My blogging program, Wordpress, added a nice Flash based uploader (multi-select and progress bars!), and I needed an excuse to try it out.
So, here are some of the more amusing cartoons and pictures I’ve seen about the bailout:
(from http://www.investors.com/)
(from the Chattanooga Times Free Press)
(via a different Vijay)
Of all the companies out there, I really admire UPS and FedEx. Here are two companies that went against a government sanctioned and heavily subsidized monopoly, and armed with private capital and their own smarts, they are winning.
The US Post Office has a government granted monopoly on first class mail. This monopoly advantage basically gives them all the facilities, trucks, and personnel they need to run package delivery services; essentially a large chunk of the US package delivery service is subsidized by the taxpayer.
And against these odds, UPS and FedEx are able to be profitable entities. Amazing.
So when Fred Smith, the FedEx CEO, was featured in a recent WJS article entitled “Washington is the Problem“, I read it with interest.
It’s worth reading the whole article, but I’ll mention a few parts that I really liked.
First he talks about how the tax structure and regulations give preferential status to banks. For example, for a company to raise money (i.e. get loans), they need to have a dollar of assets for 10 cents of “risk”. Banks, however, have one dollar of assets and $25 ot $50 of risk!
That means for every dollar in the bank, the bank lends out around $25 to $50!
With leverage like that, of course the banks can make great returns for short periods of time — until it all crashes down and the tax payer is forced to bail them out. As a result, the pay the banks offer attract the best and brightest.
So what happens is a misallocation of talent. Instead of our smartest kids going into production engineering to build factories, they go to Wall Street and move money from point A to point B. They don’t actually produce anything valuable, they just build Ponzi schemes.
The second point he made is that we’re at the point in this country where fewer people pay income taxes than don’t. And since the non-paying majority can just vote to take the money from the productive part of society, you have a problem for the overall economy.
I like Fred Smith. I don’t agree with him on everything, but the fact that his company employs 290,000, has $38 billion in sales, and owns 300 jet airplanes in face of competition that’s heavily subsidized, you got to take him seriously. :-)
I finally ditched Coppermine and switched over to Picasa. Since I work very closely with the Picasa team, I figure if I have any problems I know who to ask. :-)
All my shared photos now live here. The sidebar links are updated too.
I also put up some pictures from my family’s recent trip to India.
Enjoy!
This is a great clip of Jim Rogers sharing his thoughts about the economy and how to invest to protect your wealth.
Some of highlights:
He’s a smart guy and one of the few that predicted this crash. I completely agree with him that this downward swing is a great buying opportunity.
He said one thing that I’m still trying to wrap my head around: you’ll know we’re at the bottom when the market goes up on bad news.
I think that he’s referring to the fact that news lags fundamental market shifts. As this crash started, the “good news” was still coming in and most people didn’t grasp what was happening. For for the recovery, we need to watch for the market going up, even though news is bad and people are still thinking it’s going down.
First of all, a lot of news and indicators are backwards looking. Unemployment numbers are never for today, they are for last month. Likewise, with sales, revenue, and inventory numbers.
Second, the mainstream (especially the media) is always slow on the uptake.
We just need to get out ahead of the crowd and then we’ll know when to jump back in the market. :-)
Google is one of the corporate sponsors of Impact on Education, an advocacy group for Public Education in Colorado. As a sponsor, Google was given a table at Friday’s “Education Matters” breakfast forum. Despite the early hour (7 am!), I attended the event.
I found it very interesting and a little disappointing. Obviously as an advocacy group for public education, they are very much in favor of higher funding (e.g. taxes) for public schools. Yet much of the data they presented seemed to not support their desire.
Here are two of the facts that stood out:
The conclusion they said? We need more money for schools.
Huh?
Both of these points show that (1) money is one of many factors and (2) at the current level of funding, you can have high achieving schools.
This is where the irony comes in; the organization is unable to separate “ends” and means”.
What they want is the “ends”, namely good public education. However, they no longer separate the “means” (funding) from the ends. So even though evidence may suggest that they should concentrate on other factors, funding is what they will blindly support. While funding is, of course, important, we need to step back and look at the big picture.
Whenever education and funding comes up, I’m reminded by something my dad told me once. Consider schools in 3rd world countries like India, the school doesn’t have a roof or electricity, kids don’t have paper and pencils, and teachers are paid basically nothing. Yet, how is it these kids can read and write, but our kids, with all the wealth, facilities and curriculum, can’t?
I think the big factor is the student’s attitude and their desire to learn. And most of this attitude comes from the parents and their peers. Do the parents value education? Does the student peer set support kids that get good grades?
This is of course very important. And is likely to explain a good deal of the difference between the high achieving and low achieving districts in Colorado.
Desire is also a big part of this. And that’s tied to the return on investment of an education. In many 3rd world countries, an education is a matter of life or death. If you can get a job, you get paid and can buy food. If you don’t, you won’t have anything.
In America, between our social programs and the fact that anyone with a pulse can get tons of credit, the return on investment of an education is less drastic. If you goof off in school, life may be tough, but you won’t starve to death.
(And just to be clear, I’m not against social programs…)
In conclusion, I think it’d be good if organizations spent less time lobbying and pushing for more funding. Funding is important, but some of their resources should be used to address the other factors that impact our students’ success.
With the country completely sick and tired of the incompetence and corruption of the current administration, it seems all but certain that America will vote for Change and Obama will win in a landslide. After all, Obama is currently expected to have over 370 electoral votes and may even win Georgia.
Yet, I’m not convinced that Americans are voting for Obama; rather, I think that they are voting against Bush and McCain.
If so, it’s very important to remember that the lesser of two evils is still evil.
This election is likely to give the Democratic Congress a super-majority. And these guys currently have a 10% approval rating!
And as I’ve written about lots of times, what Obama says and what Obama does is very different. He says he is against the war, wants to restore our civil liberties, and is against government waste. Yet he voted to fund the Iraq war, to re-authorize the Patriot Act, for telecom immunity, and for the bailout including its $150 billion of pork.
American is desperately seeking change. This explains the big bump that we saw Sarah Palin when announced as the Republican VP. People thought, “Finally! Someone new!” She got the advantage of being the new choice in a field of bad choices. And America really wanted a new choice.
Remember how in 2006 America voted in a Democratic Congress with a clear mandate to end the war and restore civil liberties?
Remember how a few weeks ago we completely flooded Congressional phone lines with overwhelming opposition for the bailout?
How did those turn out again?
Any reason that an Obama presidency would be any different?
Since yesterday, things have shifted a bit. My Google clothing outflanked my Microsoft clothing, so it’s no longer surrounded.
Instead, I’m wearing a Google t-shirt under a Microsoft sweater vest under a Microsoft jacket.
I need to start wearing my free hats to shake things up a bit. :-)
No, it’s not that I’m wearing clashing colors.
Rather, I’m wearing a t-shirt that Microsoft gave me, under a sweater that Google gave me, under a jacket that Microsoft gave me.
Hee hee! :-)
I figure it’s time to stop ranting about politics for a bit and talk about education again. Education is something I’m very passionate about and “when I grow up” I’d really like to run my own charter school, set my own curriculum, and recruit the best teachers possible.
Of course, to do this, I need a big pile of money. So for now, I’m trying to figure out how to get a big pile of money. Perhaps, those Gnomes on South Park could help me…
(Hyper-observant readers will notice I added a new categories of blog posts named “Education”).
One of the things that really, really bothers me is when someone says, “But no one ever taught me that!” It’s surprising how often you hear this and it’s a clear indication of an educational system that is failing.
Let’s analyze that statement for a second. When someone doesn’t know something, what does it mean if their response is “But no one ever taught me that!”?
This phrases implies a frame of mind where one’s education is the responsibility of someone else.
The person who says this is really saying, “It’s not my job to learn, it’s someone else’s job to teach me.” This means our educational system is not teaching people to be critical thinkers who are always learning.
Rather, the system is creating a generation of people who sit passively and try to absorb “knowledge” through osmosis.
There’s a lot of things wrong with this. First of all, people are less likely to learn concepts and more likely to just memorize facts. Science is now reduced from the art of the scientific method and the beauty self-discovery to just memorizing facts. Mathematics is reduced from the mind-opening language of physics to just a set of instructions on how to solve for X, without ever understanding why.
Under this system, learning is not engaging nor rewarding, it’s boring and painful.
Futhermore, by teaching a generation of kids that it’s someone else’s responsibility to educate them, you give them a convenient crutch to lean on the rest of their lives.
As people are losing their house to foreclosure, we hear endless stories of how people were targeted with predatory loans. Unless there was a gun to their head, the loans weren’t predatory. As an adult, you have the responsibility to read and understand what you are signing. If it’s too hard to understand, don’t sign it!
Just because your real estate agent told you it was fine is not sufficient. Notice again, people are conditioned to be told what to do, not figure it out themselves.
The biggest problem I have with this way of thinking, it that over time, society loses knowledge. If knowledge is exclusively “taught to you” and you have no responsibilty to seek it out yourself, then the most any given generation can know is the set of the knowledge the previous generation had!
And if some knowledge isn’t past on, it’s lost. Forever.
From the UK Times Online:
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.
Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.
OK, so the British gov’t create a databse which tracks which phone belongs to which person. The article continues with,
The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.
The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.
Here we find out that terrorists use pay-as-you-go phones. But wait, there are 40M of these phones? How many of these people are terrorists? Probably not many. Even if you say that 0.01% of the prepaid owners are terrorists, that’s 4000 people.
If we read carefully, we find that pay-as-you-go phones are actually the norm in England. Of 72M cell phones in the country, 40M are pay-as-you-go (56%) and for companies like Vodaphone 72% of their customers use pay-as-you-go.
So the number crunching shows us that pay-as-you-go is how most people use their phones, it’s not some weird loophole.
Anyway, let’s say we build this database. Anyone see any reasons why it won’t work?
If you said, “terrorists will just steal or clone phones” or “terrorists will buy the phones on the black market without ID”, you’re right!
Even if we ignore the privacy concerns and Orwellian criticisms, the plan doesn’t even accomplish anything!
Yikes.
