Kristol, Krugman, Sex, Etc. January 4, 2008March 10, 2017 LET’S CHARGE PEOPLE MORE TO COME TO AMERICA Upping the visa application fee (from $100 to $131) should encourage them to come. Especially when they know the hike is to help cover the cost of fingerprinting them. I think Macy*s should take a page from this playbook and charge people $5 to enter the store, to help defray the cost of shoplifter surveillance. KRISTOL The New York Times has added William Kristol to its op-ed page, presumably on the theory it’s good to have someone who’s been pretty consistently wrong to balance those, like Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, who have been pretty consistently right. My pal Charles Kaiser goes into more detail in his weekly column here. SEX, ETC. Feel awkward having ‘the talk’ with your kids? Just have them click here. (But check it out yourself first, perhaps by watching this clip. Prepare to be horrified but what the teens say is today’s norm.) WHO INSURES THE TERM LIFE INSURERS? Mark Lucia: ‘As a new dad evaluating term life insurance, should I be concerned about finding an insurance company that is somehow less likely to be sideswiped by a potentially huge natural disaster? I have this fear that even an A+ rated insurer could go under if (when?) we have a series of Katrina-level disasters. Are there ways to evaluate how much exposure a life insurer has to specific kinds of risk? In other words, maybe it’s more prudent to find a lower-rated mutual company focused on life and auto policies than a top-rated behemoth with lots of hurricane/flood/earthquake-type policies. Just curious if you have given this any thought.’ ☞ Congratulations on becoming a dad. The life insurance arm of any insurer is likely to be separately incorporated, and covered by separate state-insurance guarantee funds. The chances that you will die before your child is grown are slim. The chances that a highly-rated life insurer will collapse are slim. The chances of both happening at the same time – and with insufficient guarantee-fund backup or government intervention – are real, I suppose, but infinitesimal.
20 Financial Predictions January 3, 2008January 5, 2017 GIVE MAMA A LLAMA – Pt. 2 Clare Durst: ‘You missed the essential point of Heifer International. They give someone a beast, and training for care, and that person promises to give its firstborn to someone else in their village, who likewise promises the same, etc. So the benefit isn’t just to one family, but to many. Rabbits spread faster than llamas. I’m cutting back on charities but not on Heifer International.’ CINEMA PARACHEAPO -Pt. 2 Paul Lerman: ‘The media room advice from Don Tingle Friday was right on the money. Last year I put in a 720p Sanyo projector and a 106″ gray pull-down screen and with some good 5.1 audio. It’s very close to what some of my clients spend $50K or $60K for (all at my bargain-shopping cost of well under $4K).’ John Seiffer: ‘A sales person at Circuit City who seemed to know what he was talking about said you won’t notice the difference between 720 and 1080 with a cable hi def signal – only with a HiDef or BluRay DVD and then you’d definitely want a 1080p rather than a 1080i. Interestingly, a very well reviewed Toshiba unit is $300 cheaper at CircuitCity.com than it is in the store itself but you can buy it online and pick it up in the store. What are these people thinking?’ 20 FINANCIAL PREDICTIONS I thought these were interesting. They are not pretty. But until the house next to me that sold for $105,000 in 1998 and then $765,000 in 2005 gets back down to around $275,000 or $375,000, I’ll wonder whether we’ve really bottomed. And I don’t see how that happens without a lot more pain to the economy and financial institutions.
Happy New Year! January 2, 2008January 5, 2017 Last month still has me reeling. First I learn I may live forever. Kurzweil has me truly believing. Then I learn we’re all going to die in 2030. That’s when Bill Joy suggests a bright but disgruntled teenager may have the ability to turn the biosphere to dust. So do I floss or don’t I floss? A BIT MORE JOY . . . because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics – where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors – and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore’s law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today – sufficient to implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec [and me]. As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or worse: The replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavor. Read it for yourself.