Monday, September 5, 2011

Interesting Reads and a Short Editorial

A Tweet is Worth (at least) 140 Words by Alemi << on efficiency and the English language
Stock Tiger Stalking Stocks by Stock Tiger << comprehensive market TA 9.6.2011
Try, Try Again, or Maybe Not by Leslie Berlin for The New York Times
Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult by Mike Lofgren

I used to work for a guy who treated performance not against a baseline, but as the difference between one outcome and another.  If you ended up writing a change order against a contract it wasn't the pure delta in the original and revised contract that got parsed, it was the difference in what the contract should have been written for originally and the final revised contract.

You only walked into Goodie's office one time thinking that you lost a grand.  After that you're prepared to explain why there was a 2k "swing" between what should have been and what it is now.  It used to drive me up the fucking wall because some of his what ifs were an octave below aliens dropping out of the sky with space concrete and diamond flake aggregates.

Winners want to know what the best possible outcome is and how far they have to go to get there.  I get that now.