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Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining

Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone:

Since 2008, the rest of America has suffered a severe economic correction. Ordinary people everywhere long ago had to learn to cope with the equivalent of a lower bonus season. When the crash hit, regular people could not make up the difference through bailouts or zero-interest loans from the Fed or leveraged-up synthetic derivative schemes. They just had to deal with the fact that the economy sucked – and they adjusted.

This ought to have been true also on Wall Street, but in a curious development that is somehow not addressed in Sherman’s piece, the financial services industry somehow managed to maintain its extravagant lifestyle standards in the middle of a historic global economic crash that, incidentally, they themselves caused.

After suffering one truly bad year – 2008, in which the securities industry collectively lost over $42 billion – Wall Street immediately rebounded to post record revenues in 2009, despite the fact that the economy at large did nothing of the sort. The numbers were so huge on Wall Street compared to the rest of the world that Goldman slashed its 4th-quarter bonuses, just so that the final bonus/comp number ($16.2 billion, down from what would have been $21 billion) didn’t look so garish to the rest of broke America.

What Sherman now argues is that Dodd-Frank has so completely hindered Wall Street’s ability to magically invent profits through borrowing and gambling that, unlike those wonderful days in 2009, its fortunes are now reduced to rising and falling – heaven forbid – along with the rest of the economy. Things are so bad, his interview subjects argue, that one is now more likely to make big money going into an actual business that makes an actual product:

“If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg.”

[Oh dear. You can’t make this stuff up…]

How America became a nation of freelancers

How America became a nation of freelancers:

According to the Labor Department, employers often misclassify independent contractors as employees, locking misclassified freelancers out of benefits like tax write-offs for health insurance that they’re already paying for, all by themselves. For freelancers, it’s much, much harder to qualify for a loan, refinance their mortgage or, if they’re underwater on their homes, to find relief from loan modification programs.

I know a woman who was told, off the record, that the company that was considering hiring her would only do so on a contract basis – they didn’t want to take on the expense of hiring her because of her considerable medical bills. (She didn’t get the job.) Another associate thought he’d hit pay dirt with a high-paying, full-time salaried position at a big-name software company. But then, suddenly – right as he was ready to sign the paperwork – they rescinded their offer. Instead, they told him that they could only offer him a contract position on a project-by-project basis.

If this is how our economy is now organized, then we need safety nets for independent workers. And we need to start by acknowledging, as a nation, that while it’s all very good to talk about job creation, for many of us, a regular 9-to-5 gig is no longer a reality. Work has changed; the American worker is changing. Old-school labor paradigms no longer fit.

[ Where’s the thinking about this, rather than trying to recreate old style manufacturing jobs? And while we’re on the topic, small is the new big. Individuals manufacturing custom stuff is alive and kicking, and should become much more commonplace. As it once was. Things were lost in the rush to the assembly line.]

Dr.Brendan | The iphone Doc

Dr.Brendan | The iphone Doc:

During the short visit at our apartment, I learned that Dr.Brendan since has moved his business out of his living-room and opened two stores. And not only that, he has a whole army employees and they now also fix Macs. I was thrilled to hear that as my 2.5 year old iMac at work was giving me a hard time. Tony, a Dr.Brendan employee, came to promptly pick it up the next day and conveniently brought it back a few days later, fixed. Pick-up and drop-off? Yes, please!

Dr.Brendan and his team not only fix iPhones but now also repair pretty much any Apple device, do data recovery, help you set up your network and much more.

I can’t praise Brendan and his team enough. Go check out his site. And if you live either in the East Village or Park Slope, drop by their shop. And no worries, if you don’t live in NYC, you can ship your patient to Dr.Brendan.

[Cool story.]

Source: swissmiss

Honeywell sues Nest for patent infringement

Honeywell sues Nest for patent infringement:

Honeywell makes crappy, ugly thermostats. They’re the market leader, but they’ve been sitting on their asses, not doing much. So thermostat innovation and design has been pretty stagnant for years.

Nest’s is by far the most innovative thermostat we’ve seen for a long time, but it looks like they’re going to have a lot of problems with these Honeywell patents, which will probably impair (or, at worst, prevent) them from pushing this stagnant industry forward.

Remind me again how the patent system promotes innovation.

∞ Permalink

[Yeah, what he said. And shame on Honeywell…]

Source: Marco.org

Next Phase of Commercials

Next Phase of Commercials:

I predict that in a few years from now we’ll start to see 4.5-minute length commercial shorts that come after the extended-play version. Or maybe even “directors’ cut” versions. These outright unabashed commercials will run as long as a pop hit tune, and in format resemble a music video. We’ll see YouTube-ish channels that will charge you to watch them. I make this forecast based on the fact that this prime attention-niche is just one adjacent-possible step away.

[I rate this a very likely.]

Source: The Technium

Apple Adds High-DPI Versions of Pointers in OS X 10.7.3

Apple Adds High-DPI Versions of Pointers in OS X 10.7.3:



Screenshot from FinerThingsIn.com

DaringFireball notes several changes in some of the icons found in OS X 10.7.3. Several of our readers had also noticed the small changes in pointer icons in the latest version. It seems the changes run a bit deeper than on first glance. The new icons apparently come in high DPI versions that allow them to scale at high resolutions.

Have you noticed that Safari’s hovering-over-a-link pointing-finger cursor looks a little different in Mac OS X 10.7.3? It’s not just that the finger is at a slightly different angle — it’s a new UI resource that scales gracefully to larger sizes. That’s not the only new high-DPI image resource in 10.7.3: the grabby hand in Mail, the camera cursor for selecting an individual window to take a screenshot of, and a few other UI elements got the high-DPI treatment in 10.7.3.

Matt Gemmell shows an enlarged version of the icon when zoomed in Universal Access:

[Hey, wait, i just caught up to the last round…]

Source: MacRumors

‘The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center’

‘The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center’:

Starting in the mid-1930s, when he made his first field recordings in the South,  Lomax was the foremost music folklorist in the United States. He was the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and much of what Americans have learned about folk and traditional music stems from his efforts, which were also directly responsible for the folk music and skiffle booms in the United States and Britain that shaped the pop-music revolution of the 1960s and beyond.

Lomax worked both in academic and popular circles, and increased awareness of traditional music by doing radio and television programs, organizing concerts and festivals, and writing books, articles and essays prodigiously. At a time when there was a strict divide between high and low in American culture, and Afro-American and hillbilly music were especially scorned, Lomax argued that such vernacular styles were America’s greatest contribution to music.

[Listen to a few cuts here. Great that all this material will be made available.]

The Corner: How Amazon’s KDP Select Saved My Book

The Corner: How Amazon’s KDP Select Saved My Book:

I learned that the Internet is a very, very noisy place, and that just about everyone is selling something. I learned that people aren’t sitting around thinking about your book as much as you think and hope they are. I learned that all this time we worry about social media is probably best spent worrying about something else — like writing books.

Much like I will never quite understand why my So You Want to Go to Law School video went viral the way it did 16 months ago, I don’t know exactly why my book finally took off the way it did.

[Finding a large enough audience is clearly the number #1 problem. I doubt this will ever change. Which leads back to this. Be true to yourself first. ]

Source: Daring Fireball

Path Design

Path Design:

This is the best thing I’ve read about Path, and it perfectly articulates something I’ve thought not only about Path, but also a lot of other exemplars of the fussy, post-Apple wave of “high design” in tech products.

Then Brent says:

Read both, and then the Khoi Vinh article article Buzz links to.

So I did:

It’s difficult to say exactly how much design is “too much,” but finding that middle ground may be the most important job that an interaction designer has. Negotiating an equilibrium between the user’s ability to roam free and the system’s desire to funnel activities into specific directions is tricky business. This is a challenge that requires not only imagination and skill, which the best designers always have, but also perseverance and insight — the ability and willingness to work in an iterative, responsive fashion, with the understanding that the job is never really done. Even among the best designers, that’s rare.

[But I don’t agree. There is no room to breathe in Facebook, or really in Flickr either. Flickr feels a bit more “mine” because in my use it’s mainly about me and people I know or know of. So it feels personal that way. Facebook, you’re thinking is as well. But I rarely really use Facebook per se. My tweets publish there for the sake of folks I know who inhabit that space. And I “like” a few things here and there. But that’s about it. So not only is my use limited, but I find the page jammed with alerts, ads, and junk about which I haven’t the slightest interest.

I think the “tricky” cases are where you want a clean and clear design for the main case, but make less used and more compacted flows available. to me that’s tricky. The other case for tricky smacks of trying to herd users into an action, or gaming. I’m not a fan of either tactic.

And while I’m railing about stuffs… notice how many sites have started demanding that you sign up before you can even see anything on it? I refuse to join any of them. If I visit a site with commerce on my mind, you darn well better be able to show a pretty picture and maybe some lovingly crafted text before I give you anything.]

Source: inessential.com