And now, for your daily WTF

And also this:

I woke up not a zombie today

Ok, I know the last two posts have been rough to get through.  Too analytical, not funny, and all around uninteresting.  Mostly, this is because I'm in the middle of an incredibly interesting class that has been dry-humping my face.  This has got me thinking about the class, and strategy, and greater implications of analysis on lots of other random boring crap blah, bla - oh my god, shut up - nobody cares.

But also, I'm not sure if you knew this, but we've got this kid, see.  And he doesn't like to lie down or sit anymore.  He discovered the wonders of standing.  On top of this, he is busting out his second set of teeth, and contrary to the last two, these (or this, i'm not sure how many are coming out) is a bastard tooth.  It's like those stupid tooth characters on those annoying kid commercials from the 80's telling you that you've gotta brush your teeth while wielding this massive toothbrush, and you just want to punch it in the face and say, "shut your goddamn mouth, tooth".

I want to punch this guy in the periodontal membrane

So Sammy's been up almost all night for the past two nights crying and moaning and writing in agony.  And not only is it exhausting to be up rocking him in your arms all night long (so my wife tells me - I have been bad about keeping my eyes open), but it really sucks to know he's in so much pain. 

And standing?  Sammy is now waking us up by poking his head over the rail of the crib and giving the baby equivalent of "HEY! I see you!! Why are you not paying attention to me!?!" So because he doesn't want to lie down anymore, this ALSO decreases the amount of sleep everyone gets because he's now permanently playing his own version of Jenga (or is it stack attack?), where he wobbles back and forth and your only job is to basically make sure he doesn't collapse down on the floor and bang his head off of the only sharp thing in the entire house (which is like a magnet for baby heads) and smash into a thousand pieces.

But I woke up this morning with a little extra excitement.  Reason #1 - Either Sammy let us sleep through the night, or I didn't hear him crying at all.  Reason #2 - it's an absolutely beautiful day outside.  and Reason #3 - we've got less than 45 days until our absolutely awesome vacation that is going to be like Odysseus returning home, putting his feet up on the coffee table with a beer and having Penelope feed him profiteroles, or whatever it was that people ate back then wherever he was from.

"I intend to never wear clothes again!"

I'm already dreaming about all the nothing I plan on doing.  Just sitting in a balcony on the third largest ship in the world, watching the waves go by.  I'll likely be drinking a beer too.  With my wife bringing me profiteroles.  And like Odysseus, I'll also be perpetually naked.

TL:DR - I got a newspaper called "BORING TIMES"

I heard a story this morning about illegal immigration in the US, and how it's on the decline because of the lagging economy.  This got me thinking about immigration in general, and the perception of emigrants to America by friends and family who are left behind in the countries that they leave.

My in-laws have friends and family who still live in Belarus and Ukraine.  Whenever we discuss the possibility of going to visit, (something I'm really looking forward to, but we can never seem to put the pieces together) they will always sigh and grumble over the fact that we need to bring a suitcase full of gifts for the people we were going to go and see.

This is not an acceptable gift.

There are two reasons for this.  First, as a token of gratitude for letting us come and eat and drink and relax at that person's place.  I get this - it is a simple sign of human decency to show gratitude for hospitality.  But the second reason is because most people think that if you leave to go to America, you get out of the plane and money rains down on you so much that you can barely stand from having to carry all the extra money in your pockets.  Thus, it is your obligation to spread that inevitable wealth with your unfortunate friends whom you left behind in the economic travesty that is the former USSR. 

She used to be your college roommate

And every time I bring up the conversation with my in-laws, they cite examples of friends who are living off of $100/month in a city where a pair of pants can cost $50.  But to me, this is a skewed statistic, because a) who could live off such a tiny salary, b) who counts Belorussian salaries in US dollars, and c) who can convert rubles to dollars so quickly and accurately?

Being a skeptic and a data-whore, I looked at some figures this morning.  And I haven't come to any real conclusions yet, as I'm sort of researching and writing this post at the same time.  But here's what I've found.

But first, a note about the statistics and facts: I wanted to use median household income, but couldn't find any really reliable numbers.  I instead used per capita GDP, which admittedly doesn't adjust for distribution of wealth, but for our purposes, we'll just assume that per capita GDP is roughly equivalent to what someone in that country would earn on average. Also, the majority of this information has been pulled from wikipedia and numbeo.com, so...yeah - take the data with a grain of salt.  This is mostly for gross generalization purposes.  I'm not submitting a paper to the Harvard Review here.  If I were, I wouldn't say "balls" or "fart".  because that would be unprofessional.  

Country	Per Capita GDP	Cost of Living	Adjusted Income
US	46860	76.19	$61,504.13
Ukraine	6698	45.14	$14,838.28
Russia	15612	63.98	$24,401.38
Belarus	13874	47.89	$28,970.56
Norway	51959	139.53	$37,238.59
Sweden	38204	100.68	$37,945.97
Los Angeles	57500	96.11	$59,827.28
Chicago	56300	88.55	$63,579.90
NYC	67700	100	$67,700.00
Philadelphia	58200	78.55	$74,092.93
San Fransisco	75200	101.43	$74,139.80

All data I found used NYC as a base, so in the information above, if the US cost of living is 76.19, that means prices across the US are on average 76.19% of NYC prices.  So, if you were to normalize all of this and put each GDP per capita in NYC dollars, an average Belorussian citizen would have to live in New York City off of $28,970, not an easy thing to do.  For a Russian, it would be $24,401, even WORSE than Belarus.  A Ukrainian?  $14,838.  But an average American would have to live in NYC off of $61,504.  Almost double that of the Belorussian and FOUR times that of the Ukrainian.  Not too shabby.I just threw Norway and Sweden in there because they're usually the model of oppressive taxation and outrageous cost of living.

But the problem with this, of course, is that you can't say that the income distribution across the entire country is equal (obviously).  This doesn't take into account that people in Moscow or Minsk or Kiev might make more money (or have a higher cost of living).  Additionally, it doesn't take into account that the salaries of those in American cities are generally lower than those people who can afford to live in the suburbs and commute into the urban areas.

Another interesting thing to look at is the distribution of immigrants from Eastern Europe.  The data's a little stale, but I found data from 2000 showing that of the 890,530 immigrants from the former USSR, 233,724 found themselves in New York, 181,800 in California (likely in San Fran or LA) and 44,998 in PA (probably Philly). 

So I found the per capita and cost of living information for those cities, and it was a little more revealing.  A person in Philly or San Fran is living off of almost 5 times more than someone in Ukraine.  The worst city is LA, where they only make 4 times that of the after person in Ukraine.  And the average people in these two cities beat the pants off of anyone from the Scandinavian countries. 

Ok, I'll admit - I've spent a bit too much time on Memebase.

So it would seem that the obvious solution is to come to America to quadruple your income, but what the statistics don't tell you is that there are HUGE and rather obvious issues with immigrating, beginning with being allowed in the country in the first place, and including such non-trivial things like, "hey, you're in your 40s or 50s and have to struggle with having an education that isn't recognized, oh and by the way, you've gotta start learning a language you've never even had the chance to be properly exposed to."  So you're likely to not get a job that is anywhere near what your true qualifications are, thereby significantly decreasing your earnings potential (which sort of flies in the face of everything I've said above) because you're now delivering pizzas instead of working for Lockheed Martin as a Fluid Dynamics specialist.  Also: your children and grandchildren will likely shun your language and culture, isolating you from your own family by making you "the weird grandparent with the creepy accent". 

Ok, one last meme to wrap up the post:

A discussion of the Stock Market - the traffic analogy

Disclaimer - this was going to be a long and mostly boring post.  But once I got to the end, I realized I had a really awesome and badass point.  Just wanted to give you a heads up. 

You know something that fascinates me?  Traffic.  When I'm sitting in traffic in the mornings, I'll try to put away my inevitable rage from driving down I-95 during rush hour in Philly by thinking about how traffic moves.

Mostly because efforts to convince my wife to lean out the window and offer unsolicited but honest fashion and beauty advice to strangers have been unsuccessful.

The thing that fascinates me about the flow of traffic is an analogy that I came up with when I was first learning about how the stock market operated.  It's overly simplified and mostly wrong, but it was how I first started thinking about how awesome the flow of traffic can be from a theoretical perspective.

So here's the analogy:

Each lane is like a different stock or fund.  You can only see so far down the road, and a lot of times, that short line of sight can prove to be wrong.  You don't know which lane will be the fastest, and your goal is to reach your destination in the quickest way possible.  Thus, you must shift lanes when you think it would benefit you most.  In terms of our analogy, switching lanes would be roughly equal to selling out of one stock and buying into another one.  In this way, reducing time spent driving effectively equals increasing portfolio value.

An interesting thing about traffic, though, is that there are CLEAR sections of the highway where it is absolutely beneficial to be in one lane versus another, which is where the finance analogy really starts to break down.  For example, leading up to an exit, it is in your best interest (assuming your goal is to get to your destination asap) to be in the exiting lane for as long as possible.  But immediately after an exit, when new cars are entering the highway, it is in your best interests to be as far away from those entering cars as possible.  Thus, you have to merge over a few lanes in a very short distance in order to get to the most beneficial lane.

Knowing that there is a clear way to advantage of a situation is called arbitrage in finance.  If there's an obvious mis-pricing of a stock, an arbitrageur (someone who engages in arbitrage) will try to profit by exploiting that mis-pricing.  It's obviously more complicated than this, but it serves our purposes here.  Finance theory says that arbitrageurs will exploit this mis-pricing to the point where the stock comes back in line with its fundamental value, thus erasing that mis-pricing.

So, I was sitting in traffic yesterday, because some jerk-face decided to crash his car into another car so badly that at the very beginning of rush hour, there was already a 45 minute delay (how dare he?).  And I was driving about 20-25 mph down the road in the lane leading up to an exit while everyone else was stopped dead.  Just before the exit, I merged and ended up saving myself a good 15 minutes of sitting.  I started thinking about how I was an arbitrageur.  But why was it that no one else was taking advantage of this "obvious mis-pricing"?  There were maybe one or two, but not enough to completely erase the advantage, like what would happen in a financial setting.

Then I laughed cynically to myself, realizing from the middle finger of the guy I cut off to merge over that, well, I was just driving like an asshole.  Apparently, morality has a place in society after all - serving as the deterrent for dick-like behavior.

But what does that say about the world of finance?

Of Advisers and Interviews

I have an interview this afternoon.  It's nothing big, and I don't have my hopes very high about it, but it's my first real-person interview since college. 

Sure, I've had other interviews since then, but they've mostly been those all-commission jobs where the company you work for has absolutely no incentive to keep you around and so they hire everyone who applies.  If you drop out, oh well, some other poor sap will come and be their warm body to fill their "entrepreneurial role".  In this setting the word "entrepreneurial" is just a euphemism for "hey, why don't you work your ass off setting yourself up, and we'll just take a slice of your pay?"

This is how most financial adviser companies operate.  (I say most because there are some legitimate ones out there).  Another word about financial advisers: please, please, please, never ever use them.  You can learn enough over the weekend to make what they do completely obsolete, and they take a huge chunk of your money (your RETIREMENT money) to offer you products that are handed down to them by their parent company.  This chunk can be anywhere from 0.5% to 2%, and when you start to get a crap-load of money in your account, 0.5% to 2% is a LOT of your hard-earned retirement dough.  In addition, Most financial advisers are paid to sell you generic crap that their parent company is getting on discount, and they're getting a significant commission to peddle to unsuspecting people who think investing is too complicated.  It's pretty much the definition of conflict of interest. 

Moving on, my wife was prepping me this morning on our way to work.  A significant portion of her job recently has been interviewing candidates, and so she's become pretty adept at asking interviewing questions.

So she started hammering me with these ridiculous questions to "prep" me for the interview.  "Tell me about yourself". "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?".  "Tell me about a time when you handled yourself under stress".  "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

And every time I started talking, she corrected me, saying "Don't say that, you'll sound like a total douchebag idiot with tiny deer poop pebbles fermenting in your skull from which the methane produced by the feces is slowly condensing and forming thoughts for you".  Thank you, my love - you're so kind.

Who came up with these insane questions to ask?  There's no way these questions can really form a good impression of a candidate that will perform well in an analytical role.  Most people who are good at math/science/analysis are terrible social people.  Why can't the interview process be more like a test, where they sit you down with a long list of math, science, and finance problems increasing difficulty and let the best score win?  Maybe some geography thrown in there just for good measure.  Because damn, I like geography.

I expressed this to my wife, who said, "See?  you should have stuck through with your engineering major if you didn't want to talk to people and instead answer math/science problems all day". 

Thanks again, my love - I really love it when you answer one of my problems with telling me about all my other problems.

Memory: Jotting it Down so it Won't Run Away

Memory is funny.  Funny in the way that the guy at the circus who is performing magic tricks accidentally catches on fire and you're not sure if it's part of the act or not.

For example, I remember that when I was 11, I tried to do a flip off of the swing set.  As my backward movement came to a halt while swinging, I threw my head forward, let go of the chains and tried to flip onto the ground.  As anyone normal would have expected, I landed on my face, broke my wrist, and when asked about it later, I told my dad and everyone else that I had simply "fallen off the swings" because I thought they would get mad at me for trying to do a backflip. I remember being incredibly worried that my dad would find out what I was really doing and get angry with me.  I remember him telling me to walk to the hospital (which was only about a half mile from my school where I had the accident) and I remember the walk.

But I don't remember ever getting treatment for it or even having a cast on my wrist.  If I remember so vividly the lie I was trying to pull off over the span of five or ten minutes, why don't I remember having a tremendously limiting plaster appendage for 6 weeks?  I can't even remember which arm it was, or whether the cast was full arm, or half arm.

Memory is funny.

When I was 18 or 19 (as much as I try, I still can't really place it), I dropped out of college, dropped out of ROTC (and in the process lost my full ride for aerospace engineering), and ended up living on the floor of my buddy's bedroom in Virgina for about three or four months.  I vividly remember turning in my uniform back to the ROTC people, and vividly remember calling my parents on Easter (who had moved away and left me behind to sleep on that guy's floor) sobbing and begging for them to come save me.  I have no idea how it was decided that I would sleep on this guy's floor, why my parents decided to move and leave me behind, or really, what the hell I did for three to four months.  I know I spent a good deal of time at Chili's.  Because, damn - they've got good boneless buffalo wings, and I knew the waitstaff there, so they hooked me up with wings and beer.

And the more time goes by, the more I realize I'm either losing my memories of my teenage/childhood years or corrupting them with influences of my adult life.  So I decided to start writing down those memories.  Which is what this is the prototype of.

I want to be able to look back and be able to really decipher and catalog what it was that happened prior when I was 20. Yes, the memory confusion leads up until then.  Even a little bit afterward, but when I start putting down all the memories, you'll understand why.

These posts will likely not be very funny.  Except, perhaps, in a dark way.  But they'll be cathartic.  Cathartic and revealing.  Because the majority of the memories I have from my teenage years and before definitely do not paint me in a very good light.  And I think it'll be good to get a lot of them off of my chest.  Some of these stories I've been holding onto forever.

And if other people would like to ridicule and reveal unflattering tales of themselves from before they were real humans (i.e. teenagers) perhaps I'll make this into a link-up meme.  Perhaps not.  Because, honestly, who wants to tell awful stories about themselves?

Me.  I do.

Hemingway: Not Androgynous