Blame for the financial collapse Jun 22, 2009
A recent episode of This American Life attempted to assign blame for the recent financial collapse.  The different financial institutions who were cheating at their own game are somewhat to blame, as are the government regulators who didn't want to lose income from the companies they were supposed to be regulating.  Perhaps the biggest amount of blame was placed on the credit rating agencies who also didn't want to lose income from the companies whose assets they were rating.  This conversation with Tom Warrick from Standard and Poor's stood out to me: 
This American Life:  There are people who would say, you know, these were loans being [lent] out to people who didn't even have to prove they had jobs.  We had no data on how these loans were gonna perform.  How could you rate these things? 
Tom Warrick:  It's important to understand the riskier we believed the loan was, the more loss reserves needed to be incorporated into the transaction for us to rate a transaction triple-A. 
This American Life:  But there are people who would say you had no data to know what the real risk of those people defaulting was.  How could you go and rate something when you didn't have any data on how these loans were gonna perform. 
Tom Warrick:  Well we had lots of data.  We had years worth of data as to how borrowers perform over time. 
This American Life:  For these loans?  For people who didn't have to prove they had a job?  You had lots of data for that? 
Tom Warrick:  We are able to, through our analytical process, develop assumptions around what we believe the future will be like for these particular borrowers.
So there you have it.  Extremely powerful people who deal with more money than you can fathom tried to predict the future with their silly little equations.  And they were wrong.  I can't help but think it's kind of like a nuclear scientist accidentally creating and detonating an atomic bomb.  Whoops.  These guys lost at their own game.  It would be one thing if they were playing with Monopoly money or even the money belonging to high-stakes investors who could afford to lose it.  But no, they were using everyone's money.  And they f---ed up.  That's the end of it. 

The thing is, I'm not even really affected by this whole financial mess.  I still have a job (thank God), I still pay my mortgage, I still buy things.  Nothing has really changed.  But the whole thing kind of gets to me, and I think it's largely because (1) nobody wants to (or is able to) take the blame, and (2) it looks like the exact same thing will happen again sometime in the future unless we completely overhaul our entire financial system, which likely won't happen, which means we'll continue pushing it off so the next generation has to deal with it. #money
Marriage name rules (4) Jun 22, 2009
I've witnessed and been the victim of several naming fiascoes brought on by dating and marriage, and I think the world should agree upon the following set of rules: 
  1. Women, don't marry a guy whose last name is the same as your first name.  This would've prevented the marriage of my friend Kelly Callahan to her boyfriend Joe Kelly, thus creating Kelly Kelly.
  2. Women, don't marry a guy whose last name rhymes with your first name, such as Julia Gulia from the Wedding Singer, which didn't end up happening because Adam Sandler saved the day.
  3. Men and women, don't marry a person whose first name is the same as that of one of your family members, such as my sister marrying a guy named Dave.  Otherwise, prepare yourself for an unwelcome nickname, such as "Number 2" or ""Dingus".
I call these rules for marriage, but really they should be considered the moment you meet any new person.  Before you even consider being attracted to them, you should think, "What would happen if we got married?"  If caught early enough, these naming issues could be eradicated completely. #lifestyle
Recession-proof jobs Jun 15, 2009
I was talking to a guy a few weeks ago who was attending community college and thinking about getting a degree in "the funeral sciences" and later working in the funeral industry.  His logic:  People are always dying, so he'll always have a job.  As much as the idea of touching corpses gives me the heebee jeebees, I couldn't argue with his rationale.  There are really only a handful of truly recession-proof jobs, and using this guy's logic, I would add:  People are always having babies, people are always eating food, and people are always getting sick.  Jobs that have to do with death, birth, food, and health are probably a safe bet regardless of economic conditions. #business
Recent money news Jun 15, 2009
Some recent money-related news and thoughts (ok, some of them aren't recent per se, but they're recent for me): 
  • Six Flags declared bankruptcy over the weekend.  Declaring bankruptcy doesn't mean going out of business.  It means getting rid of debt and reorganizing in order to become a financially successful company again.
  • Back in March, it was announced that pharmaceutical companies Merck and Schering-Plough are merging, and they'll be keeping the Merck name and ditching S-P.  I used to work for Schering.  Good money, boring paperwork.
  • As of right now, Twitter doesn't have a business model.  Even though everyone talks about them and they get tons of traffic, they don't actually make any money aside from the venture capital money they raised from investors.  If anything, like pretty much every technology company, all they do is spend money on things like engineers and web servers, while they try to figure out how to actually earn some income.
That is all.  Carry on. #money
Tiger and Hootie Jun 15, 2009
Hootie and the Blowfish played the music for Tiger Woods' 2004 wedding.  How appropriate.  The whitest black man on earth, serenaded by the second whitest black man on earth.  No offense, of course.  Just an observation.  (via twitter/mental_floss) #sociology
Good News Now Jun 13, 2009
TechCrunch posted a negative review of a new website made by Sears and AOL called Good News Now.  The whole idea is to report on a few of the positive things going on in the world, instead of just focusing on the negative sensational topics that get good ratings.  It's an admirable goal, and it's something I've mentioned in the past.  Unfortunately the site is plastered with Sears ads, but like any bit of advertising, it can be ignored. #entertainment
Dreft Jun 13, 2009
There's a Proctor & Gamble laundry detergent called Dreft, and it's apparently good for baby clothes.  Not having a baby or ever having washed clothes for one, I had never heard of the stuff until I saw it in Pathmark a few hours ago.  The first thought that crossed my mind was, could they have possibly come up with a worse name for a product?  Perhaps barf, or phlegm, or Veolia.  I'm no marketing genius, but I think I could have come up with a product name along the same lines as All and Tide. #products
Penguin poop Jun 13, 2009
Scientists are observing colonies of emperor penguins on Antarctica by tracking their poop with satellites.  One scientist from the British Antarctic Survey said, "We can't see actual penguins on the satellite maps because the resolution isn't good enough.  The ice gets pretty dirty and it's the guano stains that we can see."  Not so cute and cuddly anymore, are they? #nature
Green cleaning products Jun 11, 2009
Sometimes I make a claim about something, and then later I'll have to eat my words and go back on what I said.  Although I've never publicly broadcast it on the internet, I once claimed that green cleaning products like Clorox Green Works and Seventh Generation were stupid and ineffective.  How lemon juice and eucalyptus oil can clean anything, I'll never know.  But after trying a few of these products (Green Works Toilet Bowl Cleaner and Bathroom Cleaner), I can attest to the fact that they do indeed work, and they're fairly cheap.  The problem with cleaning products made with harsher chemicals is (1) the typical hippie yaya groundwater thing, (2) they make our cats act weird, and (3) they hurt my throat and eyes.  When I'm leaning over the bathtub scrubbing away that weird orange film that magically develops every few weeks (side note:  invent orange shower paint), products with bleach seem to find a way directly into my lungs and make my eyes tear up.  And then the cats start rubbing their faces all over the bathroom (some sort of primitive territory-marking behavior) and biting me.  These are things I can live without.  So I gave the green products a go and found they clean just as well, and they don't cause bodily harm or cat weirdness.  And they're blah blah good for the environment and won't cause yada yada birth defects.  The one thing that would make my life perfect right now is if these green companies made some of those automatic toilet cleaning tabs that you stick in the back of the bowl to increase the time between toilet cleanings.  Until that happens, I'm reluctantly sticking to bleach. #products
Coding should Jun 11, 2009
I do a lot of programming for work and fun, and two annoying things I come across on a regular basis are the following: 
  1. "You should be able to do (X) even though I've never tried it."  Yes, you should, but you can't.  If you don't know what you're talking about and don't understand the language you're trying to use, don't just spout off answers from the top of your head like some sort of code gunslinger.
  2. "This code should work even though I didn't test it."  You're right, it should work, but it doesn't.  If you took two minutes to actually try it yourself instead of just typing it into the comment box on a website and assuming it would work perfectly, maybe you could've actually contributed something.  Instead, I'm left trying to solve my preexisting problem while also trying to solve the problems your code created.
Programmers are so full of themselves.  Buncha nerds. #technology