The Big O

So I've known for a while that my opinion on Obama's policies has a distinct ordering, from best to worst:

1. Domestic Policy
2. Political Policy (aka what to do with the republicans)
3. Financial Policy (aka what to do with the banks)
4. Foreign Policy

Actually 2 & 3 could be swapped, I'm not too sure about those. But 1 & 4 are clear: I'm not at all pleased with the continued drone attacks on Pakistan, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, or the continued broad support of Israel's occupation of Palestine. But his just announced budget proposal is fantastic. Better healthcare, cuts to the military, increased funds for new energy research (and money to beef up the energy grid, which is a 100% necessary precondition for a lot of new energy types), carbon cap-and-trade initiatives, and increased taxes on the wealthy! I agree with every single one of these things. Of course he could go farther, but even these policies are so far removed from the previous administration's agenda one wonders if it's even the same country we're talking about here. Sometimes I am really happy that man is POTUS.

Also: hi Katy!

Mind = blown

Crucial article on how the financial collapse occurred. The crux of it being that apparently, the model that they were using to calculate the likelihood of defaults in a given mortgage-backed security really did assume that house prices would only ever keep going up! This is because the historical timescale that they were using to predict the likelihood of default only covered the last ten years, exactly the timespan of the housing boom. In other words the housing boom was used to predict the housing boom! That's incredible. And the fuckers knew this or else willfully ignored the warning signs, because they were making too much money selling mortgage-backed securities not to mention the CDS's that were used to model the fucking things in the first place. As you can tell, I'm kind of astounded by this, both by the stupidity of the whole thing and by the fact that this absurd feedback loop entirely makes sense.

Several parts of this relate back to what I was saying a couple posts ago: the power and danger of abstraction, the difficulty of keeping a complex software system stable. Because in one sense, this whole financial meltdown can be seen as a bug in the complex interconnected software system that is the global financial system. The system became too large to be easily understood as a whole; and then Li's equation entered, was quickly integrated to the point of total pervasiveness, but was subject to insufficiently rigorous testing and analysis. I guess, if there's a moral claim to made about where fault resides in this fiasco, it is there, in the lack of rigor and scrutiny that the interlocking system of mortgage-backed securities and CDS's were given. No one wanted to stop the money that was being made from these things.  It's almost capitalism's problem in a nutshell! The bankers, the modellers, the ratings agencies and the government regulators were unwilling to see past the massive profits to the massive pitfalls that lay ahead. Goddamn it was greed.

Fuck those fuckers if I lose my job because they couldn't admit to their own goddamn mistakes.

XXVII

It's my birthday! (he shouts through a large cardboard tube)

Signs that I'm now "of a certain age":
-My cooworker Chad says to me today, "By the time I was 27, I had a wife and kid!"
-Patrick Batemen, the psycho-killer/wall street big-wig played by Christian Bale in American Psycho is the same age as me
-A week ago my friends and I had an extended conversation about hair-loss.
-I have a real adult job and spend more time then I'd like to admit thinking about buying a condo.

The funny thing is you always end up growing older, so I'm sure in a few years I will look back at my concerns as a 27-year old and laugh at my innocence and envy my youth. C'est la vie. You can't really ever come to terms with aging because it isn't a neutral process that you can try to disengage yourself with. It's almost by definition a negative, subtractive process: one year closer to the grave, one year more of wear and tear on your body. All you have to measure against it is learning & wisdom; thankfully the brain works on a slightly longer timescale then the rest of your body, but even it too will begin to disintegrate eventually. And women have it even worse, let there be no doubt. At least we men can look up to people like george clooney who are allowed to grow old largely naturally and still be praised for his salt-and-pepper good looks. Women are done after about 21, if we're to take the pages of Us magazine seriously (which we all do on some level, much to our own horror).

The best we can do is accept the unacceptable because it's innevitable. We grow old, our bodies break down and we die. Sweet! That sounds awesome! :)

Google mapping

They should make up a name for obsessively scrolling around through google maps checking out sweet places in the satellite view. Cuz it's a real problem of mine, sometimes. Did you know they have the underwater topography as part of it now? It looks really sweet when you scroll out over the ocean and plus it makes it really easy to find ultra-remote random islands in the middle of the pacific ocean and such. So many candidates for the Lost island! Jeez Widmore, it's not that hard to find the island, just use google maps!

Workin' for the Man

So I work for a bank, right? I like to say I work for a software company owned by a bank, but since it's a wholly owned subsidiary of said bank then really, who am I kidding? I work for a bank, a big bank. A fuckoff big American bank. The kind of bank that gets called up in front the US Congress to explain just what the fuck they think they're doing with all that goddamn money. I'm not gonna name names just to avoid random bad-luck googling (especially given todays Metro front page story about a bus driver fired for keeping a blog), but if you know me you know the bank, and if you don't know me...wait you don't know me and you're reading my blog? Who the fuck are you?

So yeah, the bank thing. It's weird, reading about your company in the news, following random internet people speculating on your company's outlook on Google finance, or for that matter, watching your company's stock plummet or rise on a daily basis. Weird because it's so amazingly far removed from my day-to-day work life, completely detached from my influence, yet at the same time very real in it's influence. News story about layoffs...yeah seen those before...then the guy down the hall get's layed off. He's got two kids and a wife.

Sometimes I read things and it sounds like we've got our fundamentals a lot stronger then other banks (we, our...simple pronoun's and then all of a sudden you're identifying with an abstract legal entity, a bundle of business interests? No weirder than identifying with a sports team or a country, and hey at least these are my employers. The relations pretty direct really, but nonetheless, so easily is my linguistic allegiance bought.) And then other times I look at this whole mess, I see countries across the world scrambling to plug holes in their sinking economies and no two countries are plugging the same holes the same way and I think "all these economic oracles got us in to this mess in the first place, and they're expected to get us out?" The say 09 will be rough but after that it'll get better but most of them also thought 08 would be great and that didn't really turn out so well.

Just as few really understood the complex, layered securities that started this current crash, I don't think anyone has a true grasp one what our current economy has become. Particularly in the financial sector, abstractions have been based on abstractions, then split apart, wagered upon and insured, and then abstracted again. These are the hallmarks of extreme technologization. The wonder of abstractions is that each layer need only understand the layer below it. The weakness is thus that each layer is completely dependant on the assumptions of the layer below, such that if one fails, they all fail. The financials already have a name for this in their catalogue of risks: Systemic Risk. The inevitble stupidity in the face of unanticipated errors by computerized systems is only exacerbated by the difficulty in anticipating errors as systems become increasinlgy complex and interconnected. Computers are only as smart as the people who design them, and right now our world economy is essential a vast interconnected software system written by the highest bidder to feed the howling maw of unending quarterly growth.

I vacillate between confidence in my banks overall stability and horror at the blind mutant beast that is our economy, thrashing wildly while we prod and plead, suckle and suffer.

Today in music

This thread is cool, and it led me to this excellent thread: techno history from a germanic/continental european history is not something you get a lot of due to the predominance of american and (especially) british music journalists. All they ever want to talk about is detroit/chicago and the bloody "hardcore continuum." Guess Oliver Lieb is on my list of artists to check out.

Also I'd like to hear this

Also also the Fontan, Frak & D. Lissvik stuff on Information. Studio's West Coast being pretty much my favorite album of the last 2-3 years. Speaking of balaeric stuff, I was listening to the A Mountain of One album this morning and thinking to myself that I really need to listen to it more, especially on hung over weekends. It seem particularly apt for such a state of woozy languor.

And thus ends my day in music. Unless I download some tunes when I get home, which could well happen!


ps. About half an hour ago I forgot what letter came after 'v' in the alphabet. Fuck!