Author: readingbyeugene

On Crowdfunding in Start-Ups

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Yesterday, federal legislation went into effect to allow small start-ups to ask for equity investments publicly, such as through social media sites or elsewhere on the Internet, without having to register the shares for public trading. Business owners will now be able to raise any amount, though only, at this point, from accredited investors—those individuals deemed wealthy and sophisticated enough to understand and withstand (tremendous) risk (basically, if you make $200,000 in income per year or have more than $1 million in assets, excluding your primary residence).

I was thinking about this for some time, but I’m glad I read Felix Salmon’s piece “The Idiocy of Crowds” about this latest news. Basically, he thinks it’s a terrible, terrible idea and an easy way to part with your money:

Today’s a big, exciting day for anybody who has found it simply too difficult, to date, to throw their money away on idiotic gambles. Are you bored with Las Vegas? Have you become disillusioned with lottery tickets? Do micro caps leave you lukewarm? Does the very idea of a 3X ETF fill you with nothing but ennui? Well in that case today you must rejoice, because the ban on general solicitation has been abolished, and the web is now being overrun with companies like Crowdfunder and RockThePost and CircleUp which offer a whole new world of opportunity when it comes to separating fools from their money. You can even lose your money ethically, now, if that’s your particular bag. The highest-profile such platform is probably AngelList: as of today, founders like Paul Carr (alongside, according to Dan Primack, over 1,000 others) are out there tweeting at the world in an attempt to drum up new investors.

It is conceivable that over time, these equity crowdfunding platforms will learn from their inevitable mistakes, and the few which survive will learn how to be something other than a hole in which to pour millions of dollars…

I thought the email that Felix received from an anonymous angel investor was particularly wise:

These guys are building their business on the notion/dream that somehow the internet can disintermediate social and relationship capital. I’d argue that this is precisely what the internet can not do: if you’re going to invest in a startup, you’d better know the founders, and you’d better know something that most people do not know. Information asymmetry is the only way to lower the risk profile on such crazy risky investments.

Disclosure: I am staying on the sidelines; I just thought the news was interesting.

Putinphilia: The Secret American Subculture of Putin-Worshippers

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The Russian president Vladimir Putin has a number of fans in the United States—who see him as the very epitome of macho manliness. The National Journal digs in:

Putinphilia is not, of course, the predominant position of the conservative movement. But in certain corners of the Internet, adoration for the leader of America’s No. 1 frenemy is unexceptional. They are not his countrymen, Russian expats, or any of the other regional allies you might expect to find allied with the Russian leader. Some, like Young and his readers, are earnest outdoorsy types who like Putin’s Rough Rider sensibility. Others more cheekily admire Putin’s cult of masculinity and claim relative indifference to the political stances—the anti-Americanism, the support for leaders like Bashar al-Assad, the oppression of minorities, gays, journalists, dissidents, independent-minded oligarchs—that drive most Americans mad. A few even arrive at their Putin admiration through a strange brew of antipathy to everything they think President Obama stands for, a reflexive distrust of what the government and media tells them, and political beliefs that go unrepresented by either of the main American political parties.

They utterly perplex many observers of the Russian-American relationship. “No clue as to what drives it, other than some form of illness,” says Russian-born novelist Gary Shteyngart, author ofAbsurdistan.

There are many faux Putin fans in America—those who mock the hero worship ironically or half-ironically. But plenty of his fans are serious. Three months ago, Americans for Putin, a Facebook group, sprang up “for Americans who admire many of the policies and the leadership style of Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin” and think he “sounds better than the Republicrat establishment.” The group has an eight-point policy platform calling for “a unified [American] national culture,” a “firm stance against Israeli imperialism,” and an opposition to the political correctness it says dominates Washington…

When you see the kinds of things Putin has been photographed doing, you do have to wonder if some of these people do, in fact, appreciate the man for what he stands for (aww).

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The Keith Romer Experience

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It’s been many years since I’ve watched Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? when it used to air on ABC, hosted by Regis Philbin. In fact, I had no idea that the current format no longer allows a phone-a-friend (because, hey, they are just Googling that answer in those thirty seconds, right?) or that the first ten trivia questions appear in an order that is random in terms of both the questions’ level of difficulty and their monetary value. So reading Keith Romer’s piece in The New Yorker titled “Easy Money” about his experience on the show was both illuminating and captivating. I held my breath as he recounted the questions he was asked on the show…

“Are you ready?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then let’s play ‘Millionaire.’ ”

Already you are in it. Already it’s happening.

This is my first question:

MOMocrats is a blog “where mothers from across the U.S. come together to write about” what?

(a) Sports
(b) Fashion
(c) Politics 
(d) Cooking

Maybe it will all be this easy. When I say that MOMocrats must be a political blog, the producers reward me by putting five thousand dollars in my bank.

This is my second question:

In the world of air travel, a ticket that allows you to arrive in one place but depart from another is known by what name?

(a) Blind-eye
(b) Open-jaw
(c) Closed-arm 
(d) Sharp-tooth

It is wonderful to feel certainty when you are so prepared to feel doubt. I know that the right answer is (b), and for that I am given another fifteen thousand dollars, bringing my bank to twenty thousand.

Here is my third question:

Shown on ESPN, the Spike Lee documentary “Kobe Doin’ Work” follows a day in the life of a star in what pro sport?

(a) Baseball
(b) Football
(c) Basketball
(d) Boxing

Really. This is a question I was asked on a nationally televised game show. For knowing that Kobe Bryant is a basketball player, I receive an additional thousand dollars.

Here is my fourth question:

Quashing marriage rumors and quoting her own lyrics at the same time, who said “Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got” in 2012? 

(a) Britney Spears 
(b) Lady Gaga
(c) Jennifer Lopez 
(d) Christina Aguilera

I don’t know the answer, or I’m not sure enough, anyway, to risk my entire game, but I have trained myself to use my Ask the Audience lifeline on this sort of question. If you ask the audience about some obscure event from eighteenth-century U.S. history, thirty-four per cent of them will say (a) and thirty-seven per cent will say (b) and eighteen per cent will say (c) and eleven per cent will say (d), and then where are you, really? But America knows popular culture—it is the food they eat and the air they breathe. Seventy-five per cent of my beautiful audience says that it is Jennifer Lopez, and God bless them for knowing this, because this question is worth two thousand dollars. I make a series of kiss-blowing gestures to the three banks of seats—a move I learned from professional tennis players thanking the crowd after winning a major. What have I done? What have I accomplished? I have answered four trivia questions and earned twenty-three thousand dollars.

There is no time, though, to make sense of this new reality. The show rolls on relentlessly.

This is the fifth question I am asked:

Often armed to the teeth with foam swords and shields, people who are LARPing are engaging in what activity?

(a) Lunch Above Risky Places 
(b) Leaping at Rave Parties
(c) Live Action Role Play 
(d) Late Age Renaissance Pride

I confess to Meredith that the reason I know the answer is (c) is because of my own casual involvement in this as a teen-ager. If I could go back in time, I would not allow this nerdy admission to come out of my mouth on national television, but I am five questions in and haven’t used either of my Jump the Question lifelines, and I’ve begun to feel dangerously expansive. Knowing what LARPing is turns out to be worth only five hundred dollars, but still, it’s free money.

The dissonance Keith felt about the big money in later questions was something many of us won’t get to experience in our lifetimes:

What have I done to deserve to arrive at this moment? I spent a day auditioning for a game show and another one in which I have so far correctly answered eight of ten questions (with a little help from the studio audience). I have bantered with Meredith Vieira, and, before my eighth question, I have performed my Chewbacca impersonation. For this, I have somehow earned the right to try to answer a trivia question for more money than I will likely ever earn in an entire year. I have imagined this moment countless times. Meredith will ask me the question and I will know the answer, or maybe I won’t be certain but will still guess correctly and I will run around the studio with my arms wide, like an airplane coming in to land. A hundred thousand, two hundred and fifty thousand, five hundred thousand, a million. Life-changing money.

Entertaining and informative! Recommended.

“Endings that Hover”: On Stories and Resolutions

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I really, really enjoyed reading Nelly Reifler’s essay “Endings That Hover.” It’s about our (human) need to tell stories, create narratives, and come to terms with endings in short stories/books/movies.

The need to tell stories, to create narratives, grows from the weird essence of the human condition: we are conscious, and inextricable from consciousness is the awareness that we are going to die. This knowledge makes simply living kind of a crazy act. Plus, life is chaotic, and most of what happens during our short time alive just happens to us. Most of what happens occurs by chance or through the will of some outside entity; occasionally we are able to exert power, but usually with compromise and adjustment. So we narrate our lives as we live them, making sense of the chaos by organizing our experiences. Forming our lives into plot, we can pick out certain patterns and see some cause and effect. We learn to navigate the chaos, sometimes, little by little. We believe we are moving forward.

On our need for resolutions:

Within every story with a moral was a story with resolution. The role of literature has changed over the centuries, and it no longer carries the burden of reinforcing our social structure and codes of behavior. But even now — after modernism, after postmodernism — we’re still looking to narratives to provide us with a sense of resolution.

Like the author, I appreciate stories with ambiguous endings, where we’re forced to rattle our brain to come up with interpretations:

I’ve noticed that stories that appear to have resolutions don’t give me the satisfaction I want them to, and I imagine that’s true for some of you as well. Even if we crave resolution, it only satisfies us briefly. I’d say that the popularity of sequels and serials speaks to the fact that as humans we know that nothing resolves.

We writers have the urge to wrap up our stories, to provide our characters, ourselves and our readers with a sense of completion. For a while I had trouble ending my stories because I thought that I needed to somehow contain or recap everything that had unfolded in the preceding pages; I thought an ending had to be the end. It was befuddling for me. I hoped that in my fiction I was talking about the awkward, ineffable, eerie, and unresolvable aspects of life, and coming to a conclusion felt contradictory to what I understood as fiction’s purpose. It felt like lying.

This is wonderful:

To my mind, a story’s ending ought to acknowledge the ever-moving quality of life; that is, I want it to engage change rather than finality. Your final word and the void following it on the page are as close as you’ll get to conclusion. The best endings to stories have a sense of hovering in space and time; even a dark ending can be uplifting, exhilarating, as long as it seems to hover in space and time — because then it reflects life to us as it is: unresolved, eternally unresolvable.

Worth reading in entirety. I also endorse Nelly Reifler’s claim that Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Dog” will take your breath away. It’s one of my all-time favourite short stories.

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(Thanks to Jodi Ettenberg for the recommendation)

 

A Craigslist Ad For a Poem

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Esther Cohen, a writer/poet in New York City, profiles a delightful experience in answering a Craigslist ad, seeking a submission for a poem. The prize? A cool $10,000.

On the day of the Craigslist diversion, my poem was “Pre-Used”:

And now, at this point
insane moment of age and longing
cusp and pinnacle
when my arms are different arms
when my dreams are always interrupted
longing becomes more than longing
I can no longer do this
or that as much as I still want to
I wake up wondering how
I no longer care so much about why
when a day is not just a day but right now.

Contestants were told to upload their poem and include a brief cover letter explaining what they would do with the prize money. I also had to write a few sentences about myself and my theme. I’m getting older. That’s my theme. It didn’t need much more explanation. With the $10,000, I would write more poems.

A few weeks later, close to midnight on a Tuesday, a mysterious e-mail arrived.

“Congratulations!

“You have been selected as one of the 11 finalists chosen from the hundreds of entries we received. We would like to meet you this Friday, July 26th along with the other finalists at 5PM.”

The note gave an address in Chelsea, near the High Line.

She goes on to the specified location to meet two hosts by the name of River and Whisper. An evening with flowing drink and food ensues. I love this story because while Craigslist gets a bad rap for scams, there are, occasionally, amazing gems waiting to be discovered. Highly recommended.

Louis C.K. on Loneliness and Cell Phones

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Louis C.K. went on Conan last night and talked about why he won’t give his kids cell phones.

 

A brief transcript:

You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there.

But does reaching for the phone in times of sadness make the sadness go away? Louis C.K. admits:

I started to get that sad feeling and reached for my phone, but I thought ‘don’t’ — just be sad, let it hit you like a truck. I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch, it was beautiful. Sadness is poetic.

All this to say: I am reminded of this powerful video that went viral recently, “I Forgot my Phone”:

 

Sometimes we need to take a break from our phones. Have a great weekend, everyone.

C. D. Hermelin on Being a “Roving Typist” and Dealing with Internet Trolls

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C. D. Hermelin has published a wonderful, personal post on what it’s like being hated on the Internet. As a struggling writer, he went out to various locales in New York City with a vintage typewriter (he dubbed himself a “roving typist”) and offered to write short stories for people on the spot, asking for a modest, voluntary donation in return (“Stories While You Wait”):

I started at Washington Square Park. My cousin joined, which was particularly nice, since it started raining and he held an umbrella over my head. Barely anyone stopped, but there was a grand piano player and dancers to contend with. So I tried the 5th and 59th street entrance to Central Park, and was lost among the Statues of Liberty, the bubble guys, the magicians, the stand-up comic, the free hugs guy, the jugglers. At the Hans Christian Andersen memorial statue, I was writing post-card size stories for grade schoolers, mostly in the vein of Pokémon and Disney. I didn’t make a lot of money—only enough money to grab a slice of pizza on the way home.

When I set up at the High Line, I had lines of people asking for stories. At seven to 10 minutes per a story, I had to tell people to leave and come back. It surprised me when they would do just that. I never had writer’s block, although sometimes I would stare off into space for the right word, and people watching would say, “Look! He’s thinking!” Writing is usually a lonely, solitary act. On the High Line with my typewriter, all the joy of creating narrative was infused with a performer’s high—people held their one-page flash fictions and read them and laughed and repeated lines and translated into their own languages, right in front of me. Perhaps other writers would have their nerves wracked by instant feedback on rough drafts, but all I could do was smile.

And then he hit the front page of Reddit, and immediately the collective hive mind labeled him as a hipster (online bullying):

I woke up one day not long after I started “Roving Typist” to a flurry of emails, Facebook posts, text messages and missed calls. A picture of me typewriting had made it to the front page of Reddit. For those who don’t know, being on the front page of Reddit is hallowed ground—the notoriety of being on the front page can launch careers, start dance crazes, inspire Hollywood. In other words, ending up on the front page of Reddit meant a decent chunk of the million-plus people who log on daily saw my picture.

But the overwhelming negativity towards me, and the “hipster scum” I represented, was enough to make me get up from my computer, my heart racing, my hands shaking with adrenaline.

The author describes his reactions:

I did not ready myself mentally for a barrage of hipster-hating Internet commenters critiquing me for everything: my pale skin, my outfit, my hair, my typing style, my glasses. An entire sub-thread was devoted to whether or not I had shaved legs. It was not the first time I had been labeled a “hipster.” I often wear tight jeans, big plastic-frame glasses, shirts bought at thrift stores. I listen to Vampire Weekend, understand and laugh at the references in “Portlandia.” I own and listen to vintage vinyl. The label never bothered me on its own. But with each successive violent response to the picture of me, I realized that hipsters weren’t considered a comically benign undercurrent of society. Instead, it seemed like Redditors saw hipsters and their ilk as a disease, and I was up on display as an example of depraved behavior.

The whole thing is worth reading, but this paragraph was a sigh of relief:

For all the hateful words that were lobbed at me, it barely ever bubbled over from the world of online forums and websites. I received zero angry emails, only a few mean tweets. My Facebook was never broken into and vandalized—my typewriter remains unsmashed, no one has ever threatened violence towards me in real life. Instead, there are these pockets of the web that are small and ignorable, filled with hate for a picture of me, for this idea of a hipster—for the audacity of bringing a typewriter to a park.

A great story. If I were in NYC and saw C.D., I’d definitely offer a few dollars for a short story. I think this kind of creativity is awesome and welcome and these accusatory Redditors boggle the mind.

If you enjoyed the story, I suggest going to the Roving Typist site and supporting C.D. by ordering a story of your own.

What Happened in the Markets on September 18, 2013 at 2PM?

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This is an intriguing analysis at Nanex of what happened in the financial markets (equities and futures) on September 18, 2013 milliseconds before the FED announcement of “no taper” at precisely 2:00PM.

One of Einstein’s great contributions to mankind was the theory of relativity, which is based on the fact that there is a real limit on the speed of light. Information doesn’t travel instantly, it is limited by the speed of light, which in a perfect setting is 186 miles (300km) per millisecond. This has been proven in countless scientific experiments over nearly a century of time. Light, or anything else, has never been found to go faster than 186 miles per millisecond. It is simply impossible to transmit information faster.

Too bad that the bad guys on Wall Street who pulled off The Great Fed Robbery didn’t pay attention in science class. Because hard evidence, along with the speed of light, proves that someone got the Fed announcement news before everyone else. There is simply no way for Wall Street to squirm its way out of this one.

Before 2pm, the Fed news was given to a group of reporters under embargo – which means in a secured lock-up room. This is done so reporters have time to write their stories and publish when the Fed releases its statement at 2pm. The lock-up room is in Washington DC. Stocks are traded in New York (New Jersey really), and many financial futures are traded in Chicago. The distances between these 3 cities and the speed of light is key to proving the theft of public information (early, tradeable access to Fed news).

We’ve learned that the speed of light (information), takes 1 millisecond to travel 186 miles (300km). Therefore, the amount of time it takes to transmit information between two points is limited by distance and how fast computers can encode and decode the information on both sides.

Our experience analyzing the impact of hundreds of news events at the millisecond level tells us that it takes at least 5 milliseconds for information to travel between Chicago and New York. Even though Chicago is closer to Washington DC than New York, the path between the two cities is not straight or optimized: so it takes information a bit longer, about 7 milliseconds, to travel between Chicago and Washington. It takes little under 2 milliseconds between Washington and New York.

Therefore, when the information was officially released in Washington, New York should see it 2 milliseconds later, and Chicago should see it 7 milliseconds later. Which means we should see a reaction in stocks (which trade in New York) about 5 milliseconds before a reaction in financial futures (which trade in Chicago). And this is in fact what we normally see when news is released from Washington.

However, upon close analysis of millisecond time-stamps of trades in stocks and futures (and options, and futures options, and anything else publicly traded), we find that activity in stocks and futures exploded in the same millisecond. This is a physical impossibility. Also, the reaction was within 1 millisecond, meaning it couldn’t have reached Chicago (or New York): another physical possibility. Then there is the case that the information on the Fed Website was not readily understandable for a machine – less than a thousandth of a second is not enough time for someone to commit well over a billion dollars that effectively bought all stocks, futures and options.

The conclusions the authors draw? The announcement was leaked:

The Fed news was leaked to, or known by, a large Wall Street Firm who made the decision to pre-program their trading machines in both New York and Chicago and wait until precisely 2pm when they would buy everything available. It is somewhat fascinating that they tried to be “honest” by waiting until 2pm, but not a thousandth of a second longer. What makes this a more likely explanation is this: we’ve found that news organizations providing timed release services aren’t so good about synchronizing their master clock – and often release plus or minus 15 milliseconds from actual time. Their news machines in New York and Chicago still release the data at the exact same millisecond, but with the same drift in time as the master clock. That is, we’ll see an immediate market reaction at say, 15 milliseconds before the official scheduled time, but in the same millisecond of time in both New York and Chicago. Historically, these news services have shown a time drift of about 30 milliseconds (+/- 15ms), which places the odds that this event was from a timed news service at about 10%. 

Something does sound fishy based on the charts provided by Nanex. I’ve read some of their analyses before and they have been overwhelmingly convincing. We’ll see how this one unfolds pretty soon, I think.

Breaking Bad Props Auction: Tuco’s Grill, Hazmat Suits, and More

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If you’re a Breaking Bad fan (like me) and have plenty of cash to spare (unlike me), you might want to look into the auction of the props from the show. The New York Times reports:

The “Breaking Bad” sale already lists Hazmat suits, a charred pink Teddy bear, a Lucite-encased grill and various automobiles familiar to viewers of the series, about White, a high school chemistry teacher who becomes a kingpin in New Mexico’s methamphetamine trade.

Tuco’s grill is up for grabs. My favorite is probably Walter’s edition of Leaves of Grass.

Notable item that’s not for sale? Mr. White’s mobile meth lab, a Fleetwood Bounder RV.

Farhad Manjoo on the Defense of Email

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Farhad Manjoo, a departing columnist at Slate, pens a piece praising email. He writes: “Nobody gives email its due. We all kvetch about how much mail we get, how little of it is important, and how difficult it is to sort the good from the bad. Filtering and responding to email is one of the most annoying parts of my job. But I wouldn’t ever give it up.” I’ve read too many pieces espousing how email is terrible and/or evil, so this was a refreshing read.

I think the best point in Manjoo’s piece was about email being democratic and non-discriminating:

One thing people hate about email is that every message shows up in your mailbox pretty much the same way—you see the sender, subject line, and a small preview. Emails from your boss aren’t accorded better placement than messages from an intern or from some schemer in Nigeria. Smart email services like Gmail and Outlook do offer lots of tools for automatically filtering mail, but in general, if you get a lot of messages, your inbox looks like a big mess every morning.

Another way to say this is: Email doesn’t discriminate. Because anyone in the world, even strangers, can email me, and because a message that comes from my boss looks exactly like one that comes from an intern, email is the most egalitarian, accessible communications tool in your office. When every message looks the same, you’re forced to confront lots of viewpoints. Email gives newcomers to an organization just as much of an opportunity to join the conversation as old-timers. I suspect this would be less likely on social networks like Yammer, where richer profile information—follower counts, pictures, and such—clouds out content.

Excellent. I’m going to miss Farhad’s columns at Slate. He is definitely departing in style.