CRYPTOCHAOS

The reason why the best property casualty insurance companies report earnings first is the same reason the smartest pupils sit in the front of the class: they’ve done their homework and they’re ready to answer questions. So it came as no surprise that Chubb was early out of the box to report that third quarter earnings had doubled, and Travelers announced the same day that profits had quadrupled.

Meanwhile in the back of the class - where kids are staring into space, texting on cell phones and counting on government bailouts - the scene is not so serene. They haven’t been called upon to recite yet, but a gloomy longer-term picture emerges from what Chubb and Travelers already reported.

Another gem from Martin Fowler...

Ambiguity is unfortunately one of the consequences of standards development - the larger the spec and more complex the task at hand, the more potential points need to be nailed down, so a certain level of ambiguity in a working draft simply indicates that it is, well, a working draft. However, HTML 5 is seemingly being pushed inexorably towards recommendation status with most of these ambiguities still intact, with almost no community feedback (beyond the half-dozen or so committee implementers) and with remarkably little rigor being applied to what is, without a doubt, one of the most important potential specifications to emerge from the W3C in a long time.

Based on an 80-year economic cycle, we are coming to the end of the information age. The remaining 15 years of the current cycle will produce astounding changes far beyond anything we can now anticipate. However, we should also be looking at what technology will become the basis of next 80-year cycle. Continuing to focus on computers will be like producing buggy whips for horse drawn conveyances when Henry Ford started mass producing the Model T.

Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect.
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“At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing! It’s great to rewrite your code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.”

Although I don't always agree with Joel, this column is spot on...

Goldman reduced its exposure to mortgages “early,” Viniar said, “before most people had a view that the world was getting worse.” At one point before the magnitude of the problem became crystalline, Viniar thought that Goldman had become too bearish, and insisted that the firm’s traders reverse course somewhat. That decision later cost the firm around $200 million. “They were 100 percent right,” he said. “I was 100 percent wrong.”

Curiously, other firms did not follow Goldman’s lead and, in fact, during the first quarter of 2007 used the perceived weakness in the market for mortgage securities as an opportunity to double-down on their already huge long bets. This was the turning point. If Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and AIG had the same perception of risk as did Viniar and his colleagues at Goldman Sachs, there might have been a downturn, but there wouldn’t have been a meltdown.

I never get tired of reading this stuff.... Also, check out Liars Poker . I read the book back before I joined Salomon Brothers' Technology arm to help set up the 7 WTC trading environment. Good read.

Why Google won't create the next Twitter or Facebook or Posterous - By @scobleizer on posterous.com

Scoble hits the nail on the head with this little post...