Last week I saw this post on Raymond Chen’s blog, which linked to two interviews with a former burglar.  The first covered the best places to hide money, the latter covered the worst places to hide money.  Which leads me to ask: are there actually people who have money in their house?  If you broke into my house, best case you’d find a hundred dollars, and it would all be in my wallet and Stephanie’s purse.  Usually we have even less cash than that on hand.  I don’t know why you would need cash these days.  I guess drug dealers only take cash, if you’re into that sort of thing.  But even then, couldn’t you stop by the ATM on the way to the drug deal?  Is there any other reason to keep large quantities of cash in your home?

P.S. I know that what is discussed here could apply to other small valuables (like jewelery), but in both interviews they are specifically talking about money.

On my way into work this morning, I heard a story on the radio about how back-to-school spending is supposed to be down this year.  One statement in particular, I felt, was worthy of blogging about.  This quote comes from one Patricia Edwards, an analyst at Storehouse Partners (whatever that is):

The trends, especially for the teens which is where a lot of the spending happens for back-to-school, they’re the same!  The only thing they’ve really added is plaid.  And, ya know, you go out and buy one or two plaid pieces of clothing, and you’re set.

Allow me to translate that to how it sounded to me:

KIDS THESE DAYS!  What is wrong with this generation?!  They care nothing about fixing the economy.  All they care about is saving their parents’ money.  We are in a financial crisis, people!  This is no time to watch your budget!  And to top it all off, they are too lazy to change their fashion styles all the time.  When I was a kid, if you wore the same outfit to school twice, you would have been ashamed of yourself.  And we made it a point to change what we wore every year, so that we could make fun of the poor kids that couldn’t keep up.  Now, all of a sudden, it’s like everyone thinks it’s cool to be poor, just because their parents all lost their jobs.  Sheesh, I don’t know where this country is heading, but we’ve got a long road to travel if these penny-pinching hooligans don’t go into debt soon.

Once upon a time, approximately two days ago, just as I finished mowing the sixth of an acre of grass within which my house resides, an unfamiliar man in a wifebeater pulled over in front of my driveway in a dirty 1992 Ford pickup truck.  “This is unusual, even for North Carolina,” I thought to myself as he exited his vehicle and approached me.

“Would you be interested,” he proceeded to ask, “in good deals on meat?”

Is this a metaphor? a euphemism?  What plans might this stranger have?  A classic fight or flight response ensues:  if he means no harm (which is almost certainly the case) but I run, I look like a fool and possibly, depending upon his race, a bigot; on the other hand, if I hold my ground, I save face, but I could possibly be abducted and (let’s say) fed into a wood chipper.  He’s approaching, time is running out, what am I going to do??  Ultimately I decide to risk the wood chipper.

“I’m sorry?” I respond, as if I didn’t understand him (which is at least partially true).

“I have good deals on steaks, chicken, and beef.”  A strange wording, considering that “steak” is a subset of “beef.”  I make a mental note to ponder this at a later time.  After all, “steak” is a particular type of beef which (I presume) has high demand elasticity at low prices, so it is worth mentioning.  I mean, it’s not like he’s going to have every type of beef, so specifying up front that steak is one of the types of beef he carries will efficiently answer a nearly-inevitable follow-up question.

It’s been half a minute already; etiquette dictates that I supply some form of response.

“No thanks.”  There, I’ve responded.  My manners are so awesome.

He barely gets a quick “you have a nice day” out before he walks back to his truck.  Which I now notice has a freezer in the truck bed.  Secured into place with a single bungee.  As he drives away, I am filled with questions.  Where does this meat come from?  How did he come to acquire it?  Is this a side job, or his primary source of income.  For that matter, is it a source of income at all?  I’d like to think he just sells meat as a hobby.  After all, even the most rudimentary efforts at the appearance of legitimacy are lacking.  Maybe a logo on the side of the truck.  Or a dress code consisting of pretty much anything other than a wife beater.  I think such things would more than pay for themselves after a relatively short time.  How significant are the savings, compared to a grocery store?  How many other people are willing to buy meat from the back of some guy’s pickup truck?  Regulated food markets have produced enough contamination scares of late, how many people are willing to risk meat from some guy’s truck?

Or maybe I’m overthinking this.  I have a tendency to do that.  I wonder why that is.  Do I find comfort ruminating upon things which are ultimately meaningless?  Is it a way of escaping thoughts about deeper topics?  Or does everyone do this and just not write blog posts about it?  Or maybe I actually do think about things more than other people.  Some form of scientific modesty principle prevents me from leaping to that conclusion, anymore than I would leap to the conclusion that somehow the sun actually revolves around me.

Oh wait, I’m doing it again.

Just a quick note for those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook: I have accepted a new job at Verian, a small company based in Charlotte (near where I used to work) that has remained profitable even in the economic downturn.  I’ll be a “Programmer Analyst,” which is their way of saying I’ll be programming.  My manager will be a guy I worked with at Dassault (and, in fact, I don’t think I’d have found the job if it weren’t for his recommendation).  This is great news for us! :)

I’ll be starting on May 5, so Stephanie, Emma, and I are headed to Myrtle Beach Monday morning for a quick vacation while I have this last week off.  Assuming our resort isn’t on fire, of course...

My mom called me today, and this is how our conversation began:

Me: Hello.
Mom: Hey.
Mom: Do you have gas?
Me: What?
Mom: Do you have gas?
Me: ...
Me: ...No?
Mom: For your car, do you have gas for your car?
Me: Ohhh... yes.

I didn’t hold the highest opinion of Time Warner Cable before, but lately they’ve sunk to a new low.  They want to start introducing bandwidth caps on users but they can’t do this for existing customers who signed up for unlimited internet.  So what do they do?  They offer a new “deal” where you can get cable, internet, and digital phone service for a “locked-in rate” for a year.  Buried in the fine print is the fact that you’d also be signing up for a bandwidth cap.  Even worse, the afore-mentioned locked-in rate requires you to sign a contract for a year of service.  So if you found out after the fact that your bandwidth was capped, you’d have to pay a $150 early-termination fee to get out of the contract.

What is even more ridiculous is that the limit is set at 20GB per month.  When I first read about the 20GB limit, I thought surely that is per day.  That I could live with.  The only way you’re likely to use 20GB a day is if you’re downloading torrents constantly (which I still say is none of their business—courts have already ruled that the ISP is not responsible for what users do on their network).  But 20GB a month is very easy to reach even if you’re not pirating anything, especially if you watch TV online, or if you use VOIP (i.e. Vonage, Skype).  It’s almost as if Time Warner’s internet department has some financial incentive to limit competition from Time Warner’s cable TV and digital phone departments!  No, that’s just crazy talk.

You’ve probably heard before that the mo money we come across, the mo problems we see (Wallace 1997).  While that may be the case when mo money is acquired posthumously, statisticians and economists now have evidence that your happiness is proportional to the logarithm of your wealth (see chart below).  In other words, sadness is for poor people!  The corollary is that the more money you currently have, the more you would have to acquire in order to attain an additional happiness unit.  Much like crack cocaine.

See also a more formal paper about this topic.  I didn’t read it because it looked super boring, but the charts at the end are interesting.  For instance, did you know there is a “U-shaped life satisfaction in rich English-speaking countries”? (Figure 5)

Well, not quite.  But I was mentioned in a post on the Freakonomics site, which is now hosted on NYTimes.com.  I e-mailed them a link last week, which they proceeded to blog about.  But I didn’t expect my full name to show up in bold text or anything.  Kinda cool though I guess.

If you’re like me you knew there was a writers’ strike but didn’t really understand what it was about.  It finally made sense to me after reading about it on Jenna Fischer’s blog and watching the YouTube video she links to, which shows Greg Daniels, Ryan, Kelly, Mose, and Toby on the picket line (they are all writers on the show).

The gist of it is that contracts were written in a time before the Internet and before TV shows were sold on DVD.  So when someone watches a show on NBC.com, for example, the network considers that promotional material and gets to keep nearly all the ad revenue (whereas the writers/actors get paid whenever a show is rerun on TV).  Similarly, the networks keep nearly all the proceeds of DVD sales.  Ten years from now, digital downloads and DVDs could very likely be the main ways people watch television shows, and it’s not exactly fair that the networks get to keep all that cash for themselves.

And if that’s wrong, then I guess I still don’t understand it after all.

Joel (as in, on software) made some predictions on his blog yesterday as to where the state of development on the web is going and why he thinks Google’s AJAX-y apps could be troublesome for the company if they don’t adapt well.  I’m not so sure about all that, especially since it is easier to adapt on the web than it was for off-the-shelf business software written in 1989.  Plus I don’t see any web/JavaScript platform becoming as ubiquitous as C++.  But he makes his point well and it’s an interesting read.  Maybe in three or four years we’ll realize he was right.  And if he is right, could this be a second coming of Yahoo?  YUI currently seems to be the most financially backed JavaScript/CSS “platform” of the type that Joel is mentioning, even if it isn’t the most popular right now.  Something interesting to ponder.