Category Archives: Uncategorized

Some late night thoughts about the nature of money

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10

Gah. It’s late, and I can’t sleep ’cause I’m waiting for Shelly to get home from work, so let’s talk money.

Exhibit A: One of my clients, a large, publicly-traded corporation that makes custom uniforms and apparel, primarily for the hospital and tech industries. They make those weird-looking bunny suits that chip manufacturers use in cleanrooms, that sort of thing. They have manufacturing and warehousing facilities in five states, thousands of employees, and brought in a tad over $130 million dollars in 2003, with net profits after expenses and tax of approximately $5 million. A huge, successful business.

Exhibit B: A tiny, privately held company occupying one office not far from my client’s corporate headquarters, employing less than twenty people, running an online Internet dating Web site. They bring in, oh, around $66 million a month, give or take. Roughly five times what my client makes, in other words. And almost all of it’s profit.

Wall Street doesn’t like the “adult” industry, of course. I don’t believeany porn or sex-toy companies arepublicly traded, and I have to wonder what the Fortune 500 might look like if it listed sex-related businesses. Wal-Mart would probably still top the list,ofcourse, butI suspect after that things might get interesting.

Money doesn’t work the way people think it does. Take lawyers who work on commission, for example. (Please!) Now, if you’re injured in a car wreck and you’re suing someone’s insurance company, you might think that the lawyer who works on commission will get you the best possible settlement, because his financial interests are tied to yours. After all, the more money he winds for you in the settlement, the more money he gets, right?

Wrong. You’re not his only client. He has thousands of other clients, in an unending stream. That changes the equation.

Suppose he can put in an hour working on your case, and get the insurance company to offer you an $8,000 settlement. Or, he can work 15 hours on your case, and win an $80,000 settlement for you. What’s he gonna do? He’s gonna try to talk you into settling for $8,000. Why?

Well, let’s say he works 45 hours a week. If all his clients take the paltry $8,000 settlement, he’s brought in a grand total of $320,000 in settlements in a week. If all his clients get $80,000 settlements, he’s only brought in $240,000 in that week. Which would you rather have–a percentage of $320,000 or the same percentage of $240,000? It’s a no-brainer. He wants maximum income per hour worked, which means…you get the chump change, chump.

On a more personal front, the Chinese government is still doing everything in its collective power to make my life complicated. Certain old-guard factions in the Communist Party in China still oppose with all the spirit they can muster from their feeble and ancient bodies any attempt to drag China into the seedy, dirty world of capitalism and free enterprise, and are continuing to block the Chinese venture capital firm that wants to invest in another client of mine, even though the rest of the Chinese government has given the deal the official go-ahead. As a result, my client can’t pay me (or indeed anyone else), and as a result of that, my client and I are still in limbo with regards to the move to Atlanta. So we’re here in Tampa for at least the next six months or so, while my client’s representative flies back and forth between here and Beijing on an almost weekly basis, trying to discover whatever voodoo black magic is going to be necessary to get the money out of China. In other words, it’s just business as usual for my life.

Further evidence that I’m goingto hell…

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…as if any more were necessary:

Patriotism for Dummies. Mindless nationalism for the rest of us!

And in today’s news…

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…an 18-year-old Kentucky student is sitting in prison on “terrorist’ charges for writing a short story for English class in which zombies overrun a school. The police detective in the case, one Steven Caudill, apparently doesn’t realize that the legions of the Undead aren’t in fact actually real, and said “Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it’s a felony in the state of Kentucky.”

Were I of a more cynical mindset, I might suggest that nobody can actually be as sunningly stupid as Detective Caudill is claiming to be, and that it’s more likely that Mr. Caudill is in fact cynically manipulating a fundamentally b0rked legal system to puff up his own personal fame. But I’m not really that cynical, of course; it’s possible that Detective Caudill really is that stupid. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a police department deliberately sets out to weed intelligent people out of the force…

Random link o’ the day…

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…with a nod to grey_evil_twin:

The Monkeysphere

But think of Osama Bin Laden. Did you just picture a camouflaged man hiding in a cave, drawing up suicide missions? Or are you thinking of a man who gets hungry and has a favorite food and who had a childhood crush on a girl and who has athelete’s foot and chronic headaches and laughs when a friend farts, a man who wakes up in the morning with a boner and loves volleyball and fusses over his spoiled children and haggles over the price of a car and who goes on Seinfeld-esque rants about too much ice in his drinks?
Something in you, just now, probably was offended by that. You think I’m trying to build sympathy for the murderous bastard. Do you see the equation? Simply knowing random human facts about him immediately tugs at our sympathy strings. He comes closer to our Monkeysphere, he takes on dimension.
Now, the cold truth is my Bin Laden is just as desperately in need of a bullet to the skull as the raving four-color caricature on some redneck’s T-shirt. The key to understanding people like him, though, is realizing that we are the caricature on his T-shirt.

Of Dyson spheres, consumerism, and the Great Old Ones

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10

God bless consumerist society. It makes me all tingly inside to know that we live in a time and a place where Shelly and phyrra can go shopping together, and come back with matching Hello Kitty panties. Is this a great time to be alive or what?

So anyway, we went to dinner with phyrra and nihilus last night at the local Cheesecake Factory, which is (for some reason) decorated in a style that can accurately be described as “trendy chain restaurant meets shrine to the Great God Cthulhu.” The dining room is flanked by tall pillars with glowing orange eyes of the Greater Old Ones ato them, for reasons not entirely clear to your humble scribe.

So we ate beneath the scowling glower of the Great Old One, and nihilus and I started talking about Dyson spheres, and specifically what a Dyson sphere would look like from the outside.

The idea behind a Dyson sphere is pretty straightforward: you are a member of a super-advanced alien race, you have the technology to construct objects on the scale of solar systems, and you need energy. Lots and lots of it. So what do you do? Why, you take apart your solar system and build a Dyson sphere–a shell, about 90,000,000 miles or so in diameter, that completely encloses your sun. You live on the inside surface of the sphere, which has the land area of hundreds of millions of earth-sized planets, and you capture all the available energy from your star.

Now, the laws of quantum dynamics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics impose limitations on how efficiently it is possible to capture and use energy to perform useful work. The law of entropy always wins out in the end; no matter how advanced you are, there are certain limits imposed by the laws of physics themselves on how efficiently you can capture the energy from your sun. Some of it is going to leak out in the form of waste heat. A Dyson sphere cannot be a perfectly dark body; there must be some radiated waste, there’s no way around it.

I believe that a Dyson sphere, when viewed from the outside, would appear as a dark stellar-mass object radiating strongly in deep infrared. nihilus believes the limitations imposed by the laws of physics are much smaller, and that a Dyson sphere created by an advanced enough civilization can capture and use the star’s energy with such efficiency that it would appear as a dark stellar-mass body radiating only a few microdegrees Kelvin above the universal microwave background radiation. Unfortunately, I don’t have the background to be able to calculate which is more likely–anyone?

During the course of this conversation, nihilus and I apparently missed Shelly doing something lascivious with a cherry, which is a pity, but at least phyrra got to see it…

Because I don’t have enough to do…

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…I’ve put up a new section on my Web site, a friendly advice column to help you over life’s little hurdles.

Or something like that.

Ask Agent Smith. Get those letters going!

And ganked from Sinboy’s journal…

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Republican senator calls for nuking Syria in church, everyone laughs and claps.

Where do these people come from? I don’t know what’s more insane–the fact that there are still people who think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or the fact that there are legislators who think those weapons were secretly buried in Syria, or the fact that in this day and age a man can go to church and call for an unprovoked nuclear attack on another country and get cheered for it.

Guys, not to be the bearer of bad tidings, but:

Back to posting again…

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…after a rough couple of weeks in which Shelly and I were very, very, very sick in rapid succession. All manner of nastiness, misery, vomiting, and so forth, which resulted in the two of us missing movies with the Smoosh and camping with smoocherie…suck!

Shelly is an angel, though, and even put up with me whining and throwing up a lot. 🙂 phyrra is also an angel, and called often to check up on us. She and nihilus even came over to keep us company, which was very sweet.

And to watch Lexx, which I still don’t know how I feel about.

In any event, all better now, so without further ado (from femetal via phyrra and khepra)

Banned Books, with snarky comments Clicky-clicky, you KNOW you want to…

Relaxing with friends, and big giant space bugs…

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Shelly and I spent part of the weekend last weekend with phyrra and nihilus, with Shelly and phyrra doing girl stuff while nihilus and I geeking out on laptops. The girl stuff involved hair dye, with very cool results:

Afterward, they subjected us to many hours of the TV series LEXX, which is, if you’re not familiar with it, a show about a sex slave, a dweeb, and a dead guy as they journey through the universe on a gigantic bug-like living spaceship that destroys planets and eats people. It features lots of brains and body parts, people being sawn in half, and the most gratuitous shower scenes outside of anime. I still haven’t quite decided how I feel about the show.

Prejudice is expensive

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28

Last week, I was on-site with a client of mine I haven’t seen in quite some time. My client was complaining to me that she and her husband are planning to move, and the two of them can’t afford a house that’s even as good as the one they’re living in now. They’ve lived in their current house for quite a number of years, but a combination of changing property values and the recent Florida hurricanes, which have made insurance for houses near the coast impossible to obtain at any price, have created a situation where they can’t really get much from their house and moving into a new house of similar size, age, and condition will cost them three times more than their current house is costing them.

The reason they’re moving? They’ve discovered that one of their neighbors down the street runs a porn Web site. It’s “disgusting,” she says, to have to live in the same neighborhood with one of those kinds of people, and “who wants to live in that kind of environment?”

Now, what’s interesting about that, aside from its inherent silliness (“that kind of environment”? What, is he shooting porn flicks in the middle of the street?) is the way I responded emotionally to it–my opinion o fthis particular client as a person immediately dropped through the floor, melted its way through the Earth’s crust, and now sits at the center of the planet’s molten core, where it can’t get any lower unless the earth is swallowed up by the sun. I responded exactly as if she said they’re moving because there are Negroes living in the neighborhood, and “who wants to live in that kind of environment?”

What she probably doesn’t realize, though, is that there’s no neighborhood she can possibly move into where her neighbors aren’t doing things behind closed doors that she disapproves of. The other thing she doesn’t seem to grasp is that the proclivities of her neighbors really don’t have anything to do with her at all, and are None Of Her Business.