Texas Calculatem and Poker Office Blog

I just took the test on Political Compass to see how much of an evil right-winger I am. The results on the left/right axis baffle me somewhat.

I'm only 0.25 to the right (very small) and would have thought I should be much further. This is very worrying to a young capitalist. Though some of the questions could be a little weighted. For example, one question was:

"If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations."

To which I checked "disagree" (options are strongly disagree, disagree, agree and strongly agree). I guess the right wing answers would be agree, or disagree, but corporations obviously should not be allowed to destroy the planet and wipe out the human race.

Some of the other questions seemed to be inciteful rather than anything else. For example;

"It is regrettable that many personal fortunes are made by people who simply manipulate money and contribute nothing to their society." (statement A)

The statement is there to lambast the banks, who make a lot of cash from lending money, overdraft fees and many other services.

a - Banks need to pay their staff, and compensate their shareholders for the risk premium associated with lending money. If they were not allowed to be compensated then it would be illogical for them to offer loans.

b - People are always complaining about bank charges. But surely withdrawing cash that isn't theirs is morally equivalent to theft?

On the authoritarian/libertarian scale I was -1.59. Which means I'm more concerned with the individual than the state. This is wouldn't have been the case for me a few years ago, but more recent things have changed me somewhat.

First off, after being pretty much number one in every class (that mattered) up until University, I suddenly found everything a bit tough and almost dropped out a few times. I survived until the third and final year, and arrived at the Milk Round with a rather desperate desire to be over-and-done with education. However, many employers were only interested in taking on 2:1 candidates. At the time I was borderline 2:2/2:1, and felt that these blanket classifications were a little unfair as my nasty Mathematics degree was much tougher than many other courses, such as Business Studies (lots of struggling Mathematicians bumped up their grades by taking Accounting and Business Studies courses). This experience led me to question the wisdom of the "challenge" mentality, where students are encouraged to "challenge" themselves, taking tough courses to stimulate their tough minds.

During this period, my flat mate Sarah dragged me along to a UBS Warburg presentation. I'd had no dinner and she told me there'd be free food there. So I was in. At the presentation I discovered that graduates get a tasty £38k starting salary.

However, they also wanted 2:1 candidates, and that put me at a significant disadvantage to those on less rigorous courses. While I failed in my UBS application (I only got through to the final round and fucked up a presentation), I learned from the process that in order to get a job one needs to be able to lie and talk bullshit (as well as getting a degree).

With this in mind I attended a load of events aimed at helping students bullshit their way into the city. Eventually, I managed to brush up my bullshitting and lying skills, and convinced another firm to take me on.

Upon arrival in they city, it turned out that the employer didn't even care about what degrees we'd got. Some of the other graduates even had third class degrees, so I don't know why I'd bothered to put in the work to scrape a 2:1. As well as not requiring a good degree, a small but not insignificant minority of my fellow graduates, were actually pretty stupid. This yet again showed that we'd all been most cruely mislead by the establishment. Bullshit was what got us all in.

After about two days at the big prestigeous firm, I realised that I'd been misplaced and was in the wrong department. Instead of being in IT, where we were all second class citizens, I belonged in the Front Office, making cash and oggling the super model trading assistants. Alas their HR staff were well versed in graduate bullshit and would not move me. So bad luck had landed me in a most unenviable position. Having being told that I'd have a great, interesting and rewarding career ahead of me, I found myself in a depressing world surrounded by brown tongue ass lickers. Not good. I did not spend 16 years of my life being a geek, only to become a cretinous ass licker. And seeing as the internal HR staff were unwilling to assist, I was forced to look elsewhere.

As luck would have it, I attended a party, where I met an interesting chap who was an entrepreneur and fellow geek. This guy had had enough of the big firms, and was running a small software firm, offering a web-based solution for simulating a windows-like environment in a browser. After learning about my Mathematical background, he suggested I try out prop trading, where I could use my Maths to make some cash.

Alas, I hadn't had the magical luck to land in such a useful team at the big bank. So I had to apply elsewhere. I eventually got lucky and got taken on by a small firm which offered a small salary, but good bonus if results were delivered. With shit in my pants, I made the move, but had a really tough first year, and narrowly missed being made redundant.

However, last year I got lucky due to increased volatility in crude oil. And this year I've got lucky due to spotting some small but persistant abherations in the German Bond markets. So due to my lucky breaks, I'm doing a lot better than if I'd remained a second class IT coffee monkey.

Hmmm... I don't seem to have made my point. And now I'm tired. Oh well. I'm off to bed now. Good luck at the tables.