staticvars

A better use of free time

2010-03-26T09:34:00.000-04:00

As if on cue, the WSJ has a good article on kids and what they should be doing.with their cellphones- and spending more time in school could be a good idea for some. Of particular interest is in the technological advances that are going to make the time in school more useful- and the instruction more individualized.

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Over the long run, technology holds much potential to boost student learning time in flexible ways and at modest cost. We can stipulate that kids are addicted to it; that "virtual" instruction can happen at very nearly any time or place; and that well-designed distance-learning programs (and suitable hardware) enable greater individualization of learning, with each child moving at his/her own pace, diving deeper when warranted, and going back over things they didn't quite understand the first time. This already happens in the best online schools, of which the U.S. already has several dozen, often operating statewide, such as the Florida Virtual School and Ohio Virtual Academy.

It also happens in "hybrids" that make astute and economical use of computer-delivered instruction, testing and such within brick-and-mortar schools that also have flesh-and-blood teachers. Rocketship Education, a small but growing network of elementary charter schools in San Jose, Calif., is such a creation, skillfully blending online lessons, practice and testing with a small but terrific team of instructors.

With continuing advances in hardware and software, the boundaries among "learning in school," "learning in other settings" and "learning on your own" will gradually disappear, with potent implications for time spent learning, which need no longer be confined to the classroom hours stipulated in the teachers' union (or custodians' union) contract or the 180-day year prescribed in state law (and, in some jurisdictions, not allowed to start before Labor Day).

Nutter not a Nutter

2010-03-25T09:11:00.000-04:00

Mobs Are Born as Word Grows by Text Message

Roaming gangs of kids beating up people in streets. What is the response the NY Times chooses to include? Adults that want more money for their own groups, Luddite fear of text messaging, and then at the very end some information that belies the shocking headline.

"“We definitely need more jobs for kids, we need more summer jobs for kids, we need more after-school programming, and we need more parent support,” said Shelly Yanoff, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, a children’s advocacy group in Philadelphia."
Well, at least she did say they need more parent support. Maybe they need to be studying?

"Clay Yeager, a juvenile justice consultant and former director of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Pennsylvania, said he believed the flash mobs were partly a result of a decline in state money for youth violence prevention programs."
Sure...

And then some sense from the mayor:
“I don’t think people should be finding excuses for inappropriate behavior,” Mr. Nutter said. “There is no racial component to stupid behavior, and parents should not be looking to the government to provide entertainment for their children.”
That's a perfect way of putting it. The list of things people are looking to the government to provide is a bit too long.

Violent crime in Philadelphia has dropped 12 percent and homicides have fallen 23 percent since 2008.
And how did that happen? Seems like a significant story! Maybe they should report on it.

Global Warming

2010-03-21T23:01:00.000-04:00

Read this bit on Global Warming today that made me laugh...

"The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850"

Wow, there's only a 1/16 chance of that happening randomly...now if the second hottest was 1990-1999, third hottest was 1980-1989, we might have a trend. "Fooled by Randomness"

In the same blog post... "'Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen,' he said of the satellite data record since 1979."

A little better odds of that being relevant... 1/30, but it still makes you wonder if anyone is capable of rational thought on this subject any more, or if everyone has just made up their minds and decided to shout at one another in perpetuity.

It is obvious that humans are having an effect on the environment. I've been to Beijing, Los Angeles and West Virginia and tried to breathe, but that's what we should be trying to fix, the real problems. For the "Skpetics" to claim that we are not having a significant effect is to deny reality. On the other hand, for the warmers to claim that all human progress is leading to warming also seems insane. I am also not convinced that warming is all bad, it seems like it would make more arable land in the world. Farm Canada. Also, the solutions bandied about are all so anti-progress and complex. The last chapter of Freakonomics is a much more likely path to success, if more serious problems develop.

Current positions (subject to continuous change):

Cap and Trade is an Enron-like scam, in fact, they had some guy named Paul Krugman pushing it. A Pigovian carbon tax is a better option.
The air sucks in a lot of places, and we should do we can to avoid that, as long as the costs do not exceed the benefits.
We should plant more plants, apparently they can turn carbon dioxide into oxygen
We may reach a point where there is a non-optimal number of people on Earth. I have a list of nominations for those we can eliminate, in case we have too many.
People who claim to know exactly what is going on do not.

Randian Confusion

2010-01-26T11:27:00.000-05:00

"Bernanke took over the Fed when Greenspan was considered a rock star, inhaling his libertarian, free-market, Ayn Rand inspired philosophy in great giant gulps."
- madhedgefundtrader

It always confuses me when I read about how "Randian", free-market, and libertarian Greenspan was. I don't recall anywhere that she commented extensively about how the Federal Reserve should let banks borrow money from the people at extraordinarily low rates to be used for the creation of proprietary speculative derivatives markets. In fact, most Rand followers seem to be in favor of the abolition of the Fed and allowing the market to set interest rates.

Everybody's Starry Eyed

2010-01-25T12:23:00.000-05:00

Still not sick of this. Next thing, we're touching.

Oh, oh, starry eyed
Hit, hit, hit, hit, hit me with lightning

Handle bars, and then I let go, let go for anyone
Take me in, and throw out my heart and get a new one

Next thing we're touching
You look at me it's like you hit me with lightning
Ahhh

Oh, everybody's starry-eyed
And everybody goes
Oh, everybody's starry-eyed
And my body goes
Whoa oh oh ah ah
Whoa oh oh ah ah
Whoa oh oh

So we burst into colors, colors and carousels,
Fall head first like paper planes in playground games

Next thing we're touching
You look at me it's like you hit me with lightning
Ahhhh

Oh, everybody's starry-eyed
And everybody goes
Oh, everybody's starry-eyed
And my body goes
Whoa oh oh ah ah
Whoa oh oh ah ah
Whoa oh oh

Next thing we're touching (x8)

Hit me with lightning

Oh, everybody's starry-eyed
And everybody goes
Oh, everybody's starry-eyed
And my body goes (x2)

whoa oh oh ah ah (x3)

Ideas on Econ- an evolving set

2010-01-25T00:24:00.000-05:00

Prices reflect opinions.

Buying assets from others with the intention of selling them later for more money is fundamentally weird. Buying a share of a company's profits makes sense- you are buying the dividend stream. Buying existing shares of a growth stock doesn't really benefit anyone- you are basically betting that you can predict better than the seller what the future value of the company should be. Buying new issuance, investing in ventures results is money that does something. So does selling bonds.

Think about buying a home as an investment (versus as a place to live). You buy an investment home for the income stream it can provide. Let's say you put $50k down on a $350k property. It has an annual payment to the bank of $24k and a rental value of $20k. Is this a good deal? If the price of the home does not rise at faster than 8% per year, it is not a good deal, on the face of it. However, you are leveraged at 6:1, so it only needs to rise 2% per year.

Policy results - low tax on dividends and bond interest? I guess we have that, but people still invest in the lottery.

Auto-didacts

2010-01-25T00:20:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I wonder if "school comparisons" are just nonsense. It's usually clear that they are comparisons of students, not of the quality of instruction, except perhaps to the degree that they influence each other. There is a certain percentage of kids out the there that are auto-didacts. They are going to learn the stuff just by being given a reasonable textbook and some time to practice. They make schools that have more kids that can do this look better than they are, and vice versa. Maybe that's what we should be teaching, teach people how to learn on their own.

Short sighted partisans

2010-01-24T23:52:00.000-05:00

Sadly, this blog post [nsfw] illustrates the short sighted, partisan thinking that drives our policy- on both sides of the aisle. The most popular health care plans are not transformational reforms, they are expansions of what we already have. They are mostly going to make the cost control problem worse, with a few notable exceptions. If we don't attack costs now, we won't even be able to save the risk protections we have in place today from the onslaught of baby boomer retirements. We obviously need to raise money as well, just to pay for what we already have, and completely removing the income tax exclusion on health insurance benefits would be a great place to start.

It's easy to attack the insurance companies and their ridiculous rescission clauses, but the problems we face are much deeper than that. The cost of insurance is driven by the cost of health care services. I'm not angry, but I differ from the implied view here that taxing people to pay the providers insane amounts (that we aren't even allowed to see before we have to incur them) is better than making the costs public and letting the consumer drive the system towards value. When you don't know if an MRI is costing us collectively $350 or $750, even if you had an incentive to choose the better value, you wouldn't have the information to make a good decision. Of course, the question as to whether Americans get too many MRIs is generally sidestepped.

We need to create the incentive for all of us to work together for lower cost care- and make the information available to enable that. I'll go to a different grocery store to save $2 on bananas. I'd definitely go to a different doctor if I could save $100 the next time one of the kids gets sick. It is that sort of behavior that drives prices down for most other things we buy, and it can work for health care too. The reason there is no low cost provider of health care, providing popular goods at low prices, is that there is no advantage to the insured consumer of trying to save money.

The generally naive response to this, which was my initial thought as well, is that we can just cap provider costs once we have a monosopony. Of course, the general response to that is that the providers stop offering options that are money losers, and you end up with something like the Canadian wait for your MRI. Markets, for whatever flaws they have, are good at one thing, setting prices. Without a market, determining a fair price is simply not possible.

Before we lose all of the energy and attention that we have currently focused on health, let's work together to find a way to make what we have cost less, so we can afford to get it to more people. We need to sell $1.7T of Treasuries this year to pay for our current deficit. Demand is likely to fall far short of that, meaning that the interest we pay on our debt will rise, along with other interest rates as government borrowing crowds out other lending. Reducing the cost of health care is a serious concern of every party, Tea, Democrat, Green, and Libertarian (have to leave out the Republicans responsible for the Medicare Part D monstrosity). Enacting benefits without caps will just put us in the Massachusetts situation, where they are struggling to figure out how to contain the rising costs. Looking at options like Health Savings Accounts, and high deductible plans give us better coverage on the big risks, and ways to cut spending on the most common costs. There are still hard choices out there- we'll probably need the "death panels" at some point since we outspend the rest of the world so much in the last six months of life.

There are hundreds of disruptive ideas out there to revolutionize health care in America so that everyone can afford some, let's set path out there to make it happen. I'd suggest reading "The Innovator's Prescription" if you want a good picture of how our policy is preventing the best ideas from coming forward.

Intensity

2010-01-04T23:47:00.000-05:00

The intensity is about to move up. It's not the time to procrastinate. Things are going to start flying at you faster and faster. It doesn't slow down for a long time, and when it does, that's not good. That's the end. This is the new speed. Get with it or get off the bus, because if we slow down we die. Just get on with it and make it happen. What's the worst case scenario? Once you accept that, there's not much left in your way. Get it done.

Happy to be Hardcore.

The NY Times Editorial Page Fails Logic

2010-01-03T22:18:00.000-05:00

Avoiding a Japanese Decade

"The green shoots are barely out of the ground and Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress are already demanding that the administration “do something” to cut the budget gap. We worry that the political drumbeat may be too hard to resist. In 1997, after three years of tepid growth, the Japanese government stopped its stimulus: it raised a consumption tax, ended a temporary income tax cut, increased social security premiums and nipped recovery in the bud."

What an inane counterfactual. The idea that it is the government's job to spend us out of a recession is conveniently popular with the government that gets to spend all of that money to increase their own influence, power, and status. We've been overstimulating the economy for 10 years, using deficit spending to pay for all sorts of nonsense like full price prescription drugs and wars against countries that couldn't attack us. Adding more stimulus is so unbelievably risky, it risks the very status of our currency and out ability to borrow money.

Of course, we have genius bankers making these decisions, guys that are so full of ego they think they can completely orchestrate the economy by moving the fed funds rate.

Stimulus doesn't work- we tried it from 2001-2009, and look what we got. On the other hand, government fiscal discipline will allow more money to go into the job creating sectors of the economy, not make work to siphon tax dollars.

You keep it all in.

2010-01-02T22:00:00.000-05:00

There are those things that you just can't tell, without committing yourself to a certain direction forever. People keep their thinking on subjects like politics and religion quiet, because people feel so strongly about those things that you might make an enemy of someone whom you enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship. But what if you feel that people shouldn't care so strongly about anything that they it would prevent them from getting along with someone that has opposing views? You keep it all in.

Public Option

2009-11-17T23:09:00.000-05:00

We already have a public option. It's called Medicaid. Why do we need another government program? To expand participation, simply index the income limit to the local cost of living.

Some kind of end point

2009-10-02T23:10:00.000-04:00

Failure to make the hard choices. Flat world. Ignorance.

Have to switch gears.

Another chance for me to be wrong...

2009-08-29T20:04:00.000-04:00

More on the inheritance of education ... I think there is still room for parental difference making...but it is hard to tell from the limited data we have that doesn't control for the adoption age. In any case, Mankiw's point is pretty clear from the graph- genes matter.

Mankiw misses one?

2009-08-28T22:59:00.000-04:00

"It would be interesting to see the above graph reproduced for adopted children only. I bet that the curve would be a lot flatter."

I think so too, but maybe not too much flatter. A lot of being a good teacher for your kids works, even if you have a couple of little troublemakers. You can still figure out how to teach them- if you're smart enough.

Is it time to drop your 529 plan? Yes.

2009-08-28T15:05:00.000-04:00

Fidelity asks if it's time to change your 529-plan portfolio. A 529 plan is the most over-managed money option out there. You are literally paying fees on fees. How about this- let me invest in something other than mutual funds. Until you do that, it is clear that this is just another free benefit for ... Fidelity.

Take an artificial sweetener pill

2009-07-28T10:15:00.000-04:00

I just read this WSJ article that said: "Obese people spent 42% more than people of normal weight on medical costs in 2006, a difference of $1,429, the study found. Prescription drugs accounted for much of the increase." I therefore applaud and encourage everyone's efforts to keep their weight down. Maybe we need more exercise for people...

When people compare health care between countries, the costs per American always seem high. Why is that? Here are some behavioral observations, in addition to the usually cited factors and our general chubbiness.

1) Americans demand more expensive, patented, brand name medicines. Many studies have shown that placebos are equally effective, for mental disorders in particular. Generics often get the job done for a fraction of the cost- often for less than the co-pay offered by my insurance.

2) Americans go to the doctor more. We visit the doctor more frequently than people in other countries, with the exception of Japan. A lot of this is because doctors control access to medicines we want (see #1). Moving more medicine to non-prescription status (like allergy medication) and making more medicine available via a visit to a nurse practitioner would save on the number of visits.

3) Third party payers- we buy medical services with no concern for their cost, because we don't directly pay for them. People spend more time trying to save 50c in the grocery store than they do saving $200 on an MRI, which should be a commodity service. We need a market where you get some benefit by choosing a less expensive treatment. This will incentivize providers to actually compete on price, like they do for LASIK and cosmetic surgery.

Music?

2009-07-22T21:39:00.000-04:00

Long time no post, but this track just was such a classlessic, it required action!!

Go Ke$ha.

Thanks...
http://www.muumuse.com/2009/07/keha-just-threw-up-in-my-closetand-im.html

Time

2009-06-01T09:57:00.000-04:00

Read an annoying Scott Adams piece this morning, where he makes a simple metaphysical linguistic error.

"Given that science can't find evidence for either God or time, it takes a leap of faith to assume either one exists. Therefore, anything in our daily life that depends on either God or time is built on a foundation of faith and not science."

The simple error is three separate applications of the word "exists". It is obvious that the normal meaning is to say whether something physically exists or not. My computer exists. My yacht does not exist. Time is obviously different from a physical thing. Time is not something that exists in the same way. "Time" is a term that describes an aspect of the way the physical things that do exist change. Therefore, no leap of faith exists in believing in time, because no one ever said time "exists" in the same way as my computer.

Adams furthers the equivocation by suggesting that belief in gods is of a similar nature. However, most people suggest that gods exist in some way that is different than describing a property of the arrangement of physical things. Neither term applies, so there must be some third meaning of exists, if it were to be true.

So what? A Wittgenstein-style diagnosis of equivocal statements, which attempt to fuzzy the use of terms is quite productive in exposing most philosophical blatherings as pure nonsense.

Typical Healthcare Nonsense

2009-05-26T11:58:00.000-04:00

http://www.cnbc.com/id/30940076

"As a freelancer, Tolliver could work from wherever she and take playground breaks with her daughters. But a $1,200 monthly healthcare bill ultimately led her to take a job where insurance only costs her $200 per month."

It does not only cost her $200 per month, her employer is including the extra $1000 in her total compensation. I pay about $1200 per month for family healthcare- and I am taxed on it as income, as the owner of an S Corporation. If there was a government healthcare system that was similarly efficient, she would be paying $1200 in taxes per month for the healthcare. There is no magic fairy dust available from rearranging who pays whom. And, offering luxurious benefits to more people only makes this problem worse.

My five point plan for saving money now still stands:
1) Introduce malpractice liability limits to get malpractice insurance costs under control. (Fight ABA)
2) Increase the number of doctors by increasing the number of medical schools. (Fight AMA)
3) Negotiate Medicare/Medicaid drug prices with manufacturers. (Fight PhRMA)
4) Providing sliding scale premiums based on patient efforts at healthiness (smoking, exercise, diet), like life insurance does.
5) Limit over-treatment.

The Education Bubble

2009-05-12T22:58:00.003-04:00

The education bubble is the number of people willing to borrow nearly $200,000 for a BA (or PhD) in Anthropology or whatever subject that exceeds the number of positions available that require that degree at that price. I read an article yesterday that mentioned a detective with a PhD in Anthropology. While it seems to be working for him, I just don't see it as economically efficient. If we look at the causes of this inefficiency and bubble, we see similar government incentives and payouts to those that drive up the price of houses and medical care.

At some point, maybe soon, all of that money being borrowed to pay for college education is going to be hard to get. If we keep expanding grants and loan programs supported by the taxpayer, the government will distort the market and prevent costs from dropping to match demand.

So how should the government spend its money? If public universities were run in a lean fashion, with a passion for getting rid of wasteful spending, without a distasteful focus on athletics and other distractions, they would provide more than adequate competition for private universities at fair prices. By focusing on subjects that are in demand in the economy, they could support the progress of humanity. By virtue of selective admissions, they could continue to avoid the fate of bland ineffectiveness that has befallen public primary and secondary education.

Low interest rates

2009-04-20T09:45:00.003-04:00

It seems that a fundamental problem with our economy is the Federal Reserve driving the interest rate environment.

The current interest rate on Bank of America savings accounts is... 0.20%. I just don't get it. If I am a bank, I make fundamentally make money by loaning people money at a rate higher than what I pay other people for giving it to me (and charging a few fees). But who's going to give me their money at 0.2%?

This rate is extraordinarily low, but interest rates have been really low for years now. The fiscal policy behind this was pushed by Greenspan. We know now it had some weird side effects, like most government fiscal policy, that have basically crushed our economy.

On 60 Minutes last night they had a piece about people "losing" half of their 401k balance. This would mean they were 100% in equities, with maybe some in corporate bonds. Why were they 100% in equities? Especially when they were approaching retirement age?

Maybe it had something to do with the low interest rates. Even with a CD yielding 2%, your money is growing slower than the inflation rate. So, people poured their money into equities, creating a bubble. To make it worse, a lot of prominent companies haven't been paying dividends lately, so they weren't even getting any income from these investments. Stock price to earnings ratios still seem high when you look at all of the companies where the investors don't see any of the earnings, and have to speculate by selling the stock to take advantage of the price.

Lower interest rates drove the price of houses up. Government backed loans drove the price of houses up. Since the price of houses were so high, the government started buying risky loans from banks so that people could keep buying houses.

So, low interest rates may help companies grow, but most large companies sell bonds, they don't borrow from banks like I do. Who exactly are these low interest rates helping? Is there someone out there who just loves bubbles?

The sad state of...

2009-04-15T10:51:00.000-04:00

It almost seems that people are starting to realize what's happened, but still aren't accepting it. The money's gone. We have a an unbelievably large debt. We're about to go into an inflationary period. So, the paradox of savings is upon us. We need to spend less, which means the GDP shrinks. Good- it was based on leveraged consumerism. I like to think of the shrinkage as a return to realism.

Orszag says the budget shrinks the deficit by half over 4 years, but John Stewart fails to call him on it, just pretends not to get it. That was painful to watch. All of the planned budgets have deficits, which means the total amount borrowed continues to increase. We're still making it worse.

I really didn't mind paying taxes this year. I wish I made more money so we could pay this debt down faster. But then, these guys want to spend more and more and more. Maybe everyone should pay taxes. Maybe they need to make more things to sell to China...that's where the money is.

529 Plans Suck

2009-03-23T22:49:00.000-04:00

From the first time I heard about College Savings 529 plans, they seemed awful. I heard these hucksters on the radio peddling them and they just sounded like a way for them to grab fees. Now people that invested in them are f-ed.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123758112211598861.html

Let's just say...any plan that doesn't let you put close to 100% in cash within a year of having to use it is criminal. Yet: "Last April, Oregon doubled the stock exposure in its "1-3 Years to College" portfolio to 40%. In 2004, an in-college student in Rhode Island's aggressive age-based portfolio would have had 40% stocks, 31% bonds and 29% cash. By 2008, the equivalent was 40% stocks (including real estate), 55% bonds and a measly 5% cash."

In these plans, the flexibility to do the right thing was taken away by bureaucrats. My plan is simple- give the kids their own money.

Why don't all government savings accounts include some kind of commodities choices?

Private Mortgage Insurance

2009-03-18T09:09:00.000-04:00

What the heck is private mortgage insurance for? Shouldn't that insulate banks from foreclosure losses? Every loan under with less than 20% should have been paying that... Did that many people really get piggy back loans to avoid it?

Quick portfolio update

2009-03-08T17:31:00.003-04:00

I think the market has dropped to the point that I can start looking for dividends again.

I don't know what's going on with TNP, but I might be getting a greater than 10% dividend off of that stock. They are trading well below book value, and I don't know why. I guess no one is going to be shipping oil? Come on, there is some inelasticity of demand there.

Looking at the financials, there is probably no reason to go there. They should move the trading desk of these stocks down to Atlantic City. That said, I jumped into TD Bank. They're Canadian, but they are running a tight operation and took over Commerce Bank, which was a really good acquisition. I am hoping for a steady value and a 7% dividend.

As far as the macroeconomy goes, we are completely screwed. I wish we could let housing prices drop faster without a total disaster.

A small sip of water

2009-02-05T00:29:00.025-05:00

A tip from Carl- invest in water. It's getting hot out there (well, not here, but in

the Al Gore PANIC! sense) and people are thirsty. It seems logical. I think there will be a simple desalination solution soon, but it will take a big company to connect it to the infrastructure.

There isn't an easy way to directly invest in water itself, unless you build a resevoir or something, and that's not that easy. So, I bought 250 shares of a global "water industrial complex" ETF today. (CGW). A small sip of water, but the fund seems to be a fairly close proxy for the global stock index, it's not really performing as a sector. Still, the chance of one of the major holdings have a big up year soon seems pretty good.

We'll see how it goes.

Why not give Markopolos a job?

2009-02-04T12:22:00.018-05:00

Bloomberg Story on Madoff Proceedings in Congress

"The officials, in joint testimony, said the regulator may stiffen audit requirements for money managers and inspect firms more frequently. The SEC is also examining how it evaluates risk and may require investment advisers to provide more information than it currently requires, according to the testimony."

This ignores the fundamental problem with Markopolos/Madoff. Markopolos gave them everything they needed, they did the investigation, and they still didn't admit that anything was wrong. They don't understand the global financial system. (Really, who does?) They don't understand hedge funds and other complex strategies. Why don't they just hire Markopolos? Well, for one, he doesn't want to move to DC and they don't pay enough. However, with current financial industry salaries going downward ($500k salary limits!), they could meet in the middle geographically and financially. Pay $300k for SEC employees to live in New Jersey. I'd move to NJ for $300k.

Odd afternoon

2009-02-02T14:46:00.016-05:00

My investment strategy is looking bad today...tech stocks up. Oil way down. Gold down. Agricultural commodities down. Really confusing- most news today was pretty bad, and most of the stuff that I sold because it became overvalued continues to go up. The long term outlook for the US dollar is still really scary. We could end up losing reserve currency status if we inflate too quickly. The hard question remains, what is going to go up?

I think I need to start making more stuff so I can sell it to people to buy in other currencies. I just don't know if any of them will be worth anything. Is there a PayPal for gold?

The Amazon and the Outback

2009-01-30T12:23:00.030-05:00

Amazon rose so much in share price, to over 40x earnings at the moment. How much are they going to grow? People are willing to pay $25 billion dollars to get access to a revenue stream in the $600 million range with very thin profit margins (~3%). Typical market overreaction, amplified by the fact that there is very little other good news to invest in.

On the other hand, Australia is considering a drop in interest rates, so I am taking a hit on the Australian dollar. I still think it's a good longer term currency play, even though I am losing in the short run. Where are those Australian dollars going? The yen is still off of its high against the US dollar.

Gold keeps trawling upward as the stimulus grows and Russia and China are making a lot of noise at Davos about the insufficiency of the US dollar to serve as the world's reserve currency due to irresponsible spending and lending. It's going to be amazing if they can avoid a serious drop in the US dollar. I don't know if owning gold really makes logical sense, but I still feel like it's worth holding onto just because the possibility of a quick gain is worth the risk of the modest drop it might take.

Wither the Yuan?

2009-01-23T00:24:00.000-05:00

Now that Geithner is going combative on the Yuan, will the Chinese let it float? It's really hard to predict what effect that will have on the world. The real purchasing power of most currencies will drop pretty hard for Chinese made goods. Which is just about everything at the moment.

There are a couple of funds that track the Yuan. Currencyshares notably does not have an ETF that tracks the Yuan. The Dreyfus Wisdom Tree fund is out there (CYB). I held it for a little while in 2008 but it didn't really trade very much (note the stepwise like graphs), so I got worried about it and dropped it. I also thought it should pay some sort of yield like the Currencyshares funds. Anyway, the latest prospectus showed up again today and I am thinking about jumping in again.

Consider the Aussie

2009-01-21T15:28:00.000-05:00

The Australian dollar is trading about 10% over its 5 year low versus the dollar. It's had a serious drop over the last 12 months as many hedge funds have unwound their positions in the Yen carry trade (borrowing Yen at low interest rates to buy Aussies and invest those at high interest rates).

I hopped in this morning. I am hoping the kanagroos have gold in those pouches, as I dumped some of my AU to buy the AUDs. I was hoping to end with a more painful "g'day" style joke, but I just can't bring myself to do it. This is a family blog, after all.

Economics.

2009-01-21T08:58:00.000-05:00

First day that Obama's in charge and it sucks about the economy. I liked Obama especially for his foreign policy approach, aka get the heck out of Iraq. I am not such of big fan of his Keynesian madness. It may get us out of this hole, but it's a huge risk. If it doesn't work, we are going to have a crushing debt that is only going to be solved by inflation. A lot of people that don't save money don't care about inflation. I want people to save more money so that they do care about it. I don't even think this recession is a bad thing. If I were spending twice as much money as I had, and then I stopped, I think that would be a good thing. Yeah, it's less than I was spending before, but all of that spending I was doing before was deficit spending, so it was hurting my future ability to spend. People get too focused on the metrics, like the GDP, which is a total bullshit number anyway. Our job is not to protect the GDP number that counts things like me borrowing money. The government needs to be creating the climate for jobs to be created and the country to actually produce things.

I remember when Walmart became the largest company in the US. My uncle cried. He worked for Walmart (as a contractor), but he said there is something incredibly wrong with the economy when the largest company is just a distributor of stuff that isn't made here. Wealth is just flowing out of the country. Now the Keynesians want to borrow more money from overseas (where people still save money) so that all of that interest we pay (currently a huge part of the taxes we pay) will continue to float overseas. This is insane.

I hope the one thing that this recession brings is the fall of Keynesianism. People still think that massive government spending got us out of the great depression. It didn't. It made it longer, because it took longer for the market to correct itself. All Keynesianism is good for is for preventing social unrest when the economy is weak. That is a worthwhile goal, to add some buffer to the drops, so that we don't get shocked into a revolution. However, to think that it actually has some positive effect on the economy as a whole is wrong. If you want to invest in the economy, you should spend the stimulus money on things that are going to make money. Factories, research, education, etc.

The simple fact of the economy is that real wages in the US and Europe have to drop to get closer to those in the rest of the world. We can't artificially pay people here more by borrowing money from overseas to drive up asset prices. It just doesn't work. That the solution to it is somehow to borrow more money from overseas...no way.

I'm wondering if I'll all be more productive after I read the new David Allen book.

I have to finish that one before "What Would Google Do?" is delivered.

I wonder how many more blogs I need to start making money? :-)

Portfolio Analysis

2009-01-20T15:40:00.002-05:00

Wow, markets are being crushed today. GLD and NEM are good hedges today, even my oil holdings took a huge hit. I bought some more oil today...I think we'll make it back to $50/barrel in a year or so. The real question is when is the dollar going to drop? It's going up relative to the Euro, but I think it will ultimately suffer in comparison to commodities (inflation). That simply has to be the consequence of printing more money (aka, having the Fed buy T-bills). I plan to sell gold as it rises and buy more commodities in general (that's why the portfolio seems really gold heavy at the moment). I am not going to be buying any individual US equities for a while. For growth stocks I'd look at Amazon again if it goes back down to $35. For everything else, I am looking to see who can keep the dividends up and evaluating utilities.

Current non-retirement account holdings:
Tax free money market: 14.2% (Seven day yield at a pitiful 0.14%)
BKF (Brazil Russia India China ETF): 6.4%
DBA (Agricultural Commodity ETF): 7.7%
DBO (Oil ETF): 12.7%
EWY (SKorea ETF): 11.6%
GLD (Gold): 19.2%
NEM (Newmont Mining): 16.5%
TNP (Tsakos Energy Nav): 11.7%

$15B down the oil drain

2008-12-10T00:11:00.000-05:00

Warren Buffet put $230M in for 10% of BYD (leading cell phone battery manufacturer rolling out electric cars.) For $25B you could start 10 of those companies in the US (and invest the remainder in Tesla). The govt could get warrant coverage on the investments so we could convert to stock if anyone ever IPOs again. We could use the profits to pay a portion of the lost pension benefits. The government already operates several venture funds for military purposes, so it's legally sound. These 3 Detroit behemoths aren't going to be competing on the world stage.

The simple way to save money

2008-11-24T14:23:00.000-05:00

I am sick of people saying that clipping coupons is good way to save money, if you really want money, here are your options:

Move to a cheaper house/apartment - your biggest expense is the best place to save.
Buy a cheaper used car with a good warranty.
Get a better paying job or a second job (like cooking at home).
Don't tithe- it's for suckers only- Gods don't want money, they can make their own.
Travel cheaply, stay with friends.
Stop buying expensive things. You don't need them.

Go faster...

2008-11-07T23:15:00.000-05:00

Great plan from New Hampshire for making sure everyone is making progress. I don't know if getting out early is the big benefit, but...

"We're simply telling students it's okay to go at their own pace," he says. Especially if that pace is a little quicker than the status quo.

That sounds great!

Nearly four years ago, New Hampshire began an initiative called Follow the Child. Starting practically from birth, educators are expected to chart children's educational progress year to year. In the future, this effort will be bolstered by formalized curricula that specify exactly what kids should know by the end of each grade level.

Wow...

Racism sucks

2008-06-19T00:14:00.003-04:00

There is a great way of stating the obvious. I am disappointed by this New York Times article and the apparent contradictions it supports. First this claim is made:
"When New York City set a uniform threshold for admission to public school gifted programs last fall, it was a crucial step in a prolonged effort to equalize access to programs that critics complained were dominated by white middle-class children whose parents knew how to navigate the system."
This sounds like a great move to me. Take something that lets whiny parents get their way and replace it with an objective standard.

"The move was controversial, with experts warning that standardized tests given to young children were heavily influenced by their upbringing and preschool education, and therefore biased toward the affluent."
Hmmm...there's something wrong with this: "Tests are influenced by upbringing and preschool and therefore biased toward the affluent". The use of the word "biased" there is very misleading. They don't claim that the tests are biased- the claim that the results are influenced by prior education, and thus those who have had access to better preschool education do better. What sort of test do they propose that wouldn't exhibit this? I submit that any test that doesn't reflect this must be biased in some other way.

What exactly are we talking about here? We are talking about putting children in classes that move at a pace that will keep them stimulated and interested in learning. One that is not too fast nor too slow.

"...last year, there was no citywide cutoff, so available seats were distributed to the top scorers in each district. Some districts that had many spots or few applicants welcomed children with very low scores."
If we have children that don't know their alphabet in a class where everyone else is reading, that is missing the point of leveled education. But I see a much larger access problem that the Times missed- why do kids have to apply? Just test them all and put them in appropriate classes. Kids can learn how to count and other kids can learn how to add.

“They’re trying to push Hispanic kids and minority kids away from gifted program,” said Judith Amaro, a parent leader in District 6.
Now that just sounds idiotic. What does race have to do with a test? If I make a test where you have to be able to add 2+5 to get into the gifted addition class, the test doesn't care what race you are. Still, racism exists- see Obama in West Virginia. So people that don't understand the nature of the test, assume that any different performances of people across racial groups must be racist. It's really sad.

I still question Ms. Amaro- why would you want an underqualified kid in the gifted addition class?

I think the bigger problem with gifted programs is that it's all in. It should be differential by subject and you should have to keep qualifying. Check kids again every year. Check the pace at which they are learning.

“a group of professors and luminaries — including Deborah Stipek, the dean of Stanford’s School of Education, and former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo — deplored the practice in a letter to the chancellor and mayor. Testing young children for gifted classes most likely will increase inequities,” read the letter, “and undermine educational opportunities for all children
Far be it from me to say that the dean of Stanford's School of Education is wrong, but she is wrong. Gifted classes aren't magical bunny treats for rich kids- they are classes designed to run at a faster pace for kids that are ready for them.

If you want to fix the problem, spend money on Head Start and offer free preschool for the disadvantaged. Don't pretend the problem doesn't exist by pretending that kids who aren't ready for school are ready for school.

Too Rad

2008-01-14T21:39:00.001-05:00

Radiation medicine sucks: CT scans are killing us! We're an over-medicated lot.

I think this bit neatly sums up a lot of what's wrong with health care in the USA:
"Some say part of the blame lies with physicians who have financial interests in imaging facilities. "There is statistical evidence that indicates that more scans are ordered when a physician has a financial interest than when he doesn't," said Moore.

Defensive medicine also plays a role, with some doctors ordering the tests to stave off accusations that they withheld the most cutting-edge technology from their patients.

In other cases, overuse results from worried patients and from parents demanding CT scans that may not be needed. "

So we have:
1) Doctors increasing income by ordering more care
2) Doctors lowering lawsuit risk by ordering more care
3) Patients demanding care they don't need

Resulting in: more Americans being killed by their healthcare providers (see graph). It sounds utterly cynical, until we change those three things, maybe people should get less care than they do.

I know my grandmother was more or less sent on a path to death by her doctor, who misdiagnosed her broken rib as a heart condition and gave her more pills to take- that sent her on a downward spiral. Ironically, to my argument, perhaps an x-ray would have done some good there, as she didn't have that much time left to develop a cancer.

Overall though, people need to be a little less optimistic about medicine and doctors. Those bright colored commercials for prescription drugs really do make people think there's a magical cure out there for everything. Even diseases that might not exist, like fibromylagia. It reminds me of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which is a fancy way of saying your stomach hurts and you have constipation or the opposite, and your doctor doesn't know why. Except, in fibromylagia, all of you hurts, and your doctor doesn't know why. It sounds very very similar to arthritis to me- except that the (mainly) women that get it fight the arthritis diagnosis because they don't want to feel old. Of course, now Pfizer is marketing a painkiller called "Lyrica" (sounds like the name of a girly folk music concert?) to treat it. It doesn't actually cure anything (reminds me of the old Chris Rock bit on AIDS) it just alleviates a symptom.

And please don't get me started on the "Restless Leg Syndrome".

I'm 34 and I'm already achy- it ain't f-ing fibromylagia- I'm just getting old. Get used to it, ladies. It doesn't get any better.

And just because you name a symptom- it doesn't make it a disease. For example- depression is the symptom, serotonin deficit is a cause. We can't have people walking the streets saying they have headachitis. It just doesn't make any sense.

Anyway- that's phase one of my health plan- educate the people of the old USA so they aren't so overconfident in their medical science. That should save enough money to fund phase two...

More "race is stupid" notes...

2007-11-30T14:31:00.000-05:00

My high school is number one in the US News and World Report index...not surprising at all. The surprising part to me is that the minority student enrollment percentage is reported as 4.5%. Hmmm...what do they mean by minority? Only "black and Hispanic". What about the other minorities (Native American, Romany, Blondes)? Minority is now a euphemism for only some minorities that...what? If you think about it, this label is making the truly racist assumption that "blacks and Hispanics" need to be tracked separately from other people. Why would that be?

I think people assume that because the average scores for some defined group of people are lower, there needs to some separate tracking of that group... This enables the racist assumption- that any one individual is going to be more like the median member of some group they belong to, than the median of the population as a whole. For example, since the median test scores of students in the US that have Chinese ancestry score are higher than the median for the population as a whole, one might falsely presume that any random Chines person is smarter than average. Of course, this would be wrong. The converse applies to groups whose median test scores fall below the median.

In any case, schools should stop reporting their "racial percentages". It doesn't really help anyone but racists who are looking to avoid specific races. We're all miscellaneous now.

Book idea from search hit...

2007-11-28T22:21:00.000-05:00

Someone out there is looking for nice introductory philosophy book, instead they found this stupid blog. ...and I'm still addicted to Google Analytics.

Ronald Reagan, "Limited Mental Capacity"

2007-11-17T15:27:00.000-05:00

What's up with Republicans not liking people that are smart? You have to admit they have become the anti-intellectual party...Bush Sr. not included (although you have to wonder why everyone kept calling the former head of the CIA a wimp).

Recent transcript excerpt:
President Nixon: What's your evaluation or Reagan after meeting him several times now.

Kissinger: Well, I think he's a--actually I think he's a pretty decent guy.

President Nixon: Oh, decent, no question, but his brains

Kissinger: Well, his brains, are negligible. I--

President Nixon: He's really pretty shallow, Henry.

Kissinger: He's shallow. He’s got no...he's an actor. He--When he gets a line he does it very well. He said, "Hell, people are remembered not for what they do, but for what they say. Can't you find a few good lines?" [Chuckles.] That's really an actor's approach to foreign policy--to substantive....

President Nixon: Back to Reagan though. It shows you how a man of limited mental capacity simply doesn't know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area.

Don't think too much!

Tom Peters is with me!

2007-11-01T00:37:00.000-04:00

Stop saying "Asian" campaign hits the international management consultant level:
Tom says: "Implication: Eliminate the use of terms such as 'Asia'—as in 'the Asian management style.' Eliminate: as in zero, none, never, naught, zip."

Now how long before we can get the ban extended to any "racist classification"? How long before multiracial is everyone?

John Maeda @ TED

2007-10-30T14:01:00.000-04:00

Amazing John Maeda video from the TED conference. I've been pro-simplicity for a while, but I've been overly simplistic in my advocation.

Poverty is a relatively minor problem in the USA

2007-10-09T22:33:00.000-04:00

While most sensible people agree that poverty is a matter of relativity- how well off you are compared to others, this brings it into high contrast. The number of the impoverished in India is something that sticks in my mind... This isn't to say that we shouldn't strive to make the lives of all people better, even ones that have TVs, but rather that the measure of success should not be equality. That said I took real a $10 flight in Pakistan (included one cup of imitation Kool-Aid!), this seems expensive!

via Marginal Revolution

An Indian entrepreneur has given a new twist to the concept of low-cost airlines. The passengers boarding his Airbus 300 in Delhi do not expect to go anywhere because it never takes off.

All they want is the chance to know what it is like to sit on a plane, listen to announcements and be waited on by stewardesses bustling up and down the aisle.

In a country where 99% of the population have never experienced air travel, the “virtual journeys” of Bahadur Chand Gupta, a retired Indian Airlines engineer, have proved a roaring success.

If Texas can...

2007-10-05T08:51:00.000-04:00

How to drive down health care costs, the Texas way (courtesy NY Times):
Four years after Texas voters approved a constitutional amendment limiting awards in medical malpractice lawsuits, doctors are responding as supporters predicted, arriving from all parts of the country to swell the ranks of specialists at Texas hospitals and bring professional health care to some long-underserved rural areas.

The influx, raising the state’s abysmally low ranking in physicians per capita, has flooded the medical board’s offices in Austin with applications for licenses, close to 2,500 at last count.

Now, have the applications for the bar decreased? :-)

Why does this drive down costs? 1. Supply and Demand: More doctors = More supply, demand is somewhat inelastic (doesn't increase too much as a result of cost) 2. Lower costs (malpractice insurance) for doctors passed on to customers via market competition.

Now how do we get more doctors in total? How do we increase supply? Maybe if there is less money to be made in the lawsuit industry there are some smart people that will want to be doctors....

Now, if we combine this with lower drug costs via negotiation and a reduction in prescriptions- maybe there is enough money to start extending health care to more people across the world.

WHY WHY WHY...

2007-09-26T14:31:00.000-04:00

did this just become my favorite song?

"It's a Rave Dave" by Trash Fashion
I prefer the JE 2 Grade 8 Remix, but this will do...

(Almost hesitating to use the music tag here...)

I'll follow you

2007-09-20T23:44:00.000-04:00

...into the dark. Happy to be alive. Sad life is short. Is death the best part of life? Is it what gives it the urgency an endless life would lack?

Race is Racist : Everything is Miscellaneous

2007-09-17T23:07:00.001-04:00

Listened to David Weinberger's talk @Google. (see below)

It really connects with some thoughts I've been having about how the whole concept of race is racist. There are no biological meanings to it, it's just a human way of trying to bring groups of people together against others. Tribal status is dependent on identifying tribes is how Ray Immelman would describe it.

Weinberger relates a fascinating anecdote of a South African whose "Race" changed 4 times over his life, as the laws of apartheid labeling black and white changed, forcing him to end his marriage as it violated the law when his race changed.

How can Asian be a race? It seems incredibly racist to label Asians as one race in the US. Are people from Lebanon, China, and India related somehow? It's a useless label.

What about the "mixed race" people? What bubble do they fill in? The whole thing makes me sick.

Don't believe it...

2007-08-28T15:45:00.000-04:00

"Don't believe it, 'cause it's never happy hour again".

I think I have enjoyed about 10% of happy hours. I don't even think an hour is enough time for me to get happy. Maybe the problem is that an hour isn't enough time for me to get drunk and not sick.

We must remain silent = STFU?

2007-08-26T23:24:00.001-04:00

LOLCATS + Tractatus Logico Philosophicus = Ridiculous

How old am I?

2007-08-17T11:37:00.001-04:00

Wishing for autumn to begin makes me feel old. When you're young, you just want summer to last forever. You want to savor the last burning days of August, the last days of freedom. Question marks and blanks of our own design.

Still, the damp that follows the rains that are breaking our drought makes me wistful for a slight chill, a noisy windbreaker shielding me from the world.

It's a Belle and Sebastien day in my head. Must often feel like I am dreaming of in Scotland. But then it gets too cold, we get buried in down, we want the burn again. The simple rhythmic cycle.

I can't believe this is happening...

2007-08-05T00:31:00.000-04:00

They can't get a court order? That's total BS. This could lead to serious abuse of power.

Looking for the golden mean

2007-08-05T00:25:00.000-04:00

Aristotle [butchered and summarized]:
For any X where doing X is good, doing too much of X is bad, and doing too little of X is bad too. Aim for the golden mean.

Thanks alot 'stot. This is basically an empty statement, the hard bits come in determining what is too much and what is not enough.

I think I'll have another drink anyway.

Good stuff on Stuff

2007-08-01T13:23:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I feel like I have too much stuff, but I am generally bad, okay, seriously bad, at getting rid of things. I am particularly attached to my collection of spare computer and electronics cables. Paul Graham has no sympathy for me.

http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

La Costa Brava

2007-07-31T11:03:00.000-04:00

"La Costa Brava" by Ted Leo & the Pharmacists is an inspiring coding song for some reason. Maybe that's where I want to be?

Oh my god, it's ginormous

2007-07-10T23:16:00.000-04:00

I can't believe the Brits had a dictionary of Military Slang in 1948.

It was a ginormous year for the wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster. Along with embracing the adjective that combines "gigantic" and "enormous," the dictionary publishers also got into Bollywood, sudoku and speed dating.

But Merriam-Webster traces ginormous back to 1948, when it appeared in a British dictionary of military slang. And in the past several years, its use has become, well, ginormous.

[via the AP]

That is a terrible "joke" at the end there. Just terrible. The whole AP enhanced levity style for novelty articles is thoroughly annoying.

Nice Graph in the Economist

2007-07-07T22:41:00.000-04:00

Not that I care in the least, it's just more BS politics.
Article

All these dudes seem so sad to me, trotting around, begging to be liked. Begging for money. I just wish they would focus on fixing the country, and leave all the people that live in it alone...

If you have time to watch the news...

2007-07-05T16:02:00.000-04:00

(and I don't have time) watch ABC. Gary Langer is a thinker!

These aren't mere quibbles. I've reported previously on misreporting of scientific data in studies on subjects as disparate as autism, parenting and even naps. Whatever the subject, as studies like these enter the discourse through credible media sources they can influence our thinking and ultimately inform public policy. In deciding whether and how to report them, we need first to check them out in detail, as we do any other alleged news that comes in over the transom. As newspeople, that's our job. Or should be.

Wow, someone is actually examining the stupid statistics we are constantly barraged with? This is amazing.

via Freakonomics

justice?

2007-06-27T23:12:00.001-04:00

This "bong hits 4 jesus" case was so sketchy. Schools are public institutions, they should not impose on such harmless, if retarded, speech. This just sucks for freedom.

[via boingboing]

Africa- We're Making it Worse

2007-06-18T23:22:00.000-04:00

via Spiegel via Marc Andressen
The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good.
Shikwati: Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livelihoods. They're in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria's textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide.

This hit me like a pound of diamonds. We're destroying African markets with free crap. Let's build factories there instead- and then the people get the benefits of the infrastructure the factories require. Again, it's not that aid to Africa is bad, it's just that what we give them makes their economies worse. Ooops.

The World is not Flat

2007-06-18T14:29:00.000-04:00

I've been listening to the "World is Flat" by Friedman. There are some interesting anecdotes in the text, but the whole metaphor really bothers me. He does such a build up for it and then repeats it over and over again, but it never really makes sense. Perhaps I am just being overly literal?

In any case, the point is really that location is not as important as it used to be. Many things can be made anywhere. It always boggled my mind that it was cheaper to make something overseas and ship it here than to make it here, simply because of cheaper labor. The new outsourcing, where "knowledge work" can be done anywhere, actually seems to make much more sense, as knowledge can be shipped for a very low cost...culture appears to be shipped easily as well, as "Creative Destruction: Globalization Changing Cultures" by Tyler Cowen points out. There is definitely a trend for individuals to belong to global cultural movements and less to local/regional movements.

So why is labor cheaper elsewhere? Supply and demand is the obvious cause, more supply elsewhere. Cost of living is a big factor as well though, as is standard of living. It's clear that a person considered poor in the US is generally satisfied at the basic level, with shelter, running water and food. The more surprising part is that they also often have electricity, appliances, and televisions. It is clear that poverty is merely a relative term. Would an unemployed person be better off moving to a country with a lower cost of living? Probably yes from a raw numbers perspective and from a perspective of increasing their relative status.

So given all of this, wouldn't it be best to move somewhere cheap and live a rich life? Apparently not, as this survey points out: http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/15/pf/most_expensive_cities/
"A luxury two-bedroom in Moscow now rents for $4,000 a month; a CD costs $24.83, and an international newspaper, $6.30, according to Mercer. By comparison, a fast food meal with a burger is a steal at $4.80."
There is still a lot of local culture and the experience of place to soak up.

Some places are better than others...I want to be location independent, but where would I go? Everywhere better than "here" costs even more, and location independent work goes to the lowest cost of living places with adequate labor supply. A conundrum.

Striking article on cause of the USSR's demise

2007-06-13T22:14:00.000-04:00

Their economic collapse was largely brought on by the mid 80s drop in oil prices. Thanks Saudi Arabia! It's kinda funny, but I was living in Texas at the time, and the drop in oil prices caused all kinds of problems there. There were so many strip malls constructed near me that were completely without occupants. Houses wouldn't sell. Fortunately, we had plenty of grain.

Anyway, this puts in perspective a lot of the ridiculous claims that Ronald Reagan somehow brought down the USSR by running up our debt.

Great indie list by last.fm

2007-06-08T10:32:00.000-04:00

they're not bad at this...

Built to Spill – Just A Habit just listened
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – In This Home On Ice 4 minutes ago
Pavement – Perfume-V 8 minutes ago
The New Pornographers – Jackie, Dressed in Cobras 10 minutes ago
Sufjan Stevens – Sister 13 minutes ago
TV on the Radio – Blues From Down Here 19 minutes ago
The Microphones – The Moon 24 minutes ago
The Magnetic Fields – Strange Powers 29 minutes ago
The Unicorns – Emasculate the Masculine 32 minutes ago
Neutral Milk Hotel – The Fool 36 minutes ago

last.fm now part of CBS "Media Empire"

2007-06-01T16:51:00.001-04:00

A great buy for CBS. last.fm is (was?) really great. They needed money in the wake of the recent evil copyright decision where record labels get paid more for internet airplay than for radio airplay. (makes NO sense!) $280M should cover that.

Anyway, I added a little widget to the blog which is over to the right. I haven't done much "scrobbling" so it's not exactly a top songs list like you'd see in my itunes.

I am thinking about changing the name, location etc. of this little gem of a blog. There aren't that many readers, but I love them all dearly, so I am reluctant to move it and then have no readers. However, I recently discovered a wash dc band (a capella group actually) that "stole" the name staticflow, so it is now dead to me. dead i tell you...

Anyway, check out last.fm before CBS pulls any shenanigans with it. You can choose to be my friend on there (I am called "staticvars") and then we can recommend silly songs to each other. Won't that be nice? Happy scrobbling!

Rez

2007-05-23T23:33:00.000-04:00

Lots of posts in draft (still- I am sucking at writing lately) but here is something that caught my interest:

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails lets rip at ignorant record labels for charging $10 more for his disc-
Why is this the case?" He goes "Because your packaging is a lot more expensive". I know how much the packaging costs -- it costs me, not them, it costs me 83 cents more to have a CD with the colour-changing ink on it. I'm taking the hit on that, not them. So I said "Well, it doesn't cost $10 more". "Ah, well, you're right, it doesn't. Basically it's because we know you've got a core audience that's gonna buy whatever we put out, so we can charge more for that. It's the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy it. True fans will pay whatever". And I just said "That's the most insulting thing I've heard. I've garnered a core audience that you feel it's OK to rip off? F--- you'. That's also why you don't see any label people here, 'cos I said 'F--- you people. Stay out of my f---ing show. If you wanna come, pay the ticket like anyone else. F--- you guys". They're thieves. I don't blame people for stealing music if this is the kind of s--- that they pull off.

Saw the link on AlternateIdea

I knew the ol' Rezzer was a proper geez from the first, back in say, 1990. 17 years ago. Makes my head hurt.

What is emo???

2007-04-23T16:40:00.001-04:00

Have you ever wondered what "emo" is? I found it amusing...the whole concept is one of those things that makes me feel old. I was emo before there was emo! Or something.

[pic is Dashboard Confessional dude- emo!]

Getting all twittery

2007-04-23T16:36:00.000-04:00

Follow along at: http://twitter.com/mattmcknight

More failure

2007-04-04T00:17:00.000-04:00

Just read page one of Mind Set, by Carol Dweck.

It's basically a Kings of Convenience lyric, made into a psych book.

"Fail-ure is the best way to learn."

So why do we fear it?

In Twee Wee Tryst

2007-04-03T21:59:00.000-04:00

Just about everything from waah/bring on bull is now downloadable. These guys were a sort of 2nd division UK label in the 1990s along the lines of Sarah records. Delicate stuff, it's really cool.

While I am writing this I am watching The Merlin Show and he just said "email bukake" to Chris Wetherell.

While I was looking up Chris's url for the above link, I just saw this post about names of wifi nodes on his way to work. We had a similar experience running around our building at work. "I hate everyone in this building" was one of our favorites, although I think "Penis Pain" was probably the popular choice for best/worst network name. Mine is a unintelligible string of characters.

Mad Chopstix Skillz

2007-04-02T11:19:00.000-04:00

Saw this on Make advocating long tweezers. Learn to use chopsticks already...they're not just for sticky rice. I've used them for retrieving tiny screws that fall into inconvenient places under the motherboard, places where my Mr. Magneto screwdriver was not working.

I know some people believe that chopsticks are inferior to the "barbarian" fork, but they really come into their own in precision work. I will admit that they have certain failings when used for Jello or the odd heavy item...but I guess my actual favorite thing about Asian food is that it comes pre-cut- no knives out on the table. Just tweeze and eat. Yumalazious.

DRM is dying

2007-04-02T09:26:00.000-04:00

Yes, dying I tell you, dying! It's actually almost safe to get back on the iTunes Music Store again. Now I just need to get my Tivo to play AAC (too much pain to always convert to mp3), or buy one of those apple tv things so I can enjoy the entertainments on my hi-fi.

April Fools' Day

2007-04-01T17:14:00.000-04:00

April fools day on the internet completely fails to be interesting or funny to me anymore, it's completely predictable and lame. Even this.

I think everyone should take a few years off, maybe it would seem fresh again. Probably not though, it's just a dumb idea.

Pinked

2007-03-21T23:02:00.000-04:00

You know you're living in a girlie house when you can do an entire load of pink laundry every week. All pink. Seriously.

Nothing against pink here. Love pink. Still, I was tickled some other color when our pal Emily sent us a kickin' black onesie with a Dolly Parton image on it. Take that pink princess party palace!

Somehow the whole pink thing is kind of nuts. My wife has some pals whose husbands freak out about the possibility of their sons wearing pink. Completely mad, they are. Now, I don't actually have a son, but if I did, he would definitely be wearing whatever pink hand-me-downs his sister left for him. What's the worst that could happen??? And why is that worse?

Merlin's 5ives

2007-03-21T21:46:00.000-04:00

Why is this stuff so funny to me? WHY?

Merlin's lists of 5ives.

Five ideas I’ve had for family theme restaurants
November 13th, 2006

1. B.F. Skinner’s Original Stuffers - The poultry skin of your choosing is stuffed with a la carte selections from “th’ fixin’s bar,” deep fried to a golden brown, and served with your choice of fun “Dippin’” sauces.
2. Bobby B. Butterworth’s Old Fashioned Dairy Funshack - A frozen quarterpound stick of salted creamery butter is hand-battered, “flash fried,” and served with your choice of fun “Dippin’” sauces.
3. Long John Silvers’ “Dripper” Hut - Offshoot of the fast-food seafood franchise offers “mini-buckets” of their leftover fried shortening flecks, served with your choice of fun “Dippin’” sauces.
4. Mouth Meat Mel’s - 450º pizza — sure to immediately scald the roof of your mouth — is served with your choice of fun “Dippin’” sauces. (note: first-time members of “The Mel’s Mouth Meat Makers” receive a colorful “I damaged the delicate tissues of my mouth at Mel’s!” adhesive ribbon)
5. Dippin’ Dippin’ Dippin’! - The “Dippin’” sauce of your choice is served with your choice of fun “Dippin’” sauces.

Commercinals*

2007-01-18T14:27:00.000-05:00

Royksopp, Melody A.M.

Apparently this album has risen to #503 on the Amazon Charts on the basis of the "GEICO Caveman Commercial" that features "Remind Me". So, it's not cool to like anymore, and I am selling my copy that features a bonus disk of remixes and videos. If the above link doesn't work, someone has snapped it up at a bargain price.

Seriously though, this is the album that introduced me to the stylings of Erlend Oye. I skipped Kings of Convenience when I read the reviews, because I don't really like Simon & Garfunkel. But then it turns out that I do like the KoC.

The brilliant new era of sampling music online has made me a much happier person.

*My daughter calls commericials "commercinals"- we TiVo everything, so she doesn't see many and gets very excited when they do come on.

You can't find this anywhere

2007-01-02T09:16:00.000-05:00

I think concept blogs are better than random "personality (or lack thereof)" blogs like this schlumpf you are reading at this very moment for some reason unknown to me. Dalston Oxfam Shop is one such blog. The genius behind this one grabs a tape from the cheapo bin at the Dalston Oxfam shop and makes and mp3, plus commentary and a scan of the cover. As usual, I am late on this one, as an awesome post was featured on the BBC on Oct 26- however I didn't happen to be listening to radio 6 at that moment. I didn't even know there was a BBC Radio 6. Reminds me of ESPN 8 "el ocho" from the dodgeball movie. Anyway, it clears up some of the mystery about where taxi music used to come from. In case anyone was wondering.

Rock on.

Quiet is how I like it

2007-01-02T01:57:00.000-05:00

December was a month to remember...so why have I forgotten?

I have been awash in the world of mp3 blogs and music. For too long, I have been living basically in silence. I have purchased nearly 1000 albums in various forms- CD, cassette, vinyl, the hideous AAC itunes format which is going to kill your cat, etc. I have now realized, I don't like the silence, I just want the quiet. Loud music is great when you are trying to make your life more exciting. When you live in a world that is too loud- children screaming and other family disturbances, work, cars and buses and trucks, the constant whirring hum of fans...I just needed some quiet sounds. I am thinking about Kings of Convenience here. It's the medicine for whatever it is that's wrong with me- and something definitely is wrong. If you listen to the Erlend Oye DJ-Kicks album and don't like it, I am sorry. If you already have, I am just a late to the game guy on this. But really, it is something that everyone has to listen to, because if you like it, it could change your life, or something, maybe.

To get started with the new way to find music, or to have it find you- you check out a blog like fluxblog(nyc) or indie mp3(uk). It's music writing, with a twist, you get to hear the music. If you like the song, you can buy the album. Then you find the hype machine- a blog aggregator that collects link from across the galaxy of blogs into a playable stream.

There's so much going on.

The most efficacious level

2006-11-26T01:46:00.000-05:00

I have a naive trust in the universe......that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.”
......Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (as quoted in the little book of flow)

At which level does the universe make sense? It depends. Different parts make sense at different levels. You don't use particle physics to understand human behavior, the level of complexity would make it impossible to see why certain quarks could explain why I am in a bad mood. But you could use chemistry to explain it- neurotransmitter levels surely appear to be highly correlated to mood. Maybe it's something more circumstantial, like doing the dishes after midnight on a Saturday that provides the most sense making. Or an ethernet switch with an overly noisy fan. Things that make my flow static. Then again, sometimes you really can't point to the circumstances, but the chemistry is still there. Serotonin is low, sadness is high. So is the chemistry the better explanation, or is the universe the circumstance?

Consumed by Consumption

2006-11-06T09:08:00.000-05:00

"Most jobs and many leisure
activities—especially those involving the passive
consumption of mass media—are not designed to
make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to
make money for someone else. If we allow them
to, they can suck the marrow out of our lives,
leaving only feeble husks.” -Andy Hunt?

Well, I don't know if the purpose is to make money for someone else, but I suppose that it is at least one of their purposes.

Even without being passive, browsing the internet often becomes wasting time.

There is no real purpose in the mere accumulation of knowledge. We must apply that accumulation.

Do. Create. Live.

Accept Yourself

2006-10-11T09:24:00.000-04:00

Google Wisdom

Today's mantra: Accept Yourself

The Smiths

Dreams have a knack of just not coming true
And time is against me now...

Everything is hard to find
When you will not open your eyes
When will you accept yourself ?

But it's not just for the depressed:

Vedanta
If elephants spent their time wishing they were goldfish, or peacocks spent their time wishing they were crows, they'd live totally useless and disharmonious lives.

Sometime, something simple, repeated, becomes real.

Dilbert

I suggested a few cleverly designed, hypnosis-inspired phrases that were the linguistic equivalent of Kung Fu. They were simple (that’s my specialty), and once you heard these phrases, they made any competing ideas seem frankly stupid. Think of Johnny Cochran’s famous refrain “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” In my opinion, O.J. is a free man largely because of that phrase. My phrases worked the same way.

The people in high places tried my phrases. The phrases became world headlines the next day. I could tune the TV to any news channel and hear my words coming out of pundits’ mouths. The phrases smothered the competing ideas and just maybe changed the course of world events. (One can never know for sure.)

Today's Mantra: Accept Yourself.

This doesn't mean, don't change, don't improve, but understand and admit where you are starting from. How else will you know if you are making progress?

Welcome to School, Commence the Begging

2006-09-12T16:57:00.000-04:00

But I will no longer sell, cook, walk, wash cars, run or beg for any school fundraising project. Frankly, I've done my time. I've sold my share of candy bars, wrapping paper, tumblers of tiny jelly beans, cookies and books. I deserve time off for good selling. I'm tired of begging.

That was from a great column in the Washington Post on the begging that children are forced into by their schools. It's really really stupid to waste children's time this way, and teaches them some goofy principles about selling overpriced garbage for a good cause. Why can't they sell something that people want at a fair price? If schools want to go into business- let them...have the students earn money on the mechanical turk so they can learn the true value of their labor.

In the meantime, shouldn't they be wasting their time doing homework? Graded homework sucks- school is about learning, not about proving who can do the most work. If you need two hours of homework to get the test scores you want, then do it. If you don't, then don't! There was nothing worse than sitting there going through hours of problems that were easy but time consuming, making stupid things on poster board, etc. It totally demoralized me in school...but now I am much better at dealing with meaninglessness...

Asobi Seksu

2006-09-05T09:39:00.000-04:00

How out of touch am I? I knew/know nothing about this crew, except that maybe they are from NYC, etc. from their bio. Beautiful music though. I found it with one of those "people who liked this also liked" features when I was grabbing some early 90s Moose ("Honey Bee") on emusic. There is a lot of music out there these days that has evolved from that line of shimmery guitar stuff. I can trace the temporary demise in my interest in guitar music to the ascendancy of plague known as grunge. Loved Nirvana, hated Pearl Jam and there guttural imitators.

There's something nice too about not having to understand any of the lyrics that are in Japanese. It's always a worry when there is a band you like, but the lyrics are exceedingly vapid. I prefer to just hear total nonsense, or something that I just have no hope of understanding. Of course, there is the danger that they are saying totally idiotic things and you are singing along. A tough guy Russian cab driver that took me from the airport in Moscow to my hotel while singing along to the Backstreet Boys comes to mind. Fortunately I can't sing, so there's little danger of that particular embarassment.

Anyway, this Asobi Seksu album, Citrus, is more structured than a lot of the shoegazy stuff. The rhythmic underbelly of the band is a lot more modern sounding than the 90s stuff was. It gives the vocals and the guitar effects something to ride on, really a lot more pleasant to listen to.

I'll have to give it a few more listens before I drop my final rating on it, but it's got some definite 5 star tracks and few real clunkers.

iTunes Music Store = Garbage

2006-09-05T05:34:00.000-04:00

The iTunes Music Store is for the short-sighted. Speaking as recently cured member of this sect, I have to say...stop buying AAC files now! What's an AAC file you might ask? Why, it's a file that only plays on your iPod and in your licensed copy of iTunes. Unless you burn it to a CD and burn it back to a nice format, like OGG or MP3- losing all track metadata (artist, title, album, etc.) unless you burn the CDs whole, which doesn't work if you're only buying the good songs, as is my wont.

You may not have been burned by this yet, but as more non-Apple options for entertainment become prevalent- you will be, you will be.

The alternatives- if you like independent music, emusic.com is great. If you like buying from dodgy Russians, allofmp3.com is even better. And now, MySpace is letting artists make money more or less directly from downloads on their pages.

Prediction: Fox will be one the biggest "record labels" in five years, if the others don't adapt, they could just go away.

I am interested to see what Universal's Spiral Frog thing turns out to be, but if it doesn't output MP3, I am not interested.

Pride...

2006-08-15T11:49:00.000-04:00

The Dilbert Blog: Yay! Both Sides Won!

If you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize, figure out a way to trade land for pride.

I don't think it's all about pride in the mid-east, but I do think we need to approach the negotiations from a different perspective. We can't give the same land to everyone: people can't seem to share. Getting back to pride though, it's unfortunate that pride often means dominance over an other. That's the cheapest way to get respect.

Lock down the cell phone networks

2006-08-14T09:08:00.000-04:00

Another disturbing story- buying prepaid cell phones for resale is a pre-terrorist act. I think it is ridiculous that people sell consumer electronics with features disabled. In this case, they are doing it so they can sucker people in for a low initial price, but the major US cell phone networks frequently turn off features to try to force you to use their services. Rather than create all of these unbalanced markets, it is better to keep the hardware and the services sectors separate...supposedly too complicated for the American consumer. That's ridiculous, if there is one thing the US is good at, it's shopping.

Devolution

2006-08-13T23:10:00.000-04:00

http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2006/8/13/4967

I am sure there are going to be a few articles about a statistical analysis that showed up in Science [non free content - see ArsTechnica for coverage]. Basically, only 39% of Americans think the theory of evolutions is correct, and a slightly greater number think it is false. The correlation between religous belief and acceptance of evolution is much higher than it is in other countries- mostly because the Republican party has been using Christian belief as a differentiating feature, divisive issue. The abuse of religion for political gain has likely damaged the thinking of around 1/5 of Americans, amongst the 40% or so that believe evolution to be a false claim. How can the USA expect to compete in a century where genomic science is going to become a competitive international technological field? It can't. It really can't. Not if we can't even look at the data for fear of offending the gods.

Liquid Stupidity

2006-08-11T00:07:00.000-04:00

This is ridiculous BS. No liquids at the security checkpoints- so we'll pour them out. Because they might contain explosives. Which will...explode? But put whatever you want in your checked bags- since they can't explode. Or something.

I hate these stupid little terrorists and the stupid reactions of the DHS/TSA/etc. (They better end this policy very, very soon.) And when the hell are the exploding people going to realize that we don't give one crap about them? Anyone who thinks that bombing an airplane (or dropping bombs from airplanes for that matter) is going to get them into heaven should just kill themselves now and save us the trouble.

From Boing Boing:

If the liquid could be explosive, why are you dumping it in a crowd?: "Mark Frauenfelder: xopl asks a fair question:

So CNN is reporting: 'Because the plot involved taking liquid explosives aboard planes in carry-ons, passengers at all U.S. and British airports, and those boarding U.S.-bound flights at other international airports, are banned from taking any liquids onto planes.'

And then they have the photo of the TSA guy dumping a tub of confiscated possibly explosive liquids into a garbage can in a crowd of people.

Figure that shit out for me.

Testing for Dummies

2006-07-27T22:22:00.000-04:00

I really wish the Freakonomics guys would make this their issue:

Schools around the country are now being forced by the immoral "No Child Left Behind" program to judge themselves by the quality of the students they are given. The primary method of judging a school is this- compare how this year's 3rd grade students score to how last year's 3rd grade students score. Given that a school doesn't really control its population, and the result of failing evaluations under nclb is that more good students leave, you basically create a false appearance of schools getting worse year after year.

What should be measured is how much students improve from the beginning of the year to the end (pre-test, post-test). The measure of a non-selective school should not be the quality of the student body, but how well it educates the students it has. We shouldn't confuse good students with good schools. That said, measuring the quality the student body is a good criteria for choosing which neighborhood to live in, you want your child to be with students that are on their level or above, but it has nothing to do with the quality of the teachers, the curriculum, or anything that anyone can do anything about.

Here's what's happening in DC-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/27/AR2006072701668.html
They switched tests, so now it looks like schools are getting worse, when really they may not have changed at all.

The next time you hear some idiot complaining about the quality of schools, make sure they aren't complaining about the quality of the students...

Arab Strap

2006-07-08T16:02:00.000-04:00

"Stink" by Arab Strap is a sick song. I love it. These guys are for real. It's also some kind of thing that Belle and Sebastian have a song called "the boy from the arab strap". It would make you think that this is some kind of twee-fest, but it's not. As I intimated, it's serious stuff. If you've had it with music for suckers, you should listen to this truth. Forget about the music, just listen to that boy from the arab strap talk. I'd love to hear a tape of him just telling stupid people to shut the hell up.

Drug Prices Down

2006-07-08T15:40:00.000-04:00

I find this piece by Gladwell amazing. I find it amazing that the Times did not publish what would be the logically more attention grabbing headline: "Drug Prices Down". It's criminal that our health costs are skyrocketing because people are demanding brand name drugs. If you're reading this in the USA and are on Prozac and have health insurance- I demand you switch to generic fluoxetine. Look, you'll still be happy either way, only this way, I'll be happier too. It's a win-win-lose, but we'll be the winners!

The Times' Drug Problem: "The New York Times led its business section today with the headline: “Drug Prices Up Sharply.” The subject of the piece was a study by AARP showing that prices of prescription drugs rose 3.9 percent in the first three months of this year, four times the rate of inflation. Outrageous!

But wait: it isn’t until you read a little closer that you realize that the price increase just refers to brand-name pharmaceutical prices. And what the article never mentions at all is that the AARP released a second study yesterday, showing that generic drug costs in the

United States were unchanged in the first quarter and fell 0.1 percent over the past year. Here is the key paragraph from the AARP report, which—unbelievably—never made it into the Times piece:

'The rate of increase in average annual change in manufacturer’s list price for generic prescription drugs most widely used by older Americans was about one quarter the rate of general inflation for 2005.” "

"No child left behind" is wrong (and evil)

2006-05-16T22:06:00.000-04:00

No child left behind is based on a serious misuse of statistics. It claims to measure the quality of the school by measuring the scores of the students that attend the school. Unfortunately, this only measures the quality of the students. In order to measure the quality of the school, one must measure the improvement in individual student performance year to year. For example, student A scores 56 in May 2005, and 65 in May 2006. The school helped him make that improvement. Meanwhile at student B scores 71 in May 2005 and 72 in May 2006. If the cutoff score is 70, a school full of students like student A fails. A school full of students like student B is golden.

The algebra analogy is that if a train leaves new york going 100 km per hour and train leaves washington dc at 100 km per hour, it's the km per hour that counts, not which one is closer to richmond in an hour. You can't magically make these kids learn faster or "catch up"- the best you can hope for is for them to learn at the same rate as the kids that started ahead.

Okay, so that's why it's wrong- here's why it's evil:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/15/AR2006051501486.html

"McNair has not met the federal requirements for three years now, and under the law, students are given the right to transfer to a higher achieving school."

"Gibson said the school system is spending tens of thousands of dollars to send to a nearby school the high-achieving students who opted to transfer out of McNair. He said that most struggling students are choosing to stay put and that the money would be better spent on help for those children."

"Under the law, schools that don't meet the mark for two years must allow students to transfer to higher-performing schools. Schools that fail to make progress for three years must offer private tutoring to low-income children."

See- it's evil! If a school fails- the parents of good students get to send them wherever they want! Hurray- they don't have to go to school with the bad kids! And now...it's even harder for the school to meet the criteria, even if all of the students are getting better even faster, because the loss of the good students brings the average down. I can't believe people think this is good public policy- or do "they" want the public schools to fail so that I can pay for their kids to go to private or religous school...maybe I'm the evil one.

But here's the real rub- the assumption is that you can allow kids to leave school X because it's failing- it's not doing something that some other school Y is doing. If there really was something better about what school Y was doing, why not make school X do that? Maybe it's because it's not about the school at all- it's about the students. If you send the bad students to the good schools, you can hide them there- statistically, because a sufficient percentage of the students will still get the right scores! No matter is school Y is worse, the kids are smarter, they had a head start or they care about school alot, so they're going still pass the test.

All no child left behind is about is diluting the poor students amongst many schools, rather than leaving them concentrated in one school, but the actual effect is that only the parents of good students really want them to get out, so only the poor students get left behind. Still, nothing has been done to improve the quality of the education, only changes in the distribution of the students. This will make NCLB look good using the statistics it created, but will do nothing to help kids learn more and faster.

Ferry Corsten: Fire

2006-05-15T16:11:00.000-04:00

Why isn't "fire" by ferry corsten called "serious" (ferry corsten mix) by duran duran?

Seriously...

Less blind rule-following

2006-05-03T23:51:00.000-04:00

From the rapidly growing comments on Rushkoff's faith=illness post...part of Rushkoff's own comment:

"At times like these, when the operating systems have become too corrupted, religions really do need to be rebooted. (That's largely what Christ attempted to do with Judaism - elevate it from a set of static laws into a more internalized and felt way of being. Less blind rule-following, and more spontaneous ethics.) "

This really rings true, and connects with my "Catholic" background- I felt kind of cheated that all of the thinking was done. There was really no need for a person to think about what the right thing to do was. People had already produced whole books of answers for the questions you might have. It was all about rules, not about thinking.

Where in my nature did I become so distrustful of being told what to do? Maybe because I was told so many wrong things? In any case...it has served me well.

I can't believe people are calling Rushkoff insensitive...we can't get people to protect this world if they don't believe it's important.

Matt

rushkoff is right.

2006-05-02T16:22:00.000-04:00

http://www.rushkoff.com/2006/04/faith-illness-why-ive-had-it-with.php

I have had it with this myth being treated as truth. Why can't people take the great themes of the bible about how to treat others without it having to be "truth"?

VC to USA: Who's paying for this?

2006-04-27T22:59:00.000-04:00

General Motors- the future of the US?

The analogy between the US and General Motors is pretty clear- competitiveness challenged by labor costs, pensions, and health benefits. We've signed up for a quite a social contract. We need to universally accept the fact that the best health care cannot be available to all. If it costs $10M to save (prolong) a life- is it worth it? In my mind- it doesn't matter if you don't have $10M...

...and then there is the massive consumption of financial and human capital called the US-Iraq war. All of the hawks out there should at least try to find us wars where we don't lose so much money.

I want to limit the ability of the government to borrow money. I am not sure if there is a political party associated with this or not, but there should be.

Commuter Love

2006-04-23T23:15:00.000-04:00

Is a wonderful song by the Divine Comedy. Buy it now!

However, I don't love commuting much. Here was my plan:
drive two miles to the park and ride, (wair for) and take bus to metro, (wait briefly for) and take metro to work. It takes about 45 minutes- faster and cheaper than driving when the HOV restrictions are in effect on I-66.

Coming home is a different story- the metro is often so full I have to wait for multiple trains to pass before I can squeeze in. And there often aren't enough buses, so I have to wait 15 minutes for a standing room only bus. It only takes about 20-25 minutes longer than the morning, but it is much worse. Coincidentally, it's also usually worse driving home that driving in, because there are very few ways to get on to the westbound routes I need- huge choke points.

This guy did a whole statistical analysis of his travels- two way anova. And commutes average 26 minutes! That's nothing! I wouldn't waste my time with that.

So, I guess I am supposed to move closer to work. But work moves more than I do- I could be working right down the street next year- and then I'd have a miserable reverse commute.

In response to all this- I have made a game changing move- buying a Prius!

Bubbly bubbles of bubbles

2006-04-22T15:14:00.000-04:00

Lockboxes outside a condo near Dunn Loring metro- investors are bailing out!

It's popping. I had the fortune of making a deposit on a new townhome in May 2002. It was finally completed in September 2003. By that time there had been 10-15% appreciation in the value. In spring 2005, the market value was up almost 60% from the price I paid. Of course, at that time, we were still in the two year window where there are no free tax profits, so we couldn't sell. We were seriously thinking about moving up in fall 2005, but a few things held us back. I was still getting on firm ground with my business, so getting a loan might have been tricky. (Not to mention affecting the financing we did for my company.) We also didn't have anywhere we really wanted to go that we could afford.

Fast forward to the present and the neighbors on either side of me are trying to sell their places for what would have been great prices last spring, but are decidedly overpriced for this spring. My neighborhood was heavily subscribed by investors, who drove the prices up dramatically even before I locked in mine. There were hundreds of people waiting in line on the first day to make deposits...

All of these silly investors are really annoying to me. As my wife said today, it's just like the day traders who didn't know what they were doing in the internet stock bubble of the late 90's. As long as prices were generally going up, anyone could make money. But at some point, prices were only going up because people were taking advantage of the fact that everything was going up. A lot of dollars were flowing into the market, but very little of it was based on the fundamental reasons for owning stock. As soon as that kind of market changes direction- it tends to drops quickly. If you were only holding the stock because you thought a bigger idiot was going to buy it, you wanted to dump it as quickly as possible.

What generally has kept residential real estate more stable than the stock market is that the ration of owner-occupants to investors was pretty high. You can't live in a stock certificate, but you can keep a house that's a bad investment. If you're under water on your mortgage, you might not have much of a choice. However, when the ratio of investors soars, as it has in recent years in the DC region, the market can easily get distorted. There is a false demand for property. And the investors are willing to take losses. And they're mostly getting out now. It's going to be an ugly couple of years for people that want to sell their homes around here- supply is way up, and false demand is gone.

Start life blog

2006-04-21T23:04:00.000-04:00

Based on some much-needed constructive criticism from my amazing wife, I have decided to create a non-work blog, for those things that a non-technical person might actually be interested in reading about. I am not sure who might be interested in reading these particular things, but I do have a fair number of thoughts that could use a place to live.

Hopefully this can be a little taste of production to go along with the consumption of which I am so fond.

Currently reading: "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson
Currently listening: "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" Manic Street Preachers
Currently watching: My wee daughter on the video baby monitor. It's after 11PM- this kid doesn't want to sleep. Very naughty. And we're supposed to get up at 630AM tomorrow morning...

Who does want to sleep? Sleep is a waste of time...from a logical point of view. From a practical point of view, too little sleep can reduce the quality of life when you're awake. The massive line everymorning that snakes through the parking lot at the Starbucks drive-thru by my little house is an example of...something. Is it a sign of mass sleep deprivation? Caffeine addiction? Boring DC area govt related jobs where productivity is measured in abstractions of abstractions?