On the 8 Spot

A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.

Op-Ed Contributor – Buy American. I Am. – NYTimes.com.

Thanks to Bryan Caplan for the pointer

Franklin D. Roosevelt: First Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men. 7

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live. 8

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: First Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989.

from Prof Dani Rodrik.

So what will the post-mortem on Wall Street show? That it was a case of suicide? Murder? Accidental death? Or was it a rare instance of generalized organ failure? We will likely never know.

The regulations and precautions that lawmakers will enact to prevent its recurrence will therefore necessarily remain blunt and of uncertain effectiveness.

That is why you can be sure that we will have another major financial crisis sometime in the future, once this one has disappeared into the recesses of our memory. You can bet your life savings on it. In fact, you probably will.

Who Killed Wall Street?.

A never ending cycle of trouble-solution-trouble again.

In the end few people can forsee the big problems of tomorrow, thus we are forever preparing for the last war, but there are things that prove to be scarier. The speed at which information travels has exceeded our capability to make sense of it. This is true for financial innovation, and almost all other forms of innovation fueling our modern world! What we have is I think similar to what programmers have to face.

Agile programming was born as a result of frustrations with alot of the management styles that programmers are forced to adhere to. It designs the process ofsoftware development to be more responsive to changes. The processes are designed to help produce code that is easily or more readily tested and responsive to the ever changing user requirements. This is mostly done because of a structure where trust in the abilities of your co-workers and supervisors/team leads are present in abundance.

The thing is because of the fema fication of government we just don’t have that level of trust in the abilities of the people who run the government (Ben Bernanke exempted).

Going back to my main point, The technology is there, hearing Larry Lessig talk (reading on the web but hearing talk is more dramatic) of a more responsive techology enabled democracy, I cannot help but think of how much we need to restructure government to be adaptive, to be more agile.

This is because we will almost always be prepared for the last war, massive leverege, predatory lending, etc those things will be solved eventually, albeit slowly, but if we have structures/processes/agencies that are geared towards minimizing the hurt and maximizing the returns from the new challenges that face us then maybe just maybe we could live as if nothing changes because we have changed ourselves and our government to function in a way where only change is constant.

The whole pot was an excellent read. I’ve discussed my utter hate contempt <insert/hurl other insults here> in another post (ok the post was more of a positive post on not needing resumes) here and here.

The lowdown is simple if you have the ability to learn something fast, If you have the mental structure to do good work fast (programming context: for java people its a good grounding in patterns, for other more advice language its a great understanding and experience in meta programming), If you have the requisite basic social skills to be considered a good to great co-worker, you would probably never want for jobs.

Co-wrokers would refer you, and most of the times the resumes is secondary to the recommendation.

You work with someone for around 6 months and you probably know or have a fairly good idea of how well your co-worker learns, and in programming how ugly his or her code is.

If what you are working on is relatively hard and with deadlines that require you to level up your work output, if you can work in a project with some one that has critical time constraints and is still a hard project or problem you tend to have an idea of how he/she react under pressure.

This is something that no certification, no resume will tell you, and a test short of on the job evaluation will never show you these skills or attributes of a person.

I did a really short term contract a year ago, only a single week, in South Carolina trying to adapt a “free” tool for a use it wasn’t really supposed to be able to do. I had never seen the technology before (an XML publishing tool) and it had to interact with a system I knew nothing about (J.D. Edwards) and a week was all the time I had to learn, master, hack and deliver. I managed to succeed in 4 days (the fifth was a half day of just documenting) despite all the barriers and left on a real positive note from the customer and the agency. How do you put this in a resume? An ability to do anything that’s needed by learning rapidly, applying a lifetime of skills and a creative mind. Yeah, that’s a real good resume line:

Able to rapidly learn anything you need and deliver professional results

Talk about a useless resume. Yet it’s true, but lost in a sea of lies on resumes the statement may as well read “234234 dsfsjkhsdf = %432″.

Maybe resumes are still necessary, since the industry can’t figure out how to match employees and employers with a better method. Maybe people should write tests and challenge anyone to pass them (I think some people have tried that) instead of trolling for perjury. Even that isn’t foolproof since tests can be googled and passing tests doesn’t really prove you can actually deliver (I once knew a guy who passed the Java Developer Certification but couldn’t write two lines of code together that worked). Maybe people should read your blog and see if you know anything meaningful. I don’t have an answer, I just wish there was one people could agree on.

Meanwhile maybe I will try with the one line resume “Will write good code for good money”. I’d like to do some short term PHP work in the DFW area, so a short resume would be a plus.

At least it’s not a lie. Who knows, someone might believe it.

the_codist().

I once ate around 3 kilos of chocolate within an hour period, hmm maybe that caused my migraine attack. But what a way to go!!

Death by Chocolate

Where would we be without the internet and wikipedia?

Theobromine poisoning: Chemists with the USDA are investigating the use of theobromine as a toxicant to control coyotes that prey on livestock. Humans are also susceptible to chocolate poisoning if enough is ingested. The lethal dose is placed at around 10 kg (22lbs).

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong.