An altercation with my sales head sent me on an online rampage, resulting in the discovery of this excellent performance by Alec Baldwin in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

A partial transcript (from IMDb) of this video…

Blake: You’re talking about what.You’re talking about… Bitching about that sale you shot, some sonofabitch who don’t wanna buy land, some broad you’re trying to screw, so forth. Let’s talk about something important. They all here?

Williamson: All but one.

Blake: I’m going anyway. Let’s talk about something important. Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee’s for closers only. You think I’m fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. I’m here from downtown. I’m here from Mitch and Murray. And I’m here on a mission of mercy. Your name’s Levine? You call yourself a salesman you son of a bitch?

Dave Moss: I don’t gotta sit here and listen to this shit.

Blake: You certainly don’t pal, ’cause the good news is – you’re fired. The bad news is – you’ve got, all of you’ve got just one week to regain your jobs starting with tonight. Starting with tonight’s sit. Oh? Have I got your attention now? Good. “Cause we’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired. Get the picture? You laughing now? You got leads. Mitch and Murray paid good money, get their names to sell them. you can’t close the leads youre given you can’t close shit. You ARE shit. Hit the bricks pal, and beat it ’cause you are going OUT.

Shelley Levene: The leads are weak.

Blake: The leads are weak? Fucking leads are weak. You’re weak. I’ve been in this business 15 years…

Dave Moss: What’s your name?

Blake: Fuck you. That’s my name. You know why, mister? You drove a Hyundai to get here. I drove an eighty-thousand dollar BMW. THAT’S my name. And your name is you’re wanting. You can’t play in the man’s game, you can’t close them – go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted. You hear me you fucking faggots? A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing. ALWAYS BE CLOSING. A-I-D-A. Attention, Interest, Decision, Action. Attention – Do I have you attention? Interest – Are you interested? I know you are, because it’s fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks. Decision – Have you made your decision, for Christ? And Action. A-I-D-A. Get out there – you got the prospects coming in. You think they came in to get out of the rain? A guy don’t walk on the lot lest he wants to buy. They’re sitting out there waiting to give you their money. Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it? What’s the problem, pal?

Dave Moss: You – Moss. You’re such a hero, you’re so rich, how come you’re coming down here wasting your time with such a bunch of bums?

Blake: You see this watch? You see this watch?

Dave Moss: Yeah.

Blake: That watch costs more than you car. I made $970,000 last year. How much’d you make? You see pal, that’s who I am, and you’re nothing. Nice guy? I don’t give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids. You wanna work here – close! You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you cocksucker? You can’t take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a sit? You don’t like it, leave. _I_ can go out there tonight with the materials you’ve got and make myself $15,000. Tonight! In two hours! Can you? Can YOU? Go and do likewise. A-I-D-A. Get mad you son of a bitches. get mad. You want to know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes BRASS BALLS to sell real estate. Go and do likewise gents. Money’s out there. You pick it up, it’s yours. You don’t, I got no sympathy for you. You wanna go out on those sits tonight and close, CLOSE. It’s yours. If not you’re gonna be shining my shoes. And you know what you’ll be saying – a bunch of losers sittin’ around in a bar. ‘Oh yeah. I used to be a salesman. It’s a tough racket.’ These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. And to you they’re gold, and you don’t get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They’re for closers. I’d wish you good luck but you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you got it. And to answer you question, pal, why am I here? I came here because Mitch and Murray asked me to. They asked me for a favor. I said the real favor, follow my advice and fire your fucking ass because a loser is a loser.

You can read some more quotes from the movie at IMDb.

An article in the Atlantic shows how fragile the global supply chain can get during times of financial crisis. It details the sorry state of scrap metal trading between US and China. The much talked about “trust” between trading partners seems to be taking a back seat in the current “survival” crisis.

The US seems to be heading towards something scary. The last of the variables that was being flaunted by economists to ward off any suggestions of something similar to the great depression seems to be spiraling out of control.

Latest (un)employment figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 533000 U.S. jobs were lost in November 08. This is almost 73% of the 723000 jobs lost in September(403000 job losses) and October(320000) put together.

The average job loss over the past 3 months has been 419,000 per month; the same figure stood at 82,000 per month from January 08 to August 08 – now that’s like over 400% increase.

But please don’t worry…let’s just get back to being optimistic, and hope that the wizards who turned us into paupers will get us back on our feet.

Or maybe, it’s already time for us to start learning to make some ‘depression cake‘, if not actually start making it.

Everyone is pouncing on hedge funds once again… some of the results of a simple google news search on “hedge funds”…

Hedge funds brace for redemption wave, cash high

Asia Hedge Funds, Among Worst Performers, Close at Faster Rate

Year-end redemption requests loom over industry

Hedge funds hit by wind-ups as markets bite

Hedge Funds Wash Out of High-Stakes Game

Hedge Funds Are Bracing for Investors to Cash Out

Hedge funds face loss of investors

Why does all this coverage and analysis have to be ex-post? Haven’t they done enough of that after LTCM? Couldn’t they do some ex-ante analysis this time around?

I ran the V8 Benchmark Suite on all browsers installed on one of my colleagues office PC. Given below are the results…bigger the final score, better the performance is what the benchmark page says

Some basic hygeine factors were taken into consideration while testing…nothing professional, but I hope the numbers make sense? You can run the benchmarks here and check your results.

Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan highlights some interesting issues concerning Chrome in this post…

– Multiple processes rendering to a single window on Mac. There’s no supported way to do that AFAIK. From your docs (great docs by the way!), it seems you don’t have an answer there yet either.

– Separate-process plugins rendering in windowless mode. I haven’t had a chance to grovel through your code yet, but I didn’t see anything in the docs about it. Sounds especially tricky in Chrome since, if I understand correctly, all interaction between the plugin and the page is routed through the master browser process.

– Synchronous two-way script interaction between the page and a separate-process plugin seems like it’s hard to make performant.

– Running different-origin iframes in separate processes sounds hard; the interaction between iframes and their hosts is complex and bears on Web compatibility. (And the interaction gets more complicated with HTML5 “seamless” iframes.) But it really has to be solved, I think, because otherwise a compromised renderer process can violate the iframe security boundary — a gaping hole in the security architecture.

 Would be interesting to see how google answers these.

Just started using Google’s latest app – the Chrome Browser. I loved the minimalist design of the browser; it lives up to the “Maximize Content and Minimize Chrome” philosophy talked about in their The story behind Google Chrome video.

But I was a little puzzled by Chrome’s resource utilization. For all the speed that Google has been talking about, the browser was stuggling real hard when I started switching between just about 10 tabs.

Doesn’t look like Google will come out with a browser that bites the dust so easily. Something must be wrong with my config…or the sites i picked up…I’ll check it out later…probably next week.

One thing I want to do for sure is compare Flock with Chrome…both claim to be for the “new” web, and both are in beta. I don’t have any complaints about Flock till date.

A round conference table hampers decisions; a thin, long one encourages informal cliques; and a U – shaped conference table is the perfect recipe for a showdown. Ruth Haag, President and CEO of Haag Environmental Company, thinks a one-ended rectangular table is the perfect solution. Read it here…

Everyone knows it’s tough to maintain sanity and democracy at the same time in an online ecosystem, but it’s still amusing to read about how this guy cracked open the malicious practices of some of the “sophisticated” diggers using good old “talking”

Alpha has this news about Third Point LLC’s outspoken and brash CEO Daniel Loeb writting a letter to his investors indicating it’s losses resulting from a sharp reversal in energy and financial stocks in the first three weeks of July have wiped out all profits made in the quarter.
To add to the firms woes, the SEC has apparently begun a formal investigation into Third Point’s communications with portfolio managers at other hedge funds.
Wall Street’s poison pen lived up to his reputation as he wrote “As a friend said to me, ‘Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.’” in the letter.

Loeb was listed in the “Bad Boys – The Meanest” category in this 2007 New York Magazine special feature ranking some of the best hedge-fund managers.