Don't think that you're not getting hustled by the system. "$85 million for music in Cincinnati." Do you live in Cincinnati? No, of course not. And even if you did, you wouldn't spend the money on music, of all things. Maybe a couple decent offensive linemen, HAHA.

It's levity that will get us through this recession, you see. Levity and a hedge fund revival, which of course you will not be a part of. But laughing is not so easy for we, the sad clowns of poor America. Big stores are taking advantage of little people with vicious "you never spent the last $1.29 on your gift card so we are keeping it" scams. Karma is theirs: The only stores opening are tiny stores, and they're planning to eat up the big, gift card-hoarding stores like a bunch of voracious economic nanoparticles out of some implausible Michael Crichton novel.

You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? Sure, go ahead. Believe whatever makes you feel better. The truth is that if the big guys are in trouble, the little guys are really getting screwed. Mighty Harvard cannot even afford to finish building the buildings it wanted to build. If they're having a hard time, do you know what that means for you, Joe Nobody? Let's just say that if you can't even figure out how to rob a jewelry store without getting shot, we hope you really like the McDonald's dollar menu breakfast, not that you'll ever be able to afford it.

They're already killing each other over falafel in the Big Apple. Be safe out there, doomed citizens.
[Pic: Flickr]

You know who does not have it so good, these days? Old, poor, rural people. Think about it: It sucks being old. It sucks being poor. And it sucks being rural. Put it all together and cover in recession sauce, and what do you have? An old man in a trailer home in Tennessee who can't afford to go to Perkins even once a month.

Wouldn't be like this if we were Chinese. No sir. Have you heard the news? China's booming, they say. Never been to China myself, but I imagine every old, rural Chinese man lives in a golden pagoda covered in diamonds sipping caviar stew and being fellated by Megan Fox (an American).

But, oh well. You take what you can get these days. You see those people ringing bells next to Salvation Army donation kettles? You think they don't appreciate what they have? They appreciate it a great god damn deal. They don't give a fuck about "others" or "the Christmas spirit." They give a fuck about employment, and they got some, by ringing that bell. They also got an easy pot of money to skim, which is another story we're not talking about without a lawyer present, pro bono.

The problem with kids today, besides pornography? They're broke. What the hell good are they? They go off to a fancy college, then they have to work at the same time, and they can't handle it, so they drop out. Instead of following Kanye West's example and releasing a multiplatinum album based on being a College Dropout, they end up just lazying around, annoying their poor, rural, miserable grandparents, until the day comes when they blow themselves up with chewing gum.

Less college. More Chinese. If we can't make it to Perkins before January, we want you to slip us eight Oxycontin and say goodbye.
[Pic: Flickr]

Sent in by the friend of an ultimately unsuccessful Google applicant, the test was supposed to be completed by the applicant within three days. It asks for a response to an imaginary request from an imaginary Google manager, for an analysis of whether the company — "Poogle," not Google, mind you — can hire 750 engineers in six months to launch a new product within 12 months (click to enlarge):

This is a terrible question. The only issue is whether it is an intentional one, designed to test the applicant.

It's terrible because doubling the number of engineers on the sort of product Google makes — software — emphatically does not make it ship faster, certainly not within the first six months of their work, and certainly not at the scale of 750 engineers.

This has been widely understood among software managers since the publication of Frederick Brooks' Mythical Man Month in 1975. As blogger and former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky summarized the thesis 25 years later:

When you add more programmers to a late project, it gets even later. That's because when you have n programmers on a team, the number of communication paths is n(n-1)/2, which grows at O(n2).

From Mythical Man Month:

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them. This is true for... picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many woman are assigned...

Since software construction is inherently a systems effort — an exercise in complex interrelationships — communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.

Even when a software team can benefit from some organic growth (as opposed to Poogle's doubling), it's going to take on the order of six months just to get the new people up to speed on the existing code base and trained in corporate peculiarities, which at Google are significant due to the scale at which it operates (Ken Thompson, legendary co-creator of the Unix operating system and inventor of Google's new Go programming language, still isn't allowed to check in code there, having failed to jump through the requisite hoops, he recently said in the book Coders at Work ).

So "Poogle" shouldn't be asking whether it needs to hire more recruiters to add 750 new programmers to "Product X" in six months; it should be asking whether the feature list for Product X should be trimmed, the deadline lengthened or a subset of it easily split off into Product Y.

But maybe Google is asking candidates to come up with that answer on their own. Whoops.

Supporting documents supplied as tabs to the test:

This one goes on; we've cut it off:

(Top pic: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Getty.)

In 2008 the US prison population rose to 1.6 million—2.3 million, counting local jails. The increase in prisoners mostly consisted of government officials jailed for not being able to pay their hefty prison construction bills.

Look, nobody likes to lock people up, except for the prison-industrial complex and its political protectors, and Republicans. But order must be kept. Control must be had. Mayhem must be staunched. Bankers in England are getting a 50% bonus tax hit this year, and brother, if you don't they're going to be shivving accountants and tossing burning mattresses from atop their tiers, then you don't know what life is really like in The Pen, by which we mean An Office with Pens, Although Most Work is Admittedly Done on Bloomberg Terminals.

Indignities abound. Tavern on the Green, once the most popular mediocre tourist trap restaurant with annoying mirrored mazelike walls in New York, is now being forced to auction off all of its bric-a-brac, as it's going out of business.

Bankers: Go buy all the topiary and garish art. Use it to spruce up a federal prison. The PR value is great, and you'll have a nicer place to look forward to when you get locked up for tax evasion.
[Pic via]

America's House Flippers, the backbone of our economy's rise to world dominance, have been waiting dormantly for this moment, like so many of those frogs that hide under mud in the desert during the dry season, then come out when it rains. Well, it's raining now—raining opportunity! For house flipping! Now, people are flipping houses that got foreclosed on after the last Greater Fool bought it, from a house flipper. But beware: "Unlike the boom-time flippers, the latest generation needs cold cash, lots of local-market knowledge and strong nerves."

Or you can learn how to make your fortune with no money down and no knowledge, from an infomercial!

Either way, it's a good career for homebound retirees, who would rather not be retirees except for the fact that they're old and there are no jobs out there, so guess what, they're retirees. Just accept it, grandpa. But with house flipping easier than ever, you old folks should have no trouble raising more than enough money to pay off the massive MTA budget gap, which will obviously require fare hikes, especially since the MTA swears it will not hike fares.

Investment. Real estate. Transportation. Entrepreneurship. Old people. These words, taken together, spell Strength For America. As long as you don't trust the credit rating agencies.

Or drink the water.
[Pic via]

Jesus Leonardo, 57, is married with two children and works 10 hours a day picking up the garbage at an OTB place in midtown then feeding thousands of tickets through a scanner. His biggest win was a ticket for $9500 in 2006 and he snared one for $8040 last month.

His operation got so successful that he now hires staff, takes a lunch hour and pays taxes. Which makes his job significantly more legitimate than most in the media right now. And he even inspires religious devotion in those making bets:

Freddy Peguero, 53, a short-order cook from Manhattan, rooted for Mr. Leonardo to scan a winner one recent afternoon.

"Everybody in here loves Jesus," he said. "When Jesus wins, we all eat, and we all drink. Jesus is a very generous man."

Not sure who started all these rumors about how "there's a recession" and "nobody's getting cash any more," because, hey, whoa, do you even read the papers these days? We do, and leisurely, thanks to the life of leisure afforded by our ample supply of money. Do you know what rich man Richard Branson is up to this week? He is launching tourists into space, on a rocket, for a quarter million dollars each! Does that sound like a recession-plagued business, to you?

It should not. Here is another thing: a new yacht described as a "space-aged pleasure boat, a 124-foot-wide floating mansion with room for 12 guests and a crew of 20." (Pictured: The inside of a freaking yacht). Space age, yes; recession age, no. It takes money to run a yacht like that. Money that is existing right now in the economy!

A government employee has been calling in sick all year long, but he's still collecting his salary. That's money! Some high school kid got $100k just for doing a science fair project. That's money! A thousand London bankers are quitting their jobs at the Royal Bank of Scotland rather than give in to the tyranny of government cutbacks in their bonuses. That is the distinct scent of money wafting across the seas!

So we say ¡no mas! to the whining about not having any money. Buy a rocket, or build a yacht, or be a banker, and go out and get it. Motivate!

Which raises the question: what the would these Marie Antoinettes have to do before they stopped seeing hundreds of millions as a baseline salary? They're hardly starving; they're currently limited to $500,000 — or about $1400 a day — by the terms of the bailout.

To put that in perspective surgeons earn about $330,000 at the top end, according to the American College of Surgeons. And that was a survey from the boom days of 2006. The highest paid nurses in that year got about $60,000. Does William Dooley, the head of AIG's financial services division, the same division that drove the company to catastrophe, and who is among those the Wall Street Journal report is threatening to quit, provide more good to society? (That was a rhetorical question. The answer is no.)

Anyway, two of the executives, heroes both, have changed their minds over the weekend and decided to soldier on with mere hundreds of thousands of dollars and some risk of losing a lucrative severance. That leaves three whom we invite to send in their rationales for demanding more money.

AIG is not alone; last week Bank of America announced that it would pay back $45bn bailout money, primarily so it could lavish silks and ivory on a new chief executive.

Unemployment: If it goes any lower, why, it won't even be 10%, officially, and we would barely be losing jobs every month, at all! That's good news for America and for American families.

Which is not to say everything is peachy, exactly. Our plan to scalp tickets for the NBA co-champion Knicks and Nets is not working out so hot, for some reason. And the Off Track Betting thing? We thought that was a sure winner. Who ever went bankrupt on gambling, right? Well, OTB did.

But we're pursuing alternate strategic visions for economic enrichment. When the whole "Fancy Parisian restaurant that's been around for more than 400 years" thing wasn't paying off, we asked ourselves, "Why not auction off some of that wine that's filling up the cellar of this place?" So we did. And we got some money. That's how it is.

Always have a backup plan. Before you know it, the economy won't be losing any jobs at all. Then what's your excuse?
[Pic: Flickr]

The figures come from the industry breakdown of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' new employment numbers [pdf]. Jobs in the print publishing category—that includes newspapers, magazines, and books as well as direct-mail shops and the like—have declined from 863,600 last November to 776,800 last month—a 10% drop (those are seasonably adjusted figures). Last month alone saw a 4.2% decline in print jobs, helped by massive bloodletting at the Associated Press, Business Week, Time Inc., and elsewhere.

And those numbers explicitly exclude internet-based jobs, which don't appear to be tracked separately. So the total number of media workers laid off in the last year is almost certainly substantially higher.

Overall, the new job figures are being described as a small improvement, given the downtick in the unemployment rate. But the largest single employment sector to add jobs in the last month was temporary services, with an increase of 52,000. And the largest drop in unemployment was among teenagers. These are not quality jobs.

And this paragraph from the BLS's release should provide some sobering context:

About 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in November, an increase of 376,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

But there's good news: Employment in commercial banking increased by 1,000 jobs, or about 1%. They always win, don't they?

Actually his mother funded the movie — he paid for it on his own credit card and she had to settle the bills. That's the least of his worries though, report Page Six. Parker was arrested twice for grand larceny and multiple counts of ID theft — he's accused of pilfering credit cards to buy essentials like a $11,000 Hermes Birkin bag. Which he probably required because:

Mop-topped Parker, 40, is a regular on the social scene, attending soirees for Bulgari, Chanel, Vogue, Christie's and Vanity Fair and mugging for pictures with socialites like Emily Brill, Christina Oxenberg and Bettina Zhilka. His eclectic accessories store, A.S. Parker, counted Matthew Modine, Muffy Potter-Aston and Fabian Basabe among its loyal clientele.

Has there ever been a poor person called Muffy? Anyway. He's done this kind of thing before, allegedly running up $4000 at a boutique earlier this year. Police also recovered five forged Citibank credit cards. His store is, unsurprisingly, closed. Where are people going to get their "Kelly green alligator-skin women's loafers." Will someone please think of the children?

Comcast paid an un-fucking-believable $125 million for DailyCandy — just a simple shopping e-newsletter, if you're not familiar with it — just over a year ago, greatly enriching former AOL exec Bob Pittman, who had previously acquired it for $3 million. Amid all the investment, DailyCandy expanded from New York to London, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, Dallas, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle and Philly.

DailyCandy will now stop publishing city-specific editions in all but five of those 12 cities: New York, London, LA, Chicago and San Francisco. Subscribers in the other cities will now receive an "Everywhere" edition, supplemented with local news and events twice a week.

Used to be that Harvard Law would "waive tuition for third-year students who pledge to spend five years working for nonprofit organizations or for the government," so it was like, hey, perfect, free supply of attorneys for the CIA! But now they've suspended that program just because their endowment lost billions and billions and billions of dollars.

The rule of law is gone now. And how are future generations of corporate litigators to pay? Let's say, for example, you're the average American today: A suburbanite who moved out to some godforsaken farmland in search of a mythical pure rural life living off the land. What would you do when that Harvard bill came? First you'd have to learn how to farm, cause let's be honest, you know nothing about food except how to order from Sonic!, which is simply to quote those funny commercials directly into the drive-thru mouthpiece, and the people know what you want.

Next you'd have to somehow translate that "food" you grew into money. Which is not that easy now that the entire US restaurant industry is back on the barter system. The average tip for a working waitress is now an "IOU one free car wash" certificate, drawn by hand on a tablecloth. And deli owners have been reduced to giving away bread for free to robbers and hoping that one day years later the robber repays them with interest to salve his guilty soul.

Bottom line, let's all feel sorry for Harvard Law students.
[Pic via]

The big bashes are off this year, a tipster tells us. Which is just as well: Last year, there were YEPs in New York, Los Angeles and the San Mateo headquarters; these plus the departmental parties meant that many Yahoos easily got to four parties a year, a tipster told us at the time. All the festivities came despite a wave of layoffs, which left Yahoo in the awkward position of having to set up metal detectors at its LA party, and of featuring Vegas-style showgirls in dollar-bill getups at the main headquarters party (see pic above) in the face of all Yahoo's bloodletting.

The 2007 party featured a Neil Diamond tribute band, so at least Yahoos apparently won't have to worry about any such torture this year. Ironically, though, 2009 has been a much better year for layoffs at Yahoo than 2008 was.

Know what any other tech companies are doing (or not doing) to celebrate the holidays this year? We're dying to hear about any conmpany parties: drop a line toryan@valleywag.com.

(Pic by Phil Hollenback)

Two brothers so poor they're living in a cave outside Budapest just found out that their "long lost grandmother" may have left them a fortune worth more than $6 billion. How you like them now, ladies? "If all of this works out, it will certainly make up for the life we have had until now . . . No women would look at us living in a cave," one brother said.

Ooooo, but everything changes when $6 billion comes in the picture, eh? Gurl U no U rong. Before I was a caveman billionaire, I was just a caveman. Before I was a caveman billionaire, I was one of 11,000 people applying for 400 jobs at the W Hotel. Before I was a caveman billionaire, I was a bankrupt Texas oysterman. Before I was a caveman billionaire, I couldn't even sell my used clothes for cash. Before I was a caveman billionaire, I owned a hockey team in Canada but sold out before currency fluctuation would have put me well in the red.

Before I was a caveman billionaire, I was...me.

Gurl U no I can buy U mad clothes now. Gurl this caveman billionaire wanna holla at U.

The Journalism Shop, a website set up by ex-LAT staffers to offer their journalistic services, spoke informally to 75 former employees. Three quarters were asked to leave the paper and the rest left voluntarily. Here are some sobering highlights, complete with some even-more-sobering quotes from the afflicted:

• More than two thirds are receiving some kind of unemployment benefits.
  

  I'm hanging in there, but don't know what I'll do when I don't have unemployment as a base," wrote one female ex-staffer. "I'm in my 50s and it isn't easy to find a job at my level and impossible to find one that pays what I used to make.

• Almost all — 84 per cent — said that leaving the LAT had a negative impact on their finances. Four out of five reported earning half or less of their previous wages and 13 per cent said they now had no income at all.
  

  We're living on $50,000 less a year with two kids, one in college and (one) in high school," wrote a father in his 50s. "We're not at risk of losing our home but our ability to help our children get through college has been severely threatened.

• Only 11 of the 75 reported landing a full-time job. Nearly 40 per cent are freelance only and 28 per cent are not working at all. Of those who are working, 90 per cent reported that they were earning less than when at the LAT.
  

  "As with many of us, after working at the Times for more than 20 years, I was at the high end of the pay scale," wrote a woman in her 50s. "It will be very difficult to re-establish myself in a similar position."

• When they had got the sad news off their shoulders, the journalists also vented at the way they were treated by the paper. Half felt they were treated unfairly. And many are pissed that the paper fired them then hired younger, much less experienced journalists, presumably for lower wages.
  

  It was extremely dismaying to me to hear of a younger reporter being hired after some 70 layoffs occurred this past spring," wrote one female respondent. "The fact that she – and others – have been hired after so many were laid off leaves me unconvinced that the economics were such that they had no choice but to do such extensive layoffs.

• Some blame the Chandler family, who sold the paper to the Tribune company in 2000. The Tribune company was in turn sold to Sam Zell and then foundered under $8bn of debt. It's still in bankruptcy protection. Still, it's the little things we should be thankful for:
  

  At some point, I became grateful that I wasn't tossed on the street with no compensation at all," wrote a woman, who was laid off last December when severance packages were still available. "I feel Tribune and the L.A. Times were mismanaged and put into a death spiral by a sale deal that benefited the Chandlers and left the papers with a sure-death debt load.

If you're a black American seeking a good career here, in the USA, experts say your best strategy is not "going to college." Instead, it is "Being white." That helps more than any degree! In mathematical terms, "Black man with MBA from Dartmouth" is roughly equal to "Luther, the boy who just done got out of jail for the bad check thing but that was probably the drugs done made him do it, and he's white," when it comes to hire-ability.

"Hey," some African-Americans may protest, "that is not fair." Hey, that is not the "up from the bootstraps" attitude that made Booker T. Washington one of the most beloved men in white America! It could be worse; you could be one of the many poor suckers who are working two jobs and are still underemployed, because both of those jobs happen to suck. Now that we think of it, it's likely that many of those people are, indeed, black Americans.

So, bad example.

The point is, it's all about "attitude." There is no "attitude" in "macroeconomics"—there is only "attitude" in U. Get it? So whether you get your money by bitterly auctioning off your motorized bar stool or by stealing Salvation Army kettles, just get that money—with a positive attitude!

Never let irrefutable facts stand in the way of your success.
[Pic via]

The New York Times ran a big, beautiful piece today profiling the program and its newest recipients. To call this a "touchy" subject would be a gross understatement.

The numbers inspire fear and rage from pretty much every direction: left, right, or having fallen under them. They're also slightly terrifying due in no small part to the sufficiently irrational discourse held over it. The heavily moderated New York Times' comments section offers plenty of choice selections, so imagine what they turned away. Many of them echo this sentiment:

Honestly I find this frightening. This is not a positive thing, this is a broken system. And hello welfare mommies and daddies, I know it's harsh, but please consider quality v. quantity when "planning" your family.

And then there's this charmer, from the National Review:

Seems like there ought to be a stigma attached to the use of welfare. A little bit of shame can go a long way toward encouraging people to find jobs. The federal government may think it's doing people a favor by providing them with access to food, but it's doing them a disservice if it also robs them of the motivation necessary to break free from dependency.

Or this one, quoted in the piece:

"...It's really not different from cash welfare," said Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, whose views have a following among conservatives on Capitol Hill. "Food stamps is quasi money." Arguing that aid discourages work and marriage, Mr. Rector said food stamps should contain work requirements as strict as those placed on cash assistance. "The food stamp program is a fossil that repeats all the errors of the war on poverty," he said.

So, again, this (like everything else) gets turned into a religious issue (the "value" of marriage) by a guy from a thinktank a lot of people in Washington DC listen to. Meanwhile, other people want to shame and stave the hungry—genius—because (A) they're not ashamed enough already, (B) shaming people has always worked well against unparalleled economic despair, and (C) letting a populace starve has always proven to be an effective control in restoring order to chaos. John J. Miller, you deserve to have your liver overstuffed with grain, removed, frozen, shaved, and eaten by a goose over lychee and pine nuts. Regardless of politician positioning, you're an asshole. But he's not alone. There's a lot of talk like that, and it's to be expected. But this particular issue makes it a little more frightening.

Much of the context the Times won't point out but clearly wants to paint has—via that tightly moderated commenting system—started to shape quite the picture around the piece. For example, its been pointed out in the comments several times that on their county-by-county map of America, the majority of food stamp recipients reside in red states. The stats on those numbers are just as disconcerting as any other, but again, back to those comments: many of those commenters are expressing glee that people who've decried welfare programs in the past are now recipients of them both. Plenty of ire is being aimed at the residents of Forsyth County for this gem:

The richest counties are often where aid is growing fastest, although from a small base. In 2007, Forsyth County, outside Atlanta, had the highest household income in the South. (One author dubbed it "Whitopia.") Food stamp use there has more than doubled.

There's one stat that didn't make it in the piece, though: not only did anybody get trampled this year, but Black Friday numbers saw a marginal increase—but still: an increase—over sales figures from last year.

Preliminary sales data showed shoppers spent $10.66 billion on Black Friday. That's 0.5% more than last year. The figures were compiled by ShopperTrak RCT Corp., a Chicago research firm that tracks sales at more than 50,000 stores.

36 million people are on food stamps, Black Friday sales are up, and pious, self-righteous indignation from every angle wants to either burn, shame, or starve the suffering. The operative word there being: suffering. And where there's smoke (the discourse online) there's fire (everywhere else). The danger in this isn't that people are starving, or that people might be stealing from the community chest, or that the people who're well on their way to going hungry are lighting sparks under the Hindenburg of their personal finances by lining up at Best Buy earlier than they've ever arrived to work, though, that's all fairly disturbing. No: the real American Tragedy here's that people are castigating and savoring the suffering of others, without discretion or discrimination. It ends in either a whimper or a bang; until then, there's a lot of very loud, angry noise drowning out anything remotely resembling the sound of progress.