Category Archives: Business

Death to Contract Goblins

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Funny story about contract goblins, the denizens of the land of the wireless, who are not human, have no souls and bind you to contracts.

The store a few blocks away, which I walked to in the kind of weather that warps reality, couldn’t help me either. See, I purchased my phone from an at&t licensed store, not a core store. At this point, I had been trying to get this iPhone for just over three hours, and my anger was such that I could almost move objects with my mind. I returned to the kind, helpful sales rep at my local store and told him I’d be willing to swallow the price tag of an iPhone. He said he was out of stock.

I don’t have the desire to spend upwards of $1k a year on phone service; I have a brick of a phone and buy minutes so that I can use it the three times a year it’s helpful to me. Otherwise my phone is turned off. My own peeve is with the phone and cable companies who send out massive amounts of paper spam mail, with the offers to bundle your services. They put helpful phrases on the envelope, such as “Important account information inside!” to get you to open it, but of course the “important” thing is getting you to add more services to your account, which is more importance to them than to me. The trouble with this is that it gets you desensitized to the mail, and when the bill shows up, mysteriously not announcing that there is truly important information in it — your frakking bill — you might just ignore it. Which I just realized I did, again, while paying another bill online. Oh, Joy, here comes a late fee, which I have no doubt is by design, and helps pay for all that spam. Positive return on investment.

Dirty buncha angel rapers.

Cash Neutrality

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NYT: Banks and WikiLeaks

[A] bank’s ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.

The fact of the matter is that banks are not like any other business. They run the payments system. That is one of the main reasons that governments protect them from failure with explicit and implicit guarantees. This makes them look not too unlike other public utilities. A telecommunications company, for example, may not refuse phone or broadband service to an organization it dislikes, arguing that it amounts to risky business.

Of course, the net neutrality issue isn’t exactly settled. But the arguments have common roots.

While this does not represent my endorsement of Wikileaks, I think that the treatment they have received at the hands of both the government and business is scary. Nobody has been charged with a crime, and the news organization which have been relaying the leaks have not been targeted. Illegal and extra-legal actions have occurred or been contemplated. Does it not occur to “responsible” politicians and pundits that calling for assassination might be problematic? Due process, anyone? Another example of a-la-carte constitutionality. Does anyone expect that to change with Tea-Partiers arriving in a few days, or are some going to be shocked, shocked that the constitution is again being treated as a document of convenience.

I find myself in an unusual situation with regards to safeguarding information. I work for the Department of Defense and have served in the military, yet I am a scientist. I understand and agree with points on both sides. As scientists, it is pounded into our heads that information should be shared, and that the best thing that can happen is to have lots of smart people looking at a problem. The military view is just the opposite — information is to be compartmentalized so that it does not get out. It’s always a struggle to achieve a balance, because scientists don’t work very effectively when they are cordoned off. Maybe the security trade-off is worth the slower pace, maybe it isn’t. When scientists get together and talk science, they share information. You can’t just be at the receiving end all the time. Younger scientists, just starting out, are included because of the expectation that even if they have nothing to share now, they will be able to do so very soon. If you have nothing to share, you will eventually be cut off. It won’t happen right away — we love to talk about our work and contemplate interesting questions, but it has to be a two-way street. So secrecy has a very strong quenching effect on the ability to do science.

But countries do need to keep secrets. And the big problem I have with Julian Assange and Wikileaks is that they do not seem to be discriminating between secrets that are held because they are covering up behavior — the kind of “Pentagon Papers” information that they are using as a justification for their actions — and the secrets that a government needs to keep. The difference between covering up and giving cover. You show people how the sausage is made if the ingredients are not what is given on the label, otherwise you don’t need to know. Wikileaks is telling us how the sausage is made, regardless. That seems more like poking the anthill for the fun of it than the actions of (to paraphrase Justice Black) a free and unrestrained press exposing deception in government.

Physics May Succeed Where Regulation Fails

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When The Speed Of Light Is Too Slow: Trading at the Edge

The limit to signal delay imposed by the speed of light is starting to affect how well companies can do arbitrage trading.

Typically, the latency for HFT trades is now below 500 microseconds. Traders in the same city can achieve that by optimizing their computers, network hardware, and software for speed. But when it comes to trading between cities — or worse, between continents — the speed of light, not routing or traffic delays, actually becomes the limiting factor. (It takes at least 66.8 milliseconds, more than 100 times longer than 500 microseconds, for light to travel between two points located at opposite sides of the Earth, for example. This doesn’t include delays from the electronics and the fiber itself.)

Which means where you locate your trading office can affect how well you do business. Not surprisingly, the first-order solution would be to place your office at the midpoint between the two offices where the trades will occur. It will be interesting to see if people actually start doing this.

Don't Text on Me

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Semi-interesting snippet in a recent Kottke post. I say semi, in part, because the post is about the bandwidth devoted to Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, and I’m pretty far from the demographic that gives a rat’s ass about Bieber (stands on virtual porch, shakes fist*), and the few times I’ve heard Lady Gaga’s music, I could not differentiate the songs and the saturation point was quickly reached. So, BFD.

However: We all know printer ink is expensive (more expensive than silver, pound-for-pound). So the calculation showing that transmitting the information by text-message is more than an order of magnitude more expensive than by printed text is an eye-opener. One might even go gaga over such a factoid. (FYI, I don’t text, either. All of my thumb ligament damage is old and Gameboy-related. Tetriiiiiis!)

 

*just as if I were playing Lawnville on some social-networking site

The Case Against Pennies

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aka the disgusting bacteria-ridden disks of suck that fail to facilitate commerce

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

You only have to get rid of the penny for cash transactions — you could still track it for electronic ones. You’d just round up or down on the whole transaction.

UPDATE: Those statistics are out of date. In 2009, it cost 1.6 cents to make a penny and 6.1 cents to make a nickel; the US Mint lost 22 million on penny and nickel production, not the 70 million they lost in 2008. (This is because the recession has made zinc and nickel cheaper.)

Increasingly, The Answer is "No"

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Aren’t We Clever?

“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.” The push for green in China, she added, “is a practical discussion on health and wealth. There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat and breathe pollution every day.”

And because runaway pollution in China means wasted lives, air, water, ecosystems and money — and wasted money means fewer jobs and more political instability — China’s leaders would never go a year (like we will) without energy legislation mandating new ways to do more with less. It’s a three-for-one shot for them. By becoming more energy efficient per unit of G.D.P., China saves money, takes the lead in the next great global industry and earns credit with the world for mitigating climate change.

I don’t understand our hesitancy to go down the path of alternative energy. It seems like a no-brainer (making it a good match for many of our politicians) — we can become less dependent on foreign sources of energy, can create jobs here, and reduce CO2 emissions. Even if the bought-and-paid-for-by-big-oil politicians don’t like the last one, surely spending money domestically instead of sending it overseas has to be good for the economy. Waiting to act only makes things worse.

Update: Related: The Brothers Koch and AB 32

Can the Republicans be the pro-business party when we need them to be the pro-business party?

And They Invented Math!

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Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds

The Greek debt crisis.

When Papaconstantinou arrived here, last October, the Greek government had estimated its 2009 budget deficit at 3.7 percent. Two weeks later that number was revised upward to 12.5 percent and actually turned out to be nearly 14 percent. He was the man whose job it had been to figure out and explain to the world why. “The second day on the job I had to call a meeting to look at the budget,” he says. “I gathered everyone from the general accounting office, and we started this, like, discovery process.” Each day they discovered some incredible omission. A pension debt of a billion dollars every year somehow remained off the government’s books, where everyone pretended it did not exist, even though the government paid it; the hole in the pension plan for the self-employed was not the 300 million they had assumed but 1.1 billion euros; and so on. “At the end of each day I would say, ‘O.K., guys, is this all?’ And they would say ‘Yeah.’ The next morning there would be this little hand rising in the back of the room: ‘Actually, Minister, there’s this other 100-to-200-million-euro gap.’ ”

This went on for a week. Among other things turned up were a great number of off-the-books phony job-creation programs. “The Ministry of Agriculture had created an off-the-books unit employing 270 people to digitize the photographs of Greek public lands,” the finance minister tells me. “The trouble was that none of the 270 people had any experience with digital photography. The actual professions of these people were, like, hairdressers.”

Mailing It In

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I ordered something online, and expected it to be delivered at the end of this past week. I thought that it was going to ship via the postal service, but then got a tracking number from FedEx. Here’s why.

That’s right. (Pardon my use of the vernacular, but) FedEx got the package and then fucking mailed it. Apparently this is a new “service” called SmartPost, and if you Google on that term, you will find complaints all over the place. The skinny is that the SmartPost service waits until they have a critical mass of deliveries, and then they turn them over to the Post office, so “at the Postal Facility” might not be the truth. If it is, then they’ve been hanging on to my package for 4 days, not the 1 or 2 advertised. And based on the complaints I’ve read, if it actually gets delivered on Tuesday, I will be getting off easy. There are horror stories of deliveries taking weeks and packages just disappearing.