Do NOT Buy . . . January 26, 2001February 17, 2017 I am at Walgreens – which I always thought of as a ‘drugstore’ – marveling at the denim shirts on sale for $12.99. I am lost in fashion thought. These look awfully good. The label looks smartly Banana Republic-like. ‘RealGoodDenim,’ it reads, 100% cotton, made in China. It has what you intellectual property lawyers would call a good ‘look and feel.’ I am trying to decide whether I am Medium or Large, on the reasonable assumption that Walgreens has no dressing rooms to try things on (although it does have $9.99 football-size pink piggy banks and $99 four-page-a-minute computer-printers). My cell phone rings. ‘Hi, where are you?’ It’s Charles. I explain that I am in front of this remarkable display of $12.99 denim shirts at Walgreens (grinning, as I imagine his reaction) and – ‘Do NOT buy clothes at Walgreens,’ Charles instructs. ‘But . . .’ ‘Do NOT buy clothes at Walgreens,’ he repeats, a note of panic creeping into his voice. (After all, how I look is, vaguely, a reflection on him.) It is the same note of panic, more or less, coming from a different place, that inflects my voice when Charles shops at Prada. Socks, at Prada, cost thousands of dollars. I hesitate. I am considering the ethics of the situation. The shirts are, after all, only $12.99. And they are clearly $39 shirts. This is a powerful tug on my moral compass. But tug enough to risk making Charles angry? And would it really make him angry? And, in any event, can’t I just fib? Charles senses my hesitation. He is a brilliant fashion designer. He knows style better than I know anything. ‘Promise me,’ he says one more time . . . slowly . . . ‘that you will not buy clothes at Walgreens.’ ‘OK,’ I say, taking two shirts off the rack. Tomorrow, I plan to go back for more.
Cancer, Anyone? January 25, 2001February 17, 2017 My audible.com audio player just came and I will be giving you a review shortly. But in the meantime, I have been speedwalking the neighborhood – chicks and ducks and geese better scurry – reading Hamilton Jordan’s No Such Thing as a Bad Day on cassette. If you know anyone with cancer, you should get them this book. (It also comes unabridged on CD, or even, for the hearing impaired, on paper and in a large-print edition.)And if you don’t know anyone with cancer, buy it for yourself, or get it at the library, because having Hamilton Jordan read it to you is just a wonderful experience. Some of it is indeed about how he beat cancer – and how others may, also. But much of it is an inside look at Viet Nam, at the Carter years (he was chief of staff), at Roy Cohn (he was a colossal sleaze ball), and at the civil rights struggle in his home town of Albany, Georgia, among other things. Sorry to gush, but as you can tell, I loved it. Joel Williams: ‘Waterhouse waives the $25,000 minimum for Rydex funds. I cannot remember the actual minimum, but it is low. I have been told that other fund supermarkets do the same.’
My KEYCHAIN Has a Higher IQ Than Some PEOPLE January 24, 2001February 17, 2017 Ken Shirriff: ‘You recently mentioned IQ 83, saying it is out of print ‘but Amazon has three copies.’ In my experience, Amazon has been useless for out-of-print books, but bookfinder.com has found almost all of the obscure books I’ve wanted. They have 62 different copies of IQ 83, for instance.’Craig Furnas: ‘I think that book’s plot [a fiendish scheme to lower the average IQ of the humane race to 83] contradicts itself. Binet made the average IQ score 100, and scored other IQ’s in relation to that. If every IQ were 83, an 83 IQ would actually be – as the average – an IQ of 100. Wouldn’t it? I guess I’ll have to read the book.’ ☞ Well, it’s true that 100 is the median IQ, as I understand it – with as many folks below as above. But clearly that doesn’t protect us from getting collectively more stupid, if we were all, say, to ingest massive doses of stupid pills. Meanwhile, I have just added a new gadget to my high-tech arsenal. And I don’t mean the TiVo’s I have bought and will soon write about. (What amazing gadgets they are.) No, this thing weighs about half an ounce and is about half the size of a pack of gum. If anyone buys packs of gum anymore. It has a hole at one end, to fit on your key chain, and a USB connector at the other end. You stick it into your computer’s USB port and – presto – it’s a new hard drive. Either 16 megabytes, 32, 64 or, coming soon, 128. I got the 16MB version for $69. Not cheap, I suppose, but consider: I have written 1,244 of these daily columns by now. All of them – unzipped, uncompressed – fit on my little Q (as the device is known) with room to spare for my last five years’ financial records and all the books I have ever written. OK, so for all I know it’s flaky – I’ve only had it for a day. Or perhaps when I approach my car and remotely pop the trunk (I have one of those little key chains you point at your car to make it do things), the trunk will explode, in some kind of unforeseen key chain reaction, juiced up by the power of my Q. So I’m not saying you should run right out and buy one. Or that if you do it will be your Q they use in the next Bond thriller . . . your Q that contains world-dooming secrets people are rappelling down skyscrapers and risking their lives to keep from falling into the wrong hands – or attempting to steal in order to blackmail the world for $20 billion. I’m not saying that. But if you want to see the thing, and perhaps try one yourself as a way to take key files back and forth between your home and office computers, or an easy way to copy large files from one computer to another (assuming they both have USB ports, and you’ve installed Q’s little driver on each) – well, then, Mr. Bond, I should say you will want to click here. And in keeping with the bioterrorism theme of late, and potentially world-dooming technology, you might want to click here. (Warning: worry worts and hypochondriacs – steer clear.)
Four Suggestions for AOL January 23, 2001February 17, 2017 If you don’t use AOL, the only reason to read this column is to feel smug. (But that’s always fun.) I know a lot of you think I’m crazy to still be using AOL, but along with 20-odd million other crazy folks, I know AOL (or thought I did), I like AOL, and, what’s more, I’m stuck with AOL. Everyone has my e-mail address and I have all their addresses in my AOL address book. Switching would be a colossal pain, not least because AOL doesn’t allow you to export your address book. (Steve Case’s mother raised no stupid sons.) Also, I’ve always just assumed that AOL would continue to improve so that I’d like it better each year. That assumption failed with AOL 6.0. I have no doubt 6.0 is great if you’re just starting out. But when I went to convert from 5.0 to 6.0, after a 3-hour download, it said, in effect, Sorry, you have too many people in your address book. Why not either delete a thousand of them, or else just start entering in all the information anew? AOL Suggestion #1 – If the AOL supercomputer detects that a user’s address book is so large you don’t want to give it free storage on AOL’s hard drive, don’t shut me out, give me an option. The message might read: ‘Wow – you DO have a lotta friends! We’d love to accommodate your entire list on our hard drive for free, but have had to set some limits. So please either go through and trim your list down to 999 entries (surely some of these people have died by now, or have ticked you off in some way), or else authorize us to charge you an extra penny a month for every one above that. Click here.’ Something like that. It’s a win-win. If someone has an extra 1,500 addresses, that would be an extra $15 a month – found money to AOL (for whom the extra storage capacity would cost almost nothing) – and probably not a big deal to the kind of person (well, me) who has 2,500 addresses, some with very long “notes” entries he doesn’t want to lose. Do this, Steve, and you make more money from me; keep people like me from finally biting the bullet and leaving for a competitor. AOL Suggestion #2 – My personal filing cabinet grows more monstrous by the day, because I elect to save all my incoming and outgoing mail. And that makes backups less convenient – my files no longer even fit on a 120MB floppy! – and raises the risk of corruption and who knows what else. There at least two easy ways to make a huge dent in this problem. The first – suggestion #2 – is to be honest about the delete function – and fix it. I am not a completely stupid person (yet – I’m getting there), but after millions of hours with AOL, I only found out last night, over dinner with an AOL vice president, how this works. Currently, as I go through my e-mail, I click to ‘delete’ the ones I don’t need to save. AOL takes deletion in this situation very seriously and forces me to confirm I really mean it. And then, even once I’ve confirmed that, AOL still saves it for a little while in a section called ‘Recently deleted e-mail,’ just in case. So I know that AOL really takes this ‘delete’ function very seriously. I appreciate that. I do delete the unneeded ones, and confirm the deletion, because if I kept all the junk I get, ‘monstrous’ would not begin to describe the size of my files. Anyway, last night I discovered you’re just kidding. You don’t delete the messages at all. When I click the delete button and confirm that I really mean it, you stick the unwanted messages into my gargantuan, monstrous, mega-sized filing cabinet anyway. Only if I take a special trip to that file and delete them there do you actually delete an unwanted message. I never knew that. The AOL VP guy, a friend of mine, explained why it works that way, and from the point of view of a systems engineer raised on another planet, it’s quite logical, if totally counterintuitive. But I live on Earth, and I am not a systems engineer, and I naively assumed ‘Delete’ meant ‘Delete.’ Yes, I could now take six weeks to go back through four billion saved e-mails, manually deleting the ones I had thought I deleted in the first place. But somehow I can never find six spare weeks when I need them. So here’s my second suggestion: Allow an option to REALLY delete an incoming message you don’t want to save. This alone might cut the size of the file by two-thirds. (The really long messages, typically, are the spams about On-Line Casino Gambling and Hot Teenage Girls.) AOL Suggestion #3 – This one is even easier, and addresses the same ‘file size’ problem. If I get a message from another AOL user – ‘Thanks,’ is a typical message – it takes up almost no space in my file. But if I get the same one-word message from a non-AOL-er, it comes with 20 lines of routing garbage at the bottom. So 95% of what is saved is garbage. My AOL VP guy told me that garbage can be helpful if we ever need to track a cyber-terrorist – and that’s great. But if there were a way to get rid of all that junk, I could shrink my gargantuan file by 50% without having to find six weeks to do it. So here’s my suggestion: Off-line, in the utilities area where you encourage people periodically to ‘compact’ their files, allow an option to ‘strip out routing garbage more than [ 5 ] days old.’ (The user could change the number of days, but the idea would be that, after a fairly brief time, if you’ve been cyber-terrorized, you would probably know it. No need to keep this routing stuff for a lifetime.) I’m no programmer, but it seems to me it would be easy and fun to write the algorithm that, at lightning speed, would look at each saved message in turn, from the bottom up, deleting lines of gobbledygook. A warning could disclaim responsibility for perfection – ‘this process may leave some routing garbage in your files, because when in doubt, we try to err on the side of leaving something you might want to keep.’ Also [it could continue], ‘if you have received messages which have the characteristics of Internet routing garbage, we could accidentally delete something you did want to keep. For details on the rules we distinguish messages from routing gobbledygook, click [here].’ The final warning might be: ‘If you have thousands of saved messages, this process could take a few hours. It’s best to start it before you go to bed. When you wake up, your gargantuan file of saved messages will have been stripped of the junk, and your file will have been compacted.’ The combination of Suggestions #2 and #3 would probably have cut my file size by 80% or more. It’s too late for #2 to shrink my existing files – that will only help going forward. But #3 would work retroactively, and be a great help. AOL Suggestion #4 – For reasons that elude me, but that I truly pray will never change, I have access to your VIP help line. (I used to be a contenda!) It is . . . fantastic. But every time I call, I feel so grateful – and so guilty – that I make the following suggestion: Charge extra for this wonderful VIP service. And make it available to anyone willing to pay for it. Just as it makes sense to allow crazy people to pay $1000 for first class seats instead of $200 for coach seats that arrive at the same time, allow people to pay an extra $15 a month or whatever to know that when they call, they will get top-of-the-line service without having to wait. This will add to your profits; add to the satisfaction of some of your best and most impatient customers; provide the funds to hire a few extra tech support reps who’ve been laid off from dot.coms, or who were Clinton/Gore under-secretaries of one thing or another; and provide extra resources to provide better service even for standard customers who don’t want to spend the extra $15 a month just to avoid indeterminate waits on hold. (Obviously, it’s important you make a commitment not to allow the standard support to deteriorate from the level maintained prior to launching VIP Service.) I probably only call four times a year. But knowing that this resource is there when I need it is one of the reasons I haven’t abandoned AOL. I should be paying you for it.
Your Annual Life Insurance Check-Up January 22, 2001February 17, 2017 Do you have enough renewable term life insurance to protect your loved ones if you should get hit by a rogue biotech terrorist? (Or do you have life insurance you don’t need, because you have no dependents, and you just bought it because someone told you you “should?” If the latter, you might want to drop it and put the resultant savings somewhere more productive. The only reason to carry insurance you don’t need is to protect against the possibility of becoming uninsurable if and when you ever should need coverage. But that is a fairly rare occurrence, and in the priority-hierarchy, I’d rank it pretty low.) And are you paying a good low price? Allan Tanner: “TIAA’s life insurance has been a good value for me. You don’t have to bother with personal visits from smiling insurance agents, insurance counseling is offered over the phone, and you can download application forms over the Internet. Nowadays, you don’t have to work for an educational institution to buy TIAA financial products. See http://www.tiaa-cref.org/lins/index.html.” ☞ TIAA is a very good outfit. It just began offering its life insurance products to the general public last month. Before buying, though, shop around. One easy way to shop for renewable term life insurance is by clicking here for Quicken and here for SelectQuote and here for one more.
Kids and Money January 19, 2001February 17, 2017 Thanks for all your feedback on kids and money. Here was one of the stories I enjoyed most: Henry Scheck: ‘When I was 16 or so, my Aunt died, and my father decided that some part of the very small inheritance should go to my brother and me. So he said, there’s a $1000 for each of you(this was once a nice sum for a 16 year old) to do with as you wish. But he also gave us some ideas on what to do with it. My first thoughts, of course were: cool, I can get a car or maybe anew stereo with really big speakers (you’ll recall that there was a time when the cachet of any pair of speakers was proportional to their size, instead of the inversely proportional relationship that exists today). ‘As it turns out, my brother and I listened to my father’s alternatives: one of which was investing the $1000 in the stock market. This is exactly what we did — electing to buy 20 shares each of the company that ran the place we spent a lot of time in after school almost each day: McDonald’s. It turns out I was ‘investing in things I knew very well’ years before I’d ever heard of Peter Lynch. ‘I left the money in McDonald’s and watched through high school and college as it split and split again and again, the 20 shares eventually growing to 200 shares. I sold the stock when I was ready to make the down payment on my first house — my dad and McDonald’s had made it possible for me to buy my first home, years before it would have otherwise been possible. ‘This simple act by my dad started me on a lifelong interest in saving my money and investing it. Which is a pretty neat legacy.’ Amazingly, here was the very next e-mail after Henry’s: Laura Schultz: ‘My 14-year-old son’s favorite restaurant was always and continues to be McDonald’s. By starting with one share of McDonald’s when Kevin was seven and adding small amounts over the years, he has amassed a sizable position in the company. He reads the annual report when it arrives and always checks on his investment when he visits our local McDonald’s. Unlike a toy that is forgotten after the holidays, this knowledge will last for a lifetime.’ Meanwhile, you want inspiration? Try this one: Anonymous: ‘I’d like this not to be published, or at least not attributed, but fortunately for my son,I’m a saver by temperament and my wife and I have given him $20,000 annually since his birth. Soon, he will get a VERY pleasant surprise ($20,000 per year for 18 years having netted 15% – I know you’re a math whiz). Not understanding this well when I was young, I was far too casual about aggressively funding my retirement plan, and today it’s not nearly the size it could be. Obviously none of my bosses understood it either, since nobody bothered me about it. Today, I would not have an employee who wasn’t FULLY encouraged to participate in savings plans. Fortunately, I have amassed enough outside my retirement plan to suffice, but I could have done better in all areas if only I had understood.’ If you’re wondering about the math, the teenager’s got $1.5 million coming to him. Of course, the last 18 years were almost perfect for investment success – 15% after tax will not be nearly so easy to achieve in the next 18. But rain or shine, you can’t beat a program of steady saving and investing – started early.
Bioterrorist Installs Dim Bulbs January 18, 2001January 27, 2017 BIOTERRORISM Alan Rogowsky: “Some years ago (20?), I read a great book by Arthur Herzog called “IQ 83″ – where a replicant DNA escapes from a lab and actually lowers everyone’s IQ to 83! Sounds almost funny (given that it seems to have happened already without anyone noticing) but it was a great/chilling read – now sadly out-of-print. If you find it somewhere, I recommend it.” ☞ A 1978 Simon & Schuster hardcover, 1980 Berkeley paperback, out-of-print but Amazon seems to know where we can get 3 copies. MISCHIEVOUS PALINDROME “Dubya won? No way, bud!” AUDIO BOOKS Kitty Vickers: “I have found that for about the same price as renting a book on tape you can buy it on eBay, listen to it and keep as long as you want it. Then you can sell it again on eBay at or near your original purchase price. Much cheaper.” BETTER BULBS Albert Fosha: “Your recent columns discussing the benefits that accrue from replacing old-style incandescent lightbulbs with the new screw-in fluorescents piqued my curiosity regarding the actual savings that might be had. To that end, I went through a cost-benefit analysis of the effect of replacing several light bulbs at my home here in Western Washington. I had already replaced quite a few of the old lights with fluorescence bulbs, but further investigation indicated that there were still four locations that were candidates for change. The most used of the lights at these locations is turned on for an estimated 12 hours per day, with the least used being turned on for only 1½ hours per day. Lights with usage less than this were not considered as viable candidates. “Based on the daily usage, the cost of the new bulbs, the difference in life between the old and the new bulbs, the cost savings generated by not having the incandescent bulbs burn out on a frequent(700 hour) basis during the 10,000 hour lifespan of the new bulbs, and the cost of electricity here (currently averaging around 6½¢ per kilowatt), the savings in electricity and bulb replacement was calculated for each of the locations where the lights were replaced. Because each location was different in wattage, usage, cost, etc., each light required a separate calculation. Bulb prices were those at a local discount home supply store, and the bulb lifespans were those printed on the cartons. “Treating each case as a loan, with the cost of the new bulb as the amount loaned, the expected life span of the bulb as the span of the loan, and the weekly savings as the loan payment, the equivalent annual interest rate was calculated for each location. The actual cost savings from switching these four bulbs – not quite a dime a day – don’t seem very much. But the annual interest rate realized on the initial outlay was huge, ranging from 44.6% in one location to 132% in another. “This study indicated another interesting item (aside from the fact that a retired somewhat bored engineer with a computer is a dangerous thing) – namely, the amazingly large amounts of electricity that can be saved by things like this if everyone conserved. It would ‘generate’ as much electricity as a whole new power plant – and with none of the pollution. “The replacement lights are up and operating. No noticeable decrease in brightness or convenience was noticed by any of the occupants here. It’s a no-brainer.” ☞ Albert’s e-mail and analysis was actually somewhat longer than this. I took the liberty of trimming and adapting it in a few places. But he is dead on: We really ought to do this, as our Valentine’s Day gift to ourselves and our planet. For possible good rates on bulbs in bulk, click here. And, as someone suggested earlier, check out IKEA – for a while at least, they were selling compact fluorescents for $5 each.
More Biotech January 17, 2001January 27, 2017 Dana Dlott: “I do buy the Fidelity biotech in my retirement account and don’t pay the 3% load. Michael Burns’s suggestion for avoiding it – that you consider Rydex Biotechnology instead – is great, however.” Tom Jewell: “Ah, but Michael Burns forgot to mention that Rydex Biotechnology (RYOAX) has a $25,000.00 minimum initial investment. What about exchange-traded funds as a quick way to diversify? Say, Biotechnology HOLDR (BBH), with a 100-share minimum (albeit $153 a share), or the iShare Healthcare exchange-traded fund (IYH), which holds about 80% drug and biotechnology stocks? IYH only requires a minimum 1 share purchase.” ☞ I don’t know anything specific about these two exchange-traded funds (EFTs), but it does sound as if they are worth a look. Dana, again,on the bioterrorism nightmare that L.J. Kutten conjured: “I did question the young ‘artificial virus’ faculty applicant about visions of ‘The Andromeda Strain.’ One of his proposals was to make a virus covered with molecules that inhibit the body’s immune system from attacking it. I said that sounded scary– not in his hands, perhaps, but maybe in his Iraqi graduate student’s hands. “He had taken this into account, he said. It is the replication of the virus that leads to exponential multiplication with time (like compound interest) that makes it dangerous. The virus with the artificial coating contains regular DNA. The DNA cannot code for the artificial coating. So only the first generation of viruses that attack the cancer cell is protected. Any viruses that are subsequently produced will not have the artificial coating and can be attacked in the usual way. “There is quite a sizable community of people who have knee-jerk reactions to biotechnology. Yesterday I was driving onto campus in my car. I stopped at a busy cross walk. There were a dozen young students crossing the street. Just 1 pound of pressure on my accelerator pedal and my car would have jumped forward and killed them. Just one pound! We should ban all cars, and possibly all students as well. Do you know why all those students weren’t killed? Because I didn’t do that.” ☞ I am against knee-jerk reactions to biotech, and see no way to stop scientific progress even if we wanted to. But I think we still need to be very afraid of that one graduate student in a million or 10 million, whether Iraqi or just plain irritated, who isn’t like most people. In the old days, the most a guy could do was hit another guy with a rock. Now, with a little fertilizer and a very bad attitude, he can kill hundreds. But when could a single scientist kill billions of people before? I think Kuttner’s point is that, theoretically, at least, that day could be coming.
Follow-Up: Books on Tape January 16, 2001February 17, 2017 Hank Gilette: “I love books on tape, but as you pointed out, they are not cheap. Luckily, my local library has a large number available to borrow, for free. Much of my library’s collection is unabridged. I’m partial to Stephen Jay Gould, myself.” Bill Baron:“I like walking with a Walkman also. Instead of audio books, I listen to lectures on tape. Paul Roub:“Check out booksontape.com, which sells or rents Bonfire of the Vanities, among many others. I rented the unabridged version for $26.39 (total, including shipping, for two parts). Only about 6 bucks more after shipping, and it’s the whole thing. You can tell them when to ship the book to you, or (in the case of a two-parter like this) when to ship each part. You have thirty days to listen, then send it back in the included postage-paid mailer.” Ed Farber: “Check out audible.com. It’s an excellent alternative to books on tape, and much cheaper. The downloads are not too bad for abridged books. I downloaded a six-hour book in about 45 minutes at 6K. However, when I downloaded a 16-hour unabridged book it did take 2.5 to 3 hours. If you have a broadband connection it’s a no-brainer.” Heather Wells: “The catch with audible.com, of course, is that these aren’t cassette tapes – they’re digital audio files that you download onto your computer. You can play them on your PC, which isn’t very convenient, or on an MP3 player (as long as it supports Audible formats). All audio books that you’ve purchased show up in your ‘library’ on audible.com so you can always download them again at no charge. “Don’t have an MP3 player that supports Audible formats? Right now, you can get a $250 Rio 500 MP3 player with 64 MB built-in memory (expandable with memory cards) for only $49.95 after rebate. To take advantage of this deal, you sign up for what amounts to an even better deal for audio book listeners: Audible.com’s Light Listener plan. With this plan, you get two audio books – any two audio books they carry (and they carry quite a few) – for $9.95/month. “I was skeptical about downloading and listening to audio books on an MP3 player (I was skeptical about listening to MP3 players, actually), but one of my housemates – a single mother who can ill-afford the cost of books on tape, but who goes through audio books at a rate of three or four a month – was the first in our house to brave the new technology. It worked out well for her, then for my boyfriend. I was the last to join and I’m hooked. It’s almost as awesome as reading ebooks on my Palm device. “The Rio 500’s 64MB built-in memory holds up to 28 hours of audio book. It can also hold music (I’ve got 18 songs ranging from 2MB to 6MB each on mine right now instead of an audio book. Last week, I had an audio book and 11 songs on the thing at the same time. I could carry around a book and a CD in the same device!) The Rio 500 requires a USB port on your computer. If yours doesn’t have one (mine didn’t) you can get one cheap ($29 at OfficeMax) and I swear it’s the easiest card you’ll ever install on your computer – no drivers, no IRQ settings, nothing! (I did have a video card conflict that I resolved by swapping the USB card with the video card, but that only took a second.)” ☞ This is very cool, Heather. Thanks to you and Ed, I finally understand. I went and signed up – two books a month for $10 sure beats buying all those cassettes at the store. Plus, they give you some free and almost-free books to start you off. Laurie: “I know some people jog with Walkmans problem-free but for some of us – and you may not know which you are beforehand– it is dangerous. Some people can’t jog and hear traffic at the same time. Once, caught up in some good music, a car nearly got me. A lady pulled me back. It was completely my fault, as my friend had made me promise not to jog with the Walkman when she lent it to me.” WARNING: DO NOT WEAR HEADPHONES WHEN, WALKING, JOGGING, OR, ESPECIALLY,DRIVING. Okay, maybe that’s a little extreme, but Laurie makes a very good point. Some warnings are ridiculous –my Helping Hand Precision Screwdriver set, 6 itty-bitty screwdrivers made in China, purchased at Walgreen’s last week, came with this notice, copyright 1988 by The Faucet Queens, Inc., Vernon Hills, Illinois: Use Caution: Wear safety goggles when working with tools. I am guessing that by now they have sold 1 million of these little screwdriver sets. I am also guessing that not a single purchaser has ever donned safety goggles before using one of those screwdrivers. “Bob, wait! Don’t try to remove that sound card from your computer without safety goggles!”) But Laurie’s warning is not ridiculous, and I hereby endorse her caution.
Follow-Up: Bio-Tech Root Beer from Equifax January 15, 2001February 17, 2017 Michael Burns: “You might have pointed out that Fidelity Select Biotechnology (FBIOX) carries a 3% front-end load for most people, although it is waived for some institutional retirement plans. A no-load alternative: Rydex Biotechnology Adv (RYOAX). It’s not rated by Morningstar (whereas FBIOX has a 5 star rating), but over its lifetime it has been comparable to FBIOX.” Chuck Smith: “Reading Dana Dlott’s biotech column made me think of the Fortune article by Warren Buffett that went out with the 1999 Berkshire Hathaway annual report. He discusses how surely the automobile and airline industries were going to make many investors rich in the last century.” LJ.Kutten: “Dana writes of ‘A young man who is sculpturing molecules to become artificial viruses that can attack particular cancer cells.’ Soon to be followed by the young man who is sculpting virulent forms for cancers to be spread by the common cold. I have great qualms about biotech and DNA manipulation. The only reason there is not rampant nuclear blackmail by individuals is that the powers that be have made it extremely difficult to get the one necessary material, fissionable material. Will we be able to say the same about biological blackmail?” Chris Williams: “Root beer is very good stuff. One of its advantages for people nearing middle age, is the lack of caffeine found in Pepsi or Coke –that does acidy things to one’s stomach. Root beer was originally brewed tea-like from the root of the sassafras tree or sarsaparilla root. Now it’s apparently standard to just buy sassafras extract, add sugar and yeast, seal the bottle and wait for it to carbonate itself. This is particularly important because sassafrole, from sassafras, is a carcinogen and the extracts have the sassafrole extracted.” Dan Hachigian: “Cheaper than the $79.95 Amex Credit Aware program you mentioned is econsumer.equifax.com.” It’s $39.95/annually and e-mail notification within 24 hours of changes posting to your credit file, and 6 annual credit reports.” ☞ And for $8.50, you can get an immediate look at your credit file. Mark Centuori: “SEVENTY-NINE NINETY-FIVE!!! ‘Not a great deal’ sure is an understatement. We know you’re not siphoning cheap vodka anymore [actually, I am! don’t tell Charles!], but I can’t see any justification for paying this much for such a ‘service.’ I’d imagine that the real damage would already have been done by the time American Express gets a report out to a possible victim. No one should wait for trouble before requesting copies of their credit reports. Get them via the cheapest option offered by each credit bureau. (Also, promptly review the detail of monthly credit card bills.) Before I moved from New Jersey to Seattle about a year ago, I made three quick, toll-free calls to the credit bureaus and got the reports for free in less than a week. New Jersey had recently enacted a law requiring free reports to residents that requested them. And the neat thing is that if you divulge something new while making the request, it’ll already be in the report when you get it. Check out Consumer Reports’ take on the subject here.