dubious.biz(ness)

The past week has been one of the most bizarre on record. First of all our economy is in a freefall until someone finds a working parachute. Bush became the salesman for Paulson’s plan. Bernanke admits that he’s been wrong every time up until now, letting his academic humility tamper with his Wall Street (and Capitol Hill) credibility. I have been watching it all very closely and while I’m better educated than most I am not in a position to provide running commentary.

However what I can say is this: If Congress thinks the number (which by the way, I refuse to write any other way than US$700,000,000,000) is too high, they misunderstand how recessions work. If they don’t do something, the “market” will overcorrect. And by a mile. They lack much understanding of high finance but no one off Wall Street does. And there is little reason to trust the guys who got us in to the mess. But it’s not really rocket science: all this stuff must be unwound. Someone has to suffer. Ultimately the American consumer benefited most from loose credit over the past few years. Now they’re going to have to suffer the consequences. There are two ways to do it, broadly speaking: to structure that suffering or just leave it to “unwind”.

Wall Street can’t easily explain to you what “unwinding” means and why it needs to happen. Let’s just say that when you have a pyramid scheme, it has to be disassembled layer by layer. And each layer gets bigger and bigger. And that’s in terms of money. And people. And jobs. So if you want to have it toppled, if you think that Wall Street and those whiz kids deserve to be punished for getting it really really wrong, you’re only committing yourself to worse. Much, much worse.

Ultimately, the reason that we are in this mess is them and they got nice bonuses all the way up. But those three credit cards you got over the past two years, your new house, and your car. Assuming that this is just America’s problem (a bad assumption), we’re talking about US$2,333 per person for this bailout. That may seem like an awful lot, but that’s also about the credit limit of that new mastercard you got three years ago and now maxed out. So it may be their fault, but that Williams-Sonoma toaster is your little present from the credit crunch.

Others point to the rush to get this bill passed. Well, we’re living in a world where the obvious conclusion is the current reality. And the obvious conclusion is a collapse. Politicians aren’t used to working at the speed of business, they may work 12 hours a day but they take forever to do nothing.

A short list of who still needs to get a clue:

• Hank Paulson: You left Goldman Sachs to help enrich your buddies from inside the beltway. Wall Street thinks you’re a god, which you may be but only inside the board room. Unfortunately nobody in Peoria has heard of you and we’re you’re shareholders and the Congress is our proxy vote. Nobody knows you because you choose to do absolutely nothing until last week. That was a very bad move. You cannot perform a Gordon Gecko and waltz in to Capitol Hill and tell us how business works. You made an even bigger mistake by assuming that a leveraged buyout style takeover would work. You were reluctant to bring your talents to public service and with good reason. You are a fish out of water and have no clue of how to handle politics, you should have stuck to Goldman.
• House Republicans: You have no clue what you’re messing with. You are trying to keep yourself in a seat by holding firm against the bill in hopes that people will respect that you stood up to the Bush Administration and big government. Unfortunately only want small government while the going’s good. And they don’t understand what’s happening anyway enough to have an opinion. You are going to be blamed for the coming recession by your challenger, that’s a fact of life. You were elected based on your social values, not your hard line stance on spending. Your attempt to give yourself a leg up on next month’s election is likely going to set off a tailspin that you can’t comprehend because you are a stupid politician.
• Hedge Fund Managers: Start carefully unwinding. Stop betting. The roulette wheel is in motion and you’ve done enough damage. It’s almost certain that you’re going to lose all your working capital very soon, but your kamikaze actions might just kill the economy. Unwind and you just might not go to hell.
• John McCain: Stay out of Washington while the adults are trying to save the economy.
• Barack Obama: Start coming up with a viable plan that people can understand and campaign on that. People aren’t exactly in the mood to hear hope anymore so you can shut up about that. They want someone who can steer the ship and sounds like they have a clue. So figure out how to talk about real policies, not unicorns and rainbows for once.
• George Bush: Heck of a job, Bushie. If we had a Chief Executive instead of Chief Idiot it would really help because these are the times where that role is actually useful.
• Nancy Pelosi: Every time I hear about you, you’re fucking up. Let’s admit it, you aren’t a good Speaker, you aren’t even a good politician. You’re a good Democrat. Your party ties have tied your hands and now you can’t even pretend to reach across the aisle. Give up the chair to someone who can.
• The Rest of Congress (beside the House Republicans and Pelosi): Yes, there’s an election coming up. And some of your fellow members have decided to stick their heads in the sand. I know that it’s fun to play tribal games but as with many things in the past few years, peoples’ lives and livelihoods are at stake and all you guys can do is play Lord of the Flies. Let’s try cooperating and legislating for a change.

I don’t like the idea of a bailout any more than anyone else, and I don’t want to “reward” Wall Street but let’s face it: Wall Street is running the show and the first step is to shore up the financial system. Then we find out who’s accountable and how we fix it. Otherwise there may be nothing left to fix.

I have been spending a lot of time on YouTube. I have seen your viral video. Twice. But for all those hatas who try to call out youtube as a radioactive time sink, I thought I would provide some promotion to some great videos to you, my loyal viewers.

First up is a video of Paul Krugmann, a noted economist, speaking at Google. He wrote a book, which is why he was invited, but he’s not talking about it. He’s talking about the economy and since (in case you haven’t been paying attention) it’s in the shitter right now and the shitter is clogged and it’s being flushed repeatedly and possibly now overflowing into the proverbial bathroom… it’s worth a listen even if you don’t like Krugmann’s self-admittedly liberal views. He’s one of the very few people with both the academic credentials and the gift of plain speech.

And I promise my next edition of “There’s nothing good on YouTube” will not be a talk at Google (or Google related).

I have an inexplicable urge to know the marital status of famous women. I am not sure what this says about me. I know that I am not going to hook up with Halle Berry (married), Audrey Tautou (single), or Karen Hayley (also single). I don’t keep up with celebrity gossip. I have little interest in their personal lives, I never wait outside their residences. However, when I see a famous person whom I don’t recognize, I generally go their wikipedia page. And if that person is a female, my eye cannot help but wander over two details: their age (particularly relative to mine) and their current relationship status.

My only justification for it is this: I am getting older. These women are famous and therefore successful. The more successful women still on the market, the better off I am doing relatively speaking, because the more “chances” I have. So “famous” women are just a sample of all women and the more eligible famous women, the more eligible women in general, right?

I bet that you do it too. I bet that most people have the marital status of everyone within 5 years of them on either side in their heads, because we’re all keeping score. We might as well just all admit it, it’s a rat race and we’re all in it.

Or you could just stay in hiding and leave me hanging here.

As a kid I met a lot of crazy people. Fortunately I haven’t met many since, but I think it has left me with some sort of effective crazy detector that pegs when I see that wild look in the eyes and hear that sort of dispassionate dismissal of any criticism. Along with a lot of off-the-wall jargon that comes from an bizarre internal monologue, a monologue which shouldn’t be going on in the first place and would never leak out of the mouth of a sane person.

Well folks as much as I hate to discuss the CNN obsession of the moment, Palin is probably nuts. Obviously she is functional in reality but she is loosely connected with reality. Here are a few quotes:

During a Charlie Gibson interview, Palin is asked whether her instant acceptance of the VP nomination took some hubris.

I — I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink.

Mission?

GIBSON: But, Governor, I’m asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government.

PALIN: In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.

Ok this is scary crazy. I understand a hard stance on national security, but “We must not blink in making tough decisions”? That is a stronger stance than just Pakistan. That is Bush 100%. Does that mean we just chase anyone down anywhere? With what army? We’re overstretched as it is.

PALIN: I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table.

Ok, exercising all the options and having all the options on the table are completely different. Exercising the options is “win at all costs”, even if that cost is human beings, sovereignty, our domestic priorities. Having all the options on the table means never overextending yourself. They’re opposing strategies.

We’re suggesting putting her 1 person away from the button. McCain is not a young man. If we do we’re as crazy as she is.

Cambridge to Vienna, Part 5

This blog was started almost exactly 4 years ago to document my going to college in Cambridge. In fact it was originally called “Goin’ to College”, a now painfully out of date reference to a Strong Bad email. At some point it changed to the domain name, an more appropriate description of just about everything I do.

Anyway, the “Goin’ to College” chapter is over and done with. As a whole lot of you (and particularly any of you with the ability to search Facebook) know, I’m going to Google to work as an APM (Associate Product Manager). Kind of. I’m actually in Zurich, not Mountain View. And I’m at YouTube, not Google (though Google owns YouTube). Nothing in my life can be simple.

Ironically, I knew nothing of the YouTube position when I started videoing my trip. One of the rather …difficult… parts of working at Google is you don’t know your first assignment until just before you arrive. This is because they put you where you’re needed at the time. Kind of like the Army. Anyway, I thought I had it sussed where I’d end up, though I bounced between various ideas. Well turns out I was wrong every time. I’m at YouTube. I cannot express how happy this makes me for a number of reasons. The main one is that YouTube is a smaller organization and is run at an arm’s length from Google, which offers a lot of mobility. This is particularly helpful given that I am working in what Google terms a “distributed office”, i.e. an office not in Mountain View. I am also assigned to projects that are basically exactly what I love and what I’m good at. As I mentioned before, you are at Google’s mercy in your first project, and I really, really lucked out.

I thought that it would be simple to blog about what I was doing in University because there were no secrets, no private conversations between manager and employees, no lawsuits (real or possible), and no fiduciary duties I owed to Cambridge, all of which were true at QX. Well, it turned out that I couldn’t talk about how difficult being Boat Club Captain was because being frank about it would have directly insulted a few people and offended many more, which would have made my job even harder. I couldn’t talk about my difficulties in my project because I can count my project supervisor among those who read my blog not to mention my future employers and I didn’t want to sound like an idiot. These are the risks of being “known” and having a blog. You are responsible for your words, but unlike a journalist, your words are relatively valueless compared to the risk they create, so you end up silent.

This conundrum is not unique to me, a lot of my friends have become reluctant to blog due to the prevalence of Google searches (my eponymous friendfeed is the 4th result for a search on “Kenny Stoltz” and many people I have just met at work know an awful lot about me because of it) and Facebook’s policy of linking a real-world identity to a online identity have caused a lot of people to rethink what they publish online. As much as Facebook would like to tout their privacy controls, they’re pretty rudimentary compared to the fine-grained privacy available in real life. Yet they are still probably the best available right now.

All of this is to say, I don’t know what I’ll be able to say about what I’m doing. Google is very careful about what it says to the public for good reason. It is regularly the target of attention of all kinds and from all corners. It is my duty as an employee to respect that, particularly given my title, which sounds much more important than it actually is. So I doubt you will see much at all here about my work life, except maybe when we release something awesome to the public. I plan on spending a lot of time at work because there is the potential for me to make a huge impact and help Google move forward in a number of directions. But that also means I plan on not spending a lot of time on anything else. I have a lot of theoretical hobbies planned for Zurich but certainly work will be coming first for at least the next two years.

So if I’m quiet, ping me and tell me to get out of the cubicle and experience life. Otherwise I’m going to be working late making YouTube great.

I hate writing these omnibus posts. So I won’t, I’m going to break it up in to many posts.

For those of you looking for my trip videos, I’m still making/uploading them. I have switched all the hosting over to YouTube for reasons that should become clear in a bit. I now appreciate all the work that Jane went through in making the videos, not only does the software that I recommended she use truly suck (though I haven’t found better yet), it’s just a lot of time to make video. I realize that a lot of you are put off by the concept of spending 35+ minutes sitting at a computer, and I don’t know if there’s much I can do about that without getting in to serious editing, I am condensing 7 days in to 30 minutes which is a lot of compression. Hopefully it’s compelling enough that those of you who know me watch it and those who don’t, don’t. I hope to both videos up by the end of the long weekend but Adobe is conspiring to make that difficult. It’s currently “rendering” the video for the 3rd time, a process that takes 5 hours. If it fails again I will just have to start it again, there’s nothing else I can do, and until this one finishes rendering I can’t start the next one…

Anyway I will probably try to make a few changes to the blog as a whole over the next few weeks, finally moving my blog to dubious.biz/ and just linking away to Spooky… or something.

On a final note, it was really, really awesome to get comments from everyone. I am not the most read/write person in the world. I am pretty irresponsible when it comes it internal and external communications. Whenever I could check in it was nice to see that I wasn’t alone, and all in all, things worked out pretty well during the trip. I’m glad that all of you read this crap and tolerate me only occasionally responding to emails. I hope you know I still love you all. On the up side my personal and business emails are now finally separate again, so I will be able to keep track of what the hell is going on in my personal life better, so try sending me one again! Who knows, you might just get a response!