SPACs April 30, 2008March 10, 2017 ONE MORE REASON TO BECOME A VEGETARIAN You knew salmon was great for raising your good (HDL) cholesterol – but did you know that farmed salmon (aka ‘salmon affordabilus‘) contains carcinogens and pesticides? Did you know what trawling for shrimp is doing to the turtles? Click here to find the environmental and health status of your favorite fish . . . . . . although even a quick perusal of the site reveals its limitations. (E.g., farmed oysters and catfish are highly rated; but drill down and you see that ‘Available data are insufficient to assess contaminant levels in this seafood’ – a disclaimer widely applied across the site.) Even so . . . apples, I tell you! Carrots! Beets! (See also this review of Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood.) THE WORLD’S SMALLEST ELECTRONIC CALCULATOR Monty Goolsby: ‘I wouldn’t sell my $395-in-1972 HP-35 scientific calculator for all the tea in china. You can read a history of HP calculators here (a non-HP site).’ Bill Spencer: ‘I still have a basic 4-function calculator that I bought in the ’70s for $400 (which was a lot more then). What was I thinking?’ ☞ That you could give it to the Smithsonian in 50 years and get a tax deduction? SPACS [but only if you’re really interested] We made ten times our money, or thereabouts, on the first set of Aldabra warrants, which became Great Lakes Dredge & Dock. (I continue to hold my GLDD shares for the long term. While there are no guarantees, there is something inexorable about silt.) The jury is definitely out on the second set of Aldabra warrants, which became Boise Paper (BZ). At first they more than doubled. But then, having hit $3 not long ago, they are now just 56 cents, giving us the right to buy BZ shares at $7.50 anytime in the next three or so years. That was a lot more exciting when the stock was $10 last year than it is with the stock at $4.15. The jury is similarly out on HAPN warrants which became InfuSystems (INHI). The stock is down from $6 to $2.90, having dropped as low as $2.20; the warrants are 27 cents, vaguely where they were when we first bought them, but nowhere near the $1.50 or so they’d be if the stock had stayed at $6. One of the reasons these stocks are down is that the market has taken a hit and the economy is scary. And one reason may be that the companies are not doing as well as investors would like. But another reason is that hedge fund managers bought (or held onto) the warrants and shorted the stocks, driving their prices down. A smart friend in the midst of the SPAC business reports that the bloom is off the SPAC niche: More and more SPACs have liquidated because they couldn’t find a deal – or the deals they did find were voted down. And when a deal does get done, the SPAC really hits the span. (Get it? Spic and Span? No? Wanna hear a parrot joke?) That’s because hedge funds and arbitrageurs are buying the warrants and shorting the shares. Take BZ. It was above $9 when the deal was done. So you buy some warrants at $1.50, say (giving you the right to buy the stock at $7.50), and you short the stock at $9. If the stock goes to $4.15 – as in fact it has – you have a nearly $5 profit on the short side and (currently) only a $1 loss on the warrant. Now, perhaps, you will take your profit (so maybe you’ll help push the price back up some) . . . and then short it again if it gets back up around $7 or $8, figuring that you have a chance to gain nicely from the short, and with very little to lose, because you still have those warrants. If the stock went to $10 – or $100 – your loss on the short would be offset by your profit on the warrants. Actually, it’s even worse than that (or better, if you’re a hedge fund) because you may not even need to buy any warrants – you already have them from when you first bought the Aldabra 2 units that represented one share of stock and one warrant. Anyway, this puts a good bit of selling pressure on the stock, which is one reason it falls. This dynamic no longer affects us with GLDD, because the warrants were all exercised. We’re out of the mud with that one, as it were, at least as regards the weight of a warrant arbitrage. With BZ and INHI, that weight will be a continuing drag . . . but a lot can happen between now and 2011, so I’m holding my warrants (purchased with money I truly can afford to lose). (One thing that could happen: the company itself could take some cash and buy up a lot of the warrants at depressed prices, reducing the overhang.) I put in to buy some BZ stock today. Yes, there’s the recession, which could be severe; and yes; there’s the rising cost of raw materials in the Northwest (turns out, when fewer logs are being sawed to make houses, fewer wood chips and scraps are available to sell to the paper mills, which drives up the cost); and yes, the world is going paperless, supposedly. But look out a few years, and – famous last words – I’d guess a triple from here is more likely than a total loss, so it’s the kind of coin I’m happy to flip, albeit only with money I can truly afford to lose (OWMICTATL). Which leaves NAQ, the SPAC that raised $400 million last fall. Will it be able to find a tempting acquisition and make a deal? The now-established pattern of these stocks falling once the deal is done – or the deal’s NOT getting done – may make sellers less eager to agree to sell to a SPAC. Which in turn would make it less attractive for the SPAC holders to approve what might be a mediocre deal. If no deal is made – or the deal IS made but rejected by holders of more than 40% of the outstanding shares (and thus can’t be completed) – the warrants expire worthless. If a deal is made and approved, it’s very possible there will be heavy shorting of the underlying stock, driving its price down. That won’t be great for the warrants in the short run, either. The bottom line for NAQ is that those who chose to buy the units (a share of stock plus a warrant, $10) or the shares ($9.20 or so) have a conservative investment. Worst case (that I can think of), they opt out of any deal that is made and retrieve their cash, plus some interest (minus some modest expense) . . . while for those who bought the warrants at 90 cents – well, at the very least, I was a fool not to suggest that we wait for them to drop to 43 cents on April 29. Later This Week: The McCains Have a Vast Fortune (But He’s Right: The Economy Is Really Not His Strong Suit)
There May Be Hope Yet April 29, 2008January 5, 2017 BIGGER THAN AN iPHONE BUT WITH FEWER CAPABILITIES John Grund: ‘This video fits your theme of how we all live like princes today. It’s a commercial from the 1970s promoting the ‘world’s smallest electronic calculator.‘ Watch through till the end – you’ll be shocked by the price.’ ☞ Yes, I remember not being able to afford one my second year of business school. (Back then, a year’s tuition was only about $2,500, if memory serves. In that context, ‘the world’s smallest electronic calculator’ was no trivial expenditure.) THE SOLUTION TO ALL OUR PROBLEMS Solar power your home and your car, even on cloudy days and at night. Fuel cost: zero. Carbon footprint: zero. Click here and then on News Coverage – the ABC News clip will give you the idea, and the New York Times report will flesh it out. Basically, rooftop solar panels make electricity – but also hydrogen that gets stored in tanks, to be (a) converted back to electricity when the sun isn’t shining and (b) used as fuel your car. Free heat! Free electric! Free ‘gasoline’ (because these cars wouldn’t need gasoline). ‘But who has room for all those enormous hydrogen tanks?’ I asked one of the people involved. ‘They take up the entire back yard!’ ‘We put them above ground for the demonstration, but they’d be buried below ground.’ ‘But they’re so big! Even if they were underground, they must cost a fortune to buy and bury. Can this really be economical?’ ‘For the demonstration, and to get approval from the authorities in New Jersey, the hydrogen is packed at 200 pounds per square inch (like propane). But if you up that pressure to 5600 psi, which is easy to do, you shrink the required size 28-fold to just one small-ish tank.’ ‘Yeah. And then: kaboom!’ ‘No, actually. It can be made safe. The tanks envisioned for hydrogen cars would have us safely careening along the highways with tanks at even higher pressure.’ ☞ Whether or not this little start-up leads the way, my point is that 20 years from now, we could look back on ‘the energy crisis’ as something humanity largely invented its way out of. Of course, 20 years is a long time to hold your breath, so it may be perfectly appropriate to dress your daughter up as Cassandra this Halloween, even as you dress up her twin as Pollyanna. It’s all a matter of your time horizon. But I keep thinking about Ray Kurzweil’s formulation, summarized here in December, that the next 50 years of technological progress will be 32 times as astounding as the progress of the past 50 years. So when you consider that ‘the world’s smallest electronic calculator’ came to market just 36 years ago, let alone, 50, and compare it with an iPhone (which, adjusted for inflation, costs just a small fraction as much), there may be hope yet. Later This Week: The McCains Have a Vast Fortune (But He’s Right: The Economy Is Really Not His Strong Suit). Also: SPACS.
Allocating Among Vanguard Funds April 28, 2008March 10, 2017 WHEN IN DOUBT, RE-TELL A PARROT JOKE Shlomo Halberstam: ‘Three Jewish sons left home, went out on their own and prospered. Getting back together, they discussed the gifts that they were able to give to their elderly mother. The first said, ‘I built a big house for our mother.’ The second said, ‘I sent her a Mercedes with a driver.’ The third said, ‘I’ve got you both beat. You know how Mom enjoys reading the Torah and you know she can’t see very well? I sent her a large brown parrot that can recite the entire Torah. It took twenty rabbis 12 years to teach him. I had to pledge to contribute $1,000,000 a year for twenty years but it was worth it. Mom just has to name the chapter and verse and the parrot will recite it.’ Soon thereafter, Mom sent out her letters of thanks. She wrote to the first son, ‘Milton, the house you built is so huge. I live in only one room, but I have to clean the whole house.’ She wrote to the second son, ‘Marvin, I am too old to travel. I stay home all the time, so I never use the Mercedes and the driver is SO rude.’ She wrote to the third son, ‘Dearest Melvin, you were the only son to have the good sense to know what your mother likes. The chicken was delicious.’ ‘ ☞ No reason not to re-tell this every seven years. Tradition . . . ANOTHER FREE TOOL Michael Monahan: ‘Re: 50 Awesome Open Source Financial Tools . . . add easyallocator.com to the list. It really is something.’ ☞ Definitely worth a few minutes to play with. This Week: The McCains Have a Vast Fortune (But He’s Right: The Economy Is Really Not His Strong Suit). Also: SPACS.
Money and Politics April 25, 2008March 10, 2017 FREE $$$ TOOLS Wide Open Wallet: 50 Awesome Open Source Financial Tools. (Thanks, James.) I haven’t tried any of these – have you? Share your thoughts? THE RACE THE DIRTIEST CAMPAIGN EVER? By Bill Press Tribune Media Services . . . And so continues the dirtiest and most vitriolic political campaign in history – or so the mainstream media would have you believe. . . . What I want to know is: What rock have they been living under? Have they ever covered a political campaign before? By any standard, the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has been one of the most civilized in our lifetime. Of course, both candidates have emphasized differences between them. That’s what campaigns are all about. Obama says Clinton’s vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq means she can’t be trusted to make other foreign policy decisions. Clinton says Obama doesn’t have enough experience to govern from day one, especially when the phone rings at 3 a.m. Tough? Maybe. But nasty? No way. Those are legitimate issues. . . . In the 1800 presidential campaign, as David McCullough recounts in his masterful biography of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson paid James Callender to vilify his opponent. In a campaign booklet, Callender called Adams a “repulsive pedant,” a “gross hypocrite,” and “in his private life, one of the most egregious fools upon the continent.” Not only that, Callender portrayed Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Shown proofs of the campaign pamphlet, Jefferson assured Callender: “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effects.” But Adams gave as well as he took, allowing Yale president Rev. Timothy Wright to warn what would happen were “atheist” Thomas Jefferson elected president: “The Bible will be burned, the French ‘Marseillaise’ will be sung in Christian churches and we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonored; speciously polluted.” And these were our Founding Fathers! Politics weren’t much gentler in President Lincoln’s day. In her excellent book, “Dirty Politics,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson recounts the terms used to describe candidate Abe Lincoln: “filthy story teller, despot, liar, thief, braggart, buffoon, usurper, monster, Ignoramus Abe, old scoundrel, perjurer, robber, swindler, tyrant, fiend, butcher, and land-pirate.” Notice that “Honest Abe” wasn’t on the list. Of course, you don’t have to go that far back to wallow in dirty campaigns. Think 1988 and Lee Atwater’s promising to make Willie Horton “a household name.” Think South Carolina 2000, when George W. Bush’s henchmen accused John McCain of fathering an illegitimate black child (actually, his adopted daughter from Bangladesh). Think Georgia 2002 and ads equating Max Cleland with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Think 2004 and the “Swift Boat” smears against John Kerry. The truth is, we’ve seen a lot of dirty campaigns, but this isn’t one of them. You can call the 2008 Democratic primary many things. Call it historic. Call it hard-fought. Call it colorful, lively, and long. Just don’t call it dirty. Bill Press is host of a nationally syndicated radio show and author of a new book, “Trainwreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution (and Not a Moment Too Soon).” You can hear “The Bill Press Show” at his Web site: billpressshow.com. His email address is: bill@billpress.com. LIFE-LONG REPUBLICANS Drew: ‘In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the election with one simple question: ‘Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’ The answer then, as it would be for most today if asked the same question, was a resounding ‘NO!’ Since 2000, my income has pretty much been stagnant, my expenses have skyrocketed, and the credit card companies have been given free rein to jack up my interest rates however much they please, and for whatever reason, if any. However, what’s worse than my not being better off is the fact that the country as a whole is in much worse shape. I’ve been voting since 1977, and I can count the times I’ve voted for a Democrat on one hand, with a finger or two to spare. I don’t care who the Democrat nominee is this year, I’m voting for him or her. Tell the DNC to keep playing that commercial, and to make more like them.’ Rick Hubbard (Lake Mary, FL): ‘I am a life long republican. I have voted Republican in every election no matter what. I am writing you and every superdelegate I can find to tell that if Hillary is your nominee she will get my vote. The reason, health care! That is it plain and simple. I am an independent business person and pay for a terrible health plan with a huge deductible, huge monthly payments and no prescription benefits. I hope Hillary can finally make a change in our health care system.’ ☞ Being enthusiastically neutral between or two amazing candidates, let me quickly note that Barack’s health care plan would also be a huge improvement; and that I’ve gotten pro-Obama emails, as well – like this follow up to yesterday’s debt discussion: Paul deLespinasse (Corvallis, OR): ‘The data I relied on showed the national debt as of the end of fiscal years, but I have to admit that your numbers prove there actually was a twelve month period [his final year] in which the debt went down. I don’t think I am being partisan about this, being a nearly life-long Republican who has just registered as a Democrat in order to vote for Obama in the Oregon primary on May 20.’
The Debt; The Race April 24, 2008March 10, 2017 THE DEBT Paul deLespinasse: ‘The last Democratic president did NOT balance the budget, though he did come a lot closer to it than the current administration. The total size of the national debt went up each and every year of the Clinton administration; for a couple of years the debt owed to private owners of bonds went down a bit, but this was more than canceled out by increases in the amounts owed to the Social Security and other trust funds. An operating deficit is an operating deficit, no matter where they are borrowing the money from, so the ‘surplus’ was just another accounting trick (which of course was initiated long before Clinton). Any corporation which kept its books as the federal government does would properly be run out of town by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the SEC, and the AICPA. The way the government makes its financial reports to the public hardly allows for general understanding of what is happening. I sometimes wonder if most congressmen understand this point.’ ☞ Even accounting as you and I both would (and I periodically argue we should), the budget was at least more or less balanced in Clinton’s last year. Click here and set the date range from January 19, 2000, to January 19, 2001 – Clinton’s final 365 days. You’ll see that the total debt (including that intra-governmental debt owed to the Social Security Trust Fund) was $5.727 trillion both days. After a year, it was no higher – and everyone saw future surpluses (even accounted for properly) as far as the eye could see. Bush almost immediately put an end to that. The debt will be about $10 trillion when he departs. THE RACE Yes, I know. But take heart, Democrats. You’re right if you feel that we need to get this primary contest behind us. We’re pushing to have the unpledged delegates make their decision as soon as possible after the last primary June 3. That’s the natural time to do it – and now only a few weeks away. To force an earlier conclusion might not sit well with whichever side did not prevail. I don’t want to sound tone-deaf to everyone’s concerns – which I share – but there really are lots of hopeful things not to lose sight of: The huge upswing in Democratic turnout. In Ohio, in seven critical counties (Putnam, Brown, Shelby, Belmont, Warren, Delaware and Clermont), more Democrats voted in the Primary than voted in the 2004 General Election. And now we have a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Secretary of State – and have had local DNC organizers on the ground for more than two years. Whichever of our superb candidates is the nominee, he or she is going to win Ohio. Lots of other examples like this. States with Democratic Governors account for 295 electoral votes – against 270 needed to win. Add California’s 55 and you’re up to 350. Obviously, we’ll not likely win every state with a Democratic governor – but neither is California the only Republican-governor state we’ll win. For starters, there are Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Minnesota, and Hawaii, all of which we won in both 2000 and 2004. There will be others. Kennedy didn’t get his bitterly-contested nomination until July 12, 1960. Clinton was running THIRD in the polls in June, 1992. The country is crying out for change with FAR more urgency than it was in 1960 or 1992. Young voters – of every ethnic background – are turning out more heavily with each successive election and in 2006 voted our way 61% to 39%. Even some older voters recognize we’re on the wrong track. Writes Parag Mehta, our National Training Director: My parents both got to vote in the Texas Democratic Primary and Caucus. Who would have thought that my parents would even know what a caucus is? Well, my mom voted for Hillary, my dad for Obama. Some see this and ask, “Why must the Party be divided so?” I think about 1992 when mom voted for GHW Bush and dad voted for Ross Perot and ask, “Isn’t this progress?” We’ve made dramatic progress in on-the-ground Party organization . . . . . . with tens of thousands of neighborhood leaders already signed up; . . . with more than 1,000 local polling officials already extensively interviewed, to spot and avert potential fiascoes and inequities NOW, not in the chaos of Election Day; . . . with our national Voter File cleaner and significantly more powerful than ever before. But mainly: I’m all but certain that whichever candidate does NOT prevail will strongly endorse the one that does . . . and make the case to his or her followers that – as disappointing as not-winning was – if you really believe in my leadership, then follow me in working your heart out for our Party and our country (and our planet). This fall, when both Barack and Hillary – and Gore and Carter and Edwards and Oprah and MoveOn and NARAL and HRC and the unions and everyone else – are all imploring their supporters to turn out to vote, they WILL. And they’ll write millions of checks. (It’s right now – when all those checks are going to fight each other – that we need your help organizing the grassroots and running TV ads.) So yes, we face a big challenge. But no, do not despair. And please help.
Goose Bumps April 23, 2008January 5, 2017 THE REAL NEWS OUT OF PENNSYLVANIA According to McClatchy Newspapers, ‘Since Jan. 1, more than 178,000 people in Pennsylvania have changed their party affiliations, and 92 percent of them have gone from Republican or independent to Democrat.’ THE DEBT Tom Cuddy: ‘[Re yesterday‘s comment on the National Debt] It’s too late now. There is little chance of voters electing anyone who is fiscally responsible. We have reached the stage in our Republic where the people have discovered they can vote themselves all the money. There will be no return to frugality in our government because we will simply vote in those who promise us the most money and the rich already have the lobbyists.’ ☞ The last Democratic president balanced the budget and I have high hopes the next one eventually will, too. But it’s going to take a while, given the enormous hole dug these past seven years. IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID David: ‘I just saw a DNC TV ad on MSNBC and it gave me goose bumps.’ ☞ Click here. IT’S A LITTA BITTA HEAVEN Your Costa Rican home away from home, now in video. (Click here for guest reviews.) Full disclosure: I own a piece.
The Court, Our Debt April 22, 2008March 10, 2017 THE COURT Sunday was Justice John Paul Stevens’ 88th birthday. He is a magnificent, progressive voice on the Court. Do you know what I want for his birthday? I want him to have the right to retire, if he so chooses, without fear of the Court’s lurching ever further rightward. Which is the lurch it will take if John McCain, bless his conservative soul, is elected. To wit: “I’ve said a thousand times on this campaign trail, I’ve said as often as I can, that I want to find clones of Alito and Roberts. I worked as hard as anybody to get them confirmed. I look you in the eye and tell you I’ve said a thousand times that I wanted Alito and Roberts. I have told anybody who will listen. I flat-out tell you I will have people as close to Roberts and Alito [as possible], and I am proud of my record of working to get them confirmed, and people who worked to get them confirmed will tell you how hard I worked.” And so I suggest as I did last Friday: volunteer. Especially for the ‘door-to-door’ piece. And if you can, please: give $25 or $50 – or $500 – in honor of Mr. Justice Stevens’ birthday so we have the resources to win . . . to stanch the rightwing slide of the Judiciary . . . and to give Justice Stevens the option to retire, if he ever wants to. OUR DEBT Lisa Strong: ‘The National Debt is not a Republican issue, not a Democratic issue. It is an issue of America’s survival. We can stand and argue like Abbot and Costello about who’s fault it is that the ship is sinking, or we can break out the life boat and row. Start rowing. All nations rise and fall. I fear that we will collapse under the burden of our debt. Politicians buy votes with my money. It’s effective because both the politicians and the voters are greedy. Piling on debt for programs that would be ‘nice.’ We need to prioritize our list from needs down to wants, including paying off the debt. Match that with the money we have, and cut off the list where we run out of money. However, everyone seems to have their own untouchable pet program. Match the list of priorities to our income and stop there. That’s it. End of story.’ ☞ We largely agree. Places we don’t: 1. There’s absolutely no need to pay OFF the debt, just to have it growing, most of the time, slower than the economy as a whole (so that it shrinks, relatively speaking). That way, in years of recession or special catastrophe, there will be room for it comfortably to grow faster than the economy (and thus, temporarily, grow as a proportion of the GDP). When Reagan took over, the debt was about 30% of GDP. A good, conservative level. When Bush leaves it will be about 70%, a precarious level – and for what? Our bridges are in need of widespread repair, our ports need dredging (yes! yes!), half our kids are not graduating from high school, our returning veterans are not getting the health care and education benefits they need – and on and on. 2. All debt is not created equal. Debt incurred as an investment in the future can be urgently worth incurring. Debt incurred to lower taxes on the wealthy – or to blow things up – not so much. (It may sometimes be necessary to blow things up, as at Tora Bora in Afghanistan; but wars are generally financed by raising taxes on those best off, not lowering them.) 3. It does matter that so much of the debt (85%) has been racked up under Republican administrations, because Republicans routinely win elections by telling people THEY are the ones to be trusted with money. Not true.
I’d Vote For You First, But Then For Someone Who Could WIN April 21, 2008March 10, 2017 INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING James Valente: ‘I am a Vermonter (and a Democrat) and I noted your reference to Governor Douglas’s veto of the recent instant runoff bill. [‘Boo! Hiss! Click here.’] I understand why many Democrats (or liberals) are proponents of instant runoff voting. Al Gore, in this system, would have beaten George Bush, and third parties that are further to the left than the Democrats can have more influence without hurting the Democratic Party. However, it seems to me that the system comes with equal dangers, which the New Yorker article you linked to pooh-poohed. As Douglas noted, in Instant Runoff Voting, a candidate who secures the most first place votes can lose an election, something that, had it happened to Gore (or Bush), would surely have caused as much outrage as the result we had in Florida. [I don’t see why. If everyone knows in advance how it works, and that votes for Nader or Perot or Steven Colbert will likely be disregarded, from whence would stem the outrage? – A.T.] I don’t think that it is necessarily fair to condemn Douglas (or others) for vetoing instant runoff voting and I am often disappointed that the liberals in Vermont choose to make it an issue (it’s been back and forth at least since I was in high school in 2001). I don’t think instant runoff voting would change the landscape of America, and if there are about as many conservatives as there are liberals, it would empower just as many ‘bad’ third parties as ‘good’ and we’d be in about the same place.‘ ☞ Here’s where I think we’d in fact be ahead: More people on the left and the right (and in odd places) would be likely to participate – and in a democracy, I think, more civic involvement is good. Fewer people would feel disaffected – also good. And more ideas would likely be thrown into the mix of serious debate, which at the very least serves an educational function. MOZY v. JUNGLE DISK Michael Albert: ‘As suggested on your site, I started using JungleDisk when Mozy failed. It’s great: cheaper than Mozy, more reliable (at least so far), and it slows my system less. Here’s what I told Mozy when they asked why I canceled: ‘Mozy was okay while it worked. Starting around 3/25/08, Mozy would say it was ‘Reticulating Splines’ for one or two days (continuously!), and then fail. Your friendly support folk said this was a known problem, and would be fixed soon. On 4/8/08, approaching two weeks without a successful backup, I’d had enough.’ JungleDisk doesn’t do 7 input/output operations every 10 seconds when it’s disabled, so it doesn’t interfere with my Norton GoBack’s creating system safe points. Mozy has a slicker user interface and web site, but the underlying engine in JungleDisk is superior.’ HEDGING Charles Mathes: ‘Hedging against market declines does make psychological sense. When everything in your portfolio is going down, it’s nice to see at least one thing going up. But using leverage to do this, as with RSW which moves 2 times inversely to the S&P 500, can be psychologically daunting when the market is up. For years I’ve had a stake in David Tice’s Prudent Bear Fund, BEARX, and I’ve found it makes more sense for a coward like me. Tice has one of the best records as a bear over the past years because he hedged his shorts with investments in gold stocks. When the market was going up, he didn’t get killed, and over the past two years BEARX has done better than most.’
Filling Your Tank for Just $2 Someday April 18, 2008January 5, 2017 But first . . . HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JUSTICE STEVENS Sunday, John Paul Stevens – a hero to liberals and progressives – turns 88. The implications of this overwhelm any frustration we may feel over the continuing primary contest. (Trust me, it will end; we will have a great nominee; the nominee who doesn’t win will strongly support the one who does.) Senator McCain is firmly on record hoping to see Roe v. Wade overturned and wanting to appoint conservative Justices. Please: give $25 or $50 – or $500 – in honor of Mr. Justice Stevens’ birthday so we have the resources to win . . . stanch the rightwing slide of the Judiciary . . . and give Justice Stevens the option to retire, if he ever wants to. We owe him! And now . . . CHECK OUT THE AIR CAR This eight-minute video showcases two prototype cars that run on compressed air, one from an inventor in Nice, another an inventor in Melbourne. I totally don’t get it, of course. (How can there be so much power in compressed air? Why is it so cheap to compress it? Doesn’t it lose oomph as you let it out to run the motor? What if you pumped the pressure too high and it burst? Why did I major in ‘Slavic Languages and Literatures’ instead of ‘science?’) One viewer noted that the air in compressed air is not fuel, it’s a battery. That much I get: Some other fuel, like coal, powers the generator that makes the electricity that powers the compressor that pressurizes the tank . . . which then stores that energy until it is released. [Suggestion: Why not start by getting all the world’s lawn mowers to run this way and work up from there? No one expects a quiet lawnmower.] SUPERCAPACITORS – AND WHAT ALL THIS MEANS TO YOUR OIL STOCKS Here‘s some more encouragement: supercapacitors will capture a great deal of currently wasted energy. Again, I understand virtually none of it, except to say that, now that the world seems finally to have focused its attention on the problem, we’ll have it largely solved in the next couple of decades. (Getting from here to there may not be pretty.) Yet I’d be surprised if oil ever became cheap again – it has too many uses. (Remember when the Shah said oil was too valuable to burn? ‘There are more important uses for oil than burning it to produce energy, for God’s sake!’ Remember when there was a Shah?) Yes, we will eventually wean ourselves off fossil fuels; but all the while, at least for the foreseeable future, we’ll be burning 80 million barrels of cheap-to-extract oil into the atmosphere (give or take) every day. So the supply will continue to diminish – by 80 million barrels a day! – and by the time we need it only to make Saran wrap, there may be just enough left. So the price may remain high even then. An (admittedly imperfect) analogy could be wood. Once our species’ only source of fuel, it keeps getting replaced by other materials – whether by coal (for heat) or plastic (for deck chairs) or pixels (for paper) – and yet keeps getting a little more expensive, outpacing inflation. AND SPEAKING OF TECH BREAKTHROUGHS Remember, for all our considerable problems, Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of technological progress over the next 50 years that will be 32 times as astonishing as over the previous 50. Imagine, a decade from now, memory so intense that an iPod can hold 3,500 feature-length movies. IBM seems to be racing along exactly that track. At around which time, I hope, a tiny Google chip could be injected in my arm, programmed to lodge just where it needs to in my brain. Who could lose a bar bet, or forget a phone number, ever again?
BOREF, GLDD, RSW, COFFEE, OPERA – AND VOTING (What? No Kitchen Sink?) April 17, 2008March 10, 2017 BOREF Borealis’s mining partner, Advanced Explorations, announces two new board members. Its ability to attract such people (one is a former Cabinet Minister) suggests – who knows? – we just might have something valuable in Roche Bay, which seems to be AXI‘s main focus. The season’s drilling has commenced. Meanwhile, two of the four partners WheelTug needs to make the Delta Airlines project happen have been signed. It all remains highly speculative, of course, and maddeningly slow. But inch by inch, perhaps . . . (Or perhaps not: so only with money you can truly afford to lose.) GLDD The company’s latest investor presentation. I don’t see competitors springing up to get into this stodgy old field . . . and when we get back to our traditional, pre-Iraq level of dredging (as we must, no? don’t we need navigable waterways?), both the volume of work and the price that can be charged for that work are likely to rise (supply and demand), which is a powerful combination. Even with a bad economy, I like to think this one could double in a year or two. HEDGING Peter Baum: ‘I’m going to argue for the hedge you mentioned today. As a reasonable investor, I have an asset allocation range for equities. Sometimes I like moving up or down in my range even when none of my stocks cries out to be bought or sold. Joe’s hedge, RSW allows me to tinker in this way. (Actually, because I am tech-stock-heavy, I use QID). Furthermore, if you like your stocks but don’t like the market, it allows you to move your asset allocation but not exit any positions. Now, I’m doing this in a fairly narrow range (I’m always 50-70% in equities), but I’ve found this a very useful tool that also gives me some psychological solace.’ AN ALTERNATIVE TO QUICKBROWSE Zach Rosen: ‘For the purposes of sitting down in the morning and seeing all the sites there are to see, I just found ‘My Morning Coffee,’ a Firefox extension that I am enjoying.’ ☞ Outstanding. But note that Quickbrowse now has a free Firefox extension, too. Unlike My Morning Coffee – which opens Web sites in tabs – Quickbrowse opens them as a single page . . . and lets you ‘collect links’ from the first set of pages on a second Quickbrowse page. (So your first page might be HuffingtonPost and Drudge and the Wall Street Journal and a few others, which you’d quickly skim, clicking the headlines for stories you want collected on a second page.) OPERA (BUT FUN) Jeff: ‘Opera has navigation features far superior to any other browser. You can use the keyboard, mouse gestures, or mouse clicks (or any combo of them) to do anything you can do using the mouse. It’s much faster than searching for the forward and back buttons with your pointer for common tasks. On the other hand, it slows down if you open many tabs (more than, say, 30) and it comes to a dead stop and sometimes crashes on maps.google.com. A few sites do not work right in Opera (yours shows an ‘F’ where you have that little pointing hand wingding).’ ☞ My little pointing hand shows up as an F in Safari and Firefox, too. When are browsers going to comply with my standard?! Is that really asking so much? REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR VETOES INSTANT RUN-OFF VOTING Boo! Hiss! Click here. MAKING SURE AT LEAST ONE VOTE COUNTS Even if it will be some time before we routinely get to specify our first and second choices in Instant Runoff elections, an even more important concern is that every eligible voter who wants to vote gets to do so, and that every vote counts. The Nation reports that the DNC has been doing good work toward that end: . . . The Democratic National Committee isn’t waiting until November to address these problems . . . As part of its Voting Rights Institute and 50-State Strategy, its field staff has conducted approximately 1200 interviews with local elections officials in order to investigate exactly how elections will be administered come November. “While there are state and federal laws governing elections, local election officials have a lot of discretion,” Anna Martínez, DNC Deputy Political Director for Voter Protection, told me. “So we’ve used local field staff to conduct these interviews, looking state-by-state and county-by-county. Even within a single state there are a lot of discrepancies as to how elections are run and how local election officials are interpreting the law.” Martínez came to the DNC after working as a senior analyst in the Voting Rights section of the Department of Justice from 2000-2004 . . . “The people in charge there, the political appointees over in the front office, not only lacked commitment to civil rights but actively worked against voting rights enforcement and over time created a demoralizing work environment for career professionals,” Martínez said. “I went to the DNC before the 2004 election, so I could take my experience and apply it to actually working to promote and protect the right to vote.” Many troubling issues have already been uncovered by the DNC during its interview process, including: election officials saying they won’t allow college students to vote in their hometowns even though that’s not within their discretion; improper purging of voters from registration lists; lack of training for election officials; 25% of jurisdictions surveyed have no formula for allocation of voting machines; 34.7% have no written policy for removal of voters from voter registration lists; 16% have no written chain of custody procedure for equipment and election results; 66 jurisdictions have polling places that are inaccessible to people with disabilities (and those are just the ones that admit it); there is also much confusion over who has jurisdiction – state or county – over various aspects of election administration. “When you start listing these things you realize how much there is that we need to be on top of,” Martínez said. The problems are now being addressed by the state parties and the DNC’s National Lawyers Council (NLC), made up of thousands of Democratic volunteer lawyers and law students. Leadership in the state and county NLC chapters are working with a whole cadre of lawyers at the local level to help get that job done. Martínez said that many of these lawyers have relationships with local election officials, and for those that don’t, establishing them now is critical. “This project is allowing our local lawyers to meet with the local election officials now, so that we can work together addressing issues we identify,” Martínez said. “Normally these issues don’t get the attention they deserve until really late – like the last 6 weeks before an election – and then it’s chaotic. But decisions about administering elections are being made year round, so we’re trying to be vigilant in seeing what these decisions are, who’s making them, and we’re trying to flag issues and resolve problems well in advance of the election.” [. . .] “There’s been some resistance,” Martínez said. “But for the most part election officials want to do their jobs well and are happy to participate. Where there is resistance I’m concerned. It should be a transparent process.” Indeed it should be. But as we learned in 2000 and 2004, transparency isn’t always the way things pan out. Between now and Election Day the DNC will track problems, state parties and lawyers will work to address them, and how and when they are resolved will be monitored. When Election Day rolls around the DNC hopes to use its own voter hotline to quickly respond to problems, and lawyers and field workers will utilize new technology to locate trouble spots in real time and respond.