We're hearing that approximately 90 Tesla employees, or 90% of the Detroit office, was simply let go, and the remaining employees have to make their way to the San Carlos headquarters with no moving costs covered, no increase in salary and no help getting rid of their old homes. Fortunately, the real estate market in Detroit is red-hot, and the cost of living is about the same in San Carlos.... right?

The relevant section from the Tesla pink slip blog-post-of-death below:

There will also be some headcount reduction due to consolidation of operations. In anticipation of moving vehicle engineering to our new HQ in San Carlos, we are ramping down and will close our Rochester Hills office near Detroit. Good communication, tightly knit engineering and a common company culture are of paramount importance as Tesla grows.

That's right folks, "good communication" is key.

[Photo: James Nielsen/Getty Images]

A company called IMMI is perfecting software that goes in your cell phone and catches every snippet of audio you're exposed to, then automatically determines which ads you heard. And more!

To get a handle on the effectiveness of a given ad, IMMI's data can show, for example, when a panel member is exposed to a movie trailer on TV and whether that same consumer later goes to see the movie. Similarly, IMMI data can show if a panelist watching a promo for a TV program will later watch the show, either on TV or online. IMMI thinks it can expand that idea from films and TV shows to consumer products like shampoo or toothpaste. It is testing its technology with a national grocery store chain.

"We follow the same person from end to end," says Tom Zito, IMMI's chief executive.

I would recommend that IMMI start working on developing a cute, non-threatening mascot right now, because they are frankly talking about some scary shit. People volunteer to carry these phones for just $50 a month. [Obligatory ominous Minority Report reference here].

1. Because money is overrated!
We know this. We know it so well. And just to prove it we pay billions of dollars to science to prove it to us, year after year after year. And yet. As a society we totally live and die (no not really, we just act like we live and die!) by the tiny nuances of the trajectory of the aggregate of all the flows of all that money, as if it Really Totally Matters. We do this, obviously, because we're obsessed with making comparisons — am I at least doing as well as last year? Am I really smarter than his last girlfriend? Shouldn't I buy a house now that all my friends are doing it? — because it is just so much easier than the Is This Bringing Me Joy question that seems so totally sappy and sentimental we find it to be a hilarious joke when some little Third World country like Bhutan pragmatically invents a Gross National Happiness Index because no one actually thought of that first. But as the Times reminds us today:

Research has shown a significant level of depression, for example, among lottery winners. Other research has shown that above a household income of $50,000, there is little or no correlation between income and happiness.

2. Because It is already making New York more fun funner!
Nick wanted me to point out that the Great Depression was good or some industries — electrical engineering, film — that are maybe more worthwhile and exciting than the freaking stock market, but that brings me to a larger point. On Saturday I got this email from a friend who is a specialist on the New York Stock Exchange:

Last week was one of the most exciting weeks of my life. I think traders who had previously taken psychedelics had an unfair advantage.

Which kind of neatly underscores an important truth of this city: we are here for the "action." We are not here for the riches or because Guiliani made it so tidy and safe and Singaporean like our relatives always annoyingly assume when we so graciously leave it to endure family gatherings. I mean, if our relatives ever visited us they would know that New York is still fundamentally gross, and THAT'S SORT OF WHY WE'RE HERE. It is fucked up, but we chose to live among the tenements and the rats and all that once-proud peeling buckling infrastructure and all those whiffs of strangers' body odor because something about it makes us feel alive, even as the constant unquenchable thirst for that feeling also exposes the parts of our insides that we're slowly choking to death. But look! The New York Observer reports people are actually talking to strangers on the subway again. It's a paradox, and creative destruction, and possibly sector rotation — so the action leaves the Street for a little while, it will return in some gross new neighborhood the haters will instantly hate just as much. In the meantime, it's like that time all the power went out! Everyone loved that, remember? Oh and remember the subway strike? People loved that too. Shit, they probably secretly loved the cholera epidemic. Moral of story: we love that the economy is as fucked-up as we are. Like, there is a reason they call it "depression" duh!

3. Because Haters are tired of Hating!
I am not such a hater that I did not find it touching how right after 9/11 the Two Americas united to declare War On Haters. Petey Pablo penned that patriotic remix of his "North Carolina" song and Ja Rule and Kid Rock hung out together at some military base, etc. etc. Fast forward seven years, and the New York Times brings us the amusing news that Sarah Palin actually refers to her critics as "haters." This nonsense rapper concept reached all the way out to Alaska! Can we kill it now? It turns out yes! Because the very next week, following comparisons of the professional stock market haters known as shorts to terrorists and homicide bombers, the SEC actually outlawed short-selling! It outlawed hate. You would think this action would have gotten more hate from the shorts, but I have a theory: Haters really like nothing more that to be put out of their Hating-Ass Misery, at least for a few weeks. (Remember 9/11?) And this way they got to be proven right in the process, which is really all they care about. In any case, the Depression will sort of force Hateration Nation to acknowledge the symbiotic nature of its relationship with the Plutocrats, Jocks, Preachers, Republicans, Bloviating Public Intellectuals, Venture Capitalists and Self-Help Gurus that Make This Country "Great" and vice versa. Fittingly, this grudging detente was prophesied by the rapper Maino in the remix to his song Hi Hater.

4. Because everyone feels a lot better about capitalism now that Warren Buffet is the guy who will be making another few billion dollars profiting off its near-collapse!
If you are a capitalist, Warren Buffet was your hero when you were, like, eight. By the time you started your first private equity internship or whatever you were more like "Ah, Buffet, sentimental old sucker, making his money the hard way like that." Why? Because Warren Buffet made $62 billion over a six decade career investing in real companies over the Very Long Term, and that is just so unnecessary when you can make like at least a billion dollars in like a year just by taking a 20% fee on some money you got from rich folks plus a whole lot more money you got to borrow from banks at superlow rates, and throwing all that into some algorithm whereby the money makes a gazillion trades a day on some supercomplex financial instruments made up by bankers who got bored of collecting fees splitting up and re-packaging the weary pieces of the American economy and in any case, now you somehow make a half penny on the dollar every time some ratio goes below pi and none of it requires any entanglements with companies that actually produce stuff at all (thank god because that would be awkward.) Well, putting all that money through all that pointless action was not for Warren Buffet. Not because he worries about detachment from labor or any of that Marxist crap, but because it actually did just seem so pointless. (Buffet once said of gold: "It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.") Anyhow, so all this madness goes on for a few decades, generates a little "liquidity crisis" and suddenly Goldman Sachs has to become a real bank, which basically means the Smartest Richest Most Elite Motherfuckers on Wall Street are forced to sit acknowledge the existence of the Actual Economy. Put a wonkier way: Exchange Value, Meet Use Value! And Buffet sees that investors are worried about this, but he knows it's a good plan for the Long Term everyone laughed at him for caring about, so he plows $5 billion into it at supergood terms and suddenly everyone's like, "Damn, that Buffet, he really is pretty smart." And smart turns out not to be incompatible with good!

5. Because there is a reason they call it the "Dismal" Science!
At some point the economists of America got sick of no one listening to their earnest well-intentioned prescriptions for making globalization not so shitty, so they launched a hostile takeover of psychology and wrote ninety different books full of highly detailed "analyses" of why people do the things they do. The message of these books was generally: "Hey, Starbucks Is Smart And Other Crazy Ideas!" These books became bestsellers because in times like these there is a huge market for books that state true facts without being totally depressing or resorting to "self-help," which is to say they basically amounted to self-help, which is to say they kind of dumbed down the profession. Well, here is a true fact: last week chief Freakonomist Steve Levitt made the following admission on his own damn Freakonomics blog:

As an economist, I am supposed to have something intelligent to say about the current financial crisis. To be honest, however, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what this all means.

Anyway, the point is, the fiftieth anniversary of The Affluent Society came and went and no economist managed to write a more relevant book about the economy. Although The Affluent Society author John Kenneth Gabraith's son James is apparently trying to do that now!

Ok, sad thing first: a good Samaritan reset the password and tried to alert Sarah. But he also posted the new password, causing multiple people to try to log in at once, freezing the account for 24 hours. And now, the account has been deleted! Which is, as we said, maybe destruction of evidence? So for now this is, we think, all we'll get to see from this email account (if anyone finds evidence of saved emails, let us know.)

The full timeline of events, with corroborating evidence of the legitimacy of these screengrabs, is here. Here's why it all looks convincing:

• The emails to Ivy Frye, a Palin aide who's mentioned in the earlier email stories specifically wondering how best to hide her correspondence with the governor.
• The attached contact list (below) features an email address for husband Todd Palin that is legit. As well as an apparently genuine phone number for Bristol Palin and an address for Beth Leschper, Palin's deputy communications director.
• The email from Amy McCorkell, a known associate of Palin's from Wasilla who might have the governor's personal email address.
• Emails to and from Lt Governor Sean Parnell about a local radio talk host.
• Calls to the phone number listed for Bristol Palin apparently go to her voicemail.
• The public profile for the gov.palin address dates its last update to April of this year—well before she became McCain's running mate. So if it's a hoax, it's a hoax that began long before anyone outside of Alaska cared about Palin.
• We haven't seen these family photos before. Have we?
• The previously accessible public profiles for gov.sarah@yahoo and gov.palin@yahoo were both deleted at the same time.

Here are the screenshots of the emails saved before the account went dark, along with the contact list. It's newsworthy and we will not be taking it down!

CONTACT LIST

Beth Leschper (Beth Leschper SOA) [Edit]
beth.leschper@alaska.gov
Blanche Kallstrom (Blanche) [Edit]
mbkrdk@starband.net
Bristol Palin (Bristol) [Edit]
bristol_palin@hotmail.com
Chuck Heath (Chuck) [Edit]
chckheath@yahoo.com
fek9wnr@yahoo.com (Todd) [Edit]
fek9wnr@yahoo.com
ftb907@yahoo.com (Frank) [Edit]
ftb907@yahoo.com
Heather Bruce (Heather) [Edit]
khbruce@gci.net
ivy.frye@alaska.gov (Ivy SOA) [Edit]
ivy.frye@alaska.gov
ivyfrye@yahoo.com (Ivy Personal) [Edit]
ivyfrye@yahoo.com
Judy Patrick (Judy Patrick) [Edit]
jpphoto@mtaonline.net
kris.perry@alaska.gov (Kris Perry SOA) [Edit]
kris.perry@alaska.gov
krisandclark@yahoo.com (Kris Personal) [Edit]
krisandclark@yahoo.com
paymckhea@yahoo.com (Molly) [Edit]
paymckhea@yahoo.com
Roseanne Hughes (Roseanne Hughes SOA) [Edit]
roseanne.hughes@alaska.gov
Sally Heath (Mom) [Edit]
salheath@mtaonline.net
Sean Parnell (Sean Personal) [Edit]
sparnell@alaska.com
Sharon Leighow (Sharon SOA) [Edit]
sharon.leighow@alaska.gov
Sleighow@aol.com (Sharon Leighow Personal) [Edit]
Sleighow@aol.com
Track Palin (Track) [Edit]
track_44@hotmail.com

UPDATE:

ARLINGTON, VA — Today, McCain-Palin 2008 Campaign Manager Rick Davis issued the following statement concerning reports about Governor Palin's email and an invasion of privacy:
"This is a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment."

Point one: legitimacy confirmed! Point two: I guess we'll have to blow up the internet now?

Here's how it works:

Get up one morning, check your email on your iPhone. There's a message from PayPal confirming your 100 Euro purchase of services from Skype.

Whoa. I didn't order 100 Euros of anything. And in Euros?

You go to your computer, wake it out of its sleep, and an alert window from Skype is waiting for you.

"Your Skype password has been recently changed. You need to sign in again with your new password in order to use Skype. This is a security measure taken in order to prevent your Skype Account from being abused."

Hmm. I didn't change my password.

You try to login to Skype. You can't. You visit your PayPal account. 100 Euros has been taken out of it to purchase Skype services. You think fast, cancel the agreement you had between PayPal and Skype
to pay a $3 monthly fee for SkypeOut. You send a fraud report to PayPal. You send a fraud report to Skype.

In both reports you summarize the issue: someone hijacked your Skype account and stole 100 Euros (about $142) worth of Skype services from you. Nothing authorized by you at any point. It's called theft. All will be good, right?

PayPal takes four days to make a determination.

Quote: "A PayPal claims specialist has reviewed the case and determined that the claim does not meet the criteria for unauthorized use, so the case is now closed."

Are you kidding? According the the "specialists", theft is not unauthorized use. Skype gets to keep its 100 Euros that was stolen from you.

You think, "I'll just appeal this..where's the 'appeal' link?" You find there is none. You have to write PayPal a letter. Yes, a letter. To Omaha, Nebraska. A letter asking for the documentation they used to make the determination. An Internet company insists you write them a letter.

OK, surely Skype will help out. That is, if they ever write back. They take nearly two weeks to get around to assigning a human to the case.

Skype writes back in 10 days. "Patrick P. is on the case. Patrick says: "In your case it appears that someone has succeeded in fraudulently obtaining your PayPal account and purchasing credit."

You think, "great, somebody understands."

Patrick goes on:

"First, you are not liable for this transaction in any way. "

Sweet. You'll just appeal to Skype and... Wait. You read further.

"We suggest that you submit a Transaction Dispute via Paypal.com."

Great. Back to square one.

Patrick sends another email a couple of days later. It's about that money that was stolen from you to buy services from them that you didn't authorize.

"Skype can not refund the money you might have lost due to this incident. Every user has to take care of his/her security systems on private computers."

"Money you might have lost?" You did lose money...and by the way, it's your fault, loser.

(Photo by Joi)

A lot of people can’t wait to try [the plug-in Prius], so it’s understandable that one of our dealers created some confusion recently by taking deposits on future Prius plug-in hybrids.

Magnussen’s Toyota in Palo Alto, California was doing what we’ve always encouraged our dealers to do...to listen carefully to their customers and try to meet their needs. Being so close to Silicon Valley, the dealership was getting lots of requests from customers who wanted to buy a plug-in Prius. And since the dealership had confidence Toyota would eventually deliver a great vehicle, they thought it would be a good idea to take deposits and make customers happy.

So, while we applaud Magnuessen’s excitement about our future Prius plug-in, we want to be clear that we have not announced a timetable for retail sales.

Jalopnik Snap Judgment: Since one or two of us have done tours of duty in the hallowed halls of America's car dealerships, we know that cash money is God there. Faced with customers demanding something that didn't exist, but that the dealer knew would most likely soon exist, Magnussen's did what any money-grubbing auto retailer would have done: they charged folks to get on "the list." Shady? Yeah. Surprising? Not in the least. It's common knowledge that a customer who has left a deposit on something, no matter how small, is much more likely to return to complete the transaction — any transaction. The simple rule of thumb to follow is "don't put a deposit on something that doesn't yet exist." Even...or especially...at a car dealership. Incidentally, Magnussen's also agreed to return all customer deposits for plug-in Priuses, but we wonder how much thumb-twisting on Toyota's part was involved before they agreed to relinquish their precious cash. [Toyota Open Road Blog]

More precisely, Wal-Mart family money. Madrone Capital Partners, which manages venture-capital investments for the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, led Cuil's most recent $25 million financing round in April. Madrone's Greg Penner, who married Carrie Walton, Sam Walton's granddaughter, is on Cuil's board. And on Wal-Mart's.

Penner, who lives in Atherton, has ensconced himself in Silicon Valley society, despite an atypical background for the liberal Bay Area: His parents are evangelical sex therapists who believe in counseling gays into heterosexuality. He is a protege of Stanford Business School's Jack McDonald, and served as an executive at Walmart.com, a short-lived dotcom spinoff of Wal-Mart backed by Accel Partners and later folded back into the retailing giant.

Most significantly, he's also a board member of Baidu, a Chinese search engine which is eating Google's lunch in that country. The Waltons' investment in Cuil could be written off as simply an attempt to make money. But with Penner involved in two prominent Google's rivals, it's hard not to wonder if the Bentonville gang isn't hoping to do more than just add to its pile.

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Jezebel
Valleywag
Consumerist
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From Vanity Fair: View the Blogopticon and Read the Article.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that I wouldn't have been able to get any of these jobs out of college. I didn't finish with a 3.8, do a year of service in Nicaragua or file any patents during my sophomore year. But the worst part of this list is the fact that the people taking these jobs did. To paraphrase Dan Lyons, there's something distinctly evil about the way Google and the other companies listed below hoard the world's best and brightest and put them to work on creating more efficient text ads or, worse, tasking them with taking phone calls from angry customers.

Follow the link for each job to see a picture of their locations, a list of key responsibilities, first hand accounts of why each job is so bad and how much they pay.

• Tech's ten worst entry-level jobs
• Online sales and operations account manager, Google
• Support engineer, Washington-Seattle, Amazon.com
• Content Acquisition Intern, IODA
• Customer support specialist, Fox Interactive, MySpace division
• Database administrator (temporary), Google, contracted through WorkforceLogic
• Support professional, product: Windows, Microsoft
• Executive admin to Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore
• Analyst, user operations, Facebook
• Operations finance, analyst intern, Yahoo
• Part-time guide, Mahalo

(Top photo by star5112)

After the first guy jumped into his jeans, I realized what the whole video would be: a shot-for-shot rehash of a viral ad for Ray-Ban. The two ads are so similar that the creators (unless they're phenomenally short-sighted) clearly wanted to be discovered. First, let's look at the two ads:

Levi's, 5 May 2008: Guys do backflips, swinging jumps, and other stunts and land in their pants.

Ray-Ban, 6 May 2007: A guy catches sunglasses on his face in increasingly impossible maneuvers: Off a house, off a bridge, in a moving car.

Similarities
The stories are the same: A simple trick to establish what we're watching. Then increasingly elaborate iterations, culminating in a stunt so dramatic that it requires a slow-motion replay.

The music is the same: A cool innocuous background beat loosely timed to the action.

The editing is the same: Quick pacing. Slick with dramatic angles, but calculatedly rugged with lingering shots on the guys congratulating each other.

The packaging is the same: Ray-Ban's ad was posted by "neverhidefilms," a YouTube user with no previous videos. The new Levi's ad comes from "unbuttonedfilms," another first-time user. The new ad is one day shy of coming a year after the old ad. The titles are analagous: "Guy catches glasses with face" versus "Guys backflip into jeans." No product is mentioned.

Background
While Ray-Ban's ad was launched anonymously, the creative team behind it soon came forward. Josh Warner, president of The Feed Company, explained how he promoted this viral video to Adweek. The team posted more videos, now more obviously advertising Ray-Ban though still without using a traditional ad format, to the YouTube account that hosted the original viral ad.

Extra evidence
Note the line at 0:36 of the Levi's ad: "At least there's no zipper." That's what clinched it for me: Levi's is the only jeans brand to actively advertise its zipperless buttoned jeans. The user name "unbuttonedfilms" corroborates this.

How well it's worked
Blogs like Laughing Squid and Neatorama posted the video with no guess about the creators (though political blog Hot Air guessed this might be a Levi's ad). Even G4TV's Attack Of The Show discussed the ad, crediting it to an unnamed group of gymnasts and making no mention of Levi's.

And of course even this debunking is giving them publicity. (Not that I mind as long as I'm getting some too.)

My Theory
Obviously the new ad has the same goals as the old: to market a product without actually naming it, by appealing to the public's love of Internet stunt videos. Most likely, The Feed Company made the new Levi's ad. If any other agency was ripping them off, they wouldn't release the ad a year later with the exact same techniques. And in a few days, The Feed Company will come out, because who can really deny themselves another round of publicity?

Hi [Redacted], We sincerely apologize for this issue and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I recommend disabling fan photos through the Photos application editing interface by selecting "Do not allow fans to add photos". This will hide any current fan photos from view. We'll let you know as soon as we have more information. Thanks for contacting Facebook, Jack Customer Operations Facebook

When I had submitted my license last fall, I originally was using the upload-form they provided within Facebook, but that upload form was defective, and customer support told me back then to directly email them. I did. A real person at Facebook had a scan of my license in their inbox since the upload-form system wasn't working properly the week they launched the service. A real person could've caused all this.

Because America is not part of Europe. You know what would happen if we joined the European Union? Let's "mark to market" our economic figures to Euros for a second. (This is not a particularly meaningful exercise, but when the Gross Domestic Product is passing for the ultimate barometer of economic health I feel entitled to dabble in the absurd.) In the same amount of time that our economy cracked the $14 trillion mark, it would have shrunk 10% to 9 trillion Euros. In other words, no one would be lining up to buy cheap American exports. Of course, not that that much stuff is made in America anymore, which is why our 13% increase in exports of goods only contributed 0.2% in the way of GDP growth. But 0.2% can make all the difference!

Because The Rest Of The World Is Starving Thanks to land and pork barrel politics, agriculture remains a thriving (if small) sector of the American economy, and thanks to those same pork barrel politics we decided to drive food prices higher than oil prices would have already rendered them by paying people to use perfectly good corn to run cars or somesuch. Well, we make corn in America! And soybeans, and lots of other things that will make you fat if you aren't living on $3 a day in Nairobi.

Because The Rest Of The World Is Still Coming Here (And Fewer Than Ever Are Sending Their Money Home) America's growing population helps our GDP numbers sound good even when everything is actually getting harder for the average person! Between 2003 and 2007, for instance, our per-capita GDP grew less than 1.9% a year on average; Japan's per-capita GDP grew 2.1%! But thanks to our swelling immigrant class (and possibly, the celebrity baby boom) we have a growing populace that pumps that number up to nearly 3% annualized growth when we pool our funds together!

Because Everyone Is Sick, And Getting Sicker Health care a very important sector of the American economy — in fact, it's the only sector that's created any jobs since the nineties — and the costs — hey, every cost has a "benefit," hah! — just keep rising! That means lots of profits for all the companies working hard to remind us how bad heartburn can make you feel. And all the accountants and managers and lawyers responsible for figuring out how hospitals can add treatments and procedures to routine hospital stays so the insurance companies actually pay them; they are drivers of economic activity too! In this most recent quarter, medical care might have been the single brightest spot of a very unhappy chart: costs rose 12.1% over the quarter.

Because banks control all the money. The financial sector might seem like it's a mess right now, but they didn't get to represent more than a fifth of the whole GDP by being unclever. After getting the government to set up a special body giving them "immunity" from failure in the wake of that touching Jimmy Stewart movie, bankers quickly set about figuring out how to control all the money in the universe and take a big a cut possible each year in fear someone would figure out what they were up to and shut the whole thing down. Over time, of course, they realized that they controlled too much money for the government to ever shut any of it down, so at that point they just overpaid themselves because that's what they did last year, and because that's what everyone else was doing, and because if they didn't do it they were the greater fool. By 2005 the average finance worker earned 50% more than the comparable worker in any other field — and a lot of them made a lot more than that. But it's hard to blame them — absurdly profitable ideas like $3 ATM fees and selling repurposed mortgages to old people literally on a "fixed income" are all in a day's work for these guys.

Because "information processing equipment and software" sales increased 10.3%. And they haven't even released the new iPhone!

Because They Hate Us. These are serious times, Americans! We have a beautiful country to defend, and defense spending was perhaps the brightest spot on the latest GDP report of all. The Pentagon spent nearly $700 billion defending our freedoms last year, a 7.5% increase from last. And we haven't even started bombing Iran!

Image grabbed from Refacing Government Tender via Metafilter

BEA Press Release: Gross Domestic Product [Bureau of Economic Analysis]
Economists React: Recession "Still Likely" [WSJ]
Food Firms Profit As Demand Soars [WSJ]
Grossly Distorted Picture [Economist]
FDIC Seeks Hires, Braces For Trouble [WSJ]
Gross Domestic Product By Industry, Winners & Losers [Visualizing Economics]
What's Really Propping Up The Economy [BusinessWeek]
One Guy Who's Seen It All Doesn't Like What He Sees [WSJ]

Why, precisely, is Craigslist trying to dilute eBay's stake? Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka speculates that Craigslist is looking for an outside investor. Nonsense; as Kafka himself points out, Craigslist doesn't need the money. Far more likely: Newmark and Buckmaster are angling to issue more shares to themselves so they don't have to share as much of the company's profits with eBay.

Here's Foley's description:

Albany consists of 2007 version of Office Home and Student; Office Live Workspace, Microsoft's collaboration-service complement to Office; Windows Live OneCare, Microsoft's consumer security/backup service; and three Windows Live services — Live Mail, Live messenger and Photo Gallery. The bundle will be delivered via a single installer. When Microsoft releases new versions of any of these software or service components, Albany users will get the latest versions pushed to them automatically for as long as they are paying for the Albany subscription.

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• Office-productivity software that can be had for $119 at Amazon.com, but is likely already installed on a user's computer.
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• A "collaboration" service most home users will have no need for
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• Windows Live OneCare, a PC-security and maintenance service which Microsoft already sells as a subscription
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• Three Web services Microsoft already offers for free
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Microsoft hasn't specified what they'll charge, but lets assume they don't plan to lose money. A discounted copy of Office runs $119; OneCare costs $49.95 a year. Office Live Workspace is in beta, so Microsoft's not charging yet. Still, let's call it $15 a month. I can't see consumers paying that much for a package they mostly already have.

In "Albany," Microsoft has picked a perfect codename: a byword for bureaucratic waste, dysfunction, and corruption. As in New York's capital, someone needs to clean house. And as in New York's capital, it's not going to happen.

In the heady era of dotcom fanaticism, Dov Charney founded the quintessential Old Economy company.

American Apparel is a mass manufacturer. The dawn of mass manufacturing is what enabled the rise of the working class, but by the 1980s America had decided manufacturing, what with its unions and their irksome habit of reminding the market that they are human too, was something less idealistic countries should deal with, and most factories in America had closed. This would not have been of concern to Dov Charney, a Tufts dropout reared in Montreal, had he not been reared North America's Protestant talent for investing in inanimate objects an extraordinary degree of esteem, as in, the T-shirt: Rebellion.

By the 1990s that talent, the knack for Want Creation, for appealing to the desire of people to buy things they don't need in some hope of proving they Are Someone, had begun to eclipse all other talents/knacks involved in propelling the modern American economy. The result was that no one was paying attention to how their T-shirts were made anymore. No one was paying attention because T-shirts were all being made, for pennies on the benjamin, 12,000 miles away. Llike Americans themselves the shirts had become bigger, thicker, rougher, coarser. Dov hated the T-shirts presently on the market. He did not find them sexy. After wading through a few different layers of detachment from labor, Dov found a factory in China to manufacture T-shirts to his liking, but nothing they sent approached his liking, in part because the factory sewing the T-shirts often don't communicate with the factories weaving the bolts of knit cotton. Perhaps the Chinese could simply not intuitively understand the nuances of How Dov Charney Felt A T-shirt Ought to Look; perhaps they simply did not care to, either way Dov decided something radical needed to be done.

Dov Charney found his efforts lionized in a positive, and weirdly prescient New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell. It was the first of many more media stories that would make mention of Dov's "boner."

He opened a factory in the Los Angeles garment district. He decided his factory would weave its own textiles in addition to the more common business of sewing shirts. Dov's command over the intricacies of needle-spacing and fabric finishing and the various manufacturing quirks that represent his "artisan's sensibility" was well-documented in a 2000 Malcolm Gladwell piece in the New Yorker.

2000 was the era of the "New Economy," Gladwell chose to profile American Apparel because, like Dov and most Candians, he likes to think of himself as a rebellious thinker. Don't we all? Dov had started an "Old Economy" company.

We live in the age of the entrepreneur, who responds rationally to global pressures and customer demands in order to maximize profit. To the extent that we still talk of Gloversville—and the glove-making business there has long since faded away—we talk of it as a place that people need to leave behind. There was Lucius N. Littauer, for example, who, having made his fortune with Littauer Brothers Glove Co., in downtown Gloversville, went on to Congress, became a confidant of Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and then put up the money for what is now the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University. There was Samuel Goldwyn, the motion-picture magnate, who began his career as a cutter with Gloversville's Elite Glove Co. In 1912, he jumped into the movie business. He went to Hollywood. He rode horses and learned to play tennis and croquet. Like so many immigrant Jews in the movie industry, he enacted through his films a very public process of assimilation. This is the oldest of American stories: the heroic young man who leaves the small town to play on the big stage—who wants to be an entrepreneur, not an artisan. But the truth is that we always get the story wrong. It isn't that Littauer and Goldwyn left Gloversville to find the real culture, because the real culture comes from Gloversville, too; places like Washington and Hollywood persist and renew themselves only because Littauers and Goldwyns arrive from time to time, bringing with them a little piece of the real thing.

Within a few years American Apparel was the largest apparel factory in the country. The biggest surprise was probably that he didn't have to price the T-shirts any differently. Americans were so used to paying way too much money for T-shirts — because of logos or brand names or symbolism or sheer price insensitivity — the ones made by $12-an-hour tailors working under strict California labor laws did not have to cost bulk customers more than $3 or $4, and all the rock bands and small fashion labels could attach their symbolism to Dov Charney's softer, better-fitting T-shirts with a comfortable markup.

The founding innovator got bored with producing supply and fascinated by producing demand.
Somewhere along the line I think Dov got greedy and/or envious of his customers and friends in the industry, the rock bands and indie fashion labels. He wanted to be a brand as well, to create demand and desire and iconic symbolism. He wanted his iconoclasm and rebelliousness to be noticed. So he began opening retail across the country, manufacturing trendier items and masturbated in front of a magazine reporter. He staffed his new retail business with the cutest youngest coolest kids, kids immersed as he had been in the nuances of the ephemera and nothingness — the drape of a shirt, the taper of a pair of jeans, the razor-cut arrangement of the tendrils — that had come to represent the "rebellious" school of American coolness. To expedite his staffing choices he even retained the services of a friendly coke dealer in the Lower East Side. If there is a Cliff's notes guide to Dov Charney's interpretation of that which was truly cool, it was doing coke on the Lower East Side.

Dov also made his own lifestyle and practice of taking employee concubines a centerpiece of his marketing strategies, keeping apartments throughout the country for the wild parties that doubled as photo shoots for company ads, and to house the employees who best represented the company image. The possibility of getting evicted from one of the apartments at any time kept favored employees' standards in line — not that anyone knew what the standards were. There was no handbook. It was all visceral.

The company grew way too fast, driven by momentum and the geometric growth prospects of the demand business.

Charney opened 187 stores in the space of four years. The process was almost comically hurried, sloppy, and exacerbated by the presence of all the cokeheads and the employee turnover that resulted from coke, low wages and a severe detachment from anything that felt like labor resulting from the fact that work was intended to serve as an extension of a "lifestyle," which left hours upon hours open for pointless alliances and rivalries to form. He got sued for sexual harrassment a few times, a consequence of having sex in the office and, in the absence of rigorous quantifiable achievement standards, often favoring employees he had fucked, was fucking, had some complex about fucking.

At the height of the real estate bubble Dov picked his real estate in the riskiest, most foolhardy fashion, spending millions to refurbish high-profile urban locations that were neither outfitted to handle retail stores nor generally owned by landlords that might give him a good deal on a leases elsewhere.

For driving desire and demand to the company's wares the cool kids who staffed the stores and starred in Dov's gigantic billboards were just as important to the company's sales as the factory workers themselves, but they were not remunerated as such, generally because businesses find it easier to deal with young unskilled recreational drug using hipsters as a consumer than as a human resource. The low wages translated to high rates of shoplifting and employee theft. The first fellow employee I ever liked got fired for stealing from the till.

After trying to make up for its sloppiness with momentum, the company encountered its cash flow problems with a combination of sloppy accounting standards and the perception of momentum. It was tough on the poor Chief Financial Officer!

In early 2005, chief financial officer Mark Schlein died unexpectedly of heart failure, and Mr. Charney and others say a replacement wasn't found for a year. An interim CFO was later hired, though Mr. Charney only remembers that "he had gray hair and quit after a week." Mr. Charney delegated bookkeeping to a few younger staff members and continued to open stores.

Problems developed. According to a chronology of the company's financial history provided by American Apparel executives to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Bank, a Minneapolis-based bank that was backing American Apparel's growth, urged Mr. Charney to secure additional financing amid the company's rapid store openings.

Which is when the real financial wizardry came in.
Adrian found a guy named Jonathan Ledecky who had just pulled off something interesting: he'd gotten a bunch of investors to pretty much write him a $200 million blank check he then took public on the American Stock Exchange, so speculators could trade his shares on its shares before he even did anything with the money. Luckily for Dov, Ledecky decided to buy American Apparel, thinking it might be a good fit for the types of big financial funds that need to buy into nebulous concepts like "Corporate Social Responsibility," which American Apparel, by treating its predominantly Mexican base of factory workers so well, still, despite everything, very much espoused. Thus American Apparel became a publicly traded company using the unaudited 30%-inflated earnings statements someone had been pulling out of their asses.

And Ledecky saved the day!
Dov Charney was now worth more than $580 million! He had to hire a new CFO, however. The new CFO found that American Apparel had "no sense of American accounting standards." Join the club right?

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dov referred to the CFO as a "loser."

Earlier: American Apparel Is All It's Coked Up To Be
Why Retail Breeds Sexual Harrassment
Related: Living On The Edge At American Apparel [Business Week]

Avoid debt at all costs. If anything, you'll want to save up as much money as you can, in case you have to live off your savings. Thanks to recent changes in bankruptcy law, it's much harder than before for an individual to declare bankruptcy. So if you're stuck in debt with little or no income, you'll still be working for the banks. And as this guy points out, the banks will be hurting, so the moment you miss a payment, they'll be quick to try and liquidate your collateral for whatever they can get.

Get out of your mortgage before the housing market collapses any further. As this site says, if you paid $300,000 for your house and it sells for $200,000, you could end up not owning your house and owing the bank $100,000.

Buy some cheap land in a rural area. Build a house, or just get a used RV. Either way, make sure you own your home free and clear, so you can live rent-free and mortgage-free for as long as you need to.

Go off the grid. Get your own power generator — or, better yet, some of those solar helium balloons. Or some wind turbines. Don't be dependent on the power company to keep all your necessities running.

Cultivate some skills that will always be in demand. Become a decent electrician, handy-person, carpenter or cook. There may not be much need for someone who understands content management systems during a total economic shutdown, but someone who can build a house will always have a place to crash.

Offshore yourself. As the dollar gets weaker and weaker, U.S. white-collar service workers will be the cheap overseas employees for Europeans and Asians, predicts Robert Scoble in his roundup of how to recession-proof yourself. So as long as someone, somewhere, is still making use of those white-collar service skills (like programming, or customer support) you may be able to offer yourself to overseas companies as a cheaper alternative.

Invest in the ultimate counter-cyclicals. Some industries will always be in growth mode — like any business that caters to the rapidly growing senior population. Also, "sin and comfort" industries, like cigarettes, gambling and booze, do well during downturns and will probably make bank this time around as well. (Too bad booze and cigs are generally part of huge diversified conglomerates these days.) Also, movie companies are quietly bragging that the movie industry had one of its biggest growth spurts ever in the 1930s, as people craved escapism.

Invest in some Euros, or some other currency that's not the dollar. Chances are the U.S. dollar will keep getting weaker, so you'll be better off holding a more stable currency. You could also try investing in gold or silver, but those commodities are already skyrocketing in value.

Have some liquid funds on hand. MSN Money suggests reducing your contributions to your retirement plan or 401(k) (if you have one) so you can put more money into your savings instead. And remember, the banks are still FDIC insured, so your savings are probably safe — but other investments have no such guarantee.

or take part in a community garden in your neighborhood. Try to position yourself so you can get as much of your diet as possible from food you've grown yourself, instead of being hooked on sushi.

Learn to hunt. These fine people claim that hungry people are already hunting small animals in the parks of San Francisco, and during the 1930s deer and squirrels were hunted almost to extinction. Learn how to trap, kill, prepare and eat a squirrel now, so you'll be ahead of the curve.

Stockpile medications. Your biggest problem, in an economic meltdown, could be getting health care. If you're dependent on prescription meds, try to get some extra pills now so you'll have some on hand later. Just make sure you're always taking the oldest meds you have, to minimize the risk of taking expired pills, these folks advise.

And hey, here's a meeting coming up in New York on how to "prepare and profit" from the next Depression. If any of our readers are in NYC, please please go to the meeting and tell us what they said, so we can learn how to turn abject economic misery into pure lovely gravy.