On The Turning Away

Morality is a private and costly luxury.
- Henry Adams (1838 - 1918)

Fortuitously, this purported “Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective” came our way none sooner than we drank the Kool-Aid. Suspend your disbelief, you’ll find a healthy dose of pros and cons of toiling at perhaps the most sought-after workplace today. To wit,

“College kids tend to like it because it’s just like college – all of their basic needs are taken care of.”

“Google believes that developers are, with few exceptions, interchangeable parts.”

As Pink Floyd would say, welcome to the machine -
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If Goldman Sachs and Google have anything in common, it’s their shared demand and fierce competition for the latest crop of computer wizards. This year the premier Wall St firm appears to be losing out to the crème de la crème Google, if this Bloomberg report is any guide.

The ferocious demand for the bright young things underscores the essential skills in today’s market place: the ability to write the algorithms used in computer-based trading and search engines.

The “greed is good” Wall Street mantra has been steadily eroded by the west coast coolness (translation: entrepreneurs are in it for the money), personified by a roster of technology startups. Small wonder the hottest offer right now is Google’s.

We interrupt our R&R and Paris Hilton watch to bring you this: the inherent appeal of MySpace vs Facebook. Whether you’re on the former or the latter patently says a lot about you, or so some socio-structure inclined minds tend to think.

As Facebook has branched out from a predominately college network to a more embracing one, MySpace remains the open-to-all bazaar where everyone is anyone can flog his or her ware. So much so it leads some to argue that MySpace has attained an uneviable virtual ghetto reputation, allowing the upward mobile Facebook to charge ahead and become a must-have for network-hungry college kids and post-collegiate professionals.

No one can blame the aspiring networkers, as Tina Brown, author of the Diana Chronicles and social networker exemplar, once famously said, “You don’t make friends, you make contacts.” However, if the argument holds, will Facebook turn into another LinkedIn? Probably not. But the diverging of people flocking to the top social networking sites makes for a fascinating subject as it sits at the intersection of identity and online pop culture.
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Arianna Huffington’s take on Carl Bernstein’s bio of Hillary Clinton “A Woman in Charge” is hardly surprising: Hillary’s “disturbing secrecy problem”. If you followed Arianna’s blog at HuffPo, you’d know that she’s by no means a HRC fan.

But her comparison of Hillary to Dick Cheney is misguided. The latter, according to received wisdom, seems to show an innate contempt for transparency. Hillary, on the other hand, has been criticized roundly by her enemies of omission, obfuscation and outright lying. But their shared fixation with secrey differs in kind, if not in degree.

Bernstein, as The Economist - hardly a HRC enthusiast - put it, tries to “psychoanalyse Hillary” from her “boot camp” childhood to her “difficult relationship with the truth”. He concludes that Hillary married for love, on the whole is better than Bill at learning from experience, and “may have the potential to change the world, if only a little.”
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If you’re one of those who can’t live without the Sunday Times, soon - July 15, to be exact - you’ll have to dole out more - a whopping $4, no less - for the paper. Daily Times will be $1.25 at newstands.

The price hike came on the heels of Dow Jones’ decision last week to raise the cover price of The Wall Street Journal by 50% from $1 to $1.50, also on July 16. Separately, the Financial Times has had its first price hike for 5 years - started this week its daily cover price was raised by 30% to £1.30 and its Saturday edition by 20% to £1.80.

Newspapers increasingly find themselves in an unsavory position, having to face an ever dwindling readership and an irrevocable slump in advertising. Last week the Times reported its ad revenue for May declined 8.5% from the same period last year and 4.4% so far this year.

It’s not just the “druids, drummers, pagans and partygoers” who welcomed the sun today as it rose above the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, England. Summer solstice celebrations also take place in other countries, although most are deferred until the last weekend in June.

It’s one of the year’s great family holidays in the Scandinavian region. Swedes will sip spiced schnapps, Danes will light bonfires, and Balts and Finns will flock to the countryside to dance, sing, and make merry under the midnight sun in one of the region’s most important holidays.

In our fair city, there’s an annual NYC Midsummer or Swedish Midsummer celebration in Battery Park, lower Manhattan, co-hosted by the Swedish consulate and NYC Parks Department.

In America, to look a couple of years younger than you actually are is not only an achievement for which you are to be congratulated, it is patriotic.

Banality is a terribly likely consequence of the underused of a good mind. That is why in particular it is a female affliction.

- Cynthia Propper Seton (1926-1982)

Hillary Clinton’s unveiled a campaign video - to great fanfare - that’s a spoof of the buzzed Sopranos finale, about her theme song contest. The winner is Celine Dion’s “You and I”, said to be originally written for an Air Canada commercial. It got as much attention as the clever take on the ending of the Sopranos.

If you don’t have HBO, you may not get the cultural reference. But unless you live under a rock, chances are you may have watched it somewhere as it has been played over and over on both network television and cable channels. At any rate, “You and I”…”were meant to fly”.

Terry Semel’s resignation came at a time when shareholder activist groups lambasted Yahoo for his 2006 pay package of $71.7m, which was the highest among S&P 500 chief executives surveyed by AP. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share price fell 35% in 2006 and shareholders’ dissatisfaction was on full display at last week’s annual meeting.

Is Jerry Yang following the footsteps of Michael Dell, who in February returned to the struggling computer maker he founded in 1984. Not exactly. Albeit a “chief Yahoo”, Yang has not run the company he and David Filo founded in 1995 but he promised yesterday to keep Yahoo a “vibrant, independent company”.

Judging from the 4.3% jump in shares yesterday, investors apparently think after its poor run, any change at Yahoo is a good thing. But the triumvirate of Semel, Yang and Decker has a long way to go to prove skeptics wrong.