Web Publishing

I might be wrong, may be this SF Post article is inadequately describing what actually happened — “The men created computer programs that bombarded online ticket vendors including Ticketmaster.com and purchased tickets automatically by impersonating individual visitors, investigators said.”

The result? “Stevenson, along with Kenneth Lowson, 40, Kristofer Kirsch, 37, and Faisal Nahdi, 36, all of Los Angeles, were charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and unauthorized computer access.”

Problems with your forum, blog, or e-commerce website being spammed by impersonated users for commercial means? The FBI is on your side.

Many years ago I decided it would be a good idea to learn a foreign language. So I tried.

Then someone told me “If you were a CEO you could just hire a translator.”

Throughout my life I have read and heard plenty of good advice. However, it is extraordinarily rare that this advice is contained in a single sentence and that it is a specific sentence I never forget.

If you insist on doing everything yourself, make damn sure you can count everything you want to do on a single hand. If not, limit your competitions to those with a similar handicap.

The biggest mistake you can make when applying for a job is to not be bothered to read any special instructions to employer provides.

I had a few interesting responses over the past week to several job positions and freelance tasks and posted on different job boards.

For one job opening about 50% of responders followed the directions. Many of the candidates were very well qualified. With a quick glance at their application I could tell whether or not they really read my post. If they didn’t, they had no chance of winning the project.

For a freelance job opening, the person who “won” the project failed to follow instructions for the test project. Oops.

Finally, I had an opening where not a single responder followed the directions. Kind of sucks because it was a very well paying job for something that wasn’t exactly rocket science. And I spent a decent amount of money on the posting’s placement.

In 2009 I learned a lot about hiring people. Biggest lesson: most people are idiots.

I read an interesting but perhaps anecdotal column in the New York Times the other day — “The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.”

So, it used to be that the people who graduated at the top of their class in Ivy League schools got respectable jobs — judges, college professors, etc. — while the ones at the bottom went to work for Wall Street. Then in the 80s the investment banks started paying tons of money and recruited those that graduated at the top of their class.

This meant suddenly all of the new guys were a lot smarter than their bosses. The bosses couldn’t understand all of the fancy financial stuff and thus we have the financial crises.

I don’t really believe this story.

However, I do believe the part about where people ended up working. My question is, if the brightest guys all work for Wall Street, does that mean dumb people are filling the slots everywhere else?

Secondly, is this actually a bad thing? (After all, if you did make it in to an Ivy League school you probably aren’t brain dead, and if you graduated at the bottom of your class you probably didn’t do much cheating.)

Michael Arrington posted an article defending Cash4Gold’s business. A previous TechCrunch post wrote about Cash4Gold’s $50 million yearly profit margin. A lot of people think they are a scam because c4g does not pay out on the spot price of gold.

Something Micheal’s defending post does not mention: no one is going to pay you for the spot price of gold. I suggest you try purchasing physical gold and then selling it. Here is what is going to happen, you are going to pay a 10%(ish) premium, and then sell it at a 10%(ish) discount. Now how much money did you make?

Cash4Gold or any other old jewelry for money service can pay you pretty much any thing they want as long as they don’t lie to you in the process. It might even be more profitable in the short term for them to start paying out even less.

There is currently severe flooding in the Manila area. This is being described as the worst flood there in over 40 years. This is a disaster; the AP is reporting 80 dead.

As many of you who know me, I have been a strong advocate of using Filipino programmers. If you happen to have staff in the Philippines please provide them with extra support.

I have a riddle for you.

When can you divide 100 by 5 and end up with a result that adds up to less than 100?

The answer, when you divide your attention.

In the past few years I’ve seen web entrepreneurs of two categories. The first is the category of people doing lots of different loosely or unrelated projects. The second is people who do different things, but when they are different, they are related. Project A compounds the value of project B.

Take a guess which category is full of people running successful multi-million dollar companies today.

No, not me, but the 80.3% of 2009 college graduates who don’t have a job upon graduating.

Big or small, you have a good shot at finding some free interns for your company this summer. I’d recommend giving it a shot.

Don’t pay them. If someone is ready to work for free there is a good chance that they are really interested in what they are doing.

If they work out well, you’ve just landed a good employee — which is damn hard to find I might add. If they don’t work out, your out $0 and you can move on to the next person.

Suggestion for current college students: switch your degree to something in very high demand. If you can’t figure that one out on your own, I suggest study of another type.

Just a few weeks back I happened to catch a few parts of the documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room. I was shocked at how closely Enron’s actions paralleled my understanding of how the banking system generates profits. The only real difference? Enron traded “energy”, banks trade debt.

One of the things I do fairly well is reverse engineer business models. As an entrepreneur and investor this is probably the most important skill you can have. Anyone can be a copycat, but that just doesn’t mean anything. If you are truly good at doing this it allows you to copy best practices while ignoring the stuff that doesn’t matter.

When comparing Enron with American investment banks I saw underlying business models that were disturbingly close. In itself that is worth a post, but I don’t have the time to make it (this one is a stretch in itself but I feel it needs to be made.) Here specifically I am interested in how both hid and continue to hide liabilities off the balance sheet.

Truthfully I suspect a ton of companies have done or do similar things Enron did. The companies Enron dealt with didn’t seem to have a big problem helping them out (anyone remember Arthur Anderson?) The banks are more or less doing the same thing, except they can spend billions of dollars on lawyers to ensure everything follows ever single law while gliding through the loopholes. Enron’s mistake was playing dummy while leaving the job up to an amateur. Oops.

It was no surprise to me last night when the following story popped up on Bloomberg.

Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis may face scrutiny by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to disclose mounting losses at Merrill Lynch & Co. because of pressure from federal regulators to complete the takeover.

…

Cuomo revealed in a letter yesterday to Congress and federal regulators that Lewis testified in December that then- Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson may have threatened to remove the bank’s management and directors if the lender tried to back out of buying Merrill. Lewis said he was instructed by federal officials not to disclose Merrill’s losses, his desire to back out of the merger or the intervention of regulators, according to Cuomo.

(By the way, did you know when Hank took the job as Treasury Secretary he had a net worth of around $500 million? I have no idea what it is now.)

There have probably been a whole lot of illegal things going on within the federal government in regards to the banking bailout. This can not be the first or the only.

What makes this story even exist is that there are regulatory checks and balances in place. The SEC has a job to make sure laws are being followed. They have the authority to enforce those laws and they will.

The Federal Reserve along with the Treasury, on the other hand, act alone and are pretty much making up the rules as they go along. The elected representatives who should be watching over them may or may not have any idea what is going on. Hell, it sounds a lot like Abu Ghraib.

In all of the businesses I have examined and studied I have never seen so many smoke and mirrors. Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner are delivering the lies and bullshit by the boatload. I am a complete loss how anyone in the news media actually believes what any of these guys are saying. Anyone remember this guy?

I am not naive. Unlike nearly everyone protesting the bailouts and intervention I know all too well what would happen if regulators and the Fed stood back. Countless bank accounts, retirement accounts, life insurance pools, insurance pools, and pension funds would be heading straight to zero. Many have already gone to zero, most have taken serious haircuts.

Will the alternative path we are taking be less painful or shorter? I don’t know.

Pay attention what banks you do business with. If necessary, consider placing bank failure clauses in your contracts. Irregardless of what the FDIC does a few shake ups in the upcoming could very well bankrupt your company. If you are overseas, you should be paying even closer attention. Chances are your bank is holding some of the horse shit debt US banks minted.

Just saw this on Digg: http://adage.com/article?article_id=135735 “After its package redesign, sales of the Tropicana Pure Premium line plummeted 20% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22, costing the brand tens of millions of dollars.”