Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Author: fish1964

  • Officially Unemployed

    As of the 31st I am officially unemployed. I thought it would feel weird, but it doesn’t really. I have the official severance paperwork and while I’ll have a lawyer check out a couple of clauses to make sure I understand the details, I’ll sign it pretty quickly. It’s not like I have a real choice.

    The only bad thing about the agreement is the non-solicit clauses for current employees. For the next year I cannot solicit current employees. That’s a bummer since the best part about my former company is the people. But they did me a favor by letting the entire NY office go. Nothing stopping me from hiring them…

    What’s next? Well, you may or may not hear about it on this blog depending on what I do. There are a couple of start-up business opportunities that are possible (but obviously risky). There are a couple of interesting positions out there that I’ve talked to people about. But nothing is particularly close at this point.

    I’m strangely busy. I’m getting back in shape (swimming instead of running). I’m doing a lot of research on potential technologies. And there was Halloween and Danielle’s birthday, so I’ve had some fun with the kids.

    Oh yeah, Halloween:

    Danielle changed into her costume right at school to get trick or treating early. So since she rides her scooter to school, here is Alice in Wonderland riding a Razor (with her American Girl doll also in costume)

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    Victoria was Minnie Mouse:

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    The ears didn’t last long but Tori was a trick or treating machine…

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  • Twitter

    A friend of mine got me back using Twitter again. I’m still not sure how useful I find it, but now I know the truth.

    My friend is a terrorist…

  • Crackpot

    I don’t know what’s funnier, this story, or the fact that there’s a village in the UK named Crackpot…

  • The Mortgage Crisis in Stick Figures

    All you need to know…

  • Manipulating InTrade

    I’ve posted before about my fascination with predictive markets. In an election season InTrade is especially fascinating. During the primaries you could watch how candidates “stock” would rise or fall on the actual primary day and get an early (and accurate) prediction of the winner before the networks announced anything (presumably people are betting based on some inside information on exit polls).

    So this article was hugely interesting to me. Apparently a single “institutional” member on InTrade was deliberately bidding up the overall McCain for president contract value. There is one contract that you can trade for the overall chance of McCain (or Obama) winning the election and there is also a contract for each state for who will win that state. This person was bidding up the overall contract, but not the individual state contracts.

    I do recall a point after the Republican convention where if you added up all of the states electoral votes based on who InTrade was prediction you would forecast an Obama win, but the overall contract was predicting a McCain win. Markets are supposed to be rational, but this one was clearly not.

    Now we know why. But we don’t know why this person was doing it. A McCain fan with money to throw around? Did he/she really think that InTrade could drive the conventional wisdom and influence the election? There aren’t enough people as geeky as me for that to work…

  • Political Humor

    If you haven’t seen Obama and McCain at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, check out the videos. This is a charity event where the candidates traditionally roast themselves and each other. The speeches are about 15 minutes each. Both are hilarious.

    McCain’s speech

    Obama’s speech

  • Interesting week…

    Everyone knows what happened this week so I won’t comment on it. If people are looking to reach me, use my personal email at fish1964@gmail.com.

    Every challenge is an opportunity…

  • More Comedy Central

    OK, I have small children so I pretty much never watch Comedy Central even though I do like John Stewart. Parents may chuckle at the fact that I remember him from Elmopalooza (which, if you have small children, is excellent by the way). But I do check out The Daily Show on the web from time to time.

    John Stewart had an interview with an author who I don’t know, and they were discussing people who come to Ground Zero for a photo op and then leave and bad mouth New York. This author had the great quote:

    …the east coast was American enough for Al Qaeda, so it should be American enough for them.

    After a bit more discussion, she said:

    It’s great to have this show where you can just say stuff…

    You can like or hate The Daily Show, but that cracked me up…

  • Comedy Central meets Monty Python

    I don’t know how else to describe this description of stupid voters…

  • Back to the gold standard

    No, this isn’t a commentary on our economic crisis. This is a strange real estate story. A friend of ours is a real estate lawyer and he dabbles in real estate in Brooklyn. He knows this guy and the other night he told me this story…

    Back in the day (turn of the century), 99 year leases on commercial buildings were common. To hedge against inflation the leases would commonly have a “gold clause”, which basically said that the owner could request payment in gold.

    Following the Great Depression, FDR eliminated the gold standard in 1933. Gold clauses were declared invalid. However in 1977 a court held that gold clauses could be enforced if they were agreed to after 1933 (or something like that – I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV).

    Why is this important? My friend knows a guy who was smart, eccentric and in the real estate field. This guy decided to scour the country looking for an existing lease with an enforceable gold clause. It took a year. He found one.

    He spent $845,000 to buy the land. The 1912 lease entitles him to $35,000 a year. He asked for it in gold at 1912 prices (1,693 ounces of gold). The current tenant sued, won in the lower court but lost in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Unless the Supreme Court takes up the appeal, that ruling will stand and the gold clause will be enforced.

    At the current gold price of about $880/ounce the annual rent just went from $35,000 to just under $1.5 million. Wow.

    You can read about it here…