As if you didn't have enough trouble getting stoned and magically appearing in front of the Waffles and Dinges mobile apparatus, avoiding the Mitzvah Tank, finding your Mudd Coffee Truck, beating off crowds at any number of Mr. Softee Mobile, getting on Cash Cab - hell, getting an actual cab - or not getting hit by cars jaywalking in any part of the city, now you have to concern yourself with not being humiliated in perpetuity by the Google Street View Sandcruiser, back in town for a second tour of duty in all five boroughs.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.We've all seen the serendipitous results. Schadenfreude by the rest of the country (and naturally, all of New York) is in full effect. We can't wait for Google to lovingly re-document your teary breakup in front of the Astor Place cube, your rainy curbside soaking outside the 2nd Avenue F-Train stop, Michael Musto biking up Avenue A, some skaters falling on their face in Union Square, Park Slope baby stroller traffic jams, the sheer joy that will be Every. Square. Block of Williamsburg and Murray Hill, and all the wonderfully drunk, insane shit we love about this city. NYU kids puking, that bum jacking off in Madison Square Park. All of it.

The New York Times even got in on the fun: they wanted to ride shotgun in the Google Street View whip to get the full experience of magically awakening and provoking some of the weirdest split-second snapshots of humanity. And Google shot them down. Twice.

Google officials are eager to preserve the car's mystery status. They would not divulge the car's route, but they did say that the car was in New York City for about a month, photographing streets in all five boroughs.

A Google spokeswoman, Elaine Filadelfo, would not say whether there was one car in New York or several. She denied a request for a ride in the car, saying the company did not want to risk exposing the "proprietary technology" used by the cameras...A reporter for The New York Times spotted the car last Tuesday at a stoplight on West 15th Street near the West Side Highway and asked to ride along. The driver declined.

If by "proprietary technology" they mean "black magic," sure. There's nothing not to like about this story, as the Times even used Vanishing New York blogger Jeremiah Moss's man-on-the-street pictures (seen here) from his blog. And sourced them properly, too! Also, "spying" on the Google Street View car: meta. It's like finding a white stag!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Unfortunately, those who don't feel like being in the spotlight can't really do much to fight back against Google. Sure, there's a place you can file a complaint, and faces from Street View are now "blurred out." But what's the fun in that? New Yorkers should simply embrace the fact that these humiliation-spell-casting camera monsters are roaming the streets, and be resilient: put your best clothing on for them, and try to smile as that rickshaw biker near Central Park runs smack into you while staring at one.

Photo from Swerz photostream.
Put on Your Best Clothes Before Going Out: Google's Camera Car May Cross Your Path [New York Times]

Thiel, according to a 2006 Bloomberg profile, has invested his entire liquid net worth in Clarium. That's not quite technically true: Thiel has actually invested his money in a separate account managed by Clarium according to the same strategy his firm uses for outside investors. (Clarium has two other such separately managed accounts, but they are small in value.)

These matters are disclosed to the investors Clarium courts. One forwarded a copy of Clarium's marketing materials to Valleywag. Figuring out Thiel's holdings is a simple matter of subtraction.

Clarium LP, the name of Clarium's main fund, had $1.7 billion in assets under management as of March. The firm's "strategy assets" — total assets, including separately managed accounts — add up to $2.1 billion. So the ceiling on Thiel's liquid net worth is $400 million. (That's not counting his 5 percent stake in Facebook, recently valued at around $100 million.) After losing roughly $5 billion in assets from bad trading and client withdrawals in the second half of 2008, Clarium has continued to perform poorly, entirely missing the recent market rally.

So who cares if he's a hundred-millionaire instead of a billionaire? Thiel does, for one. He did not make nearly as much from the $1.5 billion sale of PayPal as he believes he deserves, according to people familiar with his thinking — the source of a long-simmering feud with top Valley venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital, one of PayPal's backers.

And a perception of outsized wealth is the source of his newfound social standing in Manhattan, where he recently relocated. It's the reason why he gets impromptu dinner invitations from the likes of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. It's the reason why people pay the slightest attention to his crackpot social theories. Take away that crucial tenth digit on his net worth, and he's just another indistinguishable member of the averagely ultrarich.

We'll note up front that this piece is not nearly as offensive as it could have been; the anonowife acknowledges that hers are "luxury problems." That said, she never should have written this, for chrissakes. Daily Intel beat us to the "Guess Who?" angle here, ID'ing the writer as (probably) Liz Peek, a former NY Sun business writer and wife of CIT Group's Jeffrey Peek (pictured). Liz, if it was you—you should have known the angry media hordes better than to go and write about troubles like these:

1. "[I] am using my credit balances at all the major department stores for important gifts and other necessities."

2. "I haven't even looked at spring clothes... Like so many others, I'm shopping in my closet."

3. "If I buy a present for someone, I have the package sent to their home. I don't want to be spotted climbing into a taxi, laden with Bergdorf Goodman shopping bags."

4. "This year, of course, entertaining our crowd [for my husband's birthday] at our usual multi-star Michelin hotspots would simply not do...We ultimately picked the cozier restaurant-even though it ended up costing us more, so eager was the more chic outfit to host the party. Why spend the extra bucks? Because our chosen place is distinctly low-profile and rarely mentioned in the press."

5. "We've picked up new habits, like making donations anonymously and sneaking in late to black-tie galas after society photographer Patrick McMullan has packed up his camera and gone home."

6. "Like most Americans, we are worried about money. Our net worth is tied up in stock that is down 95 percent."

7. "In an effort to conserve cash, we are eating out less frequently, meaning that I've been turning out some pretty dreadful lasagna."

8. "I drive the family crazy by switching off the lights every time we leave a room."

9. "Using the company plane is now out of bounds; we've heard there are reporters staking out the private airports."

10. "One daughter recently mused about going back to business school. I hope she didn't notice my instantly negative reaction, stemming completely from concern about the cost."

Sounds awful. If only there were some good news too. Oh, what, there is? "The good news is that Americans have short attention spans. Before long, some other group will come along to absorb all the frustration and anger."

Such as: Rich wives.
[Portfolio, Daily Intel. Pic via]

They should be having trouble finding judges willing to hear their appeals, but no, instead they're all just bitching about how no one wants to hire them. You know, they have an interview scheduled, but then their prospective boss googles them, and is all, "oh, you wrote the torture memo? I'm afraid we're not actually hiring right now, sorry!"

Of course this is bad for America, because lawyers should be free to tell presidents that they can do whatever they want without fear of violating any silly "laws" or "Constitutions." As Chapman University Law School Dean John Eastman explains, this "not hiring notoriously evil lawyers" thing will have a chilling effect:

"It's unfortunate, and quite frankly it's dangerous," because it could make officials risk averse, Mr. Eastman said, blaming partisan politics.

God forbid we make Justice Department lawyers reluctant to take risks! We wouldn't want them stopping to think twice about telling the president whatever he wants to hear!

John Yoo is a tenured professor at Berkeley, so he's doing fine. But David Addington? Alberto Gonzales? Those poor schmucks are basically starving on the streets.

Poor Alberto Gonzales, after everyone in America watched him embarrass himself by pretending not to be able to remember his own goddamn name in order to avoid getting in trouble for his misconduct as Attorney General, he is particularly sad:

He recently told The Wall Street Journal that the controversy surrounding him had made law firms "skittish" about hiring him, calling himself "one of the many casualties of the war on terror."

Yes, right, who on Earth would ever be skittish about hiring this bright and likable and capable and not-at-all-fucking-asinine young man?

Last summer, the company settled a dispute with a rival social network, ConnectU, that dates back to the founding of Facebook in CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room. ConnectU's lawyers — whom the site's founders have since fired — revealed that the case was settled for $65 million in a newsletter bragging about their firm's accomplishments. And now the Associated Press has obtained a court filing which shows the exact breakdown of cash and stock Facebook used to settle the case: $20 million in cash, and 1,253,326 shares of Facebook stock.

That's no mere detail. ConnectU's ex-lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges are pursuing legal action against ConnectU's founders — Divya Narendra and Olympic-rower twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss — to get them to pay $13 million. In other words, a 20 percent cut of the supposed $65 million settlement. But is the settlement really worth $65 million?

In October 2007, Microsoft paid $35.90 a share for $240 million in Facebook preferred stock, which only garnered it a 1.6 percent stake in the company. Preferred stock, the kind usually purchased by venture capitalists, have more rights and protections than common stock, which is the type owned by founders and issued to employees. And when a company is private, it's typical for preferred shares to have a higher value than common shares.

ConnectU's settlement was issued in common shares. And an appraisal Facebook conducted to value the shares it issued to employees valued the company at $3.7 billion, or $8.88 a share — making the stock part of ConnectU's payment only worth $11 million, and the total $31 million.

The uncertain value of Facebook's stock must be why ConnectU's ex-lawyers are in a dispute. If it had been paid in cash, why would they be arguing over how much the lawyers were owed? Instead of having $65 million, the Winklevosses and Narendra find themselves with $20 million in cash, a $13 million legal bill-and 1.25 million shares of Facebook that aren't worth nearly as much as they thought.

How little? An informal market for Facebook stock exists, though it's not publicly traded. Vulture investors are offering to buy shares for as little as $2.50 apiece. At that price, the company as a whole is worth $1.3 billion. That's less than Yahoo reportedly bid for the company in 2006.

And that's where Facebook could really get into trouble.

We hear that Facebook's salesforce had a series of panicked meetings last week as its salespeople tried to drum up more business. Google is actively working to steal advertisers away from the company, which has struggled to come up with new marketing products based on its users' relationships. (It does not help matters that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who worked in the Clinton Administration before joining Google to run customer service, has no real sales experience, as much as she likes to claim otherwise.) Meanwhile, Facebook continues to spend money as it attracts new users; every million users Facebook adds requires approximately $1 million in new servers.

So Facebook will probably need to raise money soon, and it will have to give up a far larger percentage of the company this time-a scenario its executives have dreaded, but which they have few ways to avoid. It will likely have to make whole Microsoft and other investors who bought in at a $15 billion valuation by issuing them new shares. That will further dilute the stake owned by employees, which will hurt morale and possibly lead to defections. If it loses key salespeople and engineers, Facebook will lose further momentum. The prospect of a death spiral is very real.

Right now, Zuckerberg's problem is averting disaster. After that, he can worry about how to get Facebook's value back up to $15 billion.

These should be heady times for Thiel, whose Clarium hedge fund sparked glowing press coverage (and more than a little envy). His strategy was different from most of the private pools of cash run out of places like Greenwich: Using relatively little debt, he sought to profit in times when governments meddle with markets. That should be now, right? Instead, he has been as hard hit by the credit crisis as most other hedge funds. He is down a mere 4.5 percent for the year — but that includes his phenomenal 58 percent rise from $4 billion in January 2008 to $7 billion six months later.

From July to December, Clarium's assets cratered. According to performance data obtained by Valleywag, Clarium's main fund returned negative 39 percent. Put simply, an investor who put in the fund's minimum of $1 million would have ended six months later with $600,00.

By the numbers, most did not wait around that long. Thiel's fund ended the year with only $2 billion under management, which suggests that investors took out another $2 billion, in addition to Clarium's $3 billion in investment losses. (Click to see the full document.)

No surprise there: Risk-averse investors have been pulling out of hedge funds everywhere. Thiel was right about the mortgage bubble, and right about the rising role of governments in markets. But was he right about how to make money off these developments? So far, the answer's no. And to investors, that's the only kind of vision that matters.

Spotted at Collateral Auction Systems, an outfit in the Bay Area suburb of Fremont, Calif. which sells repossessed cars: A Mercedes biturbo V12 SL600, a car which sells new for $120,000.

On the license-plate frame: the logo of Cisco, a San Jose-based networking-equipment giant which makes everything from cable set-top boxes to telecom switches to home Wi-Fi routers.

There's a story behind this photo of someone who lived high off of Cisco's rich stock options — an engineer? an executive? a salesman? And just as suddenly, the spigot of cash shut off. In six months, the stock has fallen by more than 40 percent. Cisco stealthily laid off employees even as its cheerleading CEO John Chambers said the company wouldn't cut staff. We don't have the details on how this six-figure driving machines landed in a repo lot — but the picture tells a story all the same.

“The economy is tanking and people are arguing about whether they should go to Demo or TechCrunch,” Abrams told the Times. “Few companies sound like they are breaking new ground. It’s like, ‘Here is Twitter for dogs.’ And people still think they are going to get rich by being a blogger.” Hm. Twitter for dogs does sound pretty lame. But then, so did "Friendster for college students."

It's actually true, as the memo states, that there is "no better time" than the current Wall Street panic to hand-distribute copies of the Journal throughout London, thus advancing editor Robert Thomson's internationalist ambitions. But perhaps this observation could have been kept close to the vest.

The memo:

DOW JONES NEWS
Read all about it
Market Turmoil Provides Hook to Sell U.S. Journal in London
September 17, 2008

The turmoil in the world's financial markets has provided strong copy and headlines for The Wall Street Journal.

So there was no better time to distribute copies of the U.S. edition - with its well-sourced, insightful and visually compelling coverage of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch and AIG's scramble for cash – at key transit points in the City of London today.

A big thanks to volunteers Adam Ezro, Nilam Vekaria, Peter Jennings, Suhki Bhuta, Arash Hamrahian, Danni Smith and Etienne Bauvir who joined Anne Hogarth and me during the City rush hour yesterday morning to distribute nearly 1,500 copies of the paper, complete with retail vouchers and subscription offers.

Thanks also to Anne, Mike Elsas and Cedric Hamerlinck for the faultless organisation and execution at such short notice. Undoubtedly, the exercise has raised further awareness of the WSJ at a time when our coverage is in a class of its own.

Tim Lafferty
Director of product sales and marketing
Dow Jones Consumer Media Group EMEA

Our tipster's reaction:

I thought this piece of company news pasted below was especially crappy, given the gravity of the economy's teeter-totter and the fact that lives depend on the outcomes. Apparently the paper's reinvention involves cackling over the snapping bones and spirits of the very Wall Streeters who've given us our stories. Yayy capitalism journalismism.

The poors might sympathize with the plight of the Lehman investor relations VP married to a fancy Yale doctor, since it can't be easy being a gay in the testosterone-soaked world of financial services. The VP for junk bond sales (pictured), however, is pure schadenfreude fodder.

Teddy Roosevelt may be charming; and we're terrified of the wrath of his new wife Serena Torrey, who runs marketing and business development for New York magazine. But the uninitiated reader will note only that the Lehman exec is the great-great grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, and probably got his doomed job through, you know, connections.

From his Times bio. "His father is a managing director and investment banker at Lehman Brothers in Manhattan; he is also the chairman of the firm’s council on climate change." As a tipster put it, "sure hope he cleaned out his desk before heading off to the honeymoon!"

[Idea via Choire, Photo New York Times]

The loss comes after a stunning track record of the firm's biggest monthly loss, beating an 11 percent drop in March 2004. Strangely, this topic went uncovered in TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's interview of Thiel on Monday. Arrington let Thiel repeat, unchallenged, his assertion that there is no bubble in technology. To which we would add: Perhaps so. But there may be a bubble in a certain hedge fund. (Photo by VentureBeat)

MICHAEL EISNER: How old were you when you started skating?

VERA WANG:I was probably about seven when I started competitive skating.

MICHAEL EISNER:And when did you retire?

VERA WANG:I retired when I was 19.

MICHAEL EISNER:And this was your life?

VERA WANG:This was my entire life. I skated seven days a week, probably every day of the year.

MICHAEL EISNER:And your goal was to make the Olympics?

VERA WANG:My goal was to represent the United States and, you know, see our flag go up— at the Olympic games, yes. And I failed. (LAUGHTER) Like I failed at many other things. That was just the first failure.

......

MICHAEL EISNER:what would be the most expensive wedding dress that anybody's ever spent? I don't wanna—

VERA WANG:Think probably the most expensive— dress I have ever been done was a dress that—actually didn't get worn at the wedding but was— Jennifer Lopez's first engagement. Engagement, wow, it's really— her— yes, it was her engagement to Ben Affleck.

MICHAEL EISNER:And she never wore it?

VERA WANG:No. But that was a dress that probably—

MICHAEL EISNER:Did she (UNINTEL) back to you?

VERA WANG:—was the most expensive (LAUGHTER) dress. I mean, every (UNINTEL) of it was a couture fabric. And I mean, I think all in all, there were 18 tiers. So, it was really probably far and away, the most expensive and time-consuming to sew and—

MICHAEL EISNER:So, we'll have to put her in a movie where she marries somebody, so we—

VERA WANG:Right.

MICHAEL EISNER:—can put the dress on her.

VERA WANG:Absolutely.

MICHAEL EISNER: And—

VERA WANG:Absolutely for Jennifer, yeah.