About me!!!
My homework for INFO4400 was to design (sketch) a game of creativity for kids. I create an online world type idea … with music composition as the main point of interaction. Kids can hear the music played by nearby players or create their own using a simple sequencer tool. The sequence allows the selection of music-pattern icons which can be dragged onto a little player bar, and then played. See my poor excuse for a pencil drawing here:
MiJam Town
Classifying the CDO burst and credit collapse as the “greatest financial calamity of our era” has safely entered the public nomenclature. I think we’re all happy to know that, despite the obfuscated nature of structured finance, people feel like something went wrong. And if people feel like something went wrong, hopefully that means we wont make the same mistakes — or will we?
After all, there’s plenty of blame to go around — so we assume there must be plenty of fixes to be made. We blame home owners for borrowing more than they could pay. We blame mortgage writers for lending imprudently. We blame securitization for masking the risk; we blame rating agencies for hiding the warning signs. We blame the quants for doing what quants do best: creating black box models… and we blame the government for instituting policies that encourage the repackaging of risk in the name of liquidity — and the natural result is unsustainable leverage. So, a lot of the quibbling of late has not been about “what’s broken” but “who should we point the gun at so they can fix things first”. Obviously the banks have been getting a lot of rap for this whole mess. Given recent liquidity injections & government takeovers. maybe we’ll declare the whole thing mopped up in a year or two and return triumphant.
But not really.
I think the liberal artsy guys&gals in the media have it right when they blame the current crisis on greed. But not just any greed. Let’s take a step back. There’s the kind of greed you see in hero movies where the bad guys steals a ton of money — or cons xyz people out of millions of dollars right in their faces. We know the ending: the people win, democracy/freedom/liberty triumphs, and the bad guys go to jail (or 5 year white collar purgatory, if we’re in the real world). No, we’re not facing that kind of greed. In economics terms, that’s stupid greed. Stupid greed occurs when the expected value is less than zero — when there’s a reasonable probability (say 1%) of losing everything 100 times over. Stupid greed doesn’t pay, and that’s why it’s stupid.
No, what we’re facing is smart greed, the kind that pays. Smart greed should ring to the tune of “externality” and “prisoners dilemma” to us cobbled up in the “ivory tower” of economics. What we lack is accountability, both structurally and temporally. We have a long way to go before fixing this kind of greed.
Structurally, there’s a good body of literature on how we’ve innovated ourselves into the dark ages. Greed permits us to create money out of money, pass it around to the next guy, convince them that they have money, subsequently inflate a sector, and burn the whole party to a ground while we pat ourselves on the back with a nice end of year bonus. In technical terms, this kind of greed is what occurred when deregulation floated our currency (allowing the fed freedom), recombined commercial and investment banking ex-visa-vi Glass-Steagall (allowing the deposit taking banks investment freedom), promoted liquidity supplying innovations, and also promoted new modeling techniques. By the end, nobody was responsible because the collective delusion and irrational exuberance left no one person accountable. If you didn’t play, you were stupid, and if you did play, you were greedy. Any structural system which encourages speculative orgies during times of economic safety is probably in need of a fix.
However, these financial calamities don’t happen very often. It’s really not in the interest of anybody (living) to fix structural problems that wont occur for another decade or two at the least. In the mean time, anybody still living and in positions of power only need make temporary fixes (e.g. bailing out LTCM style). That’s temporal greed: “it’s not my problem because it wont bother me, and it wont bother me because I’ll be dead”.
Temporal greed is thus the far more pernicious evil, which will survive even when these recent financial innovations become defunct. It’s the same evil that plagues us when we try to create policies for sustainability or healthcare. What’s worse, it’s probably harder to fix. Even middle and high school kids can tell that our social security system is a rapidly deteriorating ponzi scheme. That’s good: that’s a problem we can see. A nationwide ponzi scheme of repackaging risk into other people’s hands (and more often than not, future people’s hands)… should set off huge sirens to regulators and investors alike. Unfortunately it did not until both irational exuberance and irational denial were spent. I wonder how it felt to be on the board of lehman or bear stearns as the walls came crumbling down.
But we have to fix it. The governments of the world have settled on a bandaid fix that shifts assets from short-term managers (bank CEOs) to long term managers (the taxpayers and government officials). Hopefully that will shield us from over-zealousness at the expense of some positive innovation. However, eventually we’re going to run out of longer-term investors who have a stake in our economy and country’s lasting prosperity. What are we going to do then?
Fried Rice, Scallion Pancakes, and Red Wine
Fried Rice
Scallion Pancakes
Red Wine
A friend of mine started a web2.0 company from Cornell, and he’s looking for a front-end developer (full time / intern) and Java Applet developer (part time / contract).
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INTERNSHIP & COOP
Summer and continuing Intern (during school year) in Cambridge, Boston. Competitive pay.
Required Skills
Preferred Skills
CONTRACT WORK: JAVA APPLET DEVELOPER
Short term / temp job over the summer — developing Java applets, Voice Note and Group Chat. May work from location of choice.
Required Skills
Preferred Skills
Apparently expired medication is by in large safe to use: link. Expiration dates are not required to have any relationship with the long term safety of the medicine. According to a FDA study for the U.S. military (which has tons of old medicine), most drugs (90%) remain completely potent even after 15 years past the expiration date. To test… I had some expired Alavert last night with only positive effects. Now if only I could find out how to readjust the dosage of medicine for different body sizes.