MyATMPinIs1234

The statistics are out, and yet another industry has been devastated by the rise in gasoline prices. You don't hear about them often, because of press indifference and their poor public relations, but the arson business is off 9.7% last year. This plus the rise in food prices is a double whammy for arsonists trying to feed their families.

You've probably all read about the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo. A lot of ink has been spilled talking about it, but I still don't know what to think. I did recently post about a favorite saying of mine, "never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence," but this deal is really testing that saying. Can Microsoft really be that incompetent? Do they really want to exchange $44 billion for the site I use to check the weather forecast?

If they really do want Yahoo, why not wait until a few quarters of the coming ad recession crushes Yahoo stock before making the offer?

According to PwC MoneyTree, in 2007 there were 1245 venture capital investments in the software and media/entertainment sectors totaling $7.1 billion. So for 1/6 the price of Yahoo, they could (in theory) own a good portion of every startup financed in the past year (but not in practice). Or they could purchase all of the goods and services produced by Ecuador for an entire year.

I really hope Microsoft has some kind of evil plan to keep Yahoo paralyzed by a fake offer. Although it would also be funny if Ballmer was a student of the "Gerald Levin School of Purchasing Balance Sheet Goodwill."

Most of the time spent at a knowledge worker job is spent on two things -- communication and the creation of work product. Each task you do requires a different level of synchronization and location dependence. For example, a meeting must be synchronous and is location dependent (the participants must be at the same time and location). On the other hand, answering emails can be done asynchronously and from any location.

The problem with most companies is that they enforce 8 hours of synchronous, fixed-location work, while most of the tasks do not require both of those things. This leads to a huge amount of inefficiency, which can be seen by voluminous email forwards and links I get from my friends who are clearly spending large swaths of the day not working.

A better solution to making your employees sit in a fixed location for a fixed period each day would be to identify the activities actually require that, and schedule them appropriately. This would basically be meetings, which could be scheduled for three weekday mornings.

Other events, such as conference calls, can be scheduled, but you would be able to dial in from any location (such as the OTB phone booth). And tasks that don't require presence or scheduling, such as emails, document creation, programming, or filing out TPS reports could be completed by the workers at the time and location of their choosing, while meeting defined deadlines.

Under this system, I believe most people could get their jobs done in 2-3 hours a day, while producing the same amount of output. The firm that implemented this would have happier employees, and thus would either get the best employees or be able to pay them less, either way enjoying an advantage in the market.

The downside, is that this system requires bosses to switch from judging the workers' inputs (how late they stay fixing their fuckups and jerking around), to judging their output, which is way more difficult.

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Table 1: Boss's Opinion of Worker Productivity vs. Separation Distance

10 Ft (you're neighbors) = GOOD
1000 Ft (you're on different floors, still almost never meet in person) = GOOD
10 Miles (you're at home/starbucks/bowling alley) = HORRIBLE
1000 Miles (you're at a branch office) = GOOD
10000 Miles (you're in India) = GOOD

My opinion on the matter of politics, should perhaps be discounted, due to the fact that there is one politician right now with whom I agree on almost everything, but for whom I can't vote for president, because of an obscure constitutional problem. So I'm clearly in a small minority, but here's my breakdown of the current crop of candidates.

McCain:
Named sponsor of a bill that shat on the Constitution. Voted against Bush tax cuts. This is not someone I can get behind. Sorry.

Hilary Klinton:
There is a saying, that you should never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. The problem is that Hilary is obviously extremely smart, so I can only conclude that she is actively trying to ruin America. She is against free trade, for higher taxes, and is downright gleeful on the prospect of us losing wars. She might be an agent of the CHICOMS.

Phi Slama Obama:
I thought I liked the original version with Clyde Drexler, who was amazing. The new version is amazing in his own way. One of his problems, is that he is usually saying things that he really believes, which is not a successful tactic for a politician.

Also, I've always thought that we have enough laws on the books in this country. The tax code alone has 3.4 million words. In my opinion, the best possible political candidate would pledge to veto everything that comes across his desk, and keep those lunatics in Congress from screwing things up even more.

So when Obama talks about "change" it scares me. Change implies passing many new laws. New laws have unintended consequences and second order effects that are usually much worse than the problem they aim to fix.

I have a dilemma. Should I vote for the man who is the opposite of what I want in a candidate? Or the woman who is almost as bad, but also hates America? Or the senile candidate who loves America but is a terrible legislator?

The Comment Layup Post

Why is it I always see girls at my gym using the hip adduction machine? They must really love their boyfriends, because I can't think of any other reason to use that machine. If their goal is burning calories or getting toned (whatever that means), does anyone think exercising a muscle this size does either of those things?

The way most girls at my gym train, they might as well just come to the gym and read a book for a half hour and then go home. Because as long as they're not doing anything physically useful, they might as well learn something.

Experiment

Next time someone at work asks you if you are going to the meeting, or sends you a meeting invite, reply with:

"I can't make it. Can you just send me the podcast?"

Post the results to comments.

Caption: Must....earn....degree.

Alt Caption: Why advertising is a ridiculously easy job.

I have recently been doing some research on venture capital and technology startups, and I noticed something curious. Some companies do not, anywhere on their site, say where they are located. Contact page? Just some email addresses, or a dreaded form. Company info page? Bupkiss. Jobs page? "We are growing rapidly and looking for great employees. Here are some job descriptions." That's great, but before applying, shouldn't candidates know if they even live in the right city? Even the DNS Whois records for the site are inconclusive.

I know all about this company's $6M Series B financing, but I can't for the life of me figure out where they are.

And in case you're wondering why this post is lame, I had a 3000 word manifesto queued up about Hilary Klinton, but decided this blog was becoming too political.

Tax Day

It's tax day, and once again this year I didn't keep good records to be able to write off my *cough* unreimbursed business dinners. So now I'm going to have to just randomly write off every 3 dinners and cross my fingers. I don't want to be in the same position next year, so I've developed this "life-hack" that hopefully will be easy to follow all year. I don't plan on filing a business process patent on this, so go ahead and use it.

Prerequisites: Blackberry or other smartphone, Gmail account (hosted gmail works too).

Step 1: Create an entry in your smartphone address book called "business dinner." Make the email address "youremail+bizdinner@gmail.com." Gmail will ignore anything after a plus sign in the first part of an email address and deliver it normally.

Step 2: Create Gmail filter on all emails where the TO: is "youremail+bizdinner@gmail.com." Apply a label to it (bizdinner) and have it skip the inbox (archive).

That's it. When you're paying the check, send an email to that address from your berry with the restaurant name and who you're eating with. At the end of the year you can click on the label in gmail and get an automatic list of all your business dinners.

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm obsessed with global warming.

Today, even Paul Krugman announced that ethanol fuel is a terrible mistake. Apparently, Time magazine (which still exists, believe it or not), called ethanol a scam.

That's the bad news. The good news is, that is the only mistake we've made. All the rest of our understandings on the matter are perfect, so we can go ahead and spend a couple trillion dollars now. Especially now that we're at the perfect temperature.

There exists a blog that is a fairly good match for my sense of humor and things I find interesting. It gives me a good chuckle a few times a week. Unfortunately, it's a pain in the ass to write it.

Ticketmaster Extortion

Full Ticket Price: $37.50
Convenience Charge: $5.85
Order Processing Fee: $2.50

Plus, the important $2.50 fee for allowing you to print the ticket at home on your own printer. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? $10.85 of fees in 2008 because you have a website to sell tickets?

Now I don't want to tell Judge Mike Mukasey how to do his job, but here's how he should do his job. He needs to get old Tom Barnett over at Antitrust on the horn, and tell him to take down Barry Diller's pants and redden his bottom. And not in the way he likes.

I saw Al Gore on 60 Minutes recently. He stated that people who don't believe global warming are like those who believe the moon landing was staged in a studio, or that the Earth is flat. I'm not sure how Gore's expertise in being a sore loser, or in powerpoint, translate to weather prognostication, but I don't want to be a Luddite, so I'm going to accept his claim that the temperature of the Earth increasing is something to be avoided at all costs (and I do mean, all costs).

Of course, not too long ago when many of these scientists thought the Earth was cooling, this was also seen as a calamity. Crop yields would decline -- starving millions, lower temperatures would kill off many species, and Greenland would expand, become influential, and probably demand a seat on the UN Security Council.

So I would like to congratulate everyone for living at a time when the Earth is at the EXACT RIGHT TEMPERATURE. After millions of years of dramatic swings and changes in climate, we have finally zeroed in on the perfect environment. I urge everyone to enjoy it while it lasts though, because Al Gore tells me there is no upside to the additional .5 degrees we might experience in the next 75 years.

And for those of you in my readership who are in the investment community, now is the time to be long Hawaiian Tropic (sunscreen, zone, and calendar).

Alright, Hollywood! We get it... it's the 1990's... you guys are super progressive. Now can you stop making every fucking police lieutenant in a sitcom or drama a woman?!?

If my company had a person in charge of designing ways to hamper productivity, they could not do a better job than the way it is now. So I figure, if they don't care about productivity, why should I work hard? Here are some of the roadblocks:

1) I must present/swipe my ID badge 3 times by the time I get to my desk. I used to have to have my bag x-ray'd.

2) Half the elevators are broken. Elevator waiting time is usually around 5 mins.

3) They turned off Outlook auto-complete, yet all coworkers have extremely long and difficult to spell Indian and Russian names. Emailing a coworker is now an ordeal.

4) I still have a 17" CRT monitor. You can get a 24" LCD at Dell for $350, which at my hourly billing rate would be made up for in increased productivity the first week.

5) My computer is old, slow and poorly configured. Opening Firefox takes 2 minutes, I'm assuming because my profile is stored on some distant network drive.

6) In order to log in to the server to make a change, I have to first go to a website and fill out a request. This must be approved by my manager and sometimes by the business user. Afterwards I get a ticket number, which I can use to login.

7) But I can't log in directly. I have to go through a gateway, which gives me a list of all the servers and asks why I need access.

8) The list of servers is long, and they all have unintelligible alphanumeric names (would you like to log in to GBSSPANY01, GBSSPDAY02, SDFKJWER01, or SDFSEWSFD03)? I can never remember which one is production, QA, development, or one of the many databases. Every other company gives the servers an easy to remember alias according to some theme.

9) Once I am in, the location of our files differs for each server. On Dev is in /home1, in QA it's in /home5, in production it's in /home7. I can never remember which directory to go to for the changes.

10) Logging in from home requires three passwords, a PIN, a secureID, and remembering my work desktop computer name (fwfunyw421532). And then it allows me to remotely use my work desktop over the internet, which is extremely slow and almost unusable. Because of this I do not check my email from home.

11) There are 10 people within 20 feet of me, normally having loud conversations with each other. As soon as I get some concentration going, someone inevitably comes over to talk about some funny YouTube video.

12) Everyone in the group is CC'd on every email. Many of them are automated batch emails, saying THERE IS NO PROBLEM. Why do I need an email when there is no problem? I now get almost 1000 emails a day, of which 10 are relevant to me. So now I have an inbox rule that automatically deletes anything that was not sent specifically to me, which means I am the last to know when someone brought in cookies.

That's all I can think of right now, but I'm sure there are many more. I haven't even gotten to meetings. The impressive thing is that most of these things are relatively easy and inexpensive to remedy.

I'm not usually big on conspiracy theories, but part of me thinks these things are put in place, because if they were fixed we could get our work done quickly and then have nothing to do, and the bosses don't want to lose headcount in their little empires. And clearly, Mike Oxley and Paul Sarbannes are agents of the CHICOMS.

"The median price for Manhattan homes rose 13%, to $945,276, in the first quarter, according to Miller Samuel. Halstead said the price increase was partly driven by sales at the ultrahigh end of the market, including two homes that sold for more than $40 million each."

I'm trying to figure out how two big sales increases the median.

Did you have fun in college? Of course you did. It was awesome.

But wait, didn't you live in a tiny room and eat ramen and pizza for every meal? How were you happy without a big fancy house and expensive sushi dinners?

The saddest part about this sub-prime/mortgage crises is that EVERYONE has convinced themselves that having a McMansion is not only their right, but is a pre-condition for being content.

In the 1950's when average house sizes were 2000 sq ft, were people thinking to themselves that they needed an extra 1500 sq ft and a 3 car garage? No, they were happy, and studies have proven that despite how it appears today, people in the 1950's were not stupid.

Because your "happiness function," which henceforth we will call f(h), reveals that once you have some type of roof over your head, the size of your shelter suffers from rapidly declining marginal value. Think about the difference between a 5 bedroom house and a 6 bedroom house. It's basically just one more room to heat, cool, and keep clean.

So people waste their lives in jobs they hate, locked-in by mountains of debt, in order to pay for something that, from our examples of college students and people in the 1950's, we strongly suspect has minimal impact on f(h).

But here we encounter a problem in the analysis. Having a large, expensive house, affordable only by financial gymnastics and a soup of acronyms such as ARM, PIM, MBS, CDO, etc., effects other variables in f(h) negatively. Namely, reduced leisure time from the working to afford it, and increased stress levels from always being close to insolvency.

f(h) = Utility(House Size) - (Work Effort + Stress Level)

It does not make sense to buy large houses. The small increase in utility is swamped by the negative impact of the second two variables. But with the average house size steadily increasing over time, and assuming we are rational economic agents, clearly the formula above is incomplete to describe the situation. We must adjust the function thusly:

f(h) = Utility(House Size) + Pride(House Size) - (Work Effort + Stress Level)

It now makes sense. People are willing to forgo vacations, delay retirement, and spend less time with family and friends because of Pride, the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins. Pride is the desire to be more important or attractive than others, which is exactly the point of buying an expensive and fancy house.

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't aim high and strive, but you should do so for the right reasons, because you love what you do, not because you want to be able to afford something. Because when it comes down to it, time is the only resource that matters. It's limited and declining, and trading it for something you don't need because of your pride is... bad.