Arsenal (English Premier League) is playing a “friendly” against the NY Red Bulls. Arsenal produced this video, with their players trying NY accents (“are you talking to me?”).
Hilarious.
Category: Crazy
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Pay for Random Performance
Via Bloomberg Businessweek, The Pay-for-Performance Myth, a chart of CEO pay and Stock Returns.
Sure, I see the trend…
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Floor should be flat
I mentioned our great weekend in Nantucket but didn’t mention the return home. When we walked in, I headed to the kitchen and nearly tripped. Because our wood floors had buckled.
Our neighbor apparently had a dishwasher leak. Their dishwasher is directly opposite the wall where the buckling starts. But they are arguing that this could not have caused so much damage and there must be some other issue.
Possibly true.
But the facts as of today are:
- There was a dishwasher leak in their apartment
- Right after that, we had water damage
- The water damage started exactly opposite their dishwasher
This is tricky because we really like our neighbors. And regardless of the cause, it’s not like they wanted to flood our place. So we can’t be mad. But at the end of the day, replacing wood floors isn’t cheap, so who wouldn’t want to put the blame elsewhere? (in a co-op, a building leak would be paid for by the building). So I get their reaction.
The bad thing here is that this could drag on for a while. I don’t care who is to blame, I just want my floors fixed.
We’ll see how this plays out…
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Word Crimes
I didn’t realize “Weird Al” Yankovic was still around. This one appeals to the grammar snob in me…
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Two Factor Security Relies on Both Factors
This is kind of amusing. Two factor security is really very cool. Gmail handles it very well. If I log into Gmail from a coffee shop or random computer, Gmail sends my phone a text to make sure it’s me. Much harder to hack my email.
But a Wall Street Journal reporter decided to show how cool two factor security was by publishing his Twitter password. Not realizing that the key word in “two factor security” is “two”.
No one hacked his Twitter account, he just got so many text messages that his phone became unusable.
So use two factor authentication. Really, it’s the best. Just don’t hand out one of the factors…
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Take Back One Kadam
Another title I never thought I’d write, on the topic of iWatch sales. From It’s a Very Nice Website:
Now, it might seem ridiculous to try to predict how many of a thing we know nothing about will sell, but it’s simple, really. You just take the total number of watches ever sold ever, take the cosine (always take the cosine… take it AND RUN AND NEVER STOP RUNNING), adjust for inflation, apply the least squares method (because only squares wear smartwatches) and then — and this is the part people always forget — take back one kadam to honor the Hebrew God, whose iWatch this is.
Actually, the geek in me really likes the least squares reference…
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Construction
I’ve posted a few times about the garage across from my office that got knocked down and the construction currently going on. I now know that there will be 5 luxury townhouses built at a minimum price of $4.1 million.
I don’t think I can afford this neighborhood…
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The New Fourth Amendment
Zach Weinersmith, of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame has a serious privacy blog post up.
He states that the Fourth Amendment can be violated as gently as you please any time digital information enters or leaves your home. So, perhaps an amended amendment is in order:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, unless we’re really totally subtle about it.
It’s definitely worth a read. His final comment:
I no longer expect to have a Fourth Amendment. I really don’t. But do I have to be a good sport about it too?
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Economics Trivia
Kevin Drum has this one right, All That’s Left Are Fights Over Trivia.
What does this say about us? As near as I can tell, this is the most important domestic political battle in the country right now. That’s right: reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank. Can you think of anything more trivial? This is a government agency that costs taxpayers nothing—in fact, it’s recorded a profit over the past decade—and, at worst, will cost us no more than a tiny amount in the future. On the flip side, although reliable figures are hard to come by, its impact on our export business is probably pretty minuscule.
I was actually going to blog about this last week because it was a rare occasion where Paul Krugman and Paul Samuelson agree.
But I thought it was too trivial…
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