Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance

Nouriel Roubini 100% in equities

2009-03-16T17:05:14Z

The most valuable 10 sentences you will read during the entire recession:

Again, this is not necessarily so. Just ask Nouriel Roubini of New York University, who has a reputation as the most pessimistic economist in academe. He deserves it. His most recent paper, published last week, is entitled: “Can the Fed and Policy Makers Avoid a Systemic Financial Meltdown? Most Likely Not.”

Nobody is more aware of the gravity of the financial situation, and nobody has done more to point out the risks of a systemic crisis.

So how are Roubini’s own funds invested? They are 100 per cent in equities. In the long run stocks do best and he is not yet close to retirement, so he keeps putting more money into index funds each month.

Fully aware of the gravity of the financial situation, he is also aware of the futility of trying to take action or to time the market. Those tempted to make the investing equivalent of a goalkeeper’s depairing dive should take note.

from here

foursquare launch day!

2009-03-13T17:09:16Z

Foursquare launched today! The website is here. You can get the iPhone app here.

Check it out!

Last Night in Dodge

2009-03-06T16:06:07Z

End of an era. We're gonna do it up right tonight though. I hope to see all you NYCers there.

A dodgeball eulogy

2009-01-15T23:15:34Z

A dodgeball eulogy from my friend Caroline. It's kind of NYC biased (she lives here!), so it's maybe not perfect, but it still made me tear up a little (and I don't do that sort of thing!).

notes on dodgeball.com

2009-01-15T18:58:10Z

Ya, so I found out from the same blog post as the rest of you. I would have thought that someone would have told me internally first, but I guess not. In fact, I was denying the whole thing at Lock's birthday party last night because it didn't make any sense. I guess I was wrong. It's been fun keeping the lights on these past couple years for you guys, and I'm disappointed that my corporate masters have decided it's no longer worth the bother. Oh well.

Anyways, I don't know yet what "We will communicate the exact time-frame shortly" means yet, but when we figure that out I'll put a note of some kind up on the dodgeball homepage. In addition, for those of you that care about this sort of thing, I'm going to do some work to make it easy to export your checkin history in a convenient format (above and beyond the iCal that is already available). If you have any particular formats you might want it in, feel free to leave a comment here and I'll see what I can do. Chances are it'll be a gdata feed of some kind.

Don't fret too much about not having a tool like this to use when dodgeball gets turned off. Like you, I'm pretty unimpressed with most of the other current offerings, but I know of a couple soon-to-be-released things in the works. Keep an eye out, and we'll all find a new home that suits our needs just fine.

Rickey Henderson in HOF

2009-01-12T19:40:56Z

Rickey Henderson was just elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame! He was my favorite player growing up, and somewhere in my parents house is a box with something like 250 different Rickey Henderson baseball cards as well as stacks and stacks of various memorabilia (Oakland Tribune from the day he broke the career stolen base record!). I'm not nearly the baseball fan I use to be, but this is still pretty exciting. The induction ceremony is July 26th this summer, and since I've never been to Cooperstown, I think I'll probably make the trip.

Books

2008-12-01T19:43:40Z

I read Bringing Down The House this weekend. It was awful and full of lies. I'm not sure why I wasted my time. Probably because reading it required no brainpower. I'm also a hundred pages into 2666 which is a lot better, but requires more concentration. I wish I had an English Professor on call that I could get to explain certain things to me like, why does Bolaño occasionally have sentences go on for pages wandering from topic to topic without a period to be seen. Clearly this was a conscious choice, but I don't understand what point he's making.

Challenged ballots: You be the judge

2008-11-21T17:57:49Z

When the vote gets close, this is how the sausage gets made.

I especially like the one with the Lizard People notation. Gotta wonder what that guy was thinking.

Bacon/Beer Tasting

2008-11-11T17:05:27Z

Went to a Bacon & Beer tasting at Jimmy's No 43 last night with Dens, Heather D, and some of her friends. It was pretty awesome. We had six kinds of bacon starting with plain old Oscar Meyer (the control bacon) and working our way through salty, sweet, porky, and ended with a Berkshire Pork Bacon from R.U.B.. There were also six kinds of artisanal beers my favorite of which was a chestnut beer from Italy which is, according to the guy who picked out the beers, the most exciting beer country in the world these days. Who knew? Dens, helpfully, took a picture of the menu with some notes he took.

Afterwards, since we were all salted up, a couple of us walked over to Hearth for some dessert and a nice glass of port to finish the evening.

The next tasting @ Jimmy's is a pickle tasting in early December. Not as exciting as bacon, but possibly worth going to?

Ross Douthat on the state of American Conservatism

2008-11-03T23:32:03Z

I have a half written blog post that I may or may not post tomorrow on my feelings about the current state of American politics. If I decide not to post it this blog post from Ross Douthat comes as close to my feelings as anything I've yet read.

Credit Crisis Summary

2008-10-01T19:52:00Z

Here is a particularly excellent overview of the credit crisis. It doesn't cover everything, but it covers a lot in a pretty easy to understand way.

Highly recommended.

McArdle on the bailout proposals

2008-09-24T19:29:02Z

A particularly excellent post from Megan McArdle on the bailout proposals.

I feel bad for the homeowners, and outraged that so many people got gigantic sums of money for screwing up the financial system. But that money's gone. The mortgage bankers have already mostly lost their jobs, because their market (and often their firm) collapsed. Much of the outrageous compensation was in now worthless (or nearly worthless) company stock. And even if we dun, say, the top executives at Bear, Lehman, and AIG (I'm not opposed to doing so if it's legal), we will get only a trivial fraction of the money lost in these markets. You know who made most of the money on the subprime bubble? Anyone who bought a house in the last ten years. Yes, that's right, you, with your low fixed interest rate on a reasonably sized house. You're the profiteer who laughed all the way to the bank.

All Tomorrow's Parties

2008-09-23T17:54:27Z

Went to ATP this past weekend. Saw many bands. Mercury Rev was (by far I thought) the highlight. MBV were somewhat disappointing (though really only due to very high expectations). Felt kinda the same way as I did after I saw the Pixies: ya, that was good, but they didn't blow me away or anything. Also I was just really tired of standing up at that point. Wish I had caught more of Spectrum as the bit I caught was really great. Steve Albini's Executive Poker Room was a totally fun and unexpected treat. Kutsher's was a blast from the past; 1962 preserved for your nostalgic pleasure.

Obama on Wall Street

2008-09-16T03:41:47Z

Keep in mind that every time the Obama campaign says something like this, they are basically saying that the Bush administration should have done something (thought it's not at all clear what exactly) about the fact that our financial institutions were loaning so much money to poor people so that they could purchase homes.

He can pander with the best of them.

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-14T02:18:32Z

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

From his commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. The full text is here.

Rangel Tries to Explain Back Taxes on Villa

2008-09-10T17:38:46Z


Every time I thought I was getting somewhere, they’d start speaking Spanish	Shhiiiiiieeeeeeeet

Huzzah, it is done!

2008-07-22T17:44:30Z

Check it out. We're still checking in some docs to the SVN repository, and there are undoubtedly little things to fix here and there, but GXP is now Open Sourced. There will be a blog post here tomorrow, and we're giving a talk as OSCON as well.

Bat Mat in Chicago! Bullshit!

2008-07-16T04:58:34Z

Hold on a minute. The new Batman movie was filmed in Chicago? Bullshit! Gotham is NOT Chicago.

This is so disappointing.

Thoughts on FISA

2008-07-10T15:49:54Z

So, as most of you are aware, the US Senate passed a bill yesterday that, among other things, gives the Telcos immunity against privacy lawsuits they are facing after they (possibly illegally) assisted the US gov't in various wiretapping schemes over the last couple of years. In particular, the liberal blogosphere is up in arms as the fact that Obama voted for the bill.

Really though, I'm not really clear on why some much of the outrage has been focused on the immunity provisions in the bill. Sure, complain all you want about the erosion of civil liberties in our post 9/11 world. I'm right there with you. But when the US gov't goes and tells the telcos to do something, and the US gov't has the ability to significantly harm the business of the companies should we really be getting mad at the telcos when they caved?

Maybe there's something I'm missing here, but shouldn't we be trying to change things by changing the gov't and not by being so focused on the right to sue the Telcos who were just doing what they were told?

Fire!

2008-07-03T16:35:59Z

Last night while walking down Christie St. some drunk (or otherwise fucked up guy) comes staggering out of a building and says "What do you do when someone fucks with you?" to me and some other guy on the street. Other random guys says "You fuck with him back!" so the first guy walks across the street and sets some guys car on fire. We just kind of stare at it a minute in shock (it's burning pretty good. No idea how he did that) before calling 911. Two fire trucks show up in about 3 minutes and put it out. The guy who did it had disappeared at this point, so I figured my work was done and went on my way.

Crazy.

Ross Perot on the US Budget

2008-06-18T19:03:57Z

Ross Perot (I know! Crazy!) has a pretty good presentation on the budget difficulties that the US is likely to face over the next 75 years or so. Have a look, and celebrate our impending doom at the hands of old timers medical bills.

puzzle apartment

2008-06-12T17:17:25Z

This is one of the most amazing things ever:

Things are not as they seem in the 14th-floor apartment on upper Fifth Avenue. At first blush the family that occupies it looks to be very much of a type....But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough

Vacation!

2008-05-13T17:32:46Z

Just about to sign off the computer for good. Heading off to Spain & Morocco for 2.5 weeks. See you guys in June!

Support Jette for the LJ Advisory Board

2008-05-05T17:41:51Z

Go here and help nominate jette for the LJ advisory board. She is an awesome woman and would do a great job.

ATP

2008-04-25T14:26:23Z

alicetiara and I got tix! Didn't get in fast enough to get a room though (I guess the 3 person rooms went quickest), so we've got no place to stay yet. If anyone is looking for extra bodies to fill up a room, let me know. Otherwise it's time to investigate hotel options in the Catskills.

w00t!

Edit: At least for the moment, I've got a room booked at the Super 8 in Monticello. Wonder how trashy it will be? <5 miles from the festival though.