1) In Defense of Morgan Stanley's 'Nuclear Holocaust' (CNBC) - Why on Earth would you name a CDO something mundane like Stack 2006-1 when you could call it something catchy like "Nuclear Holocaust", "Mike Tyson Punchout", or my personal favorite, "Shitbag". I would totally buy that.
2) Ask A Banker: Why Did Bankers Destroy The World? Also, Are You Hiring? (Planet Money) - Dealbreaker's Matt Levine lays it all out in this great NPR piece. He's frank and funny, and he thinks that unleashing aimless Ivy League grads on inner city schools through Teach For America might be worse for the ghetto than crack. Well done, Matt.
3) Fasten Your Seatbelts: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions (Forbes) - There is no single product in the world, real or imagined, that I want more than a driverless Google car. And when I think of the GDP impact of this technology, I think measuring it in the trillions is too conservative. This will literally reshape the world. I predict the last Drivers Ed class will happen no later than 2035.
4) Rare Half Cent sold for £225,000 Belonged to Tragic Mountaineer (International Business Times) - If you need an excuse to clean your house, how about this one? This guy's family found this rare half-cent coin inside a matchbox 60 years after he died in a climbing accident.
5) Online Casino Makes Over 500K, Skirting Laws With Legally ‘Gray’ Digital Currency, BitCoin (TechCrunch) - This is really interesting for those curious about alternative currencies. There is definitely a low-grade war going on between the real world and the virtual world, and currency immune to government intervention is a warning shot fired over the bow of the various Central Banks.
6) Life Tastes Best When You Eat What You Kill (Altucher Confidential) - It's an expression we use all the time, but here's what it really means. In his heyday Charlie Sheen would've called this #WINNING. Great stuff from James.
7) Storing Digital Data in DNA (Wall Street Journal) - Singularity anyone? The greatest hard drive we've ever seen might be inside you right now - and it isn't your brain. This is pretty amazing.
8) Asteroid-Mining Project Aims for Deep-Space Colonies (Space) - You might dismiss this as science fiction at first, but give it a read; these guys have some solid plans. What makes me think it's viable? The use of ultra-cheap prospecting satellites that'll be in space by 2015.
9) The man who trademarked ‘Harbowl’ a year ago, until NFL lawyers pressured him to abandon it (Washington Examiner) - God, the NFL just sucks when it comes to shit like this. Whether it's suing the city of New Orleans for our Who Dat? motto to bullying this poor bastard out of his trademark, there's no end to what the greedheads in the league office will do.
10) Naked Man Poops, Goes On Rampage Inside SW Florida Home (CBS Miami) - Holy shit, this is the MUST READ of the week. Bath salts, my good man. Bath salts. Gotta love the Sunshine State. UPDATE: Thanks to Huffington Post for pointing out this guy is a CARNY. It all makes sense now.
Video of the Week:
It seemed oddly appropriate on the day following a bloodbath in Apple stock to give you guys a sneak peak at a clip of the new biopic jOBS. I don't know about you guys, but when I see Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs...well...all I really see is Ashton Kutcher. Of course you can't judge by a one minute clip, but honestly I can't help thinking that Noah Wyle is gonna come out on top by comparison for his portrayal of Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley. But I'll let you guys be the judge. Here's the Kutcher clip:
and here's Noah Wyle and Anthony Michael Hall as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates:
You tell me who seems more like the real deal.
Anyway, that's it for this week guys. Let me know what you think in the comments and have a tremendous weekend.
Love the Ask a Banker series. My favorite part was this gem in the footnotes:
"Though one thing you might ponder is whether grades and schools are the right thing to structure your meritocracy around. Investment banking is part hard analytical work, the sort of thing for which a 4.0 at MIT is a decent proxy, and part soft-skills salesmanship, the sort of thing for which it isn't. At the beginning it's mostly hard analysis, at the end it's mostly salesmanship, and so the career path basically takes smart hard-working people of various levels of social comfort and over time fires all of the ones with bad people skills. That may seem inefficient, and in fact you'll sometimes see a prominent political macher type appointed to a senior job at a bank, the idea being that he or she will be able to do the salesy thing well, and that his or her lack of financial-analytical background won't actually be a serious hindrance.
But mostly it's people who are good at spreadsheets and rise through the ranks of being least-bad at people skills, and that's kind of weird. You could imagine instead a meritocracy of salesmanship where like the best door-to-door knife salesmen got to be managing directors at Goldman Sachs. I have imagined that. I remember once buying new shoelaces and being talked into getting a shoeshine in the shoeshine throne of the little shoe-supply-and-shine place. A shoeshine like that has negative value for me: if you offered it to me for free I would say no, because I find it unbelievably awkward to sit in a tall chair with someone rubbing my feet. But the guy sold it to me anyway, because he was a good salesman. (Helpfully for him, he had someone else to do the shining; he was just the pitchman.) And I walked back to my office to sell derivatives thinking that, really, he'd be better at my job than I was. And now I blog."
Literally was about to quote that until I saw you did. So spot on
I was wondering if anyone had a Harbowl trademark before the conference title games. Stuff like that makes me feel less guilty about "pirating" the non-local games through streaming sites.
2) Why do people have to generalize the term "investment banker"? Even Matt, the prestige king, is doing it.
I'm pretty excited for the Jobs movie but Ashton Kutcher in that clip doesn't really look like or sound like Steve Jobs, just like Ashton Kutcher with a goatee. Hope the movie itself is better than that scene. Noah Wyle on the other hand looks very similar. Never seen Pirates of Silicon Valley but will have to check it out this weekend.
I also love the surly fucker who plays Ballmer (standing behind Gates in the 2nd clip) in Pirates. Totally nails it.
So Google's driverless car is basically going to solve all our problems? That was the most over-the-top, nonsensical writeup I've ever read in Forbes. Does it transform into a jet and fly you to your own private island as well? Keep dreaming, Google.
Really?
Really. It's a worthy idea worth working on; I just find it off-putting that a serious writer can engage in so much hype and not challenge any of Google's assumptions. It's as if he just reprinted their press release and blew it up times ten.
Great stuff Eddie. HERE is a supplement to those worthy links already posted that I just can't get over. A small company (
[quote=CaR]Great stuff Eddie. HERE is a supplement to those worthy links already posted that I just can't get over. A small company (
The last video was awesome. While #6 is a gem that I might have to read and re-read.
Hey Eddie. Patrick mentioned that you were looking into Aleksey Vayner?
To the extent I'm able. The NY Daily News confirmed that it was he who died last Saturday morning, and according to the now-defunct Twitter account of his niece it was suicide by overdose. It's pretty tragic when you think about it. He checked himself out at 29 and if memory serves he was still married. Not sure if he had any kids, but I hope not.
With regards to 9), The NFL and Goodell are a lot like Obama. A lot of huffing and puffing, not letting anything happen unless it's on their terms, and saying that the change will be good. But in the end it does nothing but diminish the foundation of the game, and the fans are the ones that suffer. It seriously is turning into the No Fun League. At least we get to see Ray go out in style.
7 is really cool. I'm a psych major and years ago I did research on songbirds that grow up in isolation and know how to sing their species songs. Punchline: it's embedded into their DNA. I wondered then if it was possible to embed the Encyclopedia Brittanica into our DNA and the professor advised me to finish my degree first before such wild speculation. Who's laughing now. Thanks for finding and posting this, I feel somewhat vindicated, even if I get nothing out of this.
Can I get a monthly upgrade for my DNA information resevior?
1)WTH were they supposed to call it? We joke like that at the office all the time. Obviously, no one was actually going to name it that. 2)Matt Levine is a great writer. I usually like his pieces. This is no different. 3)I wonder if SOCAL is going to be any different with computer drivers. RIP worlds deadliest chases. 4)Respect for not climbing/hiking the worlds easiest mountain, Kilimanjaro. 5)No one can stop online gambling. When will they learn? 6)Idea muscle, enough said. Always give away good ideas. Most people will never use them, and being a node on a network is dead on point. 7)Awesome.
8) Very cool. Love the shout out to the show. 9)NFL. NO F%^&ING LICENSE. They didn't even give him tickets. That's just sad. 10)Bath Salts or Meth.
A driver-less car is one of those things that are permanently 20 years away. Just like nuclear fusion or a Chinese moon mission.
Ummmm....
http://www.youtube.com/embed/cdgQpa1pUUE
Driving at 5mph down a road with no traffic..
I want to ask Matt Levine how he found a way to stomach the predictable number of nasty comments at the bottom of an article with this viewpoint written for NPR. Maybe he just ignores them.
For those curious about Vayner's death, here is the most detailed report so far:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2267861/Aleksey-Vayner-Impossib…
It was definitely him, it was almost certainly suicide, and his friends and family knew he was considering it.
Am I the only one who hates the idea of a driver-less car? Even more so for a car made by....Google?
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