Click to viewLet the depression-era nostalgia officially begin with this instructional guide from Howcast and Poykpac on how to do from cube-dweller to migrant laborer. Best tip? Squatting could become the new homesteading, thanks to "adverse possession" laws. The helpful San Francisco Tenant's Union offers a primer on your rights when it comes to taking control, and maybe even ownership, of an abandoned residence.
Folks watching the financial meltdown on Wall Street on Google Finance yesterday might not have freaked out as much as everyone else because Google was providing erroneous data, even about its own share price. Rather than a $50 drop, the site only showed a $40 drop for GOOG, though still well under $400. The numbers were fixed this morning just in time for the open of the trading day. No word from Google on what went wrong. The good news for Google shareholders is that the share price has climbed in after-hours trading — at least according to numbers from Yahoo Finance, which reported correct numbers the whole time.
The Wall Street bailout act failed to pass. One imagines the well-padded VCs of Sand Hill Road smirking: "How sad!" Congress will surely have another go, with more lobbyist-written provisions and earmarks to grease the wheels. It all seems so far away from Silicon Valley, the mostly debt-free innovation machine. But if investors here had any sense, they'd be padding the halls of the Capitol, palms out.What is a stake in a Web 2.0 startup if not a toxic investment, waiting to be written off. And why aren't the pension funds and college endowments marking to market the fliers they took on venture capital? Conspiracy theorists too paranoid to read Snopes.com believe that Facebook is secretly run by the CIA anyway; why not rescue Microsoft and the other investors who bought in at a $15 billion valuation, and make it official? (Photo by Laurel Fan)
As someone who's designed and deployed plenty of email marketing campaigns, I have to feel for the poor sods who sent this electronic come-on to Washington Mutual customers today, as news broke that the Seattle-based bank's failure is the largest in our nation's history.Washington Mutual had $309.7 billion in assets, most of which are being taken over by JPMorgan Chase. The email carried an appeal for customers to save money — just the kind of capital that the company so desperately needed to stave off federal seizure and a firesale. Too little, too late after all those other email offers for credit cards and low, low introductory mortgage rates.
Confused by Wall Street? Join the club. Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who is one of Silicon Valley's most revered brains, doesn't get what's happening, either. "If I can't understand it, I suspect a lot of people can't," he told Beet.tv's Andy Plesser in this video interview. "In the name of economic efficiency by slicing and dicing risk, we're reducing transparency, which is not a healthy thing." I was with him that far. But then he concluded: "Venture capital will be a pretty good place when we return to reality and invest in things we understand and are real." That rules out most Web startup investments made in the past couple of years. Heck, Khosla believes in cost-effective ethanol.
Ever heard of Uber.com? Join the club. But the Los Angeles-based social networking startup now says it's a victim of "the crisis in the economy." Investors like Discovery Communications and Universal Music Group, which sunk up to $7.6 million in the social network-turned-publishing platform, want what's left of their money back. Discovery's investment came just last May, with the company looking to use the site for its Miami Ink and LA Ink shows on TLC. But was it really the economic meltdown, or just investors coming to their senses?Artist and designer Glenn Kaino originally envisioned the site as a social network for jetset hipsters, and his cousin Scott Sassa signed on as CEO after a spell at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins. You might remember Sassa as the CEO who presided over Friendster's slide into irrelevancy, or as a Hollywood executive managing NBC's West Coast entertainment operations. Sassa likely was the one to hustle up the investors, as well as celebritard users like Rob Lowe, Lisa Ling and Cory Kennedy. But in May, the site was drawing only half a million users a month according to Nielsen Online. (Sassa put the number at 2 million.) That's orders of magnitude smaller than similar sites like Six Apart's Vox or off-the-shelf social network Ning, either of which could have done more for Discovery with less money. Our theory: Events on Wall Street did have something to do with Uber's shutdown. But not the way Uber would like you to think — that the site was a thriving concern kneecapped by some kind of mysterious liquidity crisis. No, the market meltdown merely provided the convenient excuse to close down a stinker of a company. Expect more cash clawbacks in the months to come — from startups that should never have gotten money, in good times or bad.
Working on Pacific Time always leaves one feeling a bit left out of the stock-market action. While Wall Street's melting down, we're just waking up. Valleywag very special correspondent Paul Boutin's reaction to the latest Wall Street Journal front page summed up, I thought, Silicon Valley's wake-me-when-it's-over nonchalance:
During an Advertising Week panel on Monday, a moderator asked Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg how the Wall Street meltdown will effect online spending. Sandberg delivered a carefully crafted response to an expected question touching upon her time at the Treasury during the Clinton years, the Mexican peso, the Asian crises of the 1990s, and contagion, a fancy new term the rest of us can break out at dinner parties. When she's so comfortable talking global economics, why did Sandberg ever leave Washington D.C.? Look how smoothly she endorses Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Most obvious of all: She's clearly enjoying herself. We don't get the same vibe from Sandberg when she's talking up Facebook.
The brilliance of Bill O'Reilly, such as it is, is his ability to put an emphatically populist spin on any Republican policy, no matter how plutocrat-friendly, and also to get comically enraged about random external stimuli of every sort. By those standards, the Fox News pundit's radio show tonight was a virtuoso performance. Suddenly, to defend a $700 billion bailout aimed at Wall Street banks but opposed by Congressional conservatives, O'Reilly lashed out at "right-wing liars" and "rich guys" with "big cigars," (Those rich cigar smokers aren't bankers, as you might logically conclude, but elitist right-wing talk show hosts.) Then he promised to severely beat both the House and Senate finance committees, personally, by breaking off their fingers. If only Hank Paulson had thought of that! Click the video icon to listen.
Want to know why newspapers are dying? Because they've been running boring cover stories about that confusing economic meltdown on Wall Street instead of what Americans really care about — stuff like wizards, cupcakes and sex toys. Bristol Palin headlines can stay above the fold, though. Online searchers love them some pregnant teenagers with high school-dropout baby daddies. [Mother Jones]
NEW YORK — And then there were none. Did you read that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are turning into boring old moneylenders, leaving Wall Street without any investment banks? Few in the Valley will weep; the investment banks abandoned tech long ago. The handful of investment bankers left in San Francisco and Palo Alto handle private placements and wealth management. IPOs? Are you kidding? Even the M&A deals going on are too small to attract New York's attention. The main worry on the left-behind coast is that Wall Street will drag the economy down, and take tech spending with it. Not that anyone is admitting it.A San Francisco Chronicle reporter attempting to survey the landscape had no luck getting called back:
Dartmouth professor John Vogel, who specializes in real estate at the Tuck School of Business, explains that the fad for mortgage-backed securities among investors really kicked off after the postmillennial dot-bomb. Everyone wanted the kind of blockbuster returns they got during the technology IPO glory days. In other words, it's all your fault, Valley, for creating unrealistic expectations — don't blame Wall Street's greed.
Talk radio superstar Laura Ingraham (the top-rated lady host on the airwaves!) finally got her own television show on Fox News after acting as Bill O'Reilly's official guest-host for 100 years. It lasted for three weeks! In part because she's strenuously unpleasant, as these ten minutes of her preparing for air demonstrate. Once again, Harry Shearer's magical satellite dish captures off-air television gold. Watch as Laura requests that you don't come in her ear and complains of a strange Hispanic gentlemen showing up in her prompter. (Fun fact: she used to date Keith Olbermann like ten years ago!) Clip below. Enjoy.
Sue Simmons is the WNBC personality who famously swore at her co-anchor during a live promo last week, scandalizing New York viewers of NBC drama Medium and prompting sympathy from network colleagues on the Today show, who said anyone could slip up like that. But CBS' Late Show host David Letterman isn't about to let the scandal drop; he's milked the incident for all it's worth, airing a new clip of Simmons swearing every night this week. It looks like Letterman plans to make his "Local News Highlight Of The Night" feature a going concern, but making Simmons the butt of his joke every night would get pretty repetitive, wouldn't it? Yes, and actually, knowing Letterman, he can keep up this sort of drumbeat for weeks. After the jump, the four WNBC segments the Late Show has run thus far.
On his show last night, Bill O'Reilly addressed the hubub over his old "Do it now!" meltdown, which has resurfaced on the internet. The Fox News host approached the topic with a sense of humor — how else could he play this, really, without looking like the same angry guy he was in the dated clip? — but also very briefly, and without the actual, unflattering footage. But O'Reilly did slip in an interesting, probably not entirely untrue joke about how he's had annual explosions since he joined Fox. And he offered to sell them. Someone, please, take this man at his word and at least try to buy some previously unseen footage, so we can all laugh some more with Bill about how charming and unharmful his on-camera rages really are.
You may recall Rachel Marsden, the former Fox News personality who had a scandalous fling with the founder of Wikipedia, who pled guilty in 2004 to harassing a Vancouver radio host and who who was ejected from the Fox News studio last year. Marsden's relationship with Fox seems to be on the mend — she was re-admitted to the studio in February — and she is clearly as big a fan of Fox host Bill O'Reilly as ever. In the comment thread on Gawker's post about O'Reilly's recently-resurfaced meltdown, Marsden said critics of his cuss-out just can't handle Papa Bear's swaggering machismo:
Sue Simmons gets it: You don't like that she said the f-word on WNBC Monday, all angry like. So the news anchor has yanked her email address from the WNBC website, according to an email tipster. Comparing Simmons' current WNBC Web page with the latest one in archive.org, from 2007, does show that her email address was dropped at some point (images after the jump). But! If you can track down Simmons' address, she will send you a nice note of apology, as she did for Animal New York:
Today hosted a very meta discussion this morning about Sue Simmons' WNBC f-bomb and Bill O'Reilly's old Inside Edition eruption, and anchpr Kathie Lee Gifford is extremely sympathetic toward both of the old TV hands and their embarassments. She told co-host Hoda Kotb there's always a chance she'll have her own "FUCK IT! DO IT NOW!" breakdown: "We're having fun, because tomorrow it could be you and I." Or maybe she was thinking of a more mild "what the FUCK are you doing" outburst. After the jump, listen to Gifford talk about how you can barely cuss anyone out in a TV studio any more because of all the satellites and bloggers and so forth.
