Undoubtably the result of a good woman's love

Ice Cube, before and after.

Welcome to the desert of the real...

Where are they now? 25 computer products that refuse to die.

Schumpeter at his finest, it would seem, but I really don't miss dot-matrix printers.

On the other hand

The End of Wall Street's Boom

On July 19, 2007, the same day that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the U.S. Senate that he anticipated as much as $100 billion in losses in the subprime-mortgage market, FrontPoint did something unusual: It hosted its own conference call. It had had calls with its tiny population of investors, but this time FrontPoint opened it up. Steve Eisman had become a poorly kept secret. Five hundred people called in to hear what he had to say, and another 500 logged on afterward to listen to a recording of it. He explained the strange alchemy of the C.D.O. and said that he expected losses of up to $300 billion from this sliver of the market alone. To evaluate the situation, he urged his audience to “just throw your model in the garbage can. The models are all backward-looking.

The models don’t have any idea of what this world has become…. For the first time in their lives, people in the asset-backed-securitization world are actually having to think.” He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt. “The rating agencies are scared to death,” he said. “They’re scared to death about doing nothing because they’ll look like fools if they do nothing.”

On September 18, 2008, Danny Moses came to work as usual at 6:30 a.m. Earlier that week, Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy. The day before, the Dow had fallen 449 points to its lowest level in four years. Overnight, European governments announced a ban on short-selling, but that served as faint warning for what happened next.

At the market opening in the U.S., everything—every financial asset—went into free fall. “All hell was breaking loose in a way I had never seen in my career,” Moses says. FrontPoint was net short the market, so this total collapse should have given Moses pleasure. He might have been forgiven if he stood up and cheered. After all, he’d been betting for two years that this sort of thing could happen, and now it was, more dramatically than he had ever imagined. Instead, he felt this terrifying shudder run through him. He had maybe 100 trades on, and he worked hard to keep a handle on them all. “I spent my morning trying to control all this energy and all this information,” he says, “and I lost control. I looked at the screens. I was staring into the abyss. The end. I felt this shooting pain in my head. I don’t get headaches. At first, I thought I was having an aneurysm.”

Schadenfreude is not attractive

But mea culpa, I enjoyed this premortem (née Washington Post-mortem, ha ha) of the newspaper industry's looming financial apocalypse. [via] In the spirit of reconciliation, let me hope that they rise again, phoenix-like from this fire, and other clichés.

Is the universe still precariously balanced in my favor?

Eric Hoffer: The True Believer

Offhand one would expect that the mere possession of power would automatically result in a cocky attitude toward the world and a receptivity to change. But it is not always so. The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power -- a slogan, a word, a button. No faith is potent unless it is also faith in the future; unless it has a millennial component. So, too, an effective doctrine: as well as being a source of power, it must also claim to be a key to the book of the future.

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.

[..]

Both the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, they who have achieved much or little can be afraid of the future. When the present seems so perfect that the most we can expect is its even continuation in the future, change can only mean deterioration. Hence men of outstanding achievement and those who live full, happy lives usually set their faces against drastic innovation. The conservatism of invalids and people past middle age stems, too, from fear of the future. They are on the lookout for signs of decay, and feel that any change is more likely to be for the worse than for the better. The abjectly poor also are without faith in the future. The future seems to them a booby trap buried on the road ahead. On must step gingerly. To change things is to ask for trouble.

Our bank and financial system's failure, and the moral failures of both lenders and borrowers which underpin them, are very real problems. Their correction will involve displacement and difficulty for many people.

But at the same time, I read Hoffer and agree that we are plagued by unwarranted self-doubt, and the panic and fear that swirl inchoate around us stems not from our current weakness, but from the opposite condition of our long-time dominance. That it stems from the belief that we are, or were, at the pinnacle of development and existence, and that we now face our inevitable decline.

Frankly, I don't think so at all, and despite my own (slight and vague) concern about my job, it has to be tempered by my very blessed existence. It seems perverse to live in such wealth and yet be so unhappy and worried about losing it. And if I am wrong, I feel that much of what I worry about are lilies of the field, and that if they are gone tomorrow, then I will still be okay. We'll see how that works out.