The Electric Monk
The Electric Monk is a concrete juicer of technology, culture and politics. Its a post-cyberpunk scrapbook of third culture critique of existance: from chanty chich to academic civil liberties nerdery.
•2001:A space odyssey movie poster•
My Manhattan Project: How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street
Pretty fascinating read by the Lehman engineer who first automated the collateralized mortgage obligation:
I made $125,000 in my bonus that year and bought an apartment on Gramercy Park. I had first-tier seats to the ballet, but I still rode my bike to work. The traders pocketed multiple millions. I wasn’t poor, but I wasn’t a plutocrat. I could live with myself. If there was a deception going on, I was but a small cog, I thought.
The world around me, though, had become bizarre. At the time, I had an odd sensation that mortgage traders felt they had to outdo the loutish behavior in Liar’s Poker. The more money they made, the more juvenile they became. What do you expect from 30-year-old megamillionaires whose overwhelming aspiration was something vaguely called Hugeness? They had wrestling matches on the floor. Food-eating contests. Like little kids, they scrambled to hide the evidence when the head of fixed income paid his rare visits to the floor.
Now that I was spending more time on the floor, I wondered why the men’s room always stank. Then one afternoon at three, when I was in there taking a leak, I discovered the hideous truth. Traders had a contest. Coming in at eight, they never left their desks all day, eating and drinking while working. Then, at three o’clock, they marched into the men’s room and stood at the wall opposite the urinals. Dropping their pants, they bet $100 on who could train his stream the longest on the urinals across the lavatory. As their hydraulic pressure waned, the three traders waddled, pants at their ankles, across the floor, desperately trying to keep their pee on target. This is what $2 million of bonus can do to grown men.
(via spookstory)
Bill Bryson
(via tmblg) (via radarchive)
Last Bullet
“Some tribe in the future, far in the future, might find a pistol, perhaps the world’s last pistol, and one hundred rounds of ammunition. The priests of that tribe, in tribute to the unknown, might invent a holiday and fire one bullet each year as a link to the unknown. After ninety years, it isn’t difficult to imagine that a new bull might be put forth that shots were to be fired only every hundred years, at the expiration of which time the something extraordinary might be foreseen to occur.
“And perhaps at the expiration of nine hundred years a new bull might go forth to the effect that the last round never was to be expended—that the tribe would choose to worship potentiality in their artifacts rather than uselessness.
“But our tribe has fired the last round and our only link to the possibility of powers greater than ourselves is the useless gun, the essential element we no longer possess. And since our priests have fired off that last round, they have expended any possible link to the past, as such a memory would surely cause us pain. Therefore, our dead rituals are rituals of denial. They concern not potential but lack, and express contempt—contempt, mainly for ourselves, and for our urge to celebrate.”
—David Mamet, “Some Thoughts on Writing in Restaurants”
