San Francisco Neverland

I read a great article today on the inter webs about how San Francisco is slowly shifting away from being the Neverland that people always think about when they think about Silicon Valley. It was written from the perspective of an artist hear in the city, but I was thinking the whole time-- Hey this isn't only for artists, bro. The struggle is real and it's hitting everyone. I might be that tech parasite that everyone's talking about, but that doesn't mean our lives are easy.

Granted, I've only been here for a little bit. A hot second in the grand scheme of life, but in San Francisco time, I'm practically a lifer. There are two very divided camps about San Francisco as a city, and tenure is only one of the hotly debated topics that are shunted around like sad beach balls during pretty much every party I go to. There's (generally) two camps. Pro-SF and "People Waiting to Move Away" aka "Disgusted Former SF Folks". Digusted Formers also sometimes take a mutation to the "Here Only for a Nobler Cause" folks. Those guys are here only because they want to teach english to starving children for a couple years before they move back to [fill in blank of other big city here] to continue working as an executive director at a non-profit that they founded with a friend in college. Every now and then you get a "I'm Here for My Fam" (I kind of count myself in that bucket), but mostly the first two. More generally I suppose you could just lump them into "optimists" and "pessimists", but these labels are more fun. So, for a roll up of the topics that keep coming up again and again, let's get started:

1. Cost of Rent: Yeah. It's really f-ing expensive. That should be the title of my memoir from my times in San Francisco.
1. Pro-SF: That's just the cost of living here! But look at the great things that SF has to offer. The culture! The parks! The sunshine! Where else can you brew your own beer, have a farm to table meal and then go to a museum for their new exhibit on the seduction prints of Japan in one day?! 
2. DFSFF: It's too expensive. And it's all those stupid tech companies' fault. If they didn't inflate the average income so much in this geographic area, we wouldn't have to deal with it.
3. My Take: Shit is just expensive yo. It's what you get when you combine basic economics + small geographic area (limited supply) + great weather + more jobs in the area. Plus, California, especially northern California, is just generally a nice place to live. It sucks, but it's not the employee's fault. We just want to have jobs.
2. The Traffic: Especially if you commute to the south bay for work. This is your life. This would be the subtitle, so I could mimic Dr. Strangelove. My memoir, for the record, is titled (so far): "Cost of Rent: Yeah. It's really f-ing expensive OR "The Traffic: This is mein kampf". Though I don't know why I decided to go german with that last part.
1. Pro-SF: It will get better- we just need to make better transportation! We have a growing population so it makes sense.
2. DFSFF: Again, totally the fault of all these damn tech companies. Without them, we wouldn't be pumping all these cars on the road-- all friggin' hipsters driving their racing-striped mini cooper from SF to Cupertino every day. Have you SEEN the 280 recently?!
3. My Take: This one is probably mostly to the fault of the tech companies. There are a lot of people (especially younger people) who are moving to the bay area for jobs, but don't want to live in the burbs. So we commute. Usually we use buses, but some of us don't. Sorry about it.
3. Adults Acting Like Kids: or, Never never land syndrome. And not the creepy Michael Jackson kind.
1. Pro-SF: That's the magic of SF! You have the freedom and the youthful energy to pursue those things that you WANT and no one is going to tell you that you CAN'T do it or that your ideas are silly. We live and think out of the box here! There are no lines to color out of!
2. DFSFF: But seriously. Living with roommates when you're in your 30s? And what about the dating scene? No one is ready to settle down, everyone just keeps dating....forever. In a flaky way.
3. My Take: Boo on living with roommates (though seriously that's the only way to afford anything decent). I live in the tenderloin because I just couldn't do it for my first year here. I needed my space. Dating is actually good out here because there's so many good options. But it's true, if you're looking to settle down, it's hard to find someone on the same wavelength as you.

There's many more, but I wanted to throw out those three to begin with. Each of those three could be broken down into tirades all on their own, but you have to start somewhere. Coming back home has been a little of a mixed bag, but I'm back. And writing again, so I'm sure we'll see more of each other again in the future :)

Well There Goes My Hope for a Gold Encrusted Office Chair

 

 ...and my hopes for a series of ornate, wooden thrones for dining room chairs, and my office desk that doubles as an aquarium for sharks. These are all things that, if I had just an insane, inordinate amount of money, I would like to partake in. I read an article on Bloomberg the other day titles "Why Rich People Feel Poor". When I started reading, I laughed to myself. The hypothetical couple had two children! (Every Chinese person knows you should cap at one, max. It's just more efficient that way.) They lived in New York! (You can't live there. C'mon... unless you're on a consultant stipend...just don't bother.) And the hypothetical couple makes $450K a year! I know, I know, by New York standards you're living in a one bedroom above a really good shwarma place, if you're lucky. The inside me mocked at the poor choices this couple had made, and the fact that they made so much money and still "felt poor". 

Then I found out that for a hypothetical couple to have two children and, I don't know, send them to college, they would need to save $2 MILLION DOLLARS. And have next to no emergency fund.

 

How can this be?! Well, they rely less on social security than lower income households, they get Medicare but have to cover the gaps that Medicare leaves, they have to pay for college, they get taxed to death (effective tax rate is close to 50%) and they have to pay for long term care to prepare for their old age. Absolutely insane. 

As I look into the future and think about how I'm going to live in San Francisco soon, arguably one of the most expensive cities to live in the country, I'm suddenly very nervous about my financial future. Ramen it is then.

PIMCO Has Become A Lot Like High School

 

Okay. Full transparency time. For a time in my naive life at business school, I thought that I wanted to go into investment management. The investment management industry is a hard industry to get into-- its an increasingly shrinking and consolidating industry (the pie is getting smaller, but there's more people that want a piece), it's filled with ridiculously intelligent people, it will only fill its ranks with what it believes are the smartest people and having a long-lived career in this industry is possible, but it takes a very specific type of person.

Specifically within fixed-income funds (or funds that are known to do fixed-income, as most firms now argue that they offer a variety of products) the game is getting harder because rising rates make people move away from bonds because the returns aren't as good. One of the biggest fixed income funds out there is PIMCO, who I have a huge amount of respect for and even got the chance to visit once. PIMCO has made waves most recently because their CEO and co-CIO (didn't know that was a thing, did ya? I didn't either.), Mohammad El-Erian has decided to step down. 

For a long while now, El-Erian and Bill Gross, another major figurehead within the PIMCO family, have steered the company together. In my mind, El-Erian was always the warm, fuzzy guy-- quick to dole out smiles, answer questions and shake hands, whereas Gross was always a little more serious-- still smiling and welcoming (at least when I saw him) but definitely more reserved than his counterpart. Together, they were like the odd couple of the fixed income financial market, but somehow it worked. They balanced each other out, and together they formed (what I thought) was a good team. Recently, however, amid news that El-Erian was leaving, there have been reports of a not-so-happy marriage, where Gross has been reported saying (basically) "I have an awesome track record, what do you have?" and El-Erian informing him that (verbatim) "I'm tired of cleaning up your shit."El-Erian's farewell letter is one of the most thoughtful I have ever read (take note-- not on an iPad) and seems like it could be a veiled attempt at stressing that PIMCO should be a "we" and "you" culture, whereas under Gross it was more of an "I" culture. 

Regardless, it hits me with a twinge of disappointment that the firm that I had so much respect for has now been reduced to little more than high school-like gossip in the papers. Now that the media smells the blood, they have no shame in publishing things outlining the hearsay of what happened within the firm. They've painted Gross as the snobby, popular girl who mercilessly bullied El-Erian away. Maybe Gross didn't like people making eye contact with him, maybe he did like the floor to be quiet (I can confirm that it was a quieter floor than others I have been on), but calling for Bill Gross to step down seems like a mistake. There is an argument that conservative fixed income investors don't want an old man (that has the view that he is right and everyone else is wrong) taking care of all their money, but Bill Gross is an institution that is intimately intertwined in PIMCO. Losing him, especially after losing El-Erian could leave investors even more wary because both of sources of guidance within the firm would be gone. Un-moored, investors would begin to question whether PIMCO could still consistently provide the returns they have previously promised, and even more outflow could be expected (after a summer of record outflows). No, if I were PIMCO, I would stand strong. Acknowledge the stepping down of El-Erian, recommit to their clients and begin to rebuild. To do otherwise would be like throwing good money after bad.

 

Things I Learned Recently... Part Purple 2.7

• Apparently the new health care law is having a lot of unintended consequences considering some people are finding it as an opportunity to quit their jobs because they no longer need to be employed to get healthcare
• Don't know how I feel about this one. On one hand, good for you for being a little more empowered and taking charge of your life. On the other hand, you either could have done this earlier and I'm scared that lazy people will use this as an excuse to leave their jobs with limited penalty
• So Satya Nadella is Microsoft CEO now 
• He's a Booth alum. Big props. Apparently, some Indians are seeing this actually as a negative reflection on their culture as it highlights how so many people are moving away from India and becoming more successful abroad, which highlights the brain drain that is currently occurring in their country
•  Dartmouth has experienced low application rates this year. They guess its because of some of the bad publicity they've received regarding sexual assault/hazing on their campus
• They say they're working on it, and they're building new centers to combat any negative occurrences on campus, but I don't know if a new center is going to fix all of their problems
• So Ali Baba is killin' it. They were just valued at $153B after surging sales, and is probably what's really propping up Yahoo (a main shareholder)
• As a B2B sourcing portal between Asia and...everywhere else, this isn't surprising anyone. Expect their valuation to keep going up and their IPO price (supposedly later this year) to be ridiculous
• Apparently inequality is kind of unavoidable
• Some scientists set up an experiment awhile ago where everyone starts with equal talent and equal wealth. Setting up incentives to protect the non-wealthy actually resulted in an aggregated wealth disparity

• Sao Paulo, facing a drought, just figured out its largest water supply may run dry in 45 days
• So, I'm not a scientist, but I don't think that's good. It's compounded because much of the petrochemical refinery that happens requires a lot of water, which could result in extreme difficulties
• Technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that, contrary to the popular belief of nerds everywhere, technology will simply allow humans to be the best versions of themselves
• Not only will we have the benefits of gene selection, but we'll also be healthier thanks to tiny blood-cell-sized nanobots, better monitoring of our everyday health and be more productive

Things I've Learned from Working

 

I was in a deep discussion the other day with one of my friends around what our worst and best jobs were. We thought deeply about what makes a good job a good one and a bad job a bad one.

All the normal characters were brought out-- a bad job? Well that would entail that you had at least one weird coworker who was always strangely (or outrightly) inappropriately sexual in the workplace, or a boss that tried to use the common approach of feedback ("Hey! Let's grab coffee, I want to hear about how you think that went") to be a truly awful person ("Is that soy? Did you order that with soy?", "Yes, I'm lactose intolerant...", "But soy is so fattening! Do you really think you need that right now?").But we soon realized that it was actually much easier to pinpoint what our favorite (best) job was then our worst ones, because even our worst ones taught us something about this crazy life we live. So I'm not going to comment any further on which one is my favorite or least favorite, but here's my list of things I've learned from each of my jobs:

1. "Street Marketer". Nope, this isn't code for "took her clothes off for change", though, in California that's entirely a possibility. No, what this meant was that, for a summer, I was that annoying person that snuck around car parking lots and put little flyers on your window for when you came back. The flyers advertised a pizza place on Main Street in Huntington Beach that you probably would've gone to anyway. But hey, it paid $20/hour, and that was a lot when you're 13! Things I learned:
• Car alarms are surprisingly sensitive, particularly around the windshield area. You're actually much more effective if you tuck it into the window on the drivers side because then i won't slip down and they'll see it as they get into the car
• You might think that parking your car in a garage might give you a little added safety, since there's a person sitting there taking money and watching people come in and out of the garage. That person is usually some high schooler who couldn't give less of a crap about someone coming in and touching your car. I'm sure it helped because I was a 13 year old girl in a jean mini, but don't hold your breath that I couldn't grow up into a 27 year old miscreant in a jean mini
2. Basketball Coach. This one is kind of self explanatory, except that it was for 9-11 year old girls. 
• This age group is confusing as hell. They're beginning to understand that they are supposed to be holy terrors in about a year or so, but they're figuring out (slowly) how far they can push their boundaries without getting in trouble just yet. Best bet is to treat them like you would a younger sibling
• This age group also hasn't figured out yet that sports are good! They're cool! They keep you in shape throughout your high school (and if you're lucky) college years and beyond! The answer to this misconception is to make them run suicides
3. Secretary and Counselor for the Boys and Girls Club. This was kind of awesome. Check in the kids, answer the  phones and then go help them with their homework or play kickball. 
• I got a little metal stool that I could sit on behind the desk, which changed my life. Would highly recommend this as sometimes the parents just want to chat when they pick up and drop off their kids
• You get sick a lot more when you're around this many children of all different age groups. Because. Well, children are just walking biohazards really. You also develop a favorite age group (mine are the 5-6 year olds because they still think you're cool and they still love you and will listen to you)
• You realize that the idea of having children is terrifying. So this is the perfect job for a teenager
4. Student Worker at the Local Cafe on Campus. This was kind of awesome because, well, free food that wasn't cafeteria food. And, it was right across the street from my dorm
•  Uh free food? Awesome. Making random new types of food with the given ingredients? Awesome.
• Not awesome was the mandatory over night shifts we had to take a few times a semester and cleaning up puke during this overnight shifts because it always happened on the weekends
5. Summer RA. For girls dorms. For sports camps, alumni reunions and whatever else happened on campus
• Adults, when put into dorms, turn back into students
• Young girls, when at sports camp and away from their parents, turn into squealing psychos (seriously, they terrorize each other)
• The best type of people to RA are nuns and priests that are here for what I assume are nun and priest conferences

 Then I graduated and got a "real job". *sigh* I guess you can't have it all....

Things I Learned Today...Part 7655.3

 

• At my school, there's a whole branch of research called "hedonomics"-- contrary to the popular study of economics that permeates pretty much all of my school, hedonomists define their study by saying, "Whereas economics studies how to maximize wealth with limited resources, hedonomics studies how to maximize happiness with limited wealth"
• They found that sometimes less is better depending on the perception. Whereas people almost always assume that more is better, depending on the perception (a high definition TV at the store when it's next to another HDTV or at home next to nothing, a full, small cup of ice cream instead of a normally filled, medium cup of ice cream) can distort your perception, leading you to buyers remorse or regrets later
• Additionally, when people thought strategically between how much reward they wanted before undertaking a task, they were able to better plan optimally for their rewards, ultimately leading to more happiness in the long run
•  At my school, there's also this sculpture in our courtyard (a courtyard we call the summer garden) and it's basically a barren tree with a bunch of rocks in the branches (see above). I always thought that this was some sort of sad, pathetic and/or angry symbol of UChicago as a whole ("where fun goes to die") but recently found out that the artist who made this piece grew up in rural Europe-somewhere (that's a real place, look it up) where it snowed all the time. Each winter, the snow would be so heavy that it would roll rocks down the mountains where she lived and push them into the trees below. When the snow melted in the spring time, the trees would all have these massive rocks in them. She made this work as a symbol of her home. This story made me feel better about my life
• I should never go shopping in October or April. April because most people get their tax refund checks then and the retailers jack up prices/decrease the number of promotions to capitalize on that. October because it's a retailer's reprieve between back to school sales and holiday sales, so they're unlikely to offer good deals during this time as they're trying to stay in the black
• 5s-es are selling better than 5c-s, which Bloomberg keeps reporting like it's some sort of genius idea. So you're telling me that in a crazily image-driven, status-symbol-centric culture like China (for the first time the iPhone releases are being simultaneously released in the US and China instead of through a phased rollout), people like the more expensive option? No way!
• Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) might be the best or worst leader ever. I never knew that he had such quips as, "If I have to hear that idea again, I'm gonna have to kill myself." On the other hand, he has a shadow CEO that follows him everywhere, so....that's.....interesting.

Things I Learn in School....

Lesson #18475740.3

Before he was a billionaire, Soichiro Honda was a hot mess.

Excerpt: "Soichiro Honda, an inventive genius with a legendary ego, founded Honda Motor Co., Ltd., in 1948. His exploits have received wide coverage in the Japanese press. Known for his mercurial temperament and bouts of "philandering", he is variously reported to have tossed a geisha out a second story window, climbed inside a septic tank to retrieve a visiting supplier's false teeth (and subsequently placed the teeth in his own mouth), appeared inebriated and in costume before a formal presentation to Honda's bankers requesting financing vital to the firm's survival (the loan was denied), hit a worker on the head with a wrench, and stripped naked before his engineers to assemble a motorcycle engine."

**I don't know why they put "philandering" in quotes. I really don't.

I Really Think I Missed My True Calling

If this whole b-school thing doesn't pan out.. Hallmark card writer.

College Costs Rise by 500% in US Since 1985

Can someone please explain this chart to me? As someone who just got hit hard with my most recent tuition bill, this seems kind of unfair.

Granted, I'm sure there's 18 different ways that this data has been tampered with and therefore this isn't as accurate as it should be because we decided to cut and filter the crap out of this data, but regardless, something needs to be done.

With unemployment levels not seen since the 1990s and the continuing rise of globalization, the world is a smarter, more efficient and more diverse place. This makes us more innovative, but it also inherently leads to more competitive positions to fill. Although people try to comfort me in saying that greater efficiency does not necessarily mean fewer jobs, it's a hard thing to believe when you're trying to pay off all of that student debt.

Marissa Mayer-- What She Predicts for the Fall Season!

I think it’s kind of funny to watch the whole Yahoo fiasco. I mean.... it was up and it was down. It seemed destined for bankruptcy and then all of a sudden people began to wonder if maybe it would get that miraculous turnaround that it so desperately needed with Marissa Mayer. And then, it was almost like all of my favorite publications suddenly all turned into a bad re-run of People magazine-- there were snarky comments about her parenting style, what she stood for as the figurehead for working women everywhere, and even comments on the types of charities that she supported and the types of designers that she supports. I mean really people. What next? You’re going to start reporting news on how Britney Spears taught her iPhone how to recognize “Y’all”? I really don’t care about that.

I could care less about what she wears. She can wear a meat suit like Lady Gaga if she wants as long as she pulls my stock out of the hole that it's in right now. 

For all of the feelings that I have around Yahoo, I have to say that Marissa Mayer is still a positive change from what it was before. No matter your feelings about Yahoo in the future, they’ve been buying up a ton, investing heavily in mobile, and are trying to recreate and revitalize their business into more of a portal-based strategy-- much like how they were viewed when they first got into the game. 

For some fun charts and graphs.... read the BusinessWeek article “Can Marissa Mayer Save Yahoo?”

High Tech and Immigration

Who knew that the high tech industry would affect immigration reform so much? I mean, outside of everyone.

It's no secret that most of the high profile firms nowadays are hiring the best and the brightest-- and they frankly don't care where those people come from as long as they continue to provide exemplary results. In a recent Economist article, "The Jobs Machine",

In another NYTimes article, "A Bill Allowing More Foreign Workers Stirs a Tech Debate", Joey Doernberg, a unemployed engineer, is a little upset because, although being in the high tech industry for years in chip making, he is now struggling to find a job in the industry that he loves. He blames the influx of immigrants who are now specifically hired for their skills, whereas his skills, although pertinent, would still require a fair amount of retraining before they gain attention from the recruiters that are prowling the business schools and engineering hotspots today.

Having a lot of friends who are on visas to be here to begin with (to go to school and now to actually work), I wonder if this immigration debate is going to end up with us needing to decide whether or not we want to curb the young immigrants that we educate here or the older immigrants who are looking to bring themselves and their families over. Although there is merit to each, I can't help but think that I'm pretty sure which one the government would choose.

The Older I Get....

The more I realize that I have no idea what I'm doing. Am I right? I'm supposed to be an "adult" now. I finished undergrad. I worked for a few years. I met interesting people, I traveled to a lot of different cities. I even own a piece of furniture that doesn't come from Ikea!! Don't all of these things somehow, when mashed together, make me an official adult? And, as an adult, doesn't that mean that I wake up and suddenly know how to make decisions and go about choosing a proper life plan for myself? Or at least get a manual?

Alas, 'tis not so. This is what I thought it would be like once I left work to go to business school:

1. I would leave work and go through three quarters a year at a really hard business school. Let the butt-kicking commence. (This was so broad it was impossible for it NOT to happen.)
2. I would take a lot of courses that I really have no business taking because I have no in-depth experience there. I would take them any way however, because, well, that's what I'm paying so much for dangit. (Butt-kicking commences. This part happened.)
3. I would be jealous of people who don't do this because they're lives are way less painful than mine. (This also really happened.)
4. I would meet some of the best people in the world and we would become best friends. (This happened. And I also met some of the not-so-best people in the world. That happens too.)
5. I would find an internship that is super exciting and would let me really know what life is like. I would meet lots of new interesting people, live in the bay area for awhile, and ultimately really figure out my life-- my financial life, my social life, my love life, my career life-- hell, even my avatar on Sim City was going to get a makeover.  (This did not happen.)

Okay, so I guess maybe I put a little too much pressure on my summer internship being the end-all, be-all of my growth as...you know, a human being, but I honestly did think that I would be more sure of myself than I am now. Because, I've found out, the problem with doing stuff, is that, the more you do, the more questions you have-- Why am I doing this and not something else? (Thanks Booth, for making me second-guess myself constantly. You call it a "analytical" mindset, I call it I'm-going-to-be-a-nervous-wreck-and-need-therapy-in-five-years.) Am I doing it the right way? The right place? With the right people? Am I making my life meaningful? Am I sharing these experiences with people that I actually care about?

I've also noticed that as I've gotten older it's become less about what I'm doing and more about who I'm doing it with-- my friends, family, my team. Being able to share life experiences with people you care about make all the difference in the world. So... for now, I'm not sure if the what or the why or the how is perfect, but I guess I can rest easy knowing that the who is pretty awesome (from a musical sense and an overall life sense). 

Failure in those Corporation Thingies

"Product failure is deceptively difficult to understand. It depends not just on how customers use a product but on the intrinsic properties of each part- what it's made of and how those materials respond to wildly varying conditions. Estimating a product's lifespan is an art that even the most sophisticated manufacturers still struggle with. And it's getting harder. In our Moore's law-driven age, we expect devices to continuously be getting smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. This thinking has seeped into our expectations about lots of product categories: Cars must get better gas mileage. Bicycles must get lighter. Washing machines need to get clothes cleaner with less water. Almost every industry is expected to make major advances every year. To do this they are constantly reaching for new materials and design techniques. All this is great for innovation, but it's terrible for reliability."

 Super interesting article from Wired on how failure affects the large companies that try to control it.

NSFV: Not Suitable for the Valley

“We reached a tipping point, where the value of having user data rose beyond the cost of storing it,” said Dan Auerbach, a technology analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an electronic privacy group in San Francisco. “Now we have an incentive to keep it forever.” 

Project Chess? Prism? I'm not even mad about all of this spying stuff-- I'm just mad that they had so much creativity to give it such awesome names when I have to deal with stuff like the USCIS to get an FOIA to find out information about my only family. Just sayin'.

Maybe people just have spying on the brain, but the most recent Times Article: Web's Reach Binds NSA and Silicon Valley Leaders, hints that the rebellious, anti-establishment valley that we once knew might not be what we thought it was.

Did you know that the chief security officer for Facebook left and joined the NSA? That Skype had eavesdropping capabilities even before it left and became part of Microsoft? That maybe these companies are targeting foreigners and using their treasure troves of information in order to spy on people of interest? It's entirely possible that all of these accusations are entirely overblown, but in a world where everyone pays (in one way or another) for information, has data become king?

As consumers, did we give up this right as we bought more and more into the services that these companies offered us? Music, email, file sharing and apps? Is that what we traded our freedom for? Is it even that big of a deal? I have a very biased opinion, being born in a generation where this type of "privacy" didn't matter-- like they said during the Obama eavesdropping fiasco, "If you don't have anything to hide, then this shouldn't matter to you!", to which millions of angry Americans yelled, "I don't have anything to hide but I still don't want to tell you what I'm not hiding!". So the argument goes. I, personally, am not that worried about them knowing that I talked to my best friend about her new job or my inability to grow grass (it's really hard, ok?) in my front lawn. I happily trade that for email, music and apps, but my feelings shouldn't be the rule.

From one perspective, the government is a heavy investor to Silicon Valley companies-- by all accounts they might be the reason why these companies have the money to have cutting edge technology. On the other hand, the consumer could just be a victim in this weird love relationship. Joe Shmoe didn't sign up for the government to listen to his conversations! Jane Doe didn't sign up for the government to watch her while she sent emails to her friends! But, harking back to the technologist's words-- we reached a point where having user data rose above the cost of storing it. What will make another tipping point?

Why Security Isn't Secure

I read an interesting article in Wired the other day called "Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can't Protect Us Anymore". It was terrifying. I feel like I just can't trust anyone anymore. In it, author Mat Honan talked about how in a matter of days, his entire life was erased by a hacker that got access to his Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and more. He also posted a really terrifying chat transcript with Applecare where in under 20 lines, he got the Applecare representative to give him access to have a new password and changed the password.

His basic argument is pretty easy actually-- terrifyingly so. Start with basic information about someone, plug that into any one of many shady sites where I can acquire social security numbers for next to no money, combine that with publicly known information (address, phone number, first car, hometown, high school mascot) and you're pretty much in. If someone uses the same password for multiple platforms, your job is done! If not, you can definitely use a hacked gmail account to change passwords/gain access to other applications just by clicking "forgot password". Terrifying.

The one thing that this made me realize is how tenuous our relationship with "security" is, and actually, why we still think that we're so secure. Do we really think that those 6-8 alphanumeric characters are really going to keep our bank accounts safe? Especially in light of all the information that we're freely publishing on Facebook and Twitter? Maybe those Luddites had it right when they decided not to get involved in that hullabaloo altogether. Also, do I care if someone hacks into my Facebook (apparently someone hacked into his social media accounts and started posting hate speech) if it's obviously not me? (I'm a lover, not a fighter.) Also, why do people do this? (The answer is that they're kids pretty much who are doing it, and they're doing it because...well, why not?) More terrifying.

Excuse me while I go change every single application that I own.

Performance Play

I know I talk about my school a lot, but I swear, it's not because I'm on some weird propaganda play. It's really just because my school releases some interesting research (and is filled with really...interesting..people) and so the stories abound. I came across this article in my Economist about how you motivate people ("Making Pay Work"). This was interesting to me for two reasons: I like to be motivated, preferably by a happy, warm fuzzy feeling or, more commonly through financial means. I also like to motivate people. I've been chosen at school to be a LEAD Facilitator. This means I'm one of a group of second years that will be one of the first to welcome our 1st years to school in the fall, and we'll also moderate a class for these first years (called LEAD for Leadership Effectiveness and Development) that's basically a leadership class. For obvious reasons, motivation is really important in this case.

In the article, they cite that you can have a system of punishment and rewards (catch more criminals if you increase the probability that they will get caught and the severity of punishment once caught) and that you can also incentivize through money or intrinsic motivation. So they did an experiment where two groups were given a 3D puzzle and asked to create a variety of shapes. Because the puzzle was challenging and mentally taxing, intrinsic motivation was high. One group left alone worked hard. The other group was monitored and given a $1 reward for each shape they completed successfully. And then...."This payment was later withdrawn with the result that the second group now put in less effort than the first. Its members switched off, turning instead to Playboy or the New Yorker."  Now what type of experiment offers Playboy and the New Yorker? And were there any men in this study? They preferred to solve puzzles than look at Playboy in spare time? What kind of weird, inaccurate experiment was this?!

I also learned (about myself) that I'm one of those people they claim as motivated by fairness. On one hand, I have a strong desire to help those I find helpful. On the flip side, I have a desire to punish those I don't find helpful. So there's that.

Ultimately, the article concludes that one should monitor harshly or not monitor at all, because the middle ground (that most favored by scientists) actually have strong drawbacks, whereas the extremes have fewer draw backs. Better get to hardcore slacking off then.

I'd Gladly Pay You Tomorrow...for a Burger Today

I love this. So.... going to Booth, we talk a lot about the economy because apparently there's been a lot of people who went to my school that were into that sort of thing. I suppose it's kind of important or something so they've developed a lot of algorithms, equations, general theories and sometimes interpretive dances to measure, quantify, analyze, track or gauge the way the economy is moving, trending, changing, increasing and decreasing. It's been an exhausting tenure for the economists at my school-- they've been busy.

But the problem is, I've learned, that the economy doesn't really like being measured. I mean, there's a lot of variables! You have to look an employment (or lack thereof as the case has been recently), population (we're not a 100% on how to measure this yet-- is it working age? All? How do we count for people who've moved back home to their parents? How about the parents that are now living with their kids? It depends who you ask apparently), how we define the poverty line, where in the nation or the globe the people are located, and how we define "standard of living".

One tried and true measure that has been used for a long time is the CPI (Consumer Price Index) which is basically a baselined measure of how much stuff (predetermined, set, unchanging stuff) people can buy with a set amount of money. This supposedly helps us benchmark so we can figure out inflation in a more accurate way. We recently changed the way we define it, but that's another story. There's a lot of qualms about why the CPI is inaccurate , but we really didn't have anything better. Until now.

So The Economist (I'm catching up on my back copies of The Economist, ok? Don't judge me, I just finished my finals and I had a lot of Bones to catch up on) made up their own index that they call the Big Mac Index. Follow me. Also, if you don't know who the guy above is, you really need to get out more. Or less. Or live in the 50s. Whatever, you're choice.

The Economist made it real easy. They based it on a symbol of Americana-- a global behemoth that's expanded to the far reaches of the world-- that can be found anywhere if you're hungry enough. The Big Mac Index is actually based on something real (!!)-- the PPP (theory of Purchasing Power Parity) according to which prices and exchange rates should adjust over the long run, so that identical baskets of tradable goods cost the same across countries. Their "basket of goods" in essence is only one thing-- a big mac. So for those that are worried about currency wars (countries purposely downplaying their currencies to give their exporters a boost in a world anxious about recovery), rest assured knowing that a Canadian burger costs $5.39 compared to the average price of about $4.37 in the US. In Mexico, it's only $2.90, suggesting the peso is 33% below its long run value relative to the dollar. The index actually suggests that currencies are overvalued in Norway, Switzerland and Brazil. The euro, in contrast, is now around 12% too expensive relative to the dollar, which could be dangerous as an indication of minimal boosting the ailing euro area. Compare this to China, which has barely moved toward fair market value, most likely due to meddling by government/banks and government banks who rely on exports as their lifeline. Big Macs can't be wrong!! Mac attack anyone?

Brave New Machines

In the recent economist article, "The Age of Smart Machines", they spotlight two management theorists (Is that even a thing? Is this real? Is that like a consultant for consultants? Because this is getting real meta real fast, and I don't know if I feel comfortable with that. Just sayin'.) from MIT Sloan who are apparently real gung-ho about the possibility of humans making themselves obsolete.

They call them "smart machines", and they really are all around us-- I mean Google's making a car that drives itself, my phone tells me when to wake up and what I have to do every day, every search engine in the world can suggest things for me to buy based on what other things I've bought in the past, and there's wristbands that you can wear to tell you how fast (or slow) you're losing weight. Is this the brave new world that we'd always hoped for?

Apparently these consultant consultants both agree that "knowledge workers" (yup, that's a term now-- it really just means "people who are white collar workers" or "people who are in the service industry" on a very fundamental level but it doesn't make them feel degraded) are on their way out. Backed up by the McKinsey Global Institute (they also go by the cool acronym MGI to feel more like super spies), they point to machine learning, voice recognition and nantotechnology as the drivers that are making this new universe possible. MGI, on a more uplifting note, argues that this evolution is a good thing-- by being spared relatively undemanding tasks, knowledge workers can focus on the more complex ones, making them ultimately more productive. The downside, championed by (Erik Brynjolfson and Andrew McAfee from MIT Sloan-- the consultant consultants), is a little bleaker, and foresees that modern technologies will widen inequality, increase social exclusion and provoke a backlash.

I don't want to be a Luddite or anything, but I want everyone just to hold on to their pants for one quick second. Just because things are modernizing doesn't mean that we're all going to lose our minds and miraculously leap into this new world and allow robots to take over my house (though, if they do the laundry then I'll consider it). What I'm saying is that things will probably be gradual (first of all). Second of all, even after adoption occurs, a tool is really only as good as the person using it. I mean, in a super tangential example, we really could use all of the guns in the world as really small planters if we wanted. (Hey, I'm not saying that we're super efficient in this hypothetical alter universe, I'm just saying we have options.) So although this article is interesting, I feel like taking sides this early in the game is a little premature. We don't know what's going to happen because we don't know how these new changes are going to be adopted in our society. Would we have a different world if we had a network of self-driving cars where special preference was given to emergency vehicles? How would that compare if we these self-driving cars were priced at $180,000 each? What if we created it to fill in the gaps that public transportation left behind? What would P2P car sharing look like then? All I'm saying is that, in this big land of unknowns, let's not start pointing directional fingers until we know how much stuff costs. Or at least if it's going to do my laundry.

The Shrinking Part of Time: Part Time Lifers

I was reading an article in the New York Times the other day titled "A Part-Time Life, As Hours Shrink and Shift", and for some reason, it really stuck with me. In the article, it details the life of a part time worker. Usually thinking that they'll get something like 30 hours a week, they sign up for a job at a retail or grocery store and begin working with 20-30 hours a week. Then, all of a sudden, their hours will get reduced to 5 or maybe 10. With an average wage of ~$10 (which they calculate, by the way, by accounting for $8 of salary and $2 of part time benefits) an hour, it's no surprise that single moms can't raise their children-- they're essentially only making $16,000 a year!

The logic around why stores do this is because, simply, it's cheaper for them. Having a bunch of part timers instead of full timers gives them additional flexibility, cost savings in not having to provide full-time benefits, and workers that, incrementally, don't really impact their schedules too much if they decide to leave (finding a replacement for a full-time employee can be much more difficult).

I think the reason why it struck me is that I came from an industry (consulting) where you're paid pretty well, and I think that sometimes people take that for granted. I once was talking to a few of my friends (also consultants) and we were chatting about what our "after" life could be (after we leave consulting, as we always did, because it's like talking about what you'll do when you get out of prison-- you glorify it to be this amazing thing. Whether it actually is glorious or not is a blog for another day...). One of my friends, who was a superior role to mine (manager) was saying that she could never work somewhere that would pay her less than $110K a year. I was aghast. $110K is almost three times the average household income. That's crazy! She was basically claiming that, because she had grown accustomed to the life that she led, she couldn't fathom a way that she would be happy living her life on less money than that. She estimated that $110K was how much she needed to keep her life "stable". Not even "nice" or "enjoyable" but "stable". Granted, consultants have a skewed version of the world (not living in one place for longer than a week at a time and spending a lot of time in airports will do that to ya), but this was crazy.

I left the consulting biz and now I'm going back at school. I won't lie. I do miss making an income and generally not stressing about money all the time (I am very fiscally responsible, I hate having debt). However, I don't know if I need that much to live a comfortable life. Now I'm stuck in this self-analysis game of "Who's the weird one?" (a game I play often). Am I crazy for thinking that I could live comfortably on half of that? Is she the crazy one for thinking she needs that much to be happy? I don't know, and I probably will never know, but it was definitely a wake up call for me to hear that and then read this. Moral of the story? Just be happy for what you've got. You might not think it's enough, but it's probably more than what other people have. Feeling pretty grateful today.

A Myth in a Myth in a Myth...

In "The Myth of Male Decline", there is a discussion about how males are feeling a little.. well, down-trodden. Maybe a little like second class citizens. Women have been making gains in wages, education, leadership positions. However, it's really a relative game, isn't it?

Women may have been making gains in wages, but its because we have a lot more to make up for-- a lot more opportunity to "make up ground". But why does this matter? I mean, in this brave new world of voice-activated phones and vacuum cleaners that clean by themselves, do we really still need to be harping on and on about the rights of women and how we're really "fighting for our rights"? Are the blogs and articles covering the "progress" of women still needed-- this new-age form of bra-burning?

The short answer is yes.

When Marissa Mayer of Yahoo gets public uproar and an internet-wide controversy for deciding to  continue working throughout her pregnancy, there is still a worthwhile reason to keep the conversation going.

As a person who's currently going to a business school with an overwhelming majority of men, after being a consultant (another male-dominated society), sometimes its a little disheartening. If you're too aggressive, trying to compete in an atmosphere that's mostly men being ultra-competitive and aggressive, then sometimes you're just seen as "mean", "unproductive", "uncooperative", "not a team player". If you're more friendly, trying to make sure that you still retain a bit of yourself in the hurricane of what you're "supposed to be", you're seen as "weak", people take advantage of you, question your ability to lead. In the middle of all of this, everyone keeps telling you to "be yourself", "stay true to what you believe". Well, it's hard!

Especially during this recruiting season, when you're doing so much questioning about who you are, and what you potentially want to do for the next large chunk of your life this strange balance of character traits can begin to weigh on you. Despite what they say, I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed in the lies of the companies that are most interested in us-- potentially, the incoming ranks of their company. All companies say that they want you to be yourself. But some industries, some firms are definitely looking for a specific type of person-- they call it "cultural fit". I understand that, coming from consulting, where the fit is the difference between a successful project or a failure. But where is this line drawn?

Be yourself, but have the following characteristics. Everyone goes through it, but for women the added layer of "how to be a successful business woman", it gets a little more complicated. It's usually easier to make decisions when you can look at how it's been done in the past. With women, we don't have a lot of options to do that. Until we have more examples, more representations, it's worthwhile for us to keep the conversation going.