Reader mail has been on fire today. Perhaps it is a consequence of the new draconian white list policy I was forced to institute. Perhaps not. Whatever the cause, I am basking in reader mail goodness. Most recently, loyal reader "JN" points me to the blog of an alleged associate at Elevation Partners. (One more example in the rather full quiver of reasons I post anonymously). The peek into his world is a fascinating tour of rudderless and inept piloting through the narrow straits of the pacific ocean with all the pointless intoxication you'd expect from a sailor. But then, what did we expect from a blog named in part for a popular, foreign vodka? This, I suspect:
"Myspace's best use has got to be for checking how drunk you were the night before."
Or perhaps, this:
Tales of Fattiness
This weekend was a complete disaster. Friday night I was partying with some friends at Vessel and we ended up getting bottle service, which is never a good idea for me. I remember eating at Yuet Lee afterwards but not much else beyond that point. The next day when I was hanging out with some of the same people, one of them mentioned how a friend might have left their camera at the pho place.
As if your taste buds had not already been literally burned off, in between the descriptions of the guilty pleasures of business class travel- awkwardly made "California Appropriate"(tm) via the addition of class warfare themes in which the airlines are segregating villains- and puzzling over the meaning of happiness (related to gambling in Vegas it seems) any number of topics are obliquely addressed with strangely intoxicating misdirection. The gems of wisdom that can be harvested therefrom include:
The author on the dangerous nature of expectations:
When you come to expect things, it becomes more difficult to exceed those expectations and create happiness.
The author on the relationship between financial model size and social skills:
Size of excel model says nothing about technical competence of employee...it's really about how you use the model. If anything, there is a positive correlation between model size and creator's lack of social life.
Of course, I violently disagree. Large unwieldy models are almost universally produced by financial "professionals" who have no clue whatsoever about their predictive value (hint: it is vanishingly small) and therefore the size of the model is, in my view, inversely proportional to the technical competence of the employee. And what does this say about the author? Let's see:
Usually I work with models that have file sizes around 1-2 mb. Well this one particular deal I am working on requires an unusually large model. Each version I save is a little larger and I'm up to about 250 mb. To give you an idea, I've saved 52 versions which implies total hard drive space of 13 gigs (not completely accurate since previous versions smaller). I'm sure the company keeps multiple instances on various days, which means this could easily require over 100 gigs of storage.
More on the danger of expectations and the purposeless of hope:
Hope leads to high expectations, which thus far seems to be a non-constructive emotion. I've mentioned how it slows down the healing process and can create dispair [sic] if the expectations are not met. This is what I have thought for quite some time now.
On the genius that is his fund (Elevation Partners?):
I was sitting there the other day thinking...I work at a media fund. I see the future. The future is online. Every part of my life is moving online. So why don't we ever hear about online dating?
Before long you'll be able to consummate the relationship without leaving home or missing a WoW session.
Who hires these people? Who invests in these funds? Oh, yeah wait....
If I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper
I dance to the beat, shuffle my feet
Wear a shirt and tie and run with the creeps
Cause it’s all about money, ain’t a damn thing
Funny
You got to have a con in this land of milk and
Honey
