About Me

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
                                  —Emily Dickinson

Indeed, Ethan Berman, the chief executive of RiskMetrics (and no relation to Gregg Berman), told me that one of VaR’s flaws, which only became obvious in this crisis, is that it didn’t measure liquidity risk — and of course a liquidity crisis is exactly what we’re in the middle of right now. One reason nobody seems to know how to deal with this kind of crisis is because nobody envisioned it. In a crisis, Brown, the risk manager at AQR, said, “you want to know who can kill you and whether or not they will and who you can kill if necessary. You need to have an emergency backup plan that assumes everyone is out to get you. In peacetime, you think about other people’s intentions. In wartime, only their capabilities matter. VaR is a peacetime statistic. RISK Mismanagement - What Led to the Financial Meltdown - NYTimes.com
As we approached his car, he began talking about his own performance in 2008. Although he is no longer a full-time trader, he remains a principal in a hedge fund he helped found, Black Swan Protection Protocol. His fund makes trades that either gain or lose small amounts of money in normal times but can make oversize gains when a black swan appears. Taleb likes to say that, as a trader, he has made money only three times in his life — in the crash of 1987, during the dot-com bust more than a decade later and now. But all three times he has made a killing. With the world crashing around it, his fund was up 65 to 115 percent for the year. Taleb chuckled. “They wouldn’t listen to me,” he said finally. “So I decided, to hell with them, I’ll take their money instead. RISK Mismanagement - What Led to the Financial Meltdown - NYTimes.com

On Love Stories

Just saw Slumdog Millionaire, a fantastic story about a boy in the slums of India overcoming the most adverse circumstances, but, of course, it was all wrapped up in a Hollywood bow of love story. She, in the end, is why he does everything: why he endures.

Perhaps romantic love really is the most important thing in the world. It’s the one gesture of choice you have, the one conscious choice you can make in the entirely random circumstance of the family you were born into. Making your environment a little more hospitable to you isn’t a bad way to spend your life.

But what was he in love with? He barely knew this woman. They were children together, briefly, and yet the ideal of her remained inside his head his entire life. It couldn’t have been her he loved. Though she was beautiful and seemingly lovely, she was only a slip of a character. His great love for her obviously wasn’t about who she was — she represented his romantic ideal of making whole his childhood loss. It wasn’t about loving her. I’m not sure why women find that romantic.

Or maybe it is better to be loved as a deity, with all the passion that engenders, despite the fact it has nothing to do with who you are. Human love is much more fleeting. Perhaps love only survives in the hothouse of ideals.

Best. Christmas. Ever.

A Christmas miracle happened today! I was starting to get anxious since I hadn’t started my Christmas shopping yet. (It was only yesterday I realized I wasn’t actually going to knit everyone sweaters like I’d been planning.) Then, I heard about this e-commerce site on NPR. It is one-stop-shopping with the perfect Christmas present for everyone, such as, “a malaria net for a child in Africa” or “a year of school for an orphan.” Perfect! Who wouldn’t pretend to love that?

Now, everyone knows that if you have a family, you should never, ever mention a preference for a specific farm animal. My mother mentioned casually, about 12 years ago, that she thought pigs were cute. So, every birthday, every Christmas, thus after—each holiday we were obligated to buy her stupid shit to prove we loved her, well, it was always a ceramic pig, or a country-home style pig portrait. Last Christmas, I sat in our kitchen, counting the pigs. There were 62. I heard my mother sigh as she added another one to the shelf.

“Mom, do you even like pigs?” I finally thought to ask.

“Not really,” she said.

So this year, what did I buy her? A pig! An actual, real live pig! (For a family in Africa.)

From there it was a shopping bonanza. I bought a “small business loan for a woman living with HIV/Aids” for my sister; “10 fruit trees” for a family in Africa for my grandmother; a “goat for a woman” for my father; and “a blanket” for my great aunt.

But the best of all? For my sister’s boyfriend I bought “hope for sexually exploited girls.” At only $25, I thought it was quite a bargain. (The pig was $60.) I couldn’t figure out why hope was so cheap this year, particularly in a recession. Then I realized—Obama has flooded the market. Basic economics: more hope on the market means the price goes down.

I see a changing landscape in which the emphasis is less on the sex than it is on the openness and intimacy and the revelation of secrets,” said Dr. Pittman, the author of “Private Lies: Infidelity and the Betrayal of Intimacy” (Norton, 1990). “Everybody talks by cellphone and the relationship evolves because you become increasingly distant from whomever you lie to, and you become increasingly close to whomever you tell the truth to. Well - More People Appear to Be Cheating on Their Spouses, Studies Find - NYTimes.com
The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night — tiny updates like “enjoying a glass of wine now” or “watching TV while lying on the couch.” They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn’t very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call. Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

Steve Schmidt - the guy who’s running John McCain’s campaign - is like Karl Rove’s son. Schmidt is probably one of the best targeter of voters in the country. He really knows how to connect one-on-one with voters. He doesn’t just do polling like other consultants - he uses commercial market studies. He reduces voting to who shops at Wal-Mart, Target and Costco and how to talk to them. He doesn’t give a damn about Wilkes Bashford or Nordstrom shoppers. He checks out what kind of cars voters are driving, where voters shop, what kind of things they buy, what programs they watch on TV, what they do on weekends. Then he does the assessment and tailors the campaign’s message to convince you that his candidate has your deepest interest at heart.
from Willie Brown’s Column in the San Francisco Chronicle

Wal-Mart pays some of its employees such a low wage that they must subsist on a range of government assistance programs. In effect, therefore, taxpayers subsidize the profits of Wal-Mart shareholders, at a rate of $2,000 per employee per year. Democratic Staff of House Comm. on Education and the Workforce (report by Rep. George Miller), Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We Pay for Wal-Mart, 8 (Feb. 16, 2004).
Roughly two-thirds of new oil demand is coming from countries that have subsidized oil markets. Christopher Ruppel, a senior geopolitical analyst with the consulting firm John S. Herold. in Where gasoline is cheap, and why it is making yours pricey - May. 4, 2007