to a new domain.

Go to http://www.cogfactory.net

I’m leaving this up as an archive for all intents and purposes. My posting is still sporadic but please update your bookmarks.

A few months ago I noted that I was off to pursue a new career in the financial sector. After about 6+ months of struggling to find business, struggling to make a paycheck, struggling to make bills, I am leaving.

I gotta hand it to people who can afford to do it. I will credit those who have the personality and poise and a large network of friends and people to call on.  I however do not. Its a sad day for me to have to give up but I need to face reality. And the truth is, it just isn’t in the cards for me. I’m not a sales person and the job was mostly not what I wanted. I thought it could be, might be, might turn out to be. But it wasn’t. The truth of the matter, looking at my peers – I wouldn’t be able to do what I wanted, how I wanted, where I wanted.

I missed almost every single target and goal I set for myself. Repeatedly. And I’m a bit disappointed with it. I will say that I am very confident in the products and services I sold however few they were in number.

So over the past two months – this has been an ongoing affair – I’ve been pounding the street looking for work. I’ve had one interview for a position that was, in the long run, closed out for business reasons. Two other jobs I applied for were closed out for the same reasons. I’ve submitted so many resumes, my fingers hurt from all of the reformatting I’ve done on the resumes.

To say I’m depressed about it would be one thing. But I’ve looked all over for jobs in my prior career field. I’ve applied for 7 positions with my former employer who told me bluntly that I was more than welcome to come back any time – which was considered a rare event in the company given the fact that they re-hire very few numbers of former employees. But again, just as part of the reason I left, I got no response. This was part of my reason for leaving – a complete lack of communication in the hiring process with them. Prior to leaving, I posted for close to 20+ positions – of which I heard absolutely nothing back on.

I’ve been approached by a couple of insurance companies who “want to talk about opportunities” which means little more than more commissioned sales and nothing concrete. The problem with that is that I can’t guarantee it will make a car payment, rent, etc. I politely declined because sales is *not* my forte, at all.

Add on top of this the fact that my student loans have all kicked back in and are adding about $300 a month in expenses, I really can’t afford to be broke.

So I have a potential offer on the table I’ll find out more about tomorrow. I had applied for a position with a company doing tech work but they, like the other company I interviewed with, closed the position due to the economy – however they threw me a bone and right now I’m not seeing a lot of choices swimming in the toilet.

Job – a lot of traveling, home once or twice a month, a lot of driving. Any guesses as to what it might be?

My Dad will know.

My Uncle, (Dad’s brother), will know.

Look. It isn’t really what I’d call an ideal career choice. But given the fact that I enjoy being by myself for long periods of time. I like to travel and I don’t mind being away from home. I guess it wouldn’t be that horrible. I’m not making digs at the industry of those who drive. It just isn’t what I would consider my ideal career. I had all of these grandiose visions of a career in Internet technology and making a big, fat salary as a manager or executive – this is after I had to give up on being a lawyer. Of course, this doesn’t mean the vision is dead. Just a little further away and a little less practical.

One downside: I’ll have to be gone for 1 1/2 months before I can get back to see Samantha, the dog. Then I have to figure out what I can do to get her to come along with me. If I do this, then I’ll just probably give up my place here and be a gypsy for a spell while I pay down my debts which are still growing each day.

Doh!

As the healthcare debate rages on, I think we need some better understanding of what politicians and healthcare promoters throw out at us in terms of the “uninsured”

44-46 million is the number of uninsured according to the census bureau. But we can’t just trust a number. We kind of need to have an idea of what that number means. The 44-46 number comes from the census bureau which asks respondants about their coverage over the prior year. But for this, we’ll assume the number of 46 million is closer to the truth.

Of that 46 million, it is estimated that ~9 million are not US citizens.

That leaves us with ~37 million uninsured.

We know that of those reporting not having insurance for a period of time in the prior year, 17% earned above $50,000 per year while 9% earned over 75,000. For the sake of our assumption, we’ll assume half of the foreign, 9 million are among the 17% making over $50,000 to give us a roundabout figure of (46million * 17% – 4.5million) 3.32 million

That leaves us at about 34 million uninsured.

The Blue Cross/Blue Shield did a study and found that ~17million of those who were reported as uninsured were actually insurable by existing government programs.

That leaves us with 20 million truly uninsured people. Now we need to add in the “stupid” quotient and factor in the fact that the reported uninsured may have materially screwed up the response which may give us a margin of error of 3%-4%.

I’m more than sure my numbers are not right – and the census bureau somewhat agrees that their numbers may be higher or lower depending on the response quality of the surveys. But when there is a potential that the true number of uninsured and uninsurable can be as much as 50% less without blinking an eye, I have a hard time digesting the answers of a politician who is good at flinging numbers out and not quite so good at comprehending the real value of the number.

I love it when traditional media likes to put on the big pants and come to the party with professionalism. Most major media outlets have been hostile to amateur journalists (bloggers) who get the scoops and write less-than-professional articles on a slant.

But big media, with the big pants on, often makes wonderful blunders to prove that they too are nothing but amatuers with deeper pockets. Case in point:

ABC News Website may need to re-think their editorial review process for headlines

I mean – come on. “Womb Raider” What – is this some video game that I missed for my PS3? Will Angelina Jolie play the role of the mother while some African kid is carved from her stomach? It is moments like this that ABC News should be a bit more high brow and take the upper road towards professionalism.

On that note, I’ll should submit this to FARK and maybe put it on photoshop for the 4Chan peeps.

As the news has turned a dramatic eye on our country’s financial regulatory system, I’ve been puttering around trying to separate the wheat from the chaffe.  For what it is worth, there are a few invalid arguments out there that really get under my skin.

The primary false argument?

“Financial Deregulation caused this economic mess we’re in” – Deregulation didn’t do anything that wasn’t already in place. Taking out the barrier between investment banking and consumer banking had very little effect on the outcome of the mortgage mess. The problem lies with the regulatory structure that didn’t change.

Imagine a huge slate of stone on the ground. When government interferes in the underlying economy it places a pointed stone underneath the slab of stone. The field becomes unbalanced. In order for the econmy to “work”, government attempts to place new stones on top of the large slab so that the economy can rest on the small stone underneath in perfect balance. While you can achieve some sense of parity where the slab is “perfectly” balanced, adding or removing weight at any given point will cause the slab to become imbalanced.

Now the arguments are often construed as a battle between adding stones (regulation) or removing stones (deregulation) on top of the slab. The crux of the argument is that both “sides” of the debate still believe that they can achieve a perfectly balanced slab perpetually so long as the other side doesn’t do anything to muck it up.

The problem is that no one looks to why balancing the slab matters. Simply remove the rock underneath and your slab rests perfectly sound and secure. No need to balance the thing, no need for placing burdens on top of the slab. In essence, remove government from having any regulatory controls and never have to deal with trying to make it work.

The political establishment is largely escaped from the very burdens they impose on everyone. There is no punishment for poor legislating even when the people demand poor legislation. The correlated problem is one where so long as government maintains the power to regulate, it maintains the ability to be influenced by specific demands of the regulated. If so-called liberals truly wanted to end the influence of corporate America in Washington, the right decision is to make Washington powerless to affect the course of the private sector. The right decision liberals would rally for would be a system of complete deregulation where corporate money can have no real influence over political affairs and the political class can have no influence over the private sector.

The Omana World Herald unwrapped a new design for Omaha.com. For the most part, I like it. I like the simplicity and organizational structure. I like how local stories have comments available to users. Overall the site feels far less clunky and a step in the right direction for a fairly run-of-the-mill newspaper.

To say the least, it is leaps and bounds above what most newspapers are doing on the Internet.

In a weird twist, Virgin has shuddered its last music store in New York as the one or two people who actually bought things at the megastore will undoubtedly shed a tear or two.

I say “weird” in the sense that if we wound back the clock a decade and a half or so ago, it was the indie retailers bemoaning the plague of the megastores and how they were being driven to the brink because they couldn’t compete.

My. How times have changed. And that is the point. For those who hate the world now, just wait a moment or two – it will change.

“Shit, if this is gonna be that kind of party, I’m gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes” – cred

With all of the hubbub over AIG’s executive pay, you’d think the dipshits at CNN and in the media would at least have half a brain to stop and think about what they are reporting. Then again, it’s all being fed by dipshits in Congress.

The money quote of the day:

“Schumer: AIG employees should return bonuses or face high tax”

I don’t know about Schumer, but the last time I looked at my bonus check, withholding was running me around 40% on bonus monies. So for all of the wanton raving and frothing and foaming at the mouth, the government is going to get most of this money back – just not in the way it expected. Of course, a $600k after-tax bonus would be nice in my bank account. Then again, I don’t really want to pay that person’s tax bill.

So I’m guessing the bullshit on Capitol Hill will only get deeper as they rush to pass yet-another-dumb-stupid-stupid-stupid law that will have even more dire consequences than the prior law. Unfortunately, Congress is going to have to really cross the line on this one by singling out a single company.

The only thing that pisses me off even more is those who support these maniacal bailouts. You have absolutely no reason to expect an idealistic outcome when reality (and a ton of real coo-coo for coco-puffs libertarians) told you the outcome was going to be bad. Economics 101 people. Come on.

So after my post on March 6, I went into a few more trades. I ended up at $999 for about five minutes with nothing open. I thought I saw an opportunity and jumped on it only to have it go backwards on me fast. I’ve just spent the past 4 trading days trying to catch up. At one point, my total equity in my account was down to ~$650 – nearly $340 loss. I was attempting to try out a new hedging strategy that almost ate me alive.

I was hedging hard, long on the USD/JPY and holding ground. A few stupid mistakes and I was at close to $750 in equity when I started trading tonight. Still down but better than where I was. It has take me about 4 hours of hard trading. My problem is that I was carrying two very heavy, negative trades. So I switched my strategy. I sucked it up and closed down almost 400 pips in losses (over $400). I had open trades going on so my equity wasn’t in that bad of a situation. As I was bouncing around the charts, I noticed I was sitting on the falling side of a right-shoulder so I went to all short on the USD/JPY. After riding it out and resisting temptation, it finally paid off.

So. As of today, I am out of the market with a total balance of:  $1014.01

That puts me at a total return since February of 14.18% – only ~4% this week.

My head hurts.

Milton Friedman at his Best