Niccolo Machiavelli, Vice President at Goldman Sachs, offers some helpful career advice to this year’s male summer interns via the GSElevator blog:
1. If your boss smokes, smoke.
2. If your boss is Indian or Pakistani, learn the rules of cricket. He probably also smokes, so see #1. But be careful, if he doesn’t, he’s a vegetarian yogi.
3. Don’t wear Hermes ties, ever. You have to earn it.
4. Buy a decent suit or 3, but no cuffed or pleated pants. And don’t wear a tie unless you might have a meeting. No one likes that kind of kiss-ass.
5. Learn how to tie a double Windsor; just make sure the knot’s not too fat.
6. Keep your shoes shiny, but don’t let anyone see you having your shoes shined. You have to earn it.
7. If you went to a decent boarding school, subtly find out if anyone who matters went to the same school. Boom, he’s your rabbi. At this point, no one cares about college credentials; it’s a given.
8. As it relates to fellow interns, make no mistake about it – it’s war:
Let’s be clear. It’s impossible to compete with female interns. And it’s not cool. So don’t bother trying.
When a fellow intern leaves his desk, change his screen (or screens) to rolex.com, porsche.com, or morganstanley.com.
Come up with dismissive nicknames for fellow interns (Chico, Bud Fox, Fredo, Bubba, etc.). Hope that it catches on.
When a fellow intern leaves his computer unlocked at the end of the evening, change the signature on his Email settings. Using white font, add any variety of obscene words. No one will see it… except for IT and HR.
9. Don’t be too good to do the coffee runs. It shows confidence. Just don’t fuck it up. If you can’t be trusted with coffee, how can you sell bonds or manage risk.
10. Call Bloomberg and have them give you a tutorial on functions. It’s free. And most EDs and above are still using functions and short cuts from 5+ years ago. It’s an easy way to impress them. And many of the Bloomberg girls are hot.
11. Leave a jacket on the back of your chair at all times. While you are at it, keep a tie in your drawer. Zegna is a good choice.
12. Ask the secretary for the travel schedules of the senior members of your group for the week ahead. She’s dumb enough to think you are being proactive. But now you know when you can sleep in, hit the gym, or beat the traffic to Southampton.
13. Never tell racist jokes. Always repeat racist jokes in the proper company and be sure to credit ‘the other intern’ who told you.
A Georgia antiques collector is the latest person to claim that he might have found the original recipe for Coca-Cola.
Cliff Kluge and his wife Arlene recently bought a box of letters at an estate sale, and one of the yellowed papers, dated 1943, includes instructions for making cola, according to Atlanta’s WXIA. Kluge thinks it could potentially be the recipe for Coca-Cola and is trying to sell it on eBay; bidding starts at $5 million, but customers can buy it now for $15 million.
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Somebody clearly believed that it was real, as it Sold via “Buy It Now” on May 15th:
On May 8th, 1886, Dr. John Stythe Pemberton, a pharmacist and inventor of medicinal beverages, invented the world’s most famous drink – Coca Cola. Shortly after, he began selling the fountain drink in a nearby Atlanta pharmacy. Concocted in a brass kettle in his back yard, this patent medicine was billed as being able to cure anything from morphine addiction to headaches to impotence.The ingredients, their ratio and the process method of the beverage is one ofthe most closely guarded secrets in the world. To this day, it is said that only two of Coca Cola’s executives know the entire ingredients.
In 1899, Benjamin F. Thomas and Joseph B. Whitehead of Chattanooga, met with Asa Chandler, then President and owner of the Coca Cola Company. They approached him with the idea of bottling the beverage. Until then, Coca Cola was only available as a fountain drink. After much negotiations, Mr. Chandler agreed to grant bottling rights to the two gentleman, for the astronomical fee of $1.00.(He never collected the $1.00, by the way) Thus born was the world’s first Coca Cola Bottling Company, located in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Fast forward 100+ years later to the 21st Century – we were at an estate sale of a deceased, renown Chattanooga chemist, who at one time worked at one of the more prominent chemical companies in the area. There were masses upon masses of personal paperwork at the sale. Curious, we bought several boxes of this paperwork, which yielded some interesting finds. Among those finds is what is offered for sale here – what we believe to be the formula for Coca Cola.
Typed on January 15th, 1943, this single page (front and back) breaks down the formula into exact amounts of specific ingredients to make one gallon of concentrate, which, when combined and processed yields enough to make 16 gallons..
May we make this perfectly clear – we can never guarantee and never claim that this is the actual recipe for Coca Cola. Even if this formula was 100% accurate in every aspect—as mentioned above—there are only two people in the world that can verify it’s accuracy, and I doubt they will be willing to compromise Coca Cola to acknowledge our exactness. That is why we are selling this as a historic artifact.
What I can guarantee is that offered for sale is a single page, hand typed and written, 70+ year old recipe on yellowed paper that was purchased out of an estate of a local chemist in a city that claims the right of being where Coca Cola Bottling originated. Whoever typed this letter back in 1943, had access to the original recipe, and references that fact on the second page – “On page 83 of the Extractor is the original Coca Cola formula(e) which might serve as a source of preparation information.”
Though you’re looking at the “Swiss Cheese” version of that formula, with the ingredients edited out, you will be purchasing the entire recipe to include ingredients, ratios and preparation details. The formula is an interesting read in itself – including the Maywood Chemical Company, now the Stepan Chemical Company, which has the solitary right of decocanizing the coca leaves for Coca Cola. Indeed, until 1903, Coca Cola had an average of 9 milligrams of cocaine in each serving. No wonder it got rid of headaches.
It is to our belief that the interest in this will be so great, that the questions through eBay will be monumental—so we ask “serious inquires only”. I will never reveal any portion of the formula in any shape or form, so don’t waste the energy asking. You may find the “Buy It Now” price exceptionally steep, but it will be a drop in the bucket if this formula rises to the occasion and yields an accurate formula for CocaCola – the most popular drink in the world , with over a billion served daily. A billion plus per day – my goodness.
Update: It’s interesting to see how this is unfolding. According to some news sources, it appears that during World War II (this letter is dated January 15, 1943) Coca Cola was concerned that they were not going to be able to obtain all the ingredients they needed to make the formula – either by war time shortages, or the countries where the ingredients came from were deep in battle and couldn’t meet supply demands. This is pure speculation – the estate we bought this from—this person was a renown chemist—is it possible that this informal letter was written to that chemist to find other avenues to reach the same tasting Coca Cola recipe? Personally, I don’t believe it was written to compromise Coca Cola or the formula. There is no doubt (at least in my mind) that whoever typed the letter had seen the original recipe for Coca Cola, and they reference that on the second page – “On page 83 of the Extractor….” Is it the original recipe? I don’t know, but more evidence and external factors are falling in place to bolster the fact that this could be the original, with an emphasis on the word “could”. Looking at the recipe, it certainly is a lot more complicated than I could have ever imagined.
Canadian blogger Jon Rafman explores Google Street Views and selects screenshots of the most interesting and unusual scenes captured, like the (above) tiger roaming near a convenience store.
The original pictures are taken by Google’s fleet of hybrid electric automobiles, each carrying 9 cameras, hence Rafman’s web-site name: 9-eyes.com
One key weakness in his concept is the editor’s failure to link each image to its Google maps location.
Cory Doctorow gleefully passes along some decidedly damaging accounts of sanctimonious corporate malfeasance.
Consumerist’s Laura Northrup rounds up several years’ worth of stories from Apple customers who say they were denied warranty support on their computers because they’d smoked around them. As an annoying ex-smoker, I can sympathize with a tech who doesn’t want to work on a machine that smells like an old ashtray, but that’s what painter’s masks are for—I’ve also serviced machines that reeked of BO and other less savory odors. This just feels like a way to weasel out of doing warranty service and forcing customers to pay for new machines. If the company has a policy of not fixing machines if you smoke near them, it should say so when it sells you the warranty: WARNING: IF YOU LIGHT UP NEAR YOUR LAPTOP, WE WON’T EVER FIX IT, EVEN IF IT IS MATERIALLY DEFECTIVE.
No Piero della Francesca RESSURECTION, not even an Easter egg, or an Easter bunny, today Google’s search logo art is focusing on something much more important.
For those hoodie-wearing fashionistas down in Mountain View, billions of Christians celebrating the most important date in the Christian calendar are irrelevant, what is important about today’s date is it being the 86th (posthumous) birthday of leftist agitator Cesar Chavez.
So let’s all raise a middle finger to those communist heathens at Google and eat some grapes. (Cesar Chavez was famous, back in the day, for organizing a grape boycott.)
A growing number of firearm and firearm-related companies have stated they will no longer sell items to states, counties, cities and municipalities that restrict their citizens’ rights to own them.
According to The Police Loophole, 34 companies have joined in publicly stating that governments who seek to restrict 2nd Amendment rights will themselves be restricted from purchasing the items they seek to limit or ban.
Friday could very well go down in history as the death knell for an 82-year-old Chicago-born American classic snack cake: The Twinkie.
Hostess Brands, Texas-based maker of Twinkies and a number of other snack foods, announced Friday that, on the heels of a nationwide worker strike, it will be going out of business, closing its production plants and laying off the vast majority of its 18,500 employees nationwide. As for the Twinkie brand? It will be going up for sale.
Three of the company’s plants—including one in St. Louis—closed earlier this week as workers went on strike in response to wage cuts and new limitations in worker participation in pension plans. Now, 1,415 workers at the company’s three Illinois bakeries—in Schiller Park, Hodgkins and Peoria—are losing their jobs, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
The America’s Cup race is a match between a defending and a challenging sailing yacht, each representing an organized yachting club. Larry Ellison, the notoriously abrasive and egomanaical CEO of Oracle, early in the 2000s developed a yen to compete for the Cup, and needed a yacht club to represent.
Larry naturally first approached San Francisco’s venerable and aristocratic St. Francis Yacht Club. The St. Francis folks were initially happy with the idea of Larry Ellison flying their club pennon and competing in their name, but when Larry informed the St. Francis Club that he expected them to surrender majority control of the club’s governing board to him as part of the deal, the St. Francis Club demurred.
Larry responded by going down to road to a more modest and considerably more desperate organization, the Golden Gate Yacht Club, a much smaller, ordinary middle-class club, the sort of club a SF fisherman’s family (like Joe DiMaggio’s) might belong to, at the time in the process of going broke. Golden Gate welcomed Larry Ellison (and an additional 100 minions and lackeys) as new members, whose waterfall of dues wiped out the club’s deficit, and in return surrendered board control to King Larry, who does not, it seems, really bother to visit this latest small outpost of his personal empire. When the Golden Gate Club requires Larry Ellison’s attention, they come humbly to his door.
The chaps standing around the bar at St. Francis are doubtless having a good laugh today. Larry Ellison’s crew lost it on a turn on Tuesday and pitchpoled (overturned so that the stern pitched forward over the bow) his $8-million 72-foot Oracle Team catamaran.
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The results were not pretty. One wing was basically shattered in fragments, and an ebb tide was sweeping the whole mess through the Golden Gate out to sea. Most of what was left was salvaged and dragged back to the dock, but Larry Ellison will be writing a very large check after this accident.
Jason Stewart (a self-described Apple addict) does not have much good to say about the current (incredibly expensive) MacBook Pro.
As Dan Ackerman at CNet noted, the Retina Mac “feels like a rest stop on the road to somewhere else,” a place where we truly get thin, light and beautiful. Already, the Samsung Series 9 is smaller and lighter. And many of the rest of the radical changes are more marketing hype than features. The asymmetrical fan blades that were going to revolutionize quiet laptop cooling? If you try real hard, you might hear a trivial difference. What about the “All Flash Architecture”? In other words, whereas before you had a choice between a fast, but ridiculously expensive SSD drive, or a cheaper, larger capacity conventional hard drive, now you can only have the SSD drive. Only Apple could successfully market that limitation as a revolutionary feature.
Of course, if you need to connect an Ethernet cable you better shell out extra for a dongle and hope you can find it when you need it. Need to watch a movie on disc or load a program or content the old fashioned way? Apple has just the extra accessory to sell you for that, too, since it is no longer included.
The new MacBook Pro with Retina display is a nice computer. The screen is innovative at a cost of both dollars and features. Whether it’s worth the substantial premium (more than $4,000, fully loaded) is a personal decision. Apple has never been accused of catering to the wish lists of the masses, and this is no exception. It has staked its claim on a new display standard and if that means trade-offs, take it or leave it.
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Meanwhile, Harry McCracken contends that the Mac world and the PC world are already very different and may soon becoming even more so.
When I sat down to review Apple’s new Retina-display MacBook Pro, I instinctively wanted to compare it with similar Windows laptops. I wanted to discuss how the specs stacked up and whether the price seemed fair. I hoped to contrast its industrial design with those of its closest counterparts.
Then it dawned on me: there are no similar Windows laptops. ...
while Apple remains the most influential computer maker in the business, the rest of the industry has chosen to ignore some of its design innovations. When it started sealing up its portables a few years ago — eliminating the ability to easily swap in batteries, RAM and hard drives — I thought that other hardware makers might follow along. For the most part, they haven’t. ...
[I]f Microsoft has its way, PCs and Macs are about to get more different than they’ve been in decades. For all of the interesting things about the new MacBook Pro, it’s a straightforward notebook computer based on a form factor that’s been around for 30 years. Apple seems to be content to let Macs be Macs, while the iPad goes places that computing devices never have before.
With Windows 8, however, Microsoft is trying to reinvent the PC from scratch. The Metro interface has little to do with the basic concepts that Windows 7 and OS X share, and it’s conceivable that a bunch of long-standing form factors that have never quite worked, such as touchscreen PCs and laptops that convert into tablets, will finally take off. If they do, and Apple doesn’t push the Mac in the same direction, the average Windows PC could end up having very little in common with any Mac.
Tom Socca writes the epitaph for Redmond’s increasingly annoying ultimate piece of bloatware.
Nowadays, I get [a] feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word. ...
[Word] become an overbearing boss, one who specializes in make-work. Part of this is Microsoft’s more-is-more approach to adding capabilities, and leaving all of them in the “on” position. Around the first time Clippy launched himself, uninvited, between me and something I was trying to write, I found myself wishing Word had a simple, built-in button for “cut it out and never again do that thing you just did.” It’s possible that the current version of Word does have one; I have no idea where among the layers of menus and toolbars it might be. All I really know how to do up there anymore is to go in and disable AutoCorrect, so that the program will type what I’ve typed, rather than what some software engineer thinks it should think I’m trying to type.
Word’s stylistic preferences range from the irritating—the superscript “th” on ordinal numbers, the eagerness to forcibly indent any numbered list it detects—to the outright wrong. Microsoft’s inability to teach a computer to use an apostrophe correctly, through its comically misnamed “smart quotes” feature, has spread from the virtual world into the real one, till professional ballplayers take the field with amateur punctuation on their hats.
Even so, people can live with typos in their input. (Witness the boom in paraphasic email Sent From My iPhone.) What makes Word unbearable is the output. Like the fax machine, Word was designed to put things on paper. It was a tool of the desktop-publishing revolution, allowing ordinary computer users to make professional (or at least approximately professional) document layouts and to print them out. That’s great if you’re making a lot of church bulletins or lost-dog fliers. Keep on using Word. (Maybe keep better track of your dog, though.)
For most people now, though, publishing means putting things on the Web. Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper.
