Dave Chen pointed me towards The Big Takeover, a great telling of the AIG story.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’etat. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grace: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve – “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington’s deregulation of the Wall Street casino. “It’s all about the regulatory environment,” says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. “These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that.”

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

“But wait a minute,” you say to them. “No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what’s left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?”

But before you even finish saying that, they’re rolling their eyes, because You Don’t Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they’re on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Eleven Warriors » Sup Dawg – more of these (like the one i am using on twitter @jhludwig). I’ll have to take my camera to the ‘shoe this fall and try to create some of these.

Had first lecture in ME 568 – Active and Sensing Materials. Topics include

• Ferroelectric polymers.  Paper here
• PVDF as a specific case. Strong piezo behaviour
• Penn State does a lot of work in these materials, as does Stanford

Who is getting the bank bailout money - CNNMoney.com. Wow, $10.5Trillion so far. $35,000 from each US citizen’s pocket. To pay for years of poor decision making, greedy decision making. F%^k.

Venture Capital - Thoughts On The Asset Class. A very concise and simple statement on the state of VC broadly. Whether you agree or not, these are issues to wrestle with.

Just two fiction books this week, pretty far apart on the fiction axis.

* “Cache of Corpses”:amazon by Henry Kisor. Fun detective story set in the Upper Peninsula. Solid characters, and the cover art on the hardback of a squirrel on a corpse is awesome. * “Pale Fire”:amazon by Vladimir Nabokov. A Kindle reviewer mentioned that the Kindle was great for linear reads, but would be terrible for nonlinear reads, such as Pale Fire. So of course I ran out and bought Pale Fire. Interesting tale and structure – written as en extended commentary by a reviewer on a poem. The reviewer is clearly an obsessed nutjob and elements of madness, comedy, tragedy, and suspense are all in the story. And clearly you could never read this on a Kindle as a Kindle exists today, as you need to be able to refer back to the poem constantly. Fun.

My Mac Mini died. Won’t boot. Fortunately I keep all my data files (music, photos) on an external USB drive so moving them to a different machine is no biggy. However, all my playlist and song rating info is in the lookaside db file that iTunes refuses to store anywhere besides the boot volume.

Smart friends of mine said I should just go dig this file out of my time machine backups. They are right. However I am not sure I had this machine backed up. So the hard way for me.

I finally got it out. A SATA drive, I ran to Fry’s and got a 2.5” SATA enclosure, they have a huge variety, from $15 to $50. I went for the cheapest “hot swap” enclosure (though I am not convinced that hot swapping would really work), about $25. Crappy looking but it seemed to work.

If only iTunes would store ratings in the mp3 metadata, I would not have had to do this. At 20,000+ songs tho, this data becomes important…

• Dark Roasted Blend: Nightmare Playgrounds, Part 3. Who thinks these are fun?
• 5 cent architectural advice. Maybe if all you spend is 5 cents, youg et one of the playgrounds above
• Pride and Prejudice…and Zombies! Zombies always a good thing
• Nerd Merit Badges. I’ve only earned the Homonym badge.

“That would drive managers out of the United States.” via Treasury Maps New Era of Regulation - WSJ.com.

So just wondering, why would driving hedge funds out of business in this country be a bad thing? How many inventions have they funded, how many jobs created? What is the biggest success story for the country to come out of a hedge fund? I know that individuals have certainly had some huge positive economic outcomes, but what has been the big positive outcome for the country? I may be completely ignorant about the big positive success stories, I need to learn.

@chrisfhoward reminded me of my own post today – A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way » Blog Archive » Icebergs. A good reminder for me. I also think a lot these days about the leaders in our financial industries taking home $10M+, $100M+ earnings for the year – how are they behaving when they are at the top of the iceberg?

The entire original post inserted below:

L brought home a paper last week on the “Iceberg” analogy for teams. How just a little bit of an iceberg peeks above the water, but it has a whole huge structure supporting its exposed surface, and how that whole structure is necessary for the top of the iceberg to achieve its height. And in teams – every player is important and contributes to the success of the team, even the players on the bench.

I love the Iceberg analogy for teams. Let me extend it!

Life is long. During our lives we will get to be on literally thousands of teams. Sports teams. Teams working on a lab problem or school project. Teams working on projects at church. Working as part of a community group. Working as a member of a nonprofit board. At the workplace as part of a project team. As part of a special project taskforce. A family working together on housework, on vacation planning, on holiday preparations, on the everyday tasks of housekeeping. For fun as part of a choir or stage production.

Literally your entire life will be spent as part of teams. There are very few truly solitary endeavors in life.

Our position on each of these teams will be different. Sometimes we will be a leader because of our experience and competence in the subject area. Sometimes we will be a learner because of relative inexperience. Sometimes we will get the public spotlight as the face of the team. Sometimes we will toil away in relative obscurity. And most often we will be doing all these each day – part of one team in the morning at work, a different in the afternoon, yet another in the evening at home or in the community.

We will all get to experience the full range of roles. Some of these roles will be amazingly gratifying. Some will be less fulfilling. But no on is on top of the iceberg their whole life, we will all get our turn on the top and on the bottom.

The true measure of our self worth is not where we are in the iceberg. We are going to be in different places at different times in our lives.

The true measure of our self worth is how we comport ourselves as we fulfill our role. When we are at the top – do we express humility and thankfulness, do we try to teach others the way up, do we show understanding and compassion for those in other roles? When we are at the bottom – do we seek to understand the strengths of those above, do we seek to learn from them, do we strive hard knowing that the other roles will be strengthened if we work our hardest?

Emotionally it feels better to be at the top. But in the words of someone I once worked with, “Success is a lousy teacher”. I probably have learned the most in my life from some of my time spent elsewhere in the iceberg.

* “The Prophet”:amazon by Kahlil Gibran. Been on the shelf for years, finally read it. Simple poetical musing on the big issues of life. Quick read, worth a moment – the section on parenting touched me most. * “Daemon”:amazon by Daniel Suarez. Fun cyber terror romp. Many parts scarily possible. “Fun” understates the book, it was great fun. * “Master of the Delta”:amazon by Thomas H. Cook. Small town secrets and class differences get out of control. Also an exploration of the nuances of evil. Quite good though the author explicitly foreshadows too often – it is obvious early on that some story threads are going to collide, the author doesn’t need to keep hinting. But I am nitpicking, a good story. * “The Good Thief”:amazon by Hannah Tinti. I gave this book a long time. But ultimately I gave up, there was no reward. Seems like a retelling of Oliver Twist and I never liked the original. And if you want to read Dickens, go read Dickents. Maybe it is just the fact that Dickens was forced on me in high school that I am reacting to.