Another Drunk Driving DEATH. Pretty awesome (and by pretty awesome I mean really douchey).

If I've said it once on this blog I've said it literally 10 times. STOP DRINKING AND DRIVING. Someone's dead because you decided not to get a cab or ask a girlfriend for a ride home. Tragic

Strib story here.

The following statement is wholly absurd on its face...wholly.

"The Rev. Edwin Findley, acting as spokesman for the family that owns the dogs, says both families have been hurt."

Seriously, I don't want to say anymore. Just click through the link for context.

Utterly and ridiculously absurd comment in context here.

This is not a good thing.

I was all set to write about the Iranian election and the importance of winning versus symbolic showing (think US Presidential Election circa 2008 or 2000 or 1960), then I read Taibblog's entry on CCB denominating loans in yuan instead of dollars. This is a problem. If countries begin denominating intl loans in the yuan, yen or euro in any material uptick the dollar could be in serious trouble. The demand for countries to purchase our dollars to hold in reserve or to pay back intl loans in whatever currency is what keeps the greenback strong. Should that interest wane the dollar becomes less demanded and more weak, again not good.

I guess the only thing that has kept this from happening en masse is the political stability and economic power (current environ kinda excluded) of the US still trumps other industrialized states. If I'm Brazil and I need a $100M line of credit to necessitate oil development do I want to be responsible for paying that back in yuan, when the Chinese govt, on a whim (or a coup), can materially affect the real/yuan exchange rate?

The Kobester

Was it just me or did Kobe torch the 2nd guards from the Magic. I hope the same thing happens tonight. It seems that like most politicians Kobe says one thing to the public and one thing in private. I've never seen this guy come out the way he did! It is pretty clear to me that he DEFINITELY wants to win this championship without Shaq and he's loathe to let anything stop him, let alone a francophone guard or a hilltopped rookie (although both are outstanding talents in their own rights.)

What's up, shut up!

My roommate/teammate from Em-eya-aay turned me on to Trick at the turn of the millennium. I remember hearing this beat and thinking at the time "it was the hardest beat I'd ever heard" a chance youtube encounter with the erstwhile hit maker leads me to believe that moniker still stands.

Let the instrumental ride....

Back on the Train

I'm back, at work that is. I started with a client on a short term contract last week. Trading, having been very good to me, is not something a person like me can sustain for a long time, and short of having the need there isn't much redeeming value in trying to make a career out of it, especially if you're doing it in the confines of your own presence.

I've amassed decent savings and plan on returning when volatility picks back up in the fall. For now, I need the challenge of problem solving and client interaction to ensure my primary skills aren't atrophying. It's a pretty good deal in this environ, presents sufficient opportunity for leadership and is challenging. What else can a consultant want?

As it is I will still maintain this blog, but frequency will probably trough at about 3-4 entries per week. But if you're interested I'm leaving you with a few of my favorite blogs:
Mags McArdle
Matt Yglesias
Matt Taibi
Rorty
Remy
Ta-Nehisi Coates

REMIX!

Or more succinctly COVER! "It's a long day living in Reseda..."

Memorial Day

Thanks Guys. Thanks so much. 100% Awesome-sauce. No one does what you do.

This guys a fighter!

Soldiers from the U.S. Army First Battalion, 26th Infantry take defensive positions at firebase Restrepo after receiving fire from Taliban positions in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan's Kunar Province on Monday May 11, 2009. Spc. Zachery Boyd of Fort Worth, TX, far left was wearing 'I love NY' boxer shorts after rushing from his sleeping quarters to join his fellow platoon members. From far right is Spc. Cecil Montgomery of Many, LA and Jordan Custer of Spokan, WA, center. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder) (Text courtesy AP/Yahoo)

Melo vs Superman? I seriously hope not, this would be the worse finals since Detroit v San Antonio...okay maybe not that bad, but I won't be watching

The Magic and Nuggets are two very good, incredibly talented teams with pros, whose talent level doesn't match that of Kobe or LeBron, but whose will is every bit as indeterminable.

With the Cavs down 0-1 and Lake Show tied up 1-1, I'm a little nervous that I (and every former or current big time high school, college or professional basketball players) won't get the much coveted Kobe v LeBron final. I surmise Vitamin Water and Nike are a little on edge as well.

On another note the Nuggets seem to catch a lot of late game help from utter ineptitude by professional highly paid officials. The cost of me zoning out on a big trade can be $10,000. I wonder what happens to officials when they miss obvious late game calls, like JR Smith cutting through a jump ball before it's been tapped. Really NBA refs? First Dallas now LA huh? I guess.

Another Dukie bites the dust....

Unfortunately (not really) another Duke perimeter will get torched for a full series beginning with Game 1 of the Nuggets/Lakers series hasta manana. For some reason I think Jones will have even less success defending the Kobester than Battier did.

If he's looking for some advice, I'd say leave that janky "hand in the face" bit at home. The guys a pro guard, it doesn't work, challenge his shot traditionally, shooters reflexively pullback if they think you're gonna get a piece. Anyways good luck Dahntay (not really, I hope Kobe torches you).

Pay for facebook? I'll pass

Andrew Ecklund a columnist for the hometown Strib has an article up today begging 2.0 media users to pay for the use of the various apps (myspace, facebook, twitter, digg, etc).

This is pretty pathetic, even for a tech journalist. These firms are not non profits, they went into business (or were funded) with the hope of eventually making money and tons of it, either through a functional business model or (and more likely) being bought by Google. If facebook wanted to charge for access it was probably better to do it from the beginning, but with myspace being free it most likely wouldn't have caught on. So they went with the free model...this is their problem not mine. Begging me to continue using facebook as a pay service makes it my problem, a problem facebook knows most users will simply dump overboard if ever forced to make a choice.

As a techie, Andrew forgets the first rule of business...never, ever, ever under any circumstances give something away for free. And if you do, just know that the consumer will never, ever, ever under any circumstances expect to pay for it again.

Not for my Southern Readers

The rapper's name is Drake and he's out of all places Toronto. I just heard him in rotation today (Midwest). Apparently it's been in heavy rotation in the Northeast for a month now and he's well known on the college circuit up there.

The beat is banging I like the hook and the auto-tuned chorus. He needs a little work on his lyrics and it's got just a touch of old Kanye but other than that it's banging, especially for when you're with your lady. It's a mixtape so no music video yet, but you can check the track below. For my southern readers who like their raps simple, replete with an inordinate amount of "uhhhsss" and overdone baselines with little to no actual rapping you probably want to take a pass.

Nike is Awesome

Besides being a pretty tradable stock, there commercials are second to none when it comes to hoops. I realized this in high school when they put out the commercial with the two little boys shooting free throws in an empty gym, with each one taking turns with the clown wig and big number 1 finger trying to distract the other. At the end the kid takes his dribbles and nails the free throw and then says "your turn".

Next up was the dribbling commercial. Any hooper is familiar with this as it capitalized on the And 1 Skip tapes. I was a pretty deso handler and even those guys were doing things that I had never seen. My brother actually shook me with the behind the back over the head move in our driveway one time.

And lastly what do I see today. But the Kobe and Lebron puppets. I won't post the youtube video here, it's probably best when you see it during the playoffs. I must say they'e pretty awesome though (oh yeah and the one Bron did with the girl from PSD wasn't bad either).

The Best 6 Minutes

I wasn't a huge fan of Six Feet Under only joining during the last season when it began preceding The Wire. That said, their last season in 2004-2005 was pretty awesome, and while there were some things I could have done without I have to say HBO got it right with this one. I just came across the last 6 minutes of the series finale on youtube. I remember watching it and thinking "live every moment" because it all goes so fast. It did a really good job helping me look at my life from the end back. What will my sons be at 40? How many grandkids will I have? Will I be healthy? Does my wife precede me in death? And more generally what does our world look like?

The song is by Sia and the writers did a great job weaving her lyrics with the action on screen. Check it out. By my estimation it's still the best six minutes of television ever.

Saturday School?

Check out this article in the hometown Strib discussing the success the local KIPP school had in bettering test scores after expanding the school day and implementing Saturday school. I've been an advocate for this, ever since I saw the episode of West Wing where Congressman Santos explained to some parents in New Hampshire that the basis for our school year and school hours were based on agriculture and industrial societal models that needed child labor to help on the family farm or supplement family income by working extra hours in the factory. However, since this is no longer the prevailing societal model then it makes sense to change the educational structure that was put in place to support a now non-existent model.

What also drives my support is hearing, ad nauseam, about how American kids are falling further and further behind their Asian and European counterparts. Since America's station in the world is due to it's ability to technologically advance (and monetize those advances which in turn feeds our political stability and military might) faster than its competitors you would think we would do all we could to ensure our next generation of technological 'advancers' were on par educationally with their Asian and European counterparts.

Moms are pretty awesome...

...aren't they? They somehow, through an act of God, spit you out, then proceed to take care of you at every turn for 18 years. Changing your poopie diapers, washing your mud soaked uniforms, and picking up your dirty socks. Care is in their nature. And whenever you return to the empty nest they find occasion to make your favorite food, whether it's chicken and broccoli spaghetti or buttermilk pancakes or awesome sauce p&b and j with crushed potato chips.

They shield you periodically from the ruggedness of your father knowing when to assuage a tough little league loss with nothing more than a "next time" or keeping the mistake of a detention "just between us."

Moms I salute your patience, your kindness, your skill, your yang and most importantly your love. Moms I salute you.

Your Parents Were Young Once

Awesome sauce Bacardi vid, that helps me remember mi padres had a life before me and it didn't include being Mom and Dad.

Why conversations about race and racial issues with people who don't like you is a good thing.

I'm a frequent reader and commenter on Matt Yglesias's blog over at ThinkProgress. His readers seem to span demographics and view points and I often find myself learning just as much from them as from Matt.

Today he wrote on Sonya Sotomayor the most talked about judge in the country right now. Why? Sonya is seen as the front runner to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. Apparently Sotomayor, who is Hispanic, had a controversial decision in the lower courts regarding affirmative action that may prove detrimental.

Now I'm no flaming proponent of affirmative action but what I learned from Matt's commenters today is that the term affirmative action means something different to different people. For me, aa is a way to ensure that qualified individuals aren't screwed over by the ole boys club.

Exhibit A:
Jamal scores a 1550 on his SAT and applies to the Ivies. Having no rich family or legacy connections to help him out he applies to the ivies through the normal process and quickly has his application heaped into a pile with academically qualified individuals. Jim, whose father is an i-banker and whose family has a generational relationship with the ivies, scored a respectable but hardly outstanding 1130. In a world without aa Jim gets the spot. In a world with aa the spot goes to Jamal, wealth be darned. To me this is a good thing.

Now, the benefit of talking with other people comes in that I get to clearly understand how they view aa and we can reconcile any long standing discrepancies between us and potentially broader groups that we may represent. For instance in talking with one of the commenters it became clear that his interpretation of aa would be when Jamal scores a 780 but his allowed in solely based on his race. What's even better is that regardless of the definition, we were both able to agree that in my scenario the spot should go to Jamal and that in his scenario it shouldn't. This would have never happened had we just clung to our individual notions of what we thought aa was. So for all of my readers let me clear on my interpretation.

What AA is: A construct that ensures objectively qualified individuals are allowed to compete for spots, historically not allowed to their demographic.

What AA isn't: A fake construct that promotes lowering some fake bar in favor of fake attempts at fake equality.

On Markets: Part 64 of 1,238

Matt Yglesias referred his readers to Chapter 12 of Keyenes' General Theory this a.m. and I checked it out after some morning hoops. It was as he said "staggeringly brilliant" especially his analysis of the American mindset and markets, both then and now.

It's even more brilliant when you consider it was published in 1936. I don't know if it's selective memory or predisposition but I'm almost always amazed when I read the writing of philosophers, long gone, such as Keynes, Smith or De Toqueville and find their analysis insightful and prescient and most surprisingly relevant. Take this passage from Keynes General Theory:

A conventional valuation which is established as the outcome of the mass psychology of a large number of ignorant individuals is liable to change violently as the result of a sudden fluctuation of opinion due to factors which do not really make much difference to the prospective yield; since there will be no strong roots of conviction to hold it steady. In abnormal times in particular, when the hypothesis of an indefinite continuance of the existing state of affairs is less plausible than usual even though there are no express grounds to anticipate a definite change, the market will be subject to waves of optimistic and pessimistic sentiment, which are unreasoning and yet in a sense legitimate where no solid basis exists for a reasonable calculation.

As a trader I can only second, third and fourth this motion. As investor for the past few years I thought investing was based solely on long term diligent financial and valuation analysis. In school you learn the keys to good market valuation rests with cash flow, balance sheet and income statement analysis. There are some more complicated techniques but they all derive from this. As a trader the last 8 months I've learned that markets move on nothing but NEWS, most time ignorantly or erroneously evaluated, as Keynes alludes to. Facts and rational analysis be darned.

The most pressing example is my trading of Apple. After I finished my love affair with the financials (thanks again Freddie!) I turned my gaze to stocks trading triple digits that I speculated would further decline on the ersatz "Obama hates markets" memes that conservatives spread. While every rational investor new anything Obama did would hardly affect Apple's balance sheet, cash positions or long term yield it literally oscillated between 112 and the low 80s 3 TIMES over a 5 month period. Based solely on NEWS, RUMOR and CONJECTURE none of which affected long term yields.

I guess Keynes main point is less economic and more behavoiral, in the sense that in the short term (which incidentally is at any one time an investors long term) emotions trumps rationality. If I like Apple but I see a bunch of orders coming in as sell, sell, sell and I watch it leak then pour to the downside I'm ghost, which in turn makes other people ghost and so on. The same thing happens, with less velocity to the upside regardless of how crappy a firms cash position or ROIC may be. While I've come to love the markets, Keyne's Chapter 12 has helped me understand that the markets, while falsely presented as esoteric and esteemed (mainly as a defensive barrier by those on the inside), are nothing more than a cheap parlour game of chance, manipulation and opportunity.