In Which George is Doomed to Insignificance

George has been talking somewhat seriously about killing himself, and I have been thinking somewhat seriously about letting him have at it.

Okay, maybe not. But good lord is he a drag.

George has it pretty good, by most standards. He has a respectable profession. He makes a middling developer salary. Maybe he’ll have a family some day.

But I’m doomed to insignificance! he says. At the end of the day, my legacy to the world will be a vague contribution to digital money-laundering. And nothing I do can’t easily be outsourced to cheap overseas labor.

Unfortunately fair points. I used to think that insecurity was reserved for young people. After a certain age, you kind of stop giving a shit what the world thinks, right?

I believed this, but then, geez, we sure are getting old. And then there’s Bill Gross in Bloomberg Markets, talking about his neurotic quest for love. I just wanted to run money and be famous, he says. I will go to the extreme to be special.

Bill Gross is a 71-year-old billionaire who sounds like a teenage girl with daddy issues. Did his parents not show him enough attention as a child?

Maybe we never outgrow it. We spend our lives running from it, thinking that if we climb enough ladders and chase enough titles it’ll go away. But that never happens, because you can’t run away from something generated within.
So welcome to the club, George.

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a bitcoin.

I made a chrome extension to replace all instances of “bitcoin” and “blockchain” with “money laundering”/”financing terrorism”/”fraud” depending on its function in the sentence. I wanted to see how difficult it would be to determine noun functions using a JS language processor.

Labeling parts of speech is easy, determining context is hard. Source code here. I suppose it would have been more useful for me to release a chrome extension that identifies the parts of speech of a sentence without messing up the web page, but that would have been less entertaining to build.

Here it is in action:

Screen Shot 2015-06-27 at 3.02.05 PM

I don’t dislike Bitcoin, of course. For my personal version of the extension, I replace “bitcoin” with “democratizing the banking system” and “market-liberating currency”.

The Academic Pay Gap

We make a lot of noise about the gender pay gap, but somehow the academic pay gap is a socially excusable injustice.

Studies have found that women tend to be intimidated by the negotiation process. Elaine’s anecdotal studies have found that academics tend to be even more intimidated. Observe a typical negotiation process for a junior faculty position:

Minimum wage, you say? And a $150 start-up package for my lab? The teaching requirement seems a bit high. Did you say the coffee in the break room is… free?? Offer accepted!

I’m kidding, of course. Unless the graduate has a first-author publication in Nature or some industry equivalent, there is no negotiation process. There probably isn’t even an offer.

I'm not convinced of the accuracy of these numbers, but you get the idea.
I’m not convinced of the accuracy of these numbers, but you get the idea.

The majority of new PhD graduates either do nothing or take postdocs. A postdoc is a lot like doing nothing, except you work 60 hours a week and still claim to be a student to get discount tickets at the movie theater though you’re well in your 30s.

Eventually these PhDs realize that the world doesn’t need professional scholars. So they learn to code or something, and get real jobs.

By this point, the presumption of utter uselessness has been wholly ingrained in their souls. Even in industry, salary negotiation looks much like the one above.

Women see the gender pay gap as an injustice. PhDs see the academic pay gap as validation of their low self-esteem.

Reddit recently eliminated salary negotiations in an attempt to close the gender pay gap. I hope more companies follow suit – Not just for the women, but for the former academics! Haven’t they suffered enough?

See Also:
1. The Stagnating Job Market for Young Scientists –Slate

Illegal offerings of security-based swaps

by George Barclay

Elaine’s in the bathroom crying again (or maybe she’s visiting her parents in LA, I don’t know). In any case, I thought it appropriate to repost this item from Matt Levine.

Ed. Note: It’s fine. I can appreciate when something is really fricken funny, even if it happens to be funny at my expense.

Bitcoin Bucket Shop Kicks Bucket

Tech is an industry of moving fast and breaking things. Finance is an industry of moving fast, breaking things, being mired in years of litigation, paying 10-digit fines, and ruefully promising to move slower and break fewer things in the future. My generic view of tech businesses trying to disrupt finance is that they tend to think that they are solving a technical or data or customer service problem, but the problems of finance are always and everywhere regulatoryproblems. The value of a bank is not that it can raise money from savers to lend to borrowers; it’s that it has special regulatory status to raise that money in the form of bank deposits. The raising-money-from-savers stuff can be replaced by a web page; the regulatory stuff is more complicated. Sand Hill Exchange found that out the hard way: It made a minimal product that some people liked, attracted users, iterated on the product, made it better and seemed to be on its way to building something useful and interesting. The Sand Hill kids thought that was what they were supposed to do. Now they’ve learned — no thanks to me! — that, in finance, it’s not so simple.

More: Bitcoin Bucket Shop Kicks Bucket –bloombergview