This is brutal, but superb:
…as is her partner’s lack of sympathy:
“I have the worst headache ever.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Ok, so what do we do now?”
“You have to finish.”
“What?! I can’t even see straight!”
Looking forward to the next season of TAR starting up.
A former Goldman Sachs quant recounts his days at the firm and compares it with his current job as a startup founder in a post entitled Why founding a three-person startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs.
To cite a particularly grotesque example, once a year, one of the partners would buy a pallet of White Castle burgers and first-year analysts and associates would have a burger-eating competition (with some nominal amount donated to charity). All trading on the Goldman Sachs trading floor would stop as every man on the floor would gather ’round to watch the plebes stuff themselves.
Trading turned from interest-rate swaps (minimal notional size: $50MM) to the over/under on the burger count for a particular analyst. Occasionally, one poor schmuck would puke, and the partner would rush to catch it with a plastic trash bin.
stuloh Almost a year into my New Yorker subscription and I finally found an issue where there are more than 2 articles that I found interesting.
In fine form as usual, Michael Lewis writes in Vanity Fair about the Greek sovereign debt crisis.
The long-term picture was far bleaker. In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he’d returned from the I.M.F.’s first Greek mission. “The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn’t even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.” …
Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.
Lewis this time takes us through the journey by drilling down into a monastery of monks which have been pinned down as the catalyst for exposing the sordid state of Greece’s finances, and ends up painting a picture of the Greek government and its citizens as Absolutely Dodgy.
There is a tradition each year at the U.S. Masters golf tournament. During the practice rounds at the 16th hole, the golfers will hit a ball over the lake that guards the entire approach to the green, some 170 yards away. They may then play a second ball by skipping it across the lake, and hopefully onto the green. This has turned out to be somewhat of a spectacle for crowds.
Floyd went first, taking out a long iron to hit a low stinger. It skimmed the lake once, bounced into the rough and got onto the putting surface to a roar from the crowd. Next up was Campbell, who skipped it a few times but didn’t get enough oomph behind it. The ball ended up in the lake. Last was Wetterich, who failed to even touch the lake, hitting a screamer straight into the green and bouncing it over the back. Wetterich then received a smattering of boos from the playful crowd.
In the 2009 Masters tourney, Vijay Singh’s skip shot memorably bounced across the lake and then…
Daily Mail journo Dominic Lawson lost his passport and his boarding pass in Amsterdam, and still managed to catch a flight back to London without having to spend an extra night in Schipol.
But the Dutchwoman at the BA counter was all smiles and sympathy, and called the representative of the UK Border Agency.
Most unusually, there is such a person permanently based at Schiphol; in other countries, one would have to travel to the British consulate, which in the Netherlands would have meant a trip to The Hague, and – it was already evening – goodbye to any chance of leaving that day.
Fortunately, I was able to give the man from the UK Border Agency the number of my missing passport, which he fed into his computer, and after asking various questions to test my knowledge of my own claimed identity, he told me he was prepared to escort me through passport control.
Everything turned out better than expected. But I dare you to try that anywhere in the US.
As the new batch of international students arrive for another academic year here, one common issue they have is coming to terms with tipping. This is an issue that causes actual, real stress: How much do you give? When do you give it? How do you give it? Failure to get it right can earn you an angry reprimand – something which is unheard of in most parts of the world. Ignorance is a poor defense.
Mint has an interesting comparison of tipping practices throughout the world. Even in places where tipping is a known practice, it seems that it rarely is an expectation (outside of restaurants).
Australia’s not quite so unaccustomed to the art of gratuity, but it’s still a far cry from the States. “Tipping’s not necessary because minimum wage there is a lot higher than it is in the U.S.,” says Bryan Silverman, a Californian who lived in Australia for the past two years. “Usually people just round up to the nearest five-dollar on the bill.”
Mint has also written another post on whether you should tip for bad service.
After two years here, I’m still not 100% used to tipping. When I was in NY at a restaurant earlier in the year, a server offered to put the duffel bag I was carrying off to the side. When I left the restaurant, I asked for my bag back, took it, and walked off, while the friend I was with turned around and whispered to me, “Hey, did you tip the guy?” A brief but sharp wave of dread swept over me. It hadn’t occurred to me at all.
The Ninth Circuit just ruled that, if a software license has the right clause, software is licensed rather than sold, even when you buy it in a box on physical media. This means you can’t onsell the product because you don’t actually own anything. (Unlike books, where the copyright first sale doctrine protects buyers against getting sued for selling their used book.) This might also mean that it’s illegal for companies like GameStop to run their used computer game selling business.
The case is Vernor v. Autodesk, and it involves Timothy Vernor, who bought four copies of Autodesk AutoCAD at a garage sale and then tried to resell them on eBay. Autodesk threatened to sue Vernor for copyright infringement. Vernor instead filed a suit asking the court to clarify his right to resell the software.
The EFF comments:
But the potential effects of this decision don’t stop there: it risks creating a situation in which violating contracts and end-user license agreements (EULAs) could result in a copyright infringement lawsuit (with the heavy club of statutory damages, attorneys fees and low standards for injunctions) rather than just a simple breach of contract claim.
We understand Mr. Vernor may seek en banc review of this decision, which means the entire court will hear the case and could reverse this dangerous ruling. We hope that the court agrees to review the case and treats it as an opportunity to put consumer rights and expectations ahead of the overreaching demands of software vendors.
Hot on the heels of YouTube Instant, comes:
These are not all practical, but they’re fun.
The Economist reports that college tuition fees are rising, while student diligence, and other indicia of quality, are falling.
The most plausible explanation is that professors are not particularly interested in students’ welfare. Promotion and tenure depend on published research, not good teaching. Professors strike an implicit bargain with their students: we will give you light workloads and inflated grades so long as you leave us alone to do our research. Mr Hacker and Ms Dreifus point out that senior professors in Ivy League universities now get sabbaticals every third year rather than every seventh. This year 20 of Harvard’s 48 history professors will be on leave.
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(0) stuloh You'd think it's just a matter of time before Apple changes iTunes' name, since it handles other media. Not today though. Just the icon.
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