entirely a vice.  And the song picked for this one is not, for once, the odious Toby Keith.

[Alsø wik] In that same post, Steve makes the point that the next election will be dynamite, huge, when it comes to the common folk appropriating the expropriators.  The photoshopping of campaign ads was one of the happier things about the last election, and I think that re-edits and you tube will in fact play a significant (and highly amusing) role in ‘08.


Posted by Buckethead on 06/10/06 at 01:29 AM
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