The effect of petrol prices on vehicle mileage

Driving habits are slow to change. This is a great way to display the information conveyed in this graph by the NY Times:

  7:53pm  •  Current Affairs  •  Science & Technology  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Daily news roundup

• EU delivers a $957b rescue package – markets recover as probability of Greek default dissipates – EU finance ministers agree to provide $636b in lending to deteriorating economies, IMF prepared to give up to $321b separately, ECB reversed policy and is now buying govt bonds and corporate debt, US Fed will also provide liquidity (see below), as will the Bank of Japan – in response, Greek 10Y bonds plummet from 10.25% last Friday to 4.72% today, Euro rose above $1.30, CAC40 up 9.7%, DAX up 5.3%, Dow up 3.9%, gold down slightly, oil up slightly
• US Fed steps in to help EU with Greek credit woes – Bernanke opens up currency swap lines with the ECB to provide liquidity for the European money markets. Link
• Obama nominates Kagan as John Paul Stevens’ replacement on SCOTUS
• GS reveals its traders made a profit on every single trading day last quarter – Link
• Truth behind AT&T’s exclusivity agreement with Apple still as clear as mud – Link
• Israel finally admitted to OECD – Link
• Fannie Mae reported $13b Q1 loss – still hemorrhaging money
• Facebook hiring more lawyers – Timothy Muris, former FTC chairman reported to be a likely hire (ostensibly, to deal with FTC investigations) – they earlier hired Tim Sparapani, an ex-ACLU lawyer as director of public policy
• BRK reports Q1 results – revenue up from $23b to $32b, net earnings rose from –$1.4b to $3.8b.
• Macbook Air refresh rumored for tomorrow
• Harrods was sold by al-Fayed to Qatar Holding
• Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe… link
• Push for derivatives on movie box office grosses likely to be nixed – Cantor Exchange in limbo (looks to me like Hollywood is being short sighted again, "The real reason most of Hollywood is opposed to this development is unclear, but it is probably simply the age-old story of large, conservative institutions being averse to change"). Link

  7:26pm  •  Business & Finance  •  Current Affairs  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

500 kinds of soft drink

Galco’s Soda Pop Stop is a store in Los Angeles that stocks about 500 different kinds of soft drink (or soda or pop), mostly made with cane sugar and stored in glass bottles which don’t leak carbonation over time. It carries stuff like double colas, a Romanian cucumber soda, coffee soda, and a whole bunch of other goodies.

 
Sadly, the store is in LA and no where else.

  4:55pm  •  Food  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Facebook’s gradual relaxation of privacy, visualized

This is a great visual representation of how privacy settings have defaulted on Facebook over the last few years. If you set up your profile today, you have to curate your data a lot more.

And today:

  10:57am  •  Internet  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Daily news rundown

• Apple sued by Nokia over 5 patents – Apple of course counterclaimed – meanwhile, Nintendo, after a decline in profitability, identified Apple as a competitive threat, or "enemy of the future"
• iPad’s international release announced by Apple – May 28 in Australia, Canada, Japan and Western Europe; HK, Benelux, Mexico, NZ, Singapore, Austria in July – pricing is materially more expensive, apparently due to taxes (top-end model is GBP 699 vs USD 829) – iPad has reportedly sold out in US retail stores
• UK election results in a hung Parliament – here are their options now – people turned away at poll booths and vote counting went all through the night and the next morning in a mismanaged election
• Germans approved their portion of Greek bailout – 22.4b Euro over 3 years as part of 110b Euro package
• Zynga announced Zynga Live – a move towards a split with Facebook after Zynga complains about Facebook’s 30% cut of Facebook credits and negotiations begin to break down
• AIG announced $1.5b Q1 profit
• HCA files for $4.6b IPO – health care company was taken private in a $21b LBO in 2006 by Bain Cap, KKR, and MLGPE

  11:43pm  •  Business & Finance  •  Current Affairs  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Survivor 20.12

Spoilers after the jump.

» Continue reading whole article »

  11:01pm  •  TV  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Daily news rundown

• Conservatives lead UK elections, but punters think hung Parliament on the way – the Times has a live feed of BBC’s coverage of the election which is on right now (it’s currently 4am GMT!) – Seats: 226 Con / 169 Lab / 36 Soc Dem / 26 Others (need 326 to win, 457 seats out of 650 called). Link
• Freak wave of selling sees DJIA fall 550 points in 5 minutes, before rebounding to close the day down 3.21% (-349 pts) – DJIA was down around 1k pts at one point – AUD/USD fell 3c to 0.8780 – mostly caused by European jitters – Euro hammered, reached 14-month low of $1.28. Link. Some of it due to glitches and nerves – Accenture went from $40 to $0.01 for a couple minutes, P&G went from $60 to $39.37. Link 2. Update: looks like some glitch triggering a mass of automated trading programs. Link 3
• TechCrunch reports how web struggled to keep up with stockmarket volatility – people like to trumpet how quickly Tweets move info, but nothing moves and acts on info as fast as Wall St (or at least the trading programs that traders use). Link. News anchors also struggled to keep up with it. Link
• Peter Henning analyzes the three arms of litigation GS is potentially facing – SEC civil, criminal, shareholder derivative suits – also evaluates the desirability of obtaining a settlement. Link
• Blackstone, TPG and others in LBO talks with $11b-large Fidelity National – would be largest LBO since Blackstone bought Hilton for $25b almost 3 years ago – FN is a leading technology provider to banks
• ICANN switches on non-Latin TLDs – three new TLDs in Arabic script. Link
• Judge denies AP’s request to unseal affidavit used to obtain search warrant in the Gizmodo iPhone investigations – DA argued affidavit contained names of “two individuals of interest, whom police do not want to alert”

  9:04pm  •  Business & Finance  •  Current Affairs  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

The US legal job market still sucks

The Wall Street Journal reports on just how shit the legal job market is for grads in the US. Still.

The situation is so bleak that some students and industry experts are rethinking the value of a law degree, long considered a ticket to financial security. If students performed well, particularly at top-tier law schools, they could count on jobs at corporate firms where annual pay starts as high as $160,000 …

Students take on average law-school debt of about $100,000 and, given the job market, many “have no foreseeable way to pay that back,” he said.

Thomas Reddy, a second-year student at Brooklyn Law School, hasn’t landed a summer internship yet after sending resumes to more than 50 law firms. He is taking on about $70,000 of debt each year of the three-year program to earn his degree, but said he may be fortunate to make $80,000 a year in a lawyer job after graduating. “That is less than what I was making before I went to law school,” he said.

Ouch. The market was terrible last year when I was in school, but it doesn’t seem to have improved this year. It turns out that getting a law degree in the US can be a terrible investment. If you don’t get a job, it’s not even something you can sell. JDs from schools in the lower tiers are comparable in cost to T-14 JDs, yet the probability of employment at graduation is substantially less. Is it really worth it?

  7:32pm  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Daily news rundown

• The UK goes to the polls tomorrow – general election being contested between the Tories, Labour, and Lib Dems, but none of these parties are expected to get a majority of seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, leading to a hung Parliament. A coalition will need to be formed to break the deadlock. Hung Parliament makes it difficult to pass legislation at a time the country faces a $250b budget deficit
• Singaporean shipbuilder New Century cancels $3.84bn IPO – reportedly because the Singapore stock exchange received a complaint that a lawsuit against NC wasn’t mentioned in the prospectus. Link
• Stack Overflow raised $6m from VCs – including Union Square Ventures
• Supreme Court Nominees list narrowed to 4: Kagan (Sol-Gen), Woods (7th Cir), Garland (DC) & Thomas (9th) – Kagan is the odds-on favourite, but ATL thinks Woods is the front-runner for a variety of compelling reasons. The two men are probably out of the running
• Fitch downgrades GS outlook from stable to negative – citing litigation issues. Rating remains at A+, but may slip if criminal indictment occurs (unlikely). S&P and Moody’s already have GS’ outlook at negative. GS closed the day down 0.84% at 148.19
• Groupon opens Silicon Valley office – Chicago-based daily deals company was valued at $250m last December and, after funding from DST, was valued at $1.35b – 2010 revenue on a $350m runrate (although I question the usefulness of revenue without also knowing their margin)
• Picasso sold for $106.5m at auction – record price for an auctioned artwork – buyer was anonymous, but speculation it was a hedge fund owner. Link

Bonus links

• How Greece got the Euro
• Greece CDSes priced at 726bps – versus Norway at 16bps. Canada apparently doesn’t have a market for CDSes on its debt

  8:47pm  •  Business & Finance  •  Current Affairs  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Stephen Hawking on how to build a time machine

Hawkin has written a very accessible article on two ways to time travel (but only into the future, not the past):

To approach the speed of light means circling the Earth pretty fast. Seven times a second. But no matter how much power the train has, it can never quite reach the speed of light, since the laws of physics forbid it. Instead, let’s say it gets close, just shy of that ultimate speed. Now something extraordinary happens. Time starts flowing slowly on board relative to the rest of the world, just like near the black hole, only more so. Everything on the train is in slow motion.

This happens to protect the speed limit, and it’s not hard to see why. Imagine a child running forwards up the train. Her forward speed is added to the speed of the train, so couldn’t she break the speed limit simply by accident? The answer is no. The laws of nature prevent the possibility by slowing down time onboard.

  7:58pm  •  Science & Technology  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Transactional attorneys as coders

Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s GC, has a post on what makes a transactional attorney’s job difficult. Glad I’m not the only one who has compared drafting contracts to writing code (people look at me funny when I draw that analogy). Law is, after all, codified in “codes”.

There is a lot of joy in making a deal work and thinking of creative solutions to disagreements but the job is also VERY tough. To put it in computer terms, imagine the contract as a computer program. In each the object is to be able to interpret the words and have that interpretation drive a result. Now imagine that there is no compiler for your program and that you can’t run any tests. All debugging must be done only theoretically and in your head. Imagine that you are coding with another person that is likely to be trying to develop a program that does something significantly different from what you want it to do. You and the other programmer may have different time constraints and, even though you are trying to do different things, you have to be on good terms with the other person because she could just as easily decide to stop working on your project. You and the other person take turns editing the code but without a common coding environment or standard tools to figure out whether the other person (or you) goofed it up. Then imagine that the code you are writing has a high probability of only ever being “run” through two different interpreters with significantly conflicting points of view about desirable outcomes and you likely won’t get to see the result of any of these “runs.” Or you may be asked to interpret the code in light of complete changes in context. Include a small chance that your code will be “run” by a relatively unbiased interpreter but the outcome of that one interpretation will be at extremely high stakes, often millions of dollars. Finally, know that you will likely get little credit for writing good code but will be crucified if the one time your code is run it doesn’t work flawlessly. Now you are beginning to understand how hard the job of a good transactional attorney is.

I can safely bet that those developers across the room from me don’t think of me as writing code when I’m hammering out a licensing contract…

Microsoft Word is my IDE. We have spell check, which is our rudimentary syntax checker, but no automatic semantic analysis tools, no way of test running it through an interpreter to pick up runtime errors. And no instant gratification from hitting the “run” button and watching it just work. (But it is pretty nice putting pen to paper and signing an agreement. Incidentally, we also call it “executing” an agreement… in much the same way that .exe files are compiled, executable files.)

  11:12pm  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (1)  •