Behind The Front

After the financial collapse, the new conventional wisdom became that investment banks, stockbrokers, and mutual funds are reliably shady, that you can count on them to screw you over.  The one exception is presumed to be Vanguard, an investment firm that presents itself as a public service.  Their whole sales pitch is that the best stockbroker is no stockbroker at all; they try to minimize transactions by running broad index funds that mirror the gains/losses of the stock market as a whole.

Fewer transactions means less money is spent on douchebag fund managers and their bullshit research costs - these big shots almost always fail to beat the market anyway, even before you deduct their exorbitant expenses (and the additional downside of added risk).  With most mutual funds, its like paying someone to babysit, but instead of watching over your kids, they put them in more dangerous situations, then spend your money on expensive scotch and Cuban cigars.

"Sometimes smaller is better."

As you can see in the publicity still shown above, Vanguard says they offer the funds "at cost", which sounds almost too good to be true...here's how they could be fucking you:

When you place an order to buy/sell shares of one of their funds, there's a lag time between when the order is placed and when the order actually gets executed.  If Vanguard lies to you about when the order was executed, they could use that discrepancy to cheat you out of some of your money.  Here's how it would go down:

Let's say you want to invest a $1,000,000 in the Vangaurd 500 Index, which tracks the S&P 500.  Lets say at the instant you place the order (10:00 am), the S&P is at 1,200.  Almost right after you "Buy" the fund, Vanguard is able to execute the order and use your money to buy the stocks that mirror the S&P.  But Vanguard doesn't tell you that they've already bought the stocks, instead they wait to see if the market goes up at any point over the next couple hours.  If the market goes up 0.83%, to 1,210 at 11:00 am, Vanguard will tell you they bought the stock at 11:00 am. 

Essentially, they'd be using this time discrepancy to lie and say the shares cost more than they actually did.  This means they can give you fewer shares than you deserve, and pocket the difference for themselves.  Its the same thing as if you gave some guy $350 to buy you an ounce of weed, then he came back a few hours later and said "it took me a long time to get over there, and by then, the guy only had 7/8ths left and he charged me the whole $350."  Obviously, this shithead bought an ounce and pocketed an eighth for himself.  He could have just told you up front that he was charging a premium, but instead he wants to pretend to be a good guy and give it to you "at cost", sort of like Vanguard.

Hey man, whats the deal with all this math, it's like "when are we actually going to use this stuff?"

The market tends to fluctuate up and down a few tenths of a percent every couple hours, so with a vast majority of transactions, they would have some opportunity to overcharge you.  If on the odd chance the market only goes down, Vanguard can just tell you they bought the stock at 10:00 am (which is when they actually bought it), meaning they break even.  From what I've seen, they don't even tell you what time they "bought" the shares, they just tell you what day, so they could potentially use an 8 hour window to fuck you over.

Vanguard has $1.2 trillion in funds under management, so if they pulled this scam every time a share was bought or sold, they could rake in billions of dollars, in other words, thousands of hookers and millions of blow.  And now, to be clear, I'm not saying they're actually doing this, I'm just saying they should sue me so the blog gets more traffic.

Celebrity Sperm Bank

If you were forced to raise the illegitimate son of some male celebrity, and the guy was going to be totally out of the picture, what celebrity's kid would you want to raise?

 Women love this guy, but its possible that men like him even more.  He's handsome, cool, and has good taste. 

James Blake might be a good choice, he's a professional tennis player, he went to Harvard, he's handsome (although I'm not partial to him), and he seems like an all-around decent guy. 

Then there's Larry David, he's un-athletic, unattractive, and sort of an asshole, but I'd probably choose his kid over anyone else's.  What does that say about my values?  Maybe it just means his kid would be one of the few I'd actually feel superior to, like a father's supposed to. 

Hype as a Product

Word on the street is, advertisers are paying a huge premium for iPad-specific ad spots.

It's here!

This idea is probably already in circulation, but I bet these advertisers are thinking that the iPad's early adopters are the type of people who "believe the hype", precisely the type of people who fall for advertising.

This phenomenon also explains why guys like 50 Cent get paid so much for their endorsements.  As a rapper, he's never been as good as his hype, not because he's all that terrible, but because, circa 2002, his hype bordered on the messianic.  The fact that his art falls short of his billing might actually make him more appealing to advertisers, because it means he attracts a target demographic of "undiscerning dullards who buy into marketing".

50 was given part ownership in Glaceau when he agreed to create and endorse the "Formula 50" flavor of Vitamin Water.  When the company sold to Coca Cola in 2007, he pocketed over $100 million.  As 50 himself said on the song "I Get Money":

"I took quarter water, sold it in bottles for 2 bucks
And Coca-Cola came and bought it for billions, what the fuck?"

Not exactly Shakespearean, but the song made the top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, and he probably moved a few units of Vitamin Water by telling people its a sham - the perks of having a stupid audience.  As they say, its not the product, its the packaging; where 50 cent failed as a rapper, he excelled as a wrapper.

Maybe if I drink this I'll become black.

The iPad and 50 Cent have been able to sell their hype as a product in and of itself; to advertisers - those great purveyors of bullshit, something insubstantial (and in the case of 50, unsubstantiated) can be a great commodity.  Artists who's talents outstrip their hype can't pull off stunts like this, in part because their discerning audiences will identify it as derivative of Warhol, and shun it as unoriginal.

Low Standards

There's a Hampton Inn commercial where they brag about how they wash the sheets for each new guest.  Holy shit, all this time I'd been taking that for granted, now I'm wondering if I don't have (as yet asymptomatic (benign?)) crabs from a Quality Inn...I can almost feel them crawling on my nutsack.  Either this is a very ill-conceived commercial or I have to reconsider the whole concept of hotels.  It would be like if Denny's said they don't reuse food, of if a guy came on to girl by saying he showers on occasion. 

That slogan seems oddly sexual.  Hampton, I just wanted a place to crash, I didn't want to sleep with you, so please fuck off.

Share the Love

The logo invokes a pair of tits - two spherical orbs, between which lies a caring heart.  A savvy marketing strategy...my only criticism is that, by associating the tits with caring, it infantilizes the breast fetish.

Opening Day

It seems like they should change the idiom from "inside baseball" to just "baseball".

Then change the name of the show "Baseball Tonight" to "Baseball?  Not tonight..."

Reading People

Addressing the Conservative political arguments of Adam Carolla is sort of like kicking the shit out of a straw man, after all, the guy brags about how he "doesn't read" and how he "barely graduated High School";  intellectually speaking, there's no way he's representative of real Conservative thinkers.  Oh wait, George Bush "doesn't read" either, and he also almost flunked out of school, the same is true of Sara Palin, so maybe the Aceman is a perfect representative of Conservative America, in fact, he just might be the smartest one among them - at least he's coherent.

The courtship of the Conservative male:  1) Firm handshake.  2) Exchange business credentials.  3) Complain about taxes/government regulations.  4) Discuss national security.  5) Complain that you "can't say anything anymore without being called a racist." 6) If all goes well, consummate the relationship by using the n-word.

Carolla recently did a podcast with screenwriter-turned-conservative Roger Simon, a former liberal who took a hard right turn after 9-11.  Carolla lept at the chance to rant about the usefulness of waterboarding, and how stupid these Hollywood liberals are to oppose it:

"Hollywood people...you assholes don't know shit, you're actors, you barely know how to do that, just shut the fuck up when it comes to what's going on in Guantanamo Bay.  You don't know shit, let the professionals handle it, and that's the way I feel." - Adam Carolla.

Whoa, wait a minute, that's the way you feel Carolla, but you're just an actor, so shut the fuck up and let the professionals handle it.  Who exactly are the professionals?  Interestingly enough, probably not the people who were doing the waterboarding; in fact the CIA "interrogators" who implemented the practice had no prior experience doing interrogations:

"It's easy to forget that when the U.S. began interrogating al-Qaeda operatives in 2002, the CIA had no idea what it was doing. The last time the agency had been charged with conducting hostile interrogations was during the Vietnam era, and most of those officers were long retired."  - Robert Baer, Time Magazine

Robert Baer would know a thing or two about the Agency, he's an ex-CIA who, according to Seymour Hersh, "was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East."  Baer goes on to say:

"When the CIA was asked to resume hostile interrogations after Sept. 11, some agency leaders were dead set against it, arguing that the military was better equipped for the task. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted the job belonged to the CIA."

Classic Bush-era pro-ignorance decision-making.  But hey, the CIA got the job, and doesn't that automatically make them professionals? 

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. His interrogator, a former CIA colleague of mine, admits he had almost no training in the technique and knew nothing about how the cumulative effect of waterboarding might affect the quality of the information he was trying to extract."

Its too bad Baer's buddy didn't do a little research into the history of waterboarding, he might have found that:

"Waterboarding...was also acknowledged to have originated in "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War," a 1957 article written for the Air Force about abusive Chinese interrogations of U.S. troops during the Korean War. Anyone who wanted to could find it via Google for years."

That's right, waterboarding was invented by Communists to elicit false information.  Not only is it inhumane, not only does alienate us from the civilized world, it also gives us bad intelligence.  But then again, the Conservatives like Bush and Carolla have never cared if their information is accurate, just so long as they have something glib to say when its their turn to talk. 

Which reminds me, why am I wasting my time writing this, its not like I'm changing people minds.  If this blog is actually being read by anyone, its not by the illiterate ilk of Carolla and Palin; if you're reading this, there's a good chance you already knew everything I said, because people who actually bother to read shit, they tend to already know stuff.

Its an exercise in futility, trying to combat Conservative ignorance through the written word.