A written work your actions can affect directly

Another Kickstarter project has caught my fancy, this time along literary lines. And the interesting thing about it is that it is already guaranteed (as near as anything in life is for certain) to come to fruition, though the precise form that will take shape is not settled at this time. Depending on the amount of money that will be raised by the deadline, the form of the physical book that Robin Sloan will write will take various forms. Already at the time time I write this it has passed the point of a routine print on demand volume, and with the remaining time and additional backers it could turn out to be something much niftier. It is an interesting model, not completely unique, I know, for a fiction writer to be engaging the audience during the act of writing itself, and not only on promotional tour only after the work has been put to bed. It is my guess that if it receives much more of a push from its backers it may cause some amount of commotion among those pondering the future of publishing itself.
I will spare you my further opining on complementarity between observer and phenomenon. It's really just a book.
The author has also written the very entertaining short story Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store featured recently and memorably. at Escape Pod, which I recommend to SF fans.
Update: Funded! Hundreds of percent over! And it seems as if the literary production is keeping pace as well, so it should all culminate in one fine-looking edition soon.
Update II:It is arrived and it is great.

An unpleasant development

This has been up for over a week on our floor at work, so we have been forced to go up a flight or down two flights. No sign that anything is being done to remedy the situation either.

At cross-purposes

The Cost of Gasoline,
originally uploaded by hidayat_peje7.

We are hearing about plans to jump-start the consumer sector of this country (and that of our trading partners) but it looks like all indications are that the new meme going around, which is really an old, old meme, is of scrimping and making do.

• There are all sorts of blog posts like the one on 15 Things You Should Never Pay For telling avid readers what they can avoid parting with their cash to obtain.
• Most of the comments on the thread asking How are you coping with collapse-anxiety? speak of simplification and doing without luxuries
• The financial station CNBC has a feature advising people not to go to far in slashing the household budget

I don't see much indication that if stimulus money ends up in the consumers' pockets there is going to be a big Keynsian multiplier effect on the level of the individual, as people take some or all of that money and sock it away into savings or to pay down credit, thus failing to stimulate producers.
To counteract this addiction to destructive savings behavior, perhaps the government could put strings on the funds it doles out to bias its use toward a multiplier greater than one. For instance, we could reward people who spend money on things which are actually addictive (drugs, alcohol, sports, greasy food, religious ecstasy, political extremism, etc.) so as to get them hooked and more willing to part with their own dollars in the future. Or we could make conspicuous consumption more fashionable again in the public eye by using the media to continue promoting extravagance, only more so. Or we could put something in the currency so that if it isn't passed along to someone else, it will self-destruct noisily and messily. Mix in a little bit of patriotism and almost anything can take off even if it doesn't sound that good in the first place.

Four quick ones

• Computer keyboards have those little bumps to help touch-typists know whether they have their hands positioned properly. (They have a rude nickname.) Why hasn't the same idea happened on keyboard instruments such as pianos? Furthermore, by way of analogy with ergonomic computer keyboards, couldn't someone devise a curved piano/organ keyboard to make it easier for the musician to reach the very high and low notes?
• Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to merge former rival brokerage services. The new company is going to be called Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, but I think it misses an opportunity to resurrect an old brokerage unit name associated with Morgan Stanley and call it instead Dean Witter Reynolds Smith Barney. Or was the Dean Witter marque too downmarket? I know it is probably too late to cancel the order for office stationery, but still.
• If we do successfully downsize our military operations in Iraq, maybe we can take some of those remotely controlled Raptor drones and set them up with rocket-propelled paintball armament to have simulated aerial warfare. There could robotic convoy of vehicles or something that a second player could control while the first player attempts to splat the target in one particular vehicle, without causing collateral damage.
• Among religious believers, it is often customary to say a prayer before sharing a meal. It seems to me to make even more sense to say a prayer before partaking in intoxicating drink. Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy libations, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty. One could be more elaborate, with some mention of avoiding drinking and driving or whatever. Perhaps some public service spots could help to popularize this new custom.

Notes for a State of the Union Address

This little piece seems as if it would work pretty well next month.

We had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people's funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. This was of course not true in the vast majority of our banks but it was true in enough of them to shock the people for a time into a sense of insecurity and to put them into a frame of mind where they did not differentiate, but seemed to assume that the acts of a comparative few had tainted them all. It was the Government's job to straighten out this situation and do it as quickly as possible—and the job is being performed.

Delivered by the President of the United States, March 12, 1933.

What did not happen over the last 36 hours

When I came home from work on Monday, hoping to have some supper before we went to church, it was not to a scene of happiness.
The acrid chemical smell in the air led us to suspect a fire in the microwave oven, so my wife had called the Fire Department, who told us we should not stay inside. It was cold and my wife went into our neighbor's place across the street, while I did not.
Besides the four or five fire trucks there was a freelance photographer there and eventually a person from the gas company, who I did not speak to at first.

Once they took a look around, they opened the windows and doors, then brought in large industrial fans on extremely long extension cords to take away most of the fumes, while we waited, wondering what was happening. Eventually one of them told us that the gas furnace had overheated and had to be turned off and sprayed down with water to cool things off, and that it was not any problem with the microwave at all. I went in to look at the old furnace, which did not seem to be in very good shape after all this.
We ended up not making it to church that night. Also, we did not have much heat in the house except for a couple of small space heaters we set up.
The next morning, I stayed home to make some phone calls, hoping to find out whether our homeowner's insurance would provide any payout (it would not). A gas company representative came by and quickly determined that the boiler was shot and could not be repaired. We measured the size of the rooms and he based on a few other quantities, he determined that the old 200000 BTU input boiler was too large for the residence. Their quote on a new, smaller, modern gas boiler was not something I wanted to accept immediately though. I called other heating contractors in the area and the first couple could not set up appointments with me right away. One of them did come to visit, discuss what they could do, and agreed to set us up with a newer, even better, system, though not appreciably lower in price than the first quote. Since they could start right away, however, and in consultation with my wife, I agreed, drawing down heavily on a line of credit I had wanted to spare. The heating company spent the following ten hours pulling out the old unit and putting in the new 150000 BTU unit, finishing just shortly before midnight, a couple hours later than expected.

The brand-new boiler does not take up as much room in the basement as the old one. Even the heating guy admitted it is not the kind of big purchase you would care to show off to people, all that much. On the other hand, it should not attempt to run while dry the way the old one apparently did.
All this for a price which, had I paid them solely in dollar bills equal weight to this twelve-pack of soda, I would not have reached. I wrote two unpleasant checks, since I did not even have such a heavy stack of cash on hand. Were it not for the pictures they still need to take for the local permit application, I would be at work this morning.
Still, we witnessed no explosions and no fires raging out of control, nor freezing pipes and no one crushed by hundreds of pounds of cast iron.
Clarification: Everything did in fact happen, that's not what the title's referring to. I have simply cast all the facts as negative statements, in the spirit of Raymond Queneau's book Exercises in Style (the chapter called "Negativities"), perhaps in order to be contrary, perhaps not.

Would that it were so

I was frightfully disappointed to discover that the Victorian Internet Exchange is not in fact a time-travel facilitated means of commerce between the present time and that of 150 years ago which we could use to bring wealth from their time into ours. It would have made some things so very simple.

1891 image from Project Gutenberg

A modest economic proposal

Administration officials, Wall Street executives, media pundits, average people in the street, and everyone else is complaining about the unavailability of business credit these days what with the shocking, shocking revelations of people playing fast and loose with other peoples' money. I ask, why not monetize scrip that everyone probably already has, in the form of board game money?

For instance, Milton Bradley's Game of Life has always had an extensive collection of scrip, including stock certificates and promissory notes. The 1960's era set had $100000 bills bearing the face of trusted television personality Art Linkletter. The Treasury could simply declare some or all of these bits of paper to be backed up by the full faith and credit of the United States Government, and there would be an immediate infusion of cash as people would unearth their bounty hidden in their attics and basements and start using them as instruments of monetary exchange.

The Promissory Notes are interesting as they are essentially debt obligations made between the player and whoever was playing the banker (in my case, this would often be my cousin Estelle). Perhaps we should reserve these for small businesses to replace the lost short-term credit opportunities that are besetting them now, in the expectation that once the system has been re-primed, they will be able to make good on the note plus interest when it matures, same as if they had obtained funds in the commercial paper market.

Some might complain that the allocation of this windfall would be unfair, purely at the whim of whether a person had packrat tendencies or not. My reply is that it is certainly less unfair than the TARP program, which gives money to the some of the very people who made the crisis as bad as it is, and just about nothing to the average citizen boardgame-playing or not.

If the amount of stimulus is too little, the Treasury Secretary could go on to phase two of the program, which would monetize Monopoly cash and perhaps also the little metal tokens they used to package in the box. One hopes that the government would not have to resort to a third round involving Scrabble tiles and the like.

10 tips for those let go from finance

With the number of high finance executives being downsized from Shearson Loeb Rhodes Pierce Fenner and Smith Mae Mac and the like, it is time to think of ways in which the affected workers can make a positive step forward in their lives. Here's the list I came up with:

1. If you were an experience in Structured Investment Vehicles, get yourself to Detroit and see whether they might be able to use you in a new line of concept cars of the same name.
2. Employers are probably completely swamped with resumes from your colleagues right now, trying to figure out whether all the acronyms are real or made up. Hire yourself out as a resume reader to help filter the good ones from the bad.
3. Contribute a foreword to a new published edition of Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
4. Take your skills offshore to bring the home of universal homeownership to the common Chinese citizen. Learn Mandarin first.
5. Don't you know there's a crisis in the health care industry in this country?! Get a set of scrubs on, pull on some surgical gloves, and learn to do something useful, anything!
6. If you are still occupying space in an office, open up an account at Etsy and sell the crafts you make from leftover office supplies.
7. Form a monastic order with your coworkers, roam midtown Manhattan begging for alms and doing good works. Call yourselves the Mad Mendicants.
8. Get yourself to the State of Alaska, where all citizens are granted an annual stipend from the state, making it the ideal socialist paradise. And IT folks: while you're up there in the frigid north, you could make a living running computer datacenters with natural rack cooling provided by the Arctic air, and piping the warm air to heat dwellings. Ample diesel supplies to power the backup generators are available as well.
9. Entrepreneurship may be a good option. See the picture for one concept.
10. Appear as a contestant on a new reality show for mortgage insurance specialists forced to live by their wits and set in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. One challenge could involve defrauding the local denizens of their swine and roots. Attire: formal business wear.

The 6.6 Million Dollar Man

Tacked on an additional quarter million.



And now, it is all gone. Back to reality.

Previously here and here.

Virtual gains

A while back I posted about how I was entering CNBC's Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge. Now, going into the last week of the competition, it's time to take a look at how well I have been doing.

So you see, all five of my portfolios funded initially with a million dollars of play money are above water, even despite the frightful bear market. A bunch of the bucks on each account were gained by answering trivia questions on the CNBC site, but even taking that into account, all of the five are solidly in the black, though not nearly to the extent of being anywhere near winning one of the prizes. It isn't as if one of the market strategies did a huge amount better than the other, even despite the great differences in maintaining the individual portfolios. I never did come up with the multibagger play in the Earnings reports, even though a few dozen stocks have come and gone through the process. Conversely, there were a few holdings which experienced wrenching falls (the rules of the game do not allow short selling), but there was enough money spread around so that the downside effect was also diluted.

The one addition to the mix of portfolios to round out the five came in late because it was a pure currency trading play, and this capability was not turned on in the contest at the very beginning. 10% of the initial stake was available for trading a number of European, North American, and Asian currencies during hours extended beyond the normal equity market hours.

Next week, all the pretend money goes away. I won't be missing it all that much, though it was fun to have while it lasted.

Virtual riches

gold coins,
originally uploaded by technicolor.

CNBC is running another one of those fantasy investment contests, runnng from now until July, and I've signed myself up. Why not? The prizes are

1. Five Hundred Thousand Dollars
2. One Hundred Thousand Dollars
3. Fifty Thousand Dollars
4. A Trip for Winner and one Guest to see Game Three of the 2008 World Series.
5. A Trip for Winner and one Guest to the Sea Island Golf Resort.
6. About $5000 of Sony stuff.
7. A Trip to Jamaica for Winner and one Guest.
8. A pair of TAG Heuer Watches.
9. A Florida golf clinic with (recently retired) Annika Sorenstam, plus other perks.
10. A Trip to Turks and Caicos for Winner and one Guest.
11. A weekend in a Bentley.
12. A Trip for the Winner to play in the Main Event of the 2009 World Series of Poker.
13. A Trip for Winner and one Guest to see the 2009 Super Bowl.

You just have to outsmart a few hundred thousand other players, that's all.

I've set up four of the allowed five million dollar portfolios for myself, and so far none of them are in the red. These are themes of the portfolios:

1. Earnings reports The weekly prizes are based on largest percentage change of a portfolio, and I figured that the best way of catching a lucky coinidence of a number of stocks "popping" was to chose those schedued to have earnings reports that week. Last week, I started with Brocade Communications, Sony, BMC Software, and Nordstrom turn in good performances for me, with Urban Outfitters posting a loss after missing the analysts' expectations. This week it will be instead Hewlett-Packard, AnnTaylor, Campbell Soup, Saks, and Staples.


2. Tech tech tech The sector that hasn't had to bear too much of the brunt of the slowdown these last few months. I've put together a port with Ansys, IDC, Microsoft, Oracle, and CommVault which is the best-performing of all so far.


3. Take me The other way a stock can get a big pop is if it suddenly finds itself on the receiving end (or occasionally the issuing end) of takeover activity. So I looked for some solid, defensive stocks with a decent amount of cash and built a port consisting of CSC, Heinz, and NetApp. A shot in the dark, really.


4. Vice As the words of the hymn say,

   Tempted and tried, we're oft made to wonder
   Why it should be thus all the day long
   While there are others living among us
   Never molested, though in the wrong

   So with this in mind I thought about some industries which flourish by causing other folks dismay and came up with this list: MasterCard, Fortune Brands, CACI International, Halliburton (duh), Altria, British American Tobacco, Baidu, Las Vegas Sands, and Foundation Coal Holdings. Just sayin'.

Any suggestions for a theme for my final million dollar portfolio? Put them in the comments. Or let me know if you are a fellow player and how you're doing. (There's still time to sign up.) If I think of it, I'll post an entry about how these strategies of mine ended up faring.

The House has an edge

With the price of fuel going up and up for the usual reasons, it seemed to me that a mashup of the one-armed bandit with the one-hose bandit might work.

You'd put your folding money in, take a pull, and see how many gallons you win. Fun for everyone!

I think it might work in Nevada, though not here in New Jersey or in Oregon because of the bans on self-service gas pumps.

I'd like to teach the world to whine

We went on a lightning holiday to western Massachusetts and I came back with threetwo tiny little issues to carp about.

1. I thought I'd be prudent and rotate out the Sprint phone card that I kept with the jump bag I prepared last summer. The idea was to use it to call my parents in California and avoid the extortionate rates commonly charged by the motel we were staying at. Neither the card nor the folder it was attached to had any date on it, but deep in the fine print was a line about how the card expires "15 months from the date of purchase/activation." When I input the number on the card, a synthesized voice informed me that the account I used was "invalid," so I called up the Customer Service number about this. I was prepared to pay some kind of fee or other in order to recoup some of the minutes I thought I'd bought, or at least be told how I could recharge the thing with more minutes, even at a rate just about as exorbitant as the room phone rate. Instead, I got the voice of a rep nearly as cold as the computer voice, informing me that the number was not in the computer and there was no provision for refund.
   I know the Nextel merger was a costly one, but would it really have been too much to expect them to keep the number on record a month or two longer, if only in hopes of extracting more money out of your consumer? Was it so important to take my $20 and run with it with such unseemly haste? Doesn't it actually make good business sense to put an expiration date on the product if only to encourage a repeat sale when the time draws near? But no, the unfeeling telecom sees fit to do none of these things, and for that they deserve my scorn and rancor, now and for a long time to come.
   In the same vein, only with regard to gift cards, I point out the public service announcement: Don't Give Your Friends Fees this Holiday Season!


2. We went out to the movies Thanksgiving evening, and as our group could not reach a consensus choice, split according to gender, the ladies seeing the latest Disney movie and us guys opting for medieval fare.
   Please note, kids, the book is different.
   I give the moviemakers credit for including the side stories about Beowulf's swimming-race early on (gory though the depiction of it was), and didn't even find too much to object to with regard to the repurposing of Grendel's mom which made the final climactic battle a struggle between father and son. The thing I did not much care for was the way Zemeckis mistrusted the audience to pick up the bit of foreshadowing regarding the proper way to dispatch a dragon: the B-man is helped out by having the weak spot picked out in vivid color, as if it were made of the stuff of mood rings perhaps, a "plot point" which by all rights ought to have been labeled "break glass in case of dramatic climax," then having the old hero reach in to fool with his offspring's viscera in a way that reminded me to much of this:
   
   
   
   So actually, that part's not like the original poem. But maybe if this does well at the box office, they'll do a cinematic version of The Elder Edda.
   
   Edited to add: I think this happy fellow has the right idea - don't go into battle with a sword that's too damn short.

Denotatively bankrupt

The other day I went to the bank for some help.

"I have a question about my High Performance Money Market Account," says I.

"Surely, sir, what is the question?"

"I'd like to know why it is that I am getting $0.80 a year in interest when I think I should be making $80 instead."

It turned out not to be a data entry error, as I'd hoped, but a pitiful 0.04% APR for deposits under $5000. And if you want to crack the 1% rate of return, you have to put no less than $10000 into the account.

To her credit, the bank representative agreed with me that the cash might be better off stuffed under a mattress.

This, by me, is a sorry way to use the term High Performance and worthy of being mocked. Here for any marketer with the chutzpah to embrace the notion is my list of that choice of words extended to other areas:

• High Performance Windows - panes made of opaque black glass in frames that do not open.


• High Performance Perfume - a small flask of water with a vaguely swampy aroma


• High Performance Air Conditioning - a damp and stale whisper of air, roughly at ambient temperature


• High Performance Camouflage - white fabric with black piping

The whirlwind

Remember how relieved you felt when the hurricane season ended this year with zero hurricanes hitting the US mainland? Wasn't it a pleasant surprise not to see pictures and headlines about people who have lost everything, and the ones even less lucky to have lost their lives to the storm? Well I felt that way too, and I know it was a good thing.

Still, I would like remind people that the Pacific typhoon season has not been so kind with super-cyclone Durian making landfall in the Philippines on southern Luzon and killing perhaps 700 people. Perhaps if you had a little money earmarked for charitable giving in case of natural disaster in this country, and ended up not needing to dip into it, you might consider a donation for disaster relief for the 100000 people affected by this typhoon? I don't have much to spare, myself, but sent in what we could afford.