Only a government employee could point to a 99.5% failure rate and declare it a success.
Look no farther than my local newspaper this morning: the city of Menlo Park (which is an affluent superb like Palo Alto, but even whiter and more sheltered) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment to read the license plates of all the cars passing by certain intersections. (We’ll set aside the creepiness of the surveillance and just focus on the economics here.)
A few days ago, a former employee of mine from back in the days of Prophet, and now a friend/business associate, emailed me to ask if I’d be heading up to San Francisco for the Money Show. He lives in San Francisco, and Palo Alto is about a forty minute drive from there, so he thought that, if I was going, it would be a good opportunity to get together.
I hadn’t really planned on going. Back when I was building Prophet, particularly in the late 1990s, financial trade shows were actually pretty fun. In fact, during the Internet boom, they were amazing, because there was a bustle of activity, and there would be hundreds of booths with the latest trading, charting, and portfolio technologies.
Were it not for the trauma of the past six years, an objective technician would sell his overpriced Palo Alto house, put it all into OEX November puts, and prepare to make tens of millions of dollars. As it is, I’ll just share the chart.
Most of you have probably gathered I’m not big on vacations. If I had committed some ghastly crime and was sentenced to spend the rest of eternity working from home, forbidden to leave the town limits of Palo Alto, I actually would have no problem with that. Indeed, I’d like to know the crime in question, just so I can enjoy committing it and then bask in the glow of a supposedly Draconian sentence.
