Standing up in Iran

Solid picture.

I think this lady's facing longer odds than even the picture suggests. But you gotta admire someone who's looking down the street at that - and still has the guts to stand there.

(H/t to Dynagirl)

Loan servicing agencies: Sorry sir, you cannot have a life preserver...

...because we've determined there's money to be made in watching you drown.

Here's the NYT

...industry insiders and legal experts say the limited capacity of mortgage companies is not the primary factor impeding the government’s $75 billion program to prevent foreclosures. Instead, it is that many mortgage companies are reluctant to give strapped homeowners a break because the companies collect lucrative fees on delinquent loans.

...and here's CJR's Chittum putting a finer point on it.

The key to understanding this story is to get that it’s talking about mortgage servicers, not the people who actually own the loans (at least in most cases). Fees aren’t going to come close to making up the huge losses incurred by a foreclosure that the actual lender takes. But the servicer’s entire business is fees. The more the merrier. The longer it can string out a borrower and tack on late fees and the like, the more revenue it makes. It gets paid out of the proceeds of the eventual sale, the Times reports, and then makes money on the actual sale, too.

Call me suspicious, but...

So, it's been buzzing around the techwire that some unfortunate Chinese worker committed suicide over a missing iPhone.

It's the old story:

• Dude has fourth generation iPhone prototype
• Dude loses fourth generation iPhone prototype
• Dude jumps out of a high rise apartment to his death

Nothing to see, really.

Except there's a disturbing subtext in the official statements. See if you can spot it:

Apple's statement to C|net:

...we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death...We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect.

Then Foxconn (the dead man's employer) agrees to pay the surviving family members $52,000 as compensation.

Which begs the question: Why does an employer pay compensation for a suicide that occurred at a private residence?

and the there's this:

Foxconn apparently suspended a security official after Sun's death, and the case was turned over to Chinese authorities to investigate. The security officer denied beating Sun but did acknowledge that he became "a little angry," according to The New York Times.

Curious, to say the least. You wonder what the rest of the story will turn out to be.

The patio

When we moved into our new digs, E and I made an unofficial vow that this house would be the house we did not phone it in on.

If there was an issue, it would get solved. The right way.

Sure, I got a laundry list of things that aren't done yet, but the gist is simple: You make a list, do it in any order - but anytime something gets crossed off - it isn't coming back for a loooong time.

With that in mind, we tackled the landscaping. This had been an issue in the previous house - we were the low spot and collected the neighborhood's surplus rainwater. It sucked.

This time around, we're in the middle of a hill - something I liked, but didn't fully appreciate. If you're on the side of a hill, you naturally have a hill taking away all the water from three sides of your house.

It's that fourth side you need to worry about. The uphill side. Done right, its water is diverted to either side and thence to the bottom of the hill. Done badly, you inherit all the rainwater landing between the side of your house and the top of the hill.

Our fourth side? Done badly.

So we called in the experts and had them re-grade 3/4ths of our lawn. It was expensive, annoying and took a long time. But we wanted it crossed off.

And so it was - except for one thing.

The patio.

The people who used to own the house (let's call them..ah - The Doofuses) they'd put in a brick patio right outside of the addition. Trouble is, they'd put it in dead level. And pretty high up - it stopped right below the level of the siding. Meaning, water easily sloped against the house and was trapped between the wooden sill plate and the brick/concrete of the patio.

If you were water and had the choice of going through concrete, or going through wood, which would you choose?

Hint: Not the concrete

First landscaping guy we had look at our yard told us we'd have to tear out the patio and put it in lower. "It's a Pandora's Box you got right there. No telling what you'll find when you start digging."

Yes, no telling.

Well, we paid the guys to dig it up - so I'm telling.

We found a concrete slab about 6" thick, resting atop 8" thick foundation walls that ran over four feet down into the ground. We also found carpenter ant damage. Lots and lots of carpenter ant damage. Luckily it wasn’t structural, so all we needed to do was seal it up and we’d be good, assuming we got the drainage issue solved.

Originally, we'd asked the landscaping guys to tear out the concrete, when they told me that would involve digging a canyon and cost thousands more I asked them what the structural threat was.

"Zero. You can put in your patio once we take off the top slab and you're good. All you'll need is a base to put the bricks on and we'll set that up for you."

(I have this ghost of a memory where they even offered to have their bobcat scrape off the top few inches of the remaining patio footing. But since that would be supremely ironic given what happened later, I’m going to presume I’m mistaken. For the record, we’re going to say they refused to help. Laughed at me and refused my money. It’s just simpler that way.)

Oh. Okay - I thought. I envisioned my landscaping done and a perfectly smooth, properly graded layer of sand awaiting an afternoon's work of replacing the patio bricks.

In the grand tradition of vendor-client relations, there was a bit of a miscommunication.

The vendor did remove the top slab completely, that was good.
But his version of "setting up a base" for my bricks was to put my 700 bricks on two pallets atop a heap of sand.

Meaning, not only would I have to level and grade my own sand - I would first have to move 700 bricks to one side. And then I could start.

Nice.

What if Gitmo detainees had their day in court?

Well, it might look like this

Of computer code theft and high speed trading

CJR was on this weeks ago:

[Goldmann Sachs] has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.

Which raises the obvious question of whether Goldman Sachs itself uses the program to manipulate markets in unfair ways. What controls are there on this? Who regulates it? I’ll look forward to some explanatory pieces on this in the days ahead.

but it looks like those explanatory pieces have started to arrive.

The NYT goes front and center with coverage of how the big trading firms use computer banks and top shelf algorithms to outmanuver the rank and file investors.

How does this work?

Goldmann's computers monitor oodles of trades and react instantly to price shifts. Okay, that seems tricky but they're essentially speed reading the market, so how is this a problem?

Quoth the NYT:

While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.

Oh, they bought better access for their hyperfast computers so they can bend the market.

Well, I guess I'm with Goldmann on this. Someone could use these tools to "manipulate markets in unfair ways."

They've been doing it for years.

(H/t emptywheel)

Full disclosure

I read Penelope Trunk's blog.

Not for career advice. I read it for her uncommonly fearless appraisal of her life. Life has not been good to her and she does not shy from telling you about it.

Even by her own standards her latest post just floored me.

When I was five, I knew something was not right. That’s when I started therapy. I was never totally sure why my parents were sending me.

When I was seven I knew something was not right because the neighbor came over to our house when my parents were smashing picture frames over each others’ head. The neighbor said to me and my little brother, “Come with me.”

Then my memories get blurry. The next thing I remember is my high school homeroom teacher. I skipped a day of school and then came to school with a black eye and a note from my dad that said I had been sick. She said that she was not accepting notes from my dad anymore. She said I could not come back to school the next time I miss a day unless I called the police.

I've said before, you have to root for this person - because how could you do otherwise?

Ye gods.

Mark to Market accounting returns from the dead?

Can it be true?

The Financial Standards Accounting Board appears to be doing a one-eighty on mark to market accounting.

Having let banks declare their assets are worth whatever they want since April, they appear to be changing their mind.

CJR's Ryan Chittum observes:

...the obvious problem with the paper-things-over approach [is] you’re never truly going to get the jitters out of the system until everyone knows where the losses are. Right now, you’re just not going to know if banks are valuing their toxic assets at ninety-seven cents on the dollar, while shoveling them out the backdoor at thirty-five cents—or what.

So FASB’s ingenious approach to the dilemma of mark-to-market vs. mark-to-myth accounting is to let investors see both numbers.

Suffice it to say, the banks aren't happy at all.

I don't think anyone expected the April change to be permanent, but I'm wondering if this short interval was always the plan - or if some bureaucratic tide has shifted.

Interesting.

Late edit: corrected my typo. Thanks AUL.

What the McAllen pig trough says about the state of health care

(H/t to E)

If you're interested in understanding how one of the richest nations on earth can be bankrupting itself on health care - you could do worse than to read Atul Gawande's article in the New Yorker, The Cost Conundrum.

Armed with national stats on medicare expenses by county, Atul visits McAllen, Texas. McAllen is a city of about 100,000 that for some reason spends more Medicare money per person than almost any other American city. Only Miami spends more.

The obvious question is, why?

...there’s no evidence that the treatments and technologies available at McAllen are better than those found elsewhere in the country. The annual reports that hospitals file with Medicare show that those in McAllen and El Paso offer comparable technologies—neonatal intensive-care units, advanced cardiac services, PET scans, and so on. Public statistics show no difference in the supply of doctors. Hidalgo County actually has fewer specialists than the national average.

Nor does the care given in McAllen stand out for its quality. Medicare ranks hospitals on twenty-five metrics of care. On all but two of these, McAllen’s five largest hospitals performed worse, on average, than El Paso’s. McAllen costs Medicare seven thousand dollars more per person each year than does the average city in America. But not, so far as one can tell, because it’s delivering better health care.

So, what the hell? Gawande lays it out: (emphasis mine)

The Medicare payment data provided the most detail. Between 2001 and 2005, critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography, two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles.
     They received one-fifth to two-thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents. And Medicare paid for five times as many home-nurse visits. The primary cause of McAllen’s extreme costs was, very simply, the across-the-board overuse of medicine.

He quotes a McAllen cardiac surgeon as saying "Medicine has become a pig trough here."

Makes you think all this public private discussion is a waste of breath. As Atul puts it:

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check

The good news, is that Gawande shows you places where medical centers have rolled up their sleeves and solved the issue for themselves. Mayo, Marshfield, Intermountain - places where facilities have severed the procedure/reimbursement connection, pooled all the Medicare money and just started paying doctors salaries. You get a set wage. Stop thinking about keeping them in treatment - your job is to keep people healthy.

Totally worth the read.

-------------------

Also, there's an interesting follow up on the Health Care Blog where a McAllen physician reflects on how the practice of medicine changed over time:

...in 1983 I'd see a patient with intermittent chest pain, and that day refer him to the cardiologist for evaluation. He'd call me on the phone and say, "David, I've seen your patient Mr. So-and-so, examined him, listened to his heart, and have done a tread mill stress test. Everything seems ok, so I'm sending him back to you for further evaluation for his problems." Fine.

But by 1987, I'd make the referral and never hear another word. Running into the cardiologist in the hospital hallway or locker room, and asking what happened to my patient, I'd get this response: "Oh, well if I remember correctly I admitted him to the hospital and we did angiography, which was normal. But he was having a headache, so the neurologist ran some CT scans, and I asked the gastroenterologist to do endoscopy because there was a question of some GI problems. As I recall, everything was normal, but I still see him every month for his blood pressure."

Storming the gate

In CorpWorld, building security is a big deal.

When your pockets are deep enough, you pay people to worry about them. Sooner or later they get around to site security.  Above and beyond simple theft there are trade secrets, confidentiality laws, and liability for staff safety.

All it takes is a single domestic situation blowing up at work, and suddenly your PR wing has to go on television to explain how the hell some whackjob was able to access the inner sanctum and beat on their ex. Or some other nightmare scenario.

Site security is at odds with the fact that your entire staff needs to come and go with a minimum of hassle.

Where I work - we do this with security doors and badge readers.

I carry a badge.

Present the badge to the reader, door beeps and unlocks - and you're in.

-and very likely - so is the person behind you.

The common courtesy of holding the door open for the next person is the gaping hole in this system. Drafting, tailgating - whatever you call it - it's asking an awful lot of people to follow proper procedure.

People who've scanned their way in are not going to block the door until it closes - and people on their way in aren't going to wait for that door to close so they can present their own badge.

It goes against all common sense. Workers aren't interested in site security, they are interested in getting to work.

When something like forgetting their badge stops them from getting in - people get creative. And that's where drafting comes in.

You're walking into the open access lobby and there's a few people ahead of you. Bonus, you just speed up until you're almost part of their group. They scan in, hold the door - and scene.

It's made a lot easier with the addition of handicap access doors, which stay open for many useful seconds after someone opens them.

The real challenge to access is always finding someone to draft. You're in a crowd, you're good. You're the only one in the lobby, ya look kinda stupid standing by the door.

This being CorpWorld, its best to look busy - whip out a cell phone and act like you're texting. Walk in a slow orbit away from the doors and watch the doors to the outside. Soon as you get somebody coming in, you pace your orbit to come in behind them - they scan and...bingo.

Looping in the lobby can look pretty odd after awhile. There's only so long you can appear to be texting. If the people aren't coming to you, you need to go to them.

My cadillac plan has always been the gift shop. Lobbys with gift shops or cafes are people magnets. You go in, scope the merch and wait for a fellow worker. Soon as you have one, you can liesurely pick something up - cup of coffee, whatever - and you're in line behind them. From then on, it's a snap to fumble with your wallet and purchase all the way to the security door. Cup of coffee, an open wallet and a pen in your mouth and you don't get a second look as people hold the the door for you.

But all that's ending. The professional worry-warts in CorpWord have dialed up the paranoia to end drafting once and for all.

Turnstile access. One admission per badge - no exceptions. It even weighs you so you can't have two people go through at a time.

My co-worker with a seeing eye dog has been consulted about how they will get through (perhaps the dog will get their own badge).

But no more drafting.

Frankly, I don't care all that much. I'm sort of a roll with it kind of person. The satisfaction of an elegant draft aside - there's no upside to forgetting your badge. I've drilled it into my routine so arriving without a badge is a freak occurrance these days - but I do have to wonder...

...What the hell prompted this level of door security? I mean, single admission per badge will slow things down. I'm sure they will do their best, but it's hard to compete with an open door.

It's their building and their liability, but jeez - why now? You'd think there'd be better ways to spend the bucks.

Bow your head for the Montasaurus

Ms. No-H has lost a buddy.

Obama on transparency:

Fail.

Late edit: TPM reports the White House has reversed themselves on this one issue. It remains to be seen if the list of people was comprehensive, or an edited list.

Later edit: Just goes to show that you never take the first draft seriously. It was an edited list, and not the actual records.

CJR has the goods:

...it certainly isn’t right to say that “Obama quickly reversed their decision.” As to the “quickly” part, it’s worth noting that the Secret Service originally denied the request on July 7, not yesterday. But ,far more importantly, Obama hasn’t decided to reverse anything. All he’s decided to do is voluntarily release the most pertinent information that would have been contained in the records CREW requested. And while that counts for something, he didn’t reverse the decision to deny the actual request; FOIA requests are for records, not for the information that may be contained within those records, as CREW points out a letter they sent in response to Craig today.

I hate motivational speakers

I do. Hate them, that is.

To a degree that is at once corporeal and elusive.

It's too easy to focus on the charlatans (Think and Grow Rich! or The Secret) or any of the endless parade of buy-my-book hucksters.

How they emphatically speak their nonsense as if it were God's own gospel. How they charge up a roomful of hopefuls, bill them for the experience, then loose them on a world that will subsequently swallow them whole.

I hate these people. Faith healers at least have to ask you to believe in magic - motivational speakers would have you believe their message is scientific. It's been tested.

Look! A testimonial! Thousands of paying customers cannot be wrong!

The more challenging targets for me - are the ones who sound reasonable. People like Marcus Buckingham.

This morning, our group is asked to watch a video of his called Trombone Player Wanted.

Buckingham. Note the off-center focal point.

And it's maddeningly great.

High production values, charismatic speaker, good soundtrack, engaging subplot in the background imagery.
Worst of all - that tried and true formula - a central message that is simple and doesn't promise the world.

This might work for you - why not give it a try?

Yes, why not?

So, there you are, asking yourself - am I just the kind of cynic who will reject good advice solely on the basis of how it was delivered? or am I the kind of person who would follow the advice of a slick motivational speaker?

And so while I'm fumbling for the familiar words: charlatan, bullsh!t, etc. I'm still psyched.

And I hate that - either I'm a complete fool, staring into the open maw of corporate reality with a big dopey smile on my face - or I'm dismissing a viewpoint because its author looked too rehearsed during their anecdote about confronting their father?

Of course mindset has a lot to do with success - who doubts that?

I'm of the opinion that self censorship is the biggest professional limitation. They'll say no, so I won't ask.

My job, I spend hours asking for the unlikely and being told no. And I still keep asking. And it gets really tiresome. When I catch myself holding back, I feel like a complete sell out. So I go back out and pitch more crazy.

But there aren't a lot of rewards for that kind of approach. It is hard to watch bad design be laid down in stone - but we are asked to do what good we can.

Buckingham is telling us that we should focus on our strengths and stop focusing on stuff we suck at. It makes you wonder - what the hell am I good at? and who would pay me to focus on that?

And a motivational speaker that makes me wonder is particularly infuriating.
It's just so much easier to loathe them reflexively, en masse.

Get back with the quacks where you belong.

Wambach nets 100

Things suck all over - but at least one thing's right in the world:

Abby Wambach has 100 goals in a USA uniform.

Scoreline - July 20, 2009
USA: 1
Wambach 79'
Canada: 0

Welcome back, Abby. Nicely done.

Now bring us home some silverware.

Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters' version of supporting the troops

(Via TPM)

You gotta be sh!tting me.

Fox News analyst Lt. Col. Peters is asked to weigh in on how the US military should react to the capture of a US soldier by the Taleban. At first, he starts out okay:

I want to stress we need to wait until all the facts are in to make a final judgment.

And then he proceeds accuse the captured soldier of being a deserter. Then implies that this soldier deserves their current predicament.

Apparently his version of waiting until the facts are in is to crucify this soldier on national television:

We know this private is a liar, we're not sure if he's a deserter, but the media needs to hit the pause button and not portray this guy as a hero.

The Fox reader, Julie - appears startled by this response and tries to steer him back to what should the military will do to get him back.

But Col. Peters will not be deflected from his crazy.

Peters: I want to be clear - If when the facts are in we find out that there's some convoluted chain of events he really was captured by the Taleban, I'm with him.

But if he walked away from his post and his buddies in wartime - I don't care how hard it sounds. As far as I'm concerned the Taleban can save a lot of legal hassles and legal bills.

Fox Reader: Alright Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters, thank you very very much. regardless of what the situations is, we don't want to see any US soldier in harm's way. And we hope he gets out of there safely. He's an American, he's one of ours. Thank-

Peters: Julie, Think about his buddies, think about his buddies.

Fox Reader: -And of course everyone who's over there in his group. Thank you very much...for talking to us.

Yes, thank you for trashing a US service member who is currently being held by the enemy. Whose name is known, whose parents are desperate for his release.

Thank you for that. Now get back to whatever sadistic pastime you use to pass the time between your televised bouts of insanity.

What the freaking hell?

Selling life preservers to the drowning

The NYT has another of those stories sure to get the blood boiling.

Back to Business - A second act in the mortgage disaster
Some of the very people who made a killing in subprime mortgages are now offering loan modifications for desperate homeowners.

In the vast sea of drowning mortgage holders, there's money to be made in selling them loan modifications.

Sadly, the same parasites who sold the orginal loans are among the first to market - and all they seem to be selling is hype.

Samples:

 “Our job was to get the money in and then we’re done,” said Paul Pejman, a former sales agent who worked out of FedMod’s two-story headquarters in Irvine, Calif. He recounted his experience, he said, because “I really feel bad.”

“I had people calling me crying, and we were telling them, ‘You can pay me or you can lose your house,’ ” Mr. Pejman said. “People were giving me every dime they had, opening credit cards. But I never saw one client come out of it with a successful loan modification.”

and

[FedMod's] three original partners brought in Mr. Anz to gain a crucial asset: his law license. Having a lawyer in charge enabled them to market their venture as a law firm and thus collect upfront payments under California rules.

“[FedMod partner] Jeff [Broughton] asked me how I could, for lack of a better word, legitimize it,” Mr. Anz said.

...

“Our big sales pitch was that an attorney could do a better job with your loan modification,” Mr. Pejman said. “If you told them these were basically washed-up people from the mortgage industry, or just people sending in paperwork, they would say, ‘Well, why bother? I might as well do this myself.’ ”

He went on: “It was misleading to the client. Attorneys never touched those files.”

and

A FedMod agent confidently described how his company could cut their monthly payments from $1,200 to $532, [FedMod customer] Mr. Garland recalled. But first, he had to pay a $995 “retainer fee.”

This was nearly as much as Mr. Garland earned in two weeks. Dental bills were piling up for his three children. He was behind on his utilities.

“I told him, ‘We have $1,200 left to make our mortgage payment, and if we give that money to you, we’re going to get further behind,’ ” Mr. Garland recalled. “He said, ‘Go ahead and make the $995 payment, because once you’re under our plan, the bank can’t foreclose on you.’ ”

After several follow-up calls from the agent, Mr. Garland paid. Then, months passed with no contact from FedMod, he said. He left countless messages seeking updates, demanding a refund. His lender foreclosed on his house, scheduling a sale for Aug. 26.

“This guy hounds me for the $1,000, and then as soon as I pay him he disappears,” Mr. Garland said.

The FTC has sued FedMod, and it is currently barred from receiving new customers - but if ever there was a business worthy of a perp-walk....

Seriously.

Taibbi on Goldman's bucks: Neither fair, nor square

Taibbi's on a tear again:

Goldman makes insane bets, runs wild on AIGFP’s house idiot Joe Cassano for a while, sticking him with $20 billion in risk, and when it all went to shit — as it inevitably had to — they drove a big stake through AIG’s heart and got the government to step in and pay them off using our money. How’s that for market capitalism? Just like Adam Smith drew it up, right? They’re just smart guys!

Read the whole thing.

(H/t The Big Picture)

And - Yes, I'm getting tired of bad economic news, too.

So here are dorky things I found on the interwebs:

• Snipers deployed to protected fairy penguins BBC
• Germany opens 'Nazi' gnome case - BBC
• Lawsuit claims Apple, Mafia sent threats via iPod - C|Net
• Company Denies its Robots Feed on the Dead - Danger Room
  

Ta ta...

Nerds + car + corporate backing = font

This is obviously a ploy by Toyota to get some play, but it's still pretty funny.

It answers the completely-not burning question of: what if you used a car to write letters, then used the resulting patterns to create an open type font?



Now you know.

The inevitable first ruling on torture evidence

Shows up at last:

In the first ruling of its kind, a federal judge on Friday barred the federal government from using any statements made by a Guantanamo Bay detainee since he was captured in Afghanistan more than six years ago, finding that all of them were “a product of torture.”  U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle did so two days after the Obama Administration notified her that it would not oppose the efforts by lawyers for Mohammed Jawad to block the use of any of those statements as a basis for keeping him in captivity.

(Via SCOTUS blog)

Kindle's yankback functionality is Orwellian

...in more ways than one.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

I'd add something, but really what more can you say...?

(H/t TPM)