So Sad April 16, 2013April 16, 2013 Ugh, ugh, ugh. Words fail. But these were written before the bombs went off, so — meaning no disrespect to my beloved Boston, or her victims — I guess I’ll let them go live as scheduled. Yet . . . such a sad day. Utterly senseless. Come back and read tomorrow if, as would be understandable, just not in the mood today. # EQUALLY WEIGHTED FUNDS Mark Coppola: “I followed Less Antman’s advice from your January 11, 2011, column and invested in EWEM and EWEF. EWEF and EWAC have both recently closed and EWEM is on ETF Deathwatch, all due to low assets under management. I was wondering if there were other equal-weight alternatives in the international market that are worthy of consideration to replace EWEF and (possibly) EWEM?” ETF is short for Exchange-Traded Fund, and the EW in each of those symbols stands for “equally weighted.” As readers of my book know (in no small part thanks to Less), most index funds weight their holdings by market cap — so they own a ton of Exxon or Apple and relatively little E-Trade or Airgas. Equally-weighted funds would own (say) $1 million worth of each. Less responds: “I have to confess surprise at the lack of interest in international versions of the equally-weighted S&P 500 index ETF, RSP. Since its inception in 2003, RSP has produced an annualized return of 10.3% vs the 7.6% return of SPY, even though these two funds invest in the exact same 500 stocks, only differing in the weighting scheme. Unlike all the academic theories that stopped working as soon as an investment vehicle to exploit the theory was created, this theory has worked exactly as predicted, even after all expenses of trading and management, yet it still hasn’t caught fire (although RSP itself has over $4 billion in assets). . . . Nonetheless, the lack of interest is clear. . . . The good news is that virtually any alternative weighting scheme for an index should benefit from the “noisy market hypothesis” on which I based my suggestion. [Not familiar with that hypothesis? See page 166. — A.T.] This includes the fundamentally-weighted indexes of WisdomTree, PowerShares, and Schwab, any of which could serve as substitutes for the equal weighting no longer available internationally. My personal favorites, however, are the minimum volatility offerings of iShares, including EFAV, the iShares MSCI EAFE Minimum Volatility ETF (expense ratio 0.2%) and EEMV, the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Minimum Volatility ETF (expense ratio 0.25%). These weren’t available when we made our bet, so we might have to clone them to the decedents in order to figure out who ultimately wins the bet.” REPORT FROM VENEZUELA An American college chum who has been doing nonprofit work in Venezuela for what must be going on four decades by now writes of this past weekend’s election: As I write this, I can barely hear myself think, owing to the loud racket of clanging pots and pans from thousands and thousands of windows and apartments across the land, overwhelmingly so in the major cities like Caracas, and in every little provincial city like our own, in a national protest owing to the refusal of the electoral commission to count the votes. The widespread assumption here is that there was just enough fraud with the silent acceptance and perhaps direct complicity of the strongly-biased government electoral commission, in order to squeak through a marginal victory and keep themselves (the current government) in power. The opposition candidate is demanding a recount and the streets are indignant with the sense of fraud. There are protests all over the country. This morning, a forum of international election observers, as well as the head of the OAS, stated that the presumed winner (Maduro) should NOT be inaugurated today until a full paper recount is done. The electoral commission has refused to do the recount (increasing the suspicion that the opposition did indeed win), Maduro was hurriedly proclaimed president this afternoon, and there are many denouncements that complicit military elements are already burning and otherwise disposing of boxes of the ballots, saying the election is over. The opposition candidate Capriles and his team did a simply phenomenal job, reducing the enormous government favoritism from 20+% following the death of the iconic Chavez (a completely over-rated but supposedly charismatic leader) and his chavismo movement, to basically ZERO in an extremely short campaign frame of one month. The government presumably won by 1+%, but they actually may have lost by slightly more than that. The government’s formidable vote-getting machine has always been significantly driven by intimidation, direct threats and bribery — this I can substantiate both in my personal experience and nationally. In contrast, each opposition vote was cast by an individual acting on his/her own with an underlying measure of fear in defiance of an increasingly autocratic state. I think it is fair to say that with this election, the back of “chavismo” has been broken. Chavismo as a movement can no longer count on a majority to win elections. In strong contrast to the past, the current Chavismo government is now borderline illegitimate, and no longer has the support of half or more of the population. This is an enormous step forward, but not enough — the opposition should be assuming power TODAY! The opposition candidate Capriles is demonstrating real leadership, extremely popular but with no assurance of victory in an extremely unfair scenario, carrying forth 100% at real personal risk. He has now built a strong political coalition that is the first serious alternative to Chavismo in fifteen years, and bodes well for the imminent future. What’s next: Many analysts doubt that the “elected” candidate Maduro, who is neither charismatic, nor has proven particularly competent to date, will be able to sustain this government, much less keep the highly diversified and conflicted Chavismo movement within his fold. The country faces enormous concrete problems (I mean, MAJOR) that are going to provoke considerable instability quite soon. It is not clear that Maduro will be able to keep it together, to say the least. (Some people have actually argued that it is better that Maduro inherit these problems produced by his own ideology, and then collapse on his own, rather than that Capriles have to face this – much as Obama had to resolve at considerable political cost the enormous problems that Bush left.) What is clear to me is that this is probably as non-trivial an electoral event as I have been witness to in my lifetime, like Germany tottering indecisively before Hitler in the 1930’s — one of those historical moments when a thin remaining margin of democracy faces the whole military and governmental apparatus of the autocratic state. If democracy loses, we can soon expect the few remaining independent media outlets to succumb, and the free press will continue fading away, so that even the basic information available in this brief report will not be easily available.
13.8% Versus 4.47% April 15, 2013April 14, 2013 4868 AND 1040ES You’ll probably need this today to file for an automatic six-month extension on your taxes (but not an extension on any tax you may owe, which should accompany the form) . . . and you may need this to send in your first 2013 quarterly estimated tax payment. In addition to being “the price we pay for civilization,” by the way, taxes are the way we finance our national defense and leadership role in the world. When did it become patriotic not proudly to pony up? They’re the way we built the railroads and the Interstates, the way we financed and won World War II, the way we put a man on the moon and lay the underpinnings of the Internet. When did it become patriotic not to want to be “number #1”? (Shouting it and being it, a purist might note, are two different things.) Taxes are also the way we pay for things like subsistence and health care for our elderly. What good son or daughter would deny them that? Taxes are the way we pay interest on the National Debt. What proud American would see us default on that debt — even if so much of it was racked up under Reagan, Bush, and Bush to finance over-generous tax cuts for the rich and a disastrous war of choice we opposed? A little complaining is fun, human nature, and part of our birthright. I whine, moan, and chafe like anyone else. But . . . enough already? 25 CENTS VERSUS $1.79 So if you missed Friday, because it went up Saturday (what’s wrong with you?), you missed Dennis King questioning SodaStream’s consumer value. He buys Diet Coke for 29 cents a can and figures SodaStream’s version actually costs more. I am agnostic — I just like the diet pink grapefruit soda and the idea of saving the environment — but the SodaStream website claims a 25-cent cost “per can” which, if true, really ain’t bad. And compare the claimed 25-cent cost of a liter of soda with the liter of Canada Dry my supermarket sells for $1.79. I also note that, for the newer SodaStreams like mine, you can get a CO2 cartridge for $50 that’s rated to provide 130 liters of soda instead of the standard 60 liters for $30. The math far exceeds my computational skills, but it seems to me this could bring the per-liter cost down . . . although what really brings it down is that after the cartridge is empty, you can exchange it for a full one at Wal-Mart or Staples or wherever for about half price. 13.8% A YEAR VERSUS 4.47% You also would have missed Patrick Johnson’s updated spreadsheet, bringing results up all the way to last week, and bumping the average annualized return up a hair from 14.98% to 15.10%. Daniel H: “The approach of calculating the compound rate of return by averaging the returns across the average holding periods can significantly skew the results since it can overweight or underweight each individual investment’s holding period. Fortunately, Excel gives us an easy tool to generate the internal rate of return (IRR) from a series of cash flows. On his spreadsheet, just model the outflow by a -1000 value and the resulting inflow with the corresponding final period date. I just added a column of exit dates using Patrick’s holding period added to the initial date. My stab at it using Excel’s XIRR function indicates an internal rate of return of a still very impressive 13.8%. This is the interest rate at which, if you borrowed the $1000 for each individual investment, you would have broken even at the end.” ☞ Here’s Daniel’s spreadsheet. (The “closing date” column he added is column E, which may be hidden as you view it. If you know Excel, just unhide it.) At the bottom, you’ll see Patrick’s 15.10% number, but also Danbiel’s 13.8% IRR. Meanwhile, as has been mentioned, It would be good to have a number for the annualized rate of return from, say, the S&P 500 over those same years, by way of comparison. According to this, that index would have returned 4.47%, annualized, over the 15 years 1998 through 2012, which may be a pretty close approximation. If so, $1,000 invested in the S&P for those 15 years would have grown to $1,927 — but to $6,952 at 13.8%. Which is to say appreciation of $5,952 versus $927. Here’s the blurb, just FYI.
14.98% – Part III . . . and pushback on fizz April 13, 2013April 14, 2013 UPDATED RESULTS By popular demand, Patrick somehow updated the 179 recommendations that run through last May, so his spreadsheet now runs through last week . . . Patrick Johnson: “Here it is — 11 good months for both the market and your picks. Now up to 195 recommendations by my count. Average return of 77.36%, average holding period up slightly to 4.10 years. Compounded return 15.10% — $195,000 invested became $345,861.” ☞ There will doubtless be further tweaks — and, if we’re lucky, further occasional updates. As previously noted, here and here, there are various grains of salt with which these results should be taken. Daniel H.: “Kudos to Patrick! Wow, that was a lot of work. I have to take a nap just thinking about it.” SODASTREAM Dennis King: “You mention the economic benefits of using SodaStream. I disagree with your analysis – at least for soft drinks. I rarely pay more than 99 cents for a 2 liter Diet Coke and $3.50 for a Twelve Pak of Diet coke cans. .29 cents per can. And unless you are just drinking fizzy water, you do not mention the cost of the other ingredients that go into making a carbonated soft drink. Let’s see: a 60 Liter Soda Stream Co2 cartridge — $30 at Target. Cola Syrup (enough to make 60 liters) — $67 at Target. A total of $97 for 60 Liters of cola. Versus $30, for 30 two-liter bottles, at my grocery store (on sale) or beverage store (normal price). Or about $50 for the equivalent in cans. From where I stand, it looks like “buying in” to this product will double or triple my cost of soft drinks. Around here, plastic and aluminum cans are recycled as well. A nickel (refundable) deposit per can or bottle gets a lot of them recycled. So, I am not sure of the environmental benefit either. I realize that prices are often MUCH higher in larger metro areas, but even at double the cost, it seams as if SodaStream just does not make economic sense.” ☞ You mean the CO2 cartridge has to be replaced? <LOL> I may have to rethink the economics. But I do think that not-producing-and-transporting billions of cans and bottles has environmental advantages over producing and recycling them. Stewart Dean: “Sorry to be a wet blanket about SodaStream, but [not everyone is thrilled by the joint Palestinian-Israeli factory clip you linked to] — see here. And as to why the SuperBowl ad was banned, see here. And what about Fizzgiz?” ☞ Well, Fizzgiz looks a bit awkward compared to SodaStream; and the SuperBowl link — while interesting — doesn’t strike me as a knock on SodaStream; and controversy over the disputed territories . . . well, I still found that clip persuasive. I don’t claim to be an expert in any of this, though I can tell you the diet pink grapefruit soda is good — I just finished my first liter. Bill Schwartz: “Love the SodaStream, have had it for years. Use it constantly (we love seltzer, have never used it for soda). Yes, I replace the CO2 cartridges frequently. It’s a snap; they just screw on and off. There are now many local stores where you can do the exchanges. That’s one of the big controversies about the company. Absolutely ruthless from what I’ve read in crushing anyone else who wants to refill the cylinders. The $$$ is definitely in those refills, plus the soda flavorings I imagine. Other than the (to me) iffy politics, my other lingering concern is the healthfulness of drinking large amounts of carbonated water, which is acidic. Just ordered some pH strips to test and experiment. I believe a pinch of salt should be sufficient to return it neutral pH. Not positive if it matters, but many smart people, including Ray Kurzweil, are very wary of consuming too much acidic water (and maybe food). Too much alkaline water, as some water filters make, probably not so good either, since we really want our stomachs to be very acidic when we eat, as Dr. David Brownstein for one has pointed out. Everything is complicated, even water apparently, if you make the mistake of looking too closely :-).”
Friday April 12, 2013 Yes it is. But one thing led to another. Please check back later . . . or, if you get this by email (subscribe at right, midway down the page), I hope to get it out by the end of the day.
14.98% – Part II April 11, 2013April 13, 2013 Following up from yesterday, wherein it was alleged that readers who followed all 179 suggestions here over the years might have seen their money compound at 14.98% annually, at least as of May 4, 2012 . . . Patrick Johnson: “The update through April 9th 2013 will be coming soon. [AND HERE IT IS.] I had the day off and got a lot of it done yesterday. As you point out, if there were any systematic bias either for you, because I think you are swell, or against you, because someone hates authors who are registered Democrats and Harvard graduates, it would make a pretty big difference. I did my very best to avoid any such bias. Working in my favor in my efforts to be objective was that I went through the columns first and took notes on what the recommendations were before evaluating how anything turned out. Borealis was the one I had the hardest time judging the recommendations for. In the end, I went with what I did. If I had reiterated a buy with EVERY mention the portfolio would be very overweight in BOREF. I strive to be objective but complicating things is that I personally hate companies like BOREF. So perhaps I underrepresented it. . . . Separately: You made this point but the reason one doesn’t ten-tuple one’s money is because you aren’t fully invested from day 1 in 1996 to the present day. Investments are made in $1,000 dribs and drabs with some sales along the way. It would be misleading if we tried to imply (which neither of us has) that one gained 900% in 17 years. But over time, the money that was invested in your recommendations did compound at ~15% a year. An interesting addendum would be to assume one had, say, $25,000 or $40,000 or whatever in 1996 and bought and sold the recommendations, reinvesting the gains. Or that one started with say $5,000 following the recommendations and added $1,000 per quarter in addition to reinvesting the gains. Personally, in 1996 I was a freshman at Columbia and didn’t have $400, let alone $5,000 to my name! There are a large number of directions we can go and hypotheses we can test. Let me finish with the data update before we go too deep.” ☞ Isn’t this fun? It’s like getting a long overdue report card — and finding out that we did reasonably well . . . albeit only with money we could truly afford to lose (because the same report card in March of 2009 would not have looked so good). Also worth noting: most of the credit for any good results you may have had goes to Guru and to Christ Brown of Aristides and a few other smart people. I won’t name my First Marblehead guy — punishment enough that he lost at least a million or two, I would guess, of actual cash, and tens of millions of his own paper gains, when it went south. If BOREF ever does hit big, all I can say is that, yes, it IS very substantially overweighted in my own basket of speculations. My fingers are crossed so much on that one I may need hand surgery. Chip in Philadelphia: “As you constantly recommend index funds for nonspeculative investing, wouldn’t it be interesting to compare the return on your $1000 speculative investments with the return on $1000 invested in either a total market or S&P500 index fund invested on the same dates? Isn’t the true test of a stock picker is not the return but the return compared to the market over the long-term?” ☞ Indeed. Index funds since 1996 have not compounded at 15%. But before I pat myself too heavily on the back, I want to make sure we’re not too far off on that number, and also bring it up to date. Also, it should be noted, on a risk-adjusted basis, we should have outperformed the indexes . . . or else what would have justified taking the extra risk? (“Ooh! Ooh! I know!” “What, Horshack?” “Well, in a taxable account, even if you did no better than an index fund, you had the advantage of tax control — using your losers to lower your taxable income and your winners, held for more than a year, to fund the charitable giving, via Fidelity’s Charitable Gift Fund or one of the others, that you would otherwise have done with cash.” “Very good, Horshack.”) Suzanne: “Patrick chose to use $1000 invested for each one of your stocks picks. What happened to lots of 100? Are lots of 100 old fashioned?” ☞ Well, yes, they are old-fashioned. Though most of us do place orders in round numbers, the computer couldn’t care less. There’s no extra fee for odd lots as there once was). More to the point, it would be kinda nuts to weight a $50 stock 10 times as heavily as a $5 stock, just because it sells at a higher price. That said, I look back on the old days of round lots — and fractional rather than decimal pricing (remember halves, quarters, eighths, teenies, and two-nies?) — with considerable fondness. Until I remember the grotesque commission structure. (“Ooh! Ooh!” “What now Horshack?” “Remember the pink sheets?” I do. Literally pink. Literally sheets, long and narrow, with a giant staple at the top. They were so much fun.)
14.98% A Year? April 10, 2013April 13, 2013 In an act of selfless, heroic readership unmatched in modern time, one of you — Patrick Johnson, whom I have never met — undertook to read the thousands of columns posted here since 1996, searching for the investment suggestions buried therein and then calculating how much money — that you could “truly afford to lose” — you in fact would have lost by following them. There are so many grains of salt with which his findings should be taken that I can just hear my mother, who lived health-consciously to age 91: “Don’t use so much salt! Have you even tasted it yet? Darling, you’re going to get hardening of the arteries!” But first the unseasoned meat of it: “Here is the tentative final file,” Patrick writes. “You made a total of 179 recommendations. I can do more analysis later but it looks like the average holding was held for 4.05 years and was up 76%, which works out to a compound average of +14.98% a year. Or in other words, if someone put $1,000 in each of your recommendations, they would have invested $179,000 for various amounts of time and ended up with $315,000 not counting taxes and commissions. All the decisions of what constitutes a firm recommendation were subjective and I used my best judgement. Any mistakes or miscalculations are my own. I don’t believe there are any egregious errors. Thanks to the readers who helped out in filling the information gaps. Just think, we started this a year ago and we are at last done, at least with the initial data file. One of the neat things about Excel is that we can delve further into the numbers and find out more interesting stuff beyond the basic summary above. I will be in touch! For now I have to do my taxes and have a busy week of work ahead.” I mean, seriously, can you imagine how much work this was? So the first thing to say is . . . thank you, Patrick! The second is: wow! Patrick went all the way from December 28, 1996, to May 4, 2012. How do we induce him to (a) update the final prices (for stocks not yet jettisoned) to today? and (b) add the nutty suggestions I have made since last May? So far, the only inducement I have been able to come up with is: more thanks. [UPDATE: THROUGH APRIL 9, 2013] The third thing to say is that, spreadsheet results aside, all that matters to you is whatever results you achieved — good or bad — if you acted on some of my suggestions. And now the grains of salt, quibbles, and other signs of ingratitude: As Patrick would be first to acknowledge, this cannot possibly be as accurate as a number carried to two decimal places — 14.98% — makes it sound. I linked to Patrick’s spread sheet so anyone can see and evaluate it for herself. But surely there were a few “buys” and “sells” in those 4,300 posts Patrick missed. And, as he says, he had to interpret when my often pretty-well-hedged suggestion was a buy or a sell, a buy-more or a partial sale. And while Patrick sensibly chose to assume an equal $1,000 investment in each — what if you put more in my disastrously enthusiastic recommendation of First Marblehead? Or less in some winner I only mentioned once, without emphasis? To a certain extent Patrick seems to have had you double up (a second $1,000, at a new price) if I reiterated a recommendation sometime later. But he only has us buying BOREF three times since 1999, and I could swear I’ve mentioned it once or twice more than that. And what if you had put $5,000 in the kinds of things that were not nutty speculations (like the very first recommendation in his spreadsheet, the T. Rowe Price Global Stock Fund) and just $1,000 in the clearly risky ones? On top of that, there may simply be some errors in his research. Some of this stuff — like calculating what happened to $1,000 invested in GM in 1997 — gets really complicated, what with dividends and bankruptcies and spin-offs and such. And then there’s The Stockholm Syndrome. Once he got captured by this project — self-inflicted though his entrapment was — Patrick may have found himself co-opted and, if only subconsciously, rooting for me to look good. As he noted, there are a lot of judgment calls in an effort like this. If you had two people doing it — both truly attempting to be fair and accurate, but one kind of hoping I’d look good and the other kind of hoping I’d look bad (don’t look away: you know who you are) — I think their results would not have been identical. It’s not as straightforward as measuring the weight of a cabbage. So to you all, please feel free to weigh in with suggestions, corrections, refinements, for anything up through last May 4. I would note that anyone who did manage to compound his or her money at 14.98% over these years would have nearly tentupled it, and I’m all but certain that, even if investing with $8 commissions sheltered from taxes in an IRA, none of you has. I sure haven’t. (Obviously, to have made 179 $1,000 investments and seen them grow from $179,000 to $315,000 — 76% — is not to have nearly tentupled your money. What Patrick is saying is that the average holding time was just over 4 years. To have grown 76% over 4 years is to have achieved a compounded annual return of about 15% a year. The notion is that the money from your early winners — and losers — would have been reinvested upon sale in subsequent winners and losers. Another way of saying this is that you would not have had to start with $179,000. You would have started with $1,000 in the first investment, added further $1,000’s in future investments, but within a few years, perhaps, you would have been placing new bets not with cash from your paycheck, but with profits from from some of the earlier investments.) This is all very preliminary. But why should Patrick and I struggle to fine-tune and make sense of it without your having to put a little sweat equity into the game? To be continued.
Republican Outreach April 9, 2013April 8, 2013 Matt Ball forwards this MSNBC report on the tactics Republicans are using to keep people from voting. “If you can’t win, cheat,” he says. “And look at the last bullet point!” National Republicans have been talking a good game lately about reaching out to minorities, but the GOP is pursuing a very different strategy on the state level. Republicans around the country are pushing a fresh wave of voting restrictions that figure to keep blacks, Hispanics and other Democratic leaning groups from the polls–and North Carolina just became ground zero for that effort. In the last week, Republican lawmakers in the Tar Heel State have introduced a huge raft of new measures that make voting more difficult. If they go into effect—and because the state is controlled entirely by the GOP, they’re likely to—here’s what would happen: A government-issued photo ID would be required to vote. A full week of the state’s early voting period would be eliminated. Same-day voter registration during the early voting period would also be scrapped. All Sunday voting would likewise be banned. Poll watchers looking for voter fraud (like those trained by the Tea Party group True the Vote) would be able to move around more freely inside polling places, making it easier for harassment and intimidation of voters and poll workers to occur. Felons would have to wait five years before getting their right to vote restored. The move also would have to be approved unanimously by their county board of elections. Voters deemed “mentally incompetent” would be barred from voting. Parents would lose a tax credit worth $2500 if their child registers to vote at a different address. The effect would be to force college students—who, like minorities, tend to vote Democratic—to return to their parents’ towns to vote, or cost their families money. Of course, North Carolina is not alone. Just since the start of the year, at least 75 restrictive voting bills have been introduced across the country, according to a Brennan Center analysis. But the state’s effort may be the most extensive and far-reaching. . . . I know many find partisanship distasteful. And outrage by now may just be boring, there’s been so much of it. But when a majority of Americans — including Americans in Florida, counted fairly — elect Al Gore but get George Bush and the $2 trillion war in Iraq . . . when his reelection hinged on a victory in Ohio that itself hinged on voter suppression (watch!!!) . . . when 92% of Americans want sensible gun safety measures but that may not be enough for Congress to enact them . . . when it proves impossible to pass the American Jobs Act that would have put more than a million people back to work . . . when “the people” are thwarted at every turn, as with tooth-and-nail opposition to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and so much else . . . why shouldn’t we be outraged? The Occupy movement AND the Tea Party have exactly the right sentiment — outrage! It’s just that the Occupy folks, for the most part, understand what’s going on, while the Tea Party folks, for the most part, have been manipulated by the Koch brothers-Limbaugh-Fox News-Sarah Palin crowd into largely misdirecting their outrage. Or so it seems to me. The poor and middle class are not the enemy — and neither are the rich, or Exxon. But over the last few decades the balance of power and wealth — already skewed wildly in favor of the rich and powerful (obviously), has just swung just too much further their way. Some of the rich and powerful agree. They vote Democrat. Some disagree, or even feel abused that there is any estate tax (for example). They vote Republican. And now the Republicans are working overtime to suppress the vote of the least powerful, as, for example, above. Tomorrow: How You Would Have Made Out Since 1996 Investing Money You Could Truly Afford To Lose
Fizz April 8, 2013 ANN Now extended through September 1 . . . and I’ll tell you why: it’s wonderful! A one-woman show that feels like a full cast — her entire family is there, her secretary, her speechwriter, the lawyer advising her on a death-penalty stay, Bill Clinton — Ann is Ann Richards, the larger-than-life former governor of Texas, who died in 2006 but is brought back to life — magnificently — by Holland Taylor at the Vivian Beaumont theater at Lincoln Center. Funny, brilliant, and even a little inspirational. SODASTREAM Pamela forwards this 45-second Superbowl ad CBS refused to air. Fun. I’ve decided that SodaStream is the near exact opposite of Nespresso. Nespresso machines are expensive and add significantly to your cost of caffeine (50 cents a shot versus 50 cents a pot) and — perhaps less significantly, but still — to the strain you place on the environment (all those little cartridges to be disposed of). SodaStream machines are cheap and save significantly on both your cost of carbonation (about a third the price of a 50-cent aluminum can of soda or half the price of a $1.89 2-liter plastic bottle . . . and 100% saving on the soda in your Scotch and soda or the fizzy water in your “Perrier”) and on the cost to the environment (all that aluminum and plastic to make, transport, and dispose of). Plus, Nespresso is, well, snooty. Where SodaStream is, well, fun. (Watch the ad again or visit their website.) And while it’s no big deal to carry Nespresso cartridges home or have them mailed to you — they’re light — do you know how much strain you’re putting on your back when you lug around a couple of cases of Dr. Pepper? The truth is I’m not much on fizzy drinks when I’m home anyway — I’m more of a carrot juice or iced tea kind of guy. (Read: communist.) And when guests ask for a Diet Coke, I’m not sure I can get away with pouring it for them from a SodaStream bottle. (Pouring Glenlivet from a Johnny Walker Blue bottle saves $150 a bottle: the perfect crime .) But somebody is drinking tens of billions of cans of soda each year, and SodaStream is a good way for them to drink that soda from the tap, essentially, instead. I have bought a few January 2015 SODA 42.5 LEAPS.* You never know. *With money I can truly afford to lose, because they will expire worthless in less than two years should we get a dip in the price of the stock. QUIT SMOKING Mark: “Some of the smoking statistics here are very interesting. I know your history trying to get Russians to stop. Maybe a little reminder to the rest of the world is in order. And think of the money smokers could save.”
Targeted Marketing April 5, 2013April 5, 2013 Today’s column is late for two reasons with a unified theme. The first is that it took me a ridiculously long time to figure out how to insert the photo. The second is that we had a little dinner party last night with eight estimable guests — one quite famous and spectacularly gracious — and I decided to demonstrate my brand new SodaStream fizz maker (remember?) for the assembled. (The unified theme is that I’m an idiot.) “Don’t DO it!” laughed my co-host. What sensible person, having never actually tried it before, puts a SodaStream between his knees to do a sort of late night infomercial demo at a faux-elegant dinner party? “I know, I know. And Charles is horrified as well,” I said, looking skyward. “‘Honey . . . ‘ I can just hear him . . . ‘and not on the carpet.’ But it’s a way for us all to bond with a common experience — making fun of me — and actually, this is supposed to be pretty amazing.” I told them the story of the Israeli-Palestinian factory and how each SodaStream — of which 10 million have now been sold in 35 countries — saves thousand of soda cans and plastic bottles from having to be made. And transported. And disposed of. I explained that I had just gotten mine and that I had never ever tried it. I wanted us to experience its maiden fizz together. “Ready?” (They were ready.) My friend Victor, knowing my talent for such things, was wincing the way you do when you expect something very loud and awful to happen. I pressed the button. Nothing happened. I pressed it again, harder. Not only did something happen — it sprayed water all over our quite famous guest. Who was spectacularly gracious as we mopped him up. I had forgotten the rather crucial step of screwing the water bottle into the machine. Like forgetting to cap a bottle of his sesame ginger salad dressing before shaking it up. You can’t blame Paul Newman. I was an idiot. Anyway, here’s today’s column: TARGETED MARKETING So Airbus builds a lot of planes. It’s got 11,000 employees at its headquarters in Toulouse, France, and 15,000 at its headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. Take a look at this photo and then meet me below: This is a newly-painted Germania Airbus A-319. It is NOT equipped with WheelTug — no airplane yet is. And, yes, it’s just one jet out of more than 10,000 that fly around the world every day. What’s nice about this particular jet, though — from the point of view of supremely patient Borealis shareholders — is that this jet is employed shuttling Airbus employees back and forth between Toulouse and Hamburg. And they board the plane from the tarmac by walking up stairs. Have a great weekend.
If We Used Our Brains . . . April 4, 2013April 4, 2013 . . . we would find a way to fix our political system to allow us to move forward logically. And expeditiously. (A good start, if only we could do it: dis-gerrymandering districts so that centrists and moderates could more easily win Congressional seats, and, once elected, work together.) How broken is our political system, and its funding? Watch Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk from a few weeks ago. If it grabs you — and it will — consider LESTERLAND: The Corruption of Congress and How To End It, his short $2.99 e-book. In the meantime, with our deeply divided, deeply dysfunctional Congress, we’re blowing the chance to put people eager for work to work doing urgent things, financed by record-low long-term interest rates. One exciting project one hopes the loyal opposition may allow was announced Tuesday: REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON THE BRAIN INITIATIVE AND AMERICAN INNOVATION April 2, 2013 THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. (Applause.) Thank you, everybody. . . . Today I’ve invited some of the smartest people in the country, some of the most imaginative and effective researchers in the country — some very smart people to talk about the challenge that I issued in my State of the Union address: to grow our economy, to create new jobs, to reignite a rising, thriving middle class by investing in one of our core strengths, and that’s American innovation.Ideas are what power our economy. It’s what sets us apart. It’s what America has been all about. We have been a nation of dreamers and risk-takers; people who see what nobody else sees sooner than anybody else sees it. We do innovation better than anybody else — and that makes our economy stronger. When we invest in the best ideas before anybody else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else. And because of that incredible dynamism, we don’t just attract the best scientists or the best entrepreneurs — we also continually invest in their success. We support labs and universities to help them learn and explore. And we fund grants to help them turn a dream into a reality. And we have a patent system to protect their inventions. And we offer loans to help them turn those inventions into successful businesses. And the investments don’t always pay off. But when they do, they change our lives in ways that we could never have imagined. Computer chips and GPS technology, the Internet — all these things grew out of government investments in basic research. And sometimes, in fact, some of the best products and services spin off completely from unintended research that nobody expected to have certain applications. Businesses then used that technology to create countless new jobs. So the founders of Google got their early support from the National Science Foundation. The Apollo project that put a man on the moon also gave us eventually CAT scans. And every dollar we spent to map the human genome has returned $140 to our economy — $1 of investment, $140 in return. Dr. Collins helped lead that genome effort, and that’s why we thought it was appropriate to have him here to announce the next great American project, and that’s what we’re calling the BRAIN Initiative. As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away, we can study particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears. (Laughter.) But today, scientists possess the capability to study individual neurons and figure out the main functions of certain areas of the brain. But a human brain contains almost 100 billion neurons making trillions of connections. So Dr. Collins says it’s like listening to the strings section and trying to figure out what the whole orchestra sounds like. So as a result, we’re still unable to cure diseases like Alzheimer’s or autism, or fully reverse the effects of a stroke. And the most powerful computer in the world isn’t nearly as intuitive as the one we’re born with. So there is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be — will be — transformative. In the budget I will send to Congress next week, I will propose a significant investment by the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, and the National Science Foundation to help get this project off the ground. I’m directing my bioethics commission to make sure all of the research is being done in a responsible way. And we’re also partnering with the private sector, including leading companies and foundations and research institutions, to tap the nation’s brightest minds to help us reach our goal. And of course, none of this will be easy. If it was, we would already know everything there was about how the brain works, and presumably my life would be simpler here. (Laughter.) It could explain all kinds of things that go on in Washington. (Laughter.) We could prescribe something. (Laughter.) So it won’t be easy. But think about what we could do once we do crack this code. Imagine if no family had to feel helpless watching a loved one disappear behind the mask of Parkinson’s or struggle in the grip of epilepsy. Imagine if we could reverse traumatic brain injury or PTSD for our veterans who are coming home. Imagine if someone with a prosthetic limb can now play the piano or throw a baseball as well as anybody else, because the wiring from the brain to that prosthetic is direct and triggered by what’s already happening in the patient’s mind. What if computers could respond to our thoughts or our language barriers could come tumbling down. Or if millions of Americans were suddenly finding new jobs in these fields — jobs we haven’t even dreamt up yet — because we chose to invest in this project. That’s the future we’re imagining. That’s what we’re hoping for. That’s why the BRAIN Initiative is so absolutely important. And that’s why it’s so important that we think about basic research generally as a driver of growth and that we replace the across-the-board budget cuts that are threatening to set us back before we even get started. A few weeks ago, the directors of some of our national laboratories said that the sequester — these arbitrary, across-the-board cuts that have gone into place — are so severe, so poorly designed that they will hold back a generation of young scientists. When our leading thinkers wonder if it still makes sense to encourage young people to get involved in science in the first place because they’re not sure whether the research funding and the grants will be there to cultivate an entire new generation of scientists, that’s something we should worry about. We can’t afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead. We have to seize them. I don’t want the next job-creating discoveries to happen in China or India or Germany. I want them to happen right here, in the United States of America. And that’s part of what this BRAIN Initiative is about. That’s why we’re pursuing other “grand challenges” like making solar energy as cheap as coal or making electric vehicles as affordable as the ones that run on gas. They’re ambitious goals, but they’re achievable. And we’re encouraging companies and research universities and other organizations to get involved and help us make progress. We have a chance to improve the lives of not just millions, but billions of people on this planet through the research that’s done in this BRAIN Initiative alone. But it’s going to require a serious effort, a sustained effort. And it’s going to require us as a country to embody and embrace that spirit of discovery that is what made America, America. They year before I was born, an American company came out with one of the earliest mini-computers. It was a revolutionary machine, didn’t require its own air conditioning system. That was a big deal. It took only one person to operate, but each computer was eight feet tall, weighed 1,200 pounds, and cost more than $100,000. And today, most of the people in this room, including the person whose cell phone just rang — (laughter) — have a far more powerful computer in their pocket. Computers have become so small, so universal, so ubiquitous, most of us can’t imagine life without them — certainly, my kids can’t. And, as a consequence, millions of Americans work in fields that didn’t exist before their parents were born. Watson, the computer that won “Jeopardy,” is now being used in hospitals across the country to diagnose diseases like cancer. That’s how much progress has been made in my lifetime and in many of yours. That’s how fast we can move when we make the investments. But we can’t predict what that next big thing will be. We don’t know what life will be like 20 years from now, or 50 years, or 100 years down the road. What we do know is if we keep investing in the most prominent, promising solutions to our toughest problems, then things will get better. I don’t want our children or grandchildren to look back on this day and wish we had done more to keep America at the cutting edge. I want them to look back and be proud that we took some risks, that we seized this opportunity. That’s what the American story is about. That’s who we are. That’s why this BRAIN Initiative is so important. And if we keep taking bold steps like the one we’re talking about to learn about the brain, then I’m confident America will continue to lead the world in the next frontiers of human understanding. And all of you are going to help us get there. So I’m very excited about this project. Francis, let’s get to work. God bless you and God bless the United States of America. Thank you.