Jim Rogers on Ben Bernanke

I saw Bernanke testifying before Congress, and he said that if an American buys only American products in American currency he is not affected by the decline in the U.S. dollar. I couldn't believe the man said that! I was looking at him to see - Is he lying? Is he just using government propaganda? Or does the man just not know?

He's supposed to be an economist, and he doesn't know how the economy works! Let's say you only buy American tires. Well, if the price of foreign tires goes up because the dollar goes down, the price of American tires is going to go up too. American companies are going to raise the prices if the competition goes higher. And if the dollar goes down, the price of the rubber in the tires is going to go higher. The price of oil, wheat, copper, everything is going to go higher if the dollar goes down. So it's another signal to get out of the dollar.

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How to Sell your Art

by John Baldessari

We lose a dollar on every sale, but we make it up in volume.

from Carl Howe at Seeking Alpha:

Wharton Business School professor J. Scott Armstrong now has data that demonstrates that market share maximization strategies provide poorer long-term business results than profit maximization strategies, both in the lab and in the field. They cite the video game business as one of the worse offenders in chasing the wrong metrics:

The harm that competitor-oriented objectives can cause the companies that pursue them was the subject of a December 4, 2006, article in The New Yorker by James Surowiecki, the magazine's business writer. Surowiecki describes how Sony (SNE), with its PlayStation 3, and Microsoft (MSFT), maker of the Xbox 360, are beating each other's brains out trying to capture the biggest share of the video-game market. Meanwhile, third-place Nintendo (NTDOY.PK), with its new game console called Wii (pronounced "wee"), has quietly become the most profitable game console company in Japan.

Nintendo "has not just survived out of the spotlight; it has thrived," Surowiecki writes. "It has $5 billion in the bank from years of solid profits, and this past year, though it has spent heavily on the launch of the Wii, it made close to a billion dollars in profit and saw its stock price rise by 65%. Sony's game division, by contrast, barely eked out a profit and Microsoft's reportedly lost money. Who knew bringing up the rear could be so lucrative?"

Wharton Debunks Market Share Myth

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The law is now an asset class

The law is now an asset class
Patrick Hosking:

The notion of litigation as a separate asset class is a novel one. It's hard to imagine fund managers one day allotting a bit of their portfolio to third-party lawsuits, alongside shares, bonds, property and hedge funds.

But some wealthy investors are starting to dabble in lawsuit investment, bankrolling some or all of the heavy upfront costs in return for a share of the damages in the event of a win.

The London-managed hedge fund MKM Longboat last month revealed plans to invest $100million (£50.5million) to finance European lawsuits. Today a new company, Juridica, floats on AIM, having raised £80million to make litigation bets.

Juridica will make investments in ongoing legal claims, mostly in the US, and loans to law firms to finance their costs in pursuing claims.

Profiting from other people's lawsuits, a practice known as champerty, is illegal in some jurisdictions and risks accusations of ambulance-chasing, but Juridica is concentrating on backing business plaintiffs, where the practice is better established and more accepted.

Xmas story - Angel In The Post Office

Craigslist -

AN ANGEL IN THE POST OFFICE

---

Date: 2007-11-23, 10:55PM MST


This is one of the kindest things I've ever experienced. I have no way to know who sent it, but there is a kind soul working in the dead letter office of the US postal service. Our 14 year old dog, Abbey, died last month. The day after she died, my 4 year old daughter Meredith was crying and talking about how much she missed Abbey. She asked if we could write a letter to God so that when Abbey got to heaven, God would recognize her. I told her that I thought we could so she dictated these words:

Dear God, Will you please take care of my dog? She died yesterday and is with you in heaven. I miss her very much. I am happy that you let me have her as my dog even though she got sick. I hope you will play with her. She likes to play with balls and to swim. I am sending a picture of her so when you see her you will know that she is my dog. I really miss her.

Love, Meredith.

We put the letter in an envelope with a picture of Abbey and Meredith and addressed it to God/Heaven. We put our return address on it. Then Meredith pasted several stamps on the front of the envelope because she said it would take lots of stamps to get the letter all the way to heaven. That afternoon she dropped it into the letter box at the post office. A few days later, she asked if God had gotten the letter yet. I told her that I thought He had.

Yesterday, there was a package wrapped in gold paper on our front porch addressed, 'To Meredith' in an unfamiliar hand. Meredith opened it. Inside was a book by Mr. Rogers called, 'When a Pet Dies.' Taped to the inside front cover was the letter we had written to God in its opened envelope. On the opposite page was the picture of Abbey & Meredith and this note:

Dear Meredith,

Abbey arrived safely in heaven. Having the picture was a big help. I recognized Abbey right away. Abbey isn't sick anymore. Her spirit is here with me just like it stays in your heart. Abbey loved being your dog. Since we don't need our bodies in heaven, I don't have any pockets to keep your picture in, so I am sending it back to you in this little book for you to keep and have something to remember Abbey by. Thank you for the beautiful letter and thank your mother for helping you write it and sending it to me. What a wonderful mother you have. I picked her especially for you. I send my blessings every day and remember that I love you very much. By the way, I am wherever there is love.

Love, God

Boredom is so yesterday

Free college lectures by the best teachers.

Education evolves.

iTunes University has arrived, giving higher education institutions an ingenious way to get audio and video content out to their students. Presentations, performances, lectures, demonstrations, debates, tours, archival footage — school is about to become even more inspiring.

More of a very good thing.

Designed to be completely intuitive, iTunes U is based on the iTunes Store, where millions of people already get their music, movies, and TV shows. Now there’s an area of the iTunes Store devoted entirely to education, where it’s easy to search thousands of audio and video files from schools across the country.

DNA dating site predicts chemical romance

By Elsa Wenzel – Dec 17, 20o7

The first dating service to use lab-based genetic profiling launched online last week. Scientific Match promises to pair up people who will be physically attracted to each other because their DNA is different.

Well-matched couples will like each others' natural scents, have more fun in bed, and bear healthier children than those who are genetically similar, the company claims.

The service, available only in the Boston area, charges $1,995 for a year-long subscription.

Members swab their cheeks and send in saliva samples. A lab spends two weeks analyzing the immune system genes, and then the company matches individuals with genetic profiles that are unalike.

"We look at six specific genetic reference points on DNA, and none of those six can match to make a match," Holzle explained.

He was inspired by a well-known "sweaty T-shirt" study of a dozen years ago, in which biologists found that women liked the smell of dirty shirts worn by men who were immunologically dissimilar to themselves.

$731 billion dollars is a lot of money

• States have promised at least $2.73 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits for public employees over the next three decades, but have set aside only $2 trillion for pension payments, and only $11 billion is available for benefits, the Pew Center on States report released today said.
• See, look at the pie chart:
  
• States still need to come up with about $731 billion to meet their promises.
• The Pew Center says that's a conservative figure that does not include all costs for teachers and local government employees.
• The number of people 65 and older is projected to increase by 80% between 2010 and 2030, the report said.
• Of course, by 2030 about 71 million, or one out of every five people, will be over 65, so any funding shortfall can be easily managed by simply confiscating huge portions of the earnings of anyone under 35.

Legend of the Rothschild

From a Wikipedia entry on Rothschild:

In the 19th century a legend began which falsely accuses him of having used his early knowledge of victory at the Battle of Waterloo to speculate on the Stock Exchange and make a vast fortune.^[6]

Frederic Morton relates the story thus:^[7]

To the Rothschilds, [England's] chief financial agents, Waterloo brought a many million pound scoop.
... a Rothschild agent ... jumped into a boat at Ostend ... Nathan Rothschild ... let his eye fly over the lead paragraphs. A moment later he was on his way to London (beating Wellington's envoy by many hours) to tell the government that Napoleon had been crushed: but his news was not believed, because the government had just heard of the English defeat at Quatre Bras. Then he proceeded to the Stock Exchange.
Another man in his position would have sunk his work into consols, already weak because of Quatre Bra. But this was Nathan Rothschild. He leaned against "his" pillar. He did not invest. He sold. He dumped consols.
...Consols dropped still more. "Rothschild knows," the whisper rippled through the 'Change. "Waterloo is lost."
Nathan kept on selling ... consols plummeted—until, a split second before it was too late, Nathan suddenly bought a giant parcel for a song. Moments afterwards the great news broke, to send consols soaring.
We cannot guess the number of hopes and savings wiped out by this engineered panic.

Research by the Rothschild family^[8] has shown that this legend originated in an anti-semitic French pamphlet in 1846, was embellished by John Reeves in 1887 in The Rothschilds: the Financial Rulers of Nations and then repeated in other later popular accounts, such as that of Morton. Many of the alleged facts stated are incorrect. For example, it has been shown that the size of the market in government bonds at the time would not have enabled a scenario producing a profit of anything near £1 million.

"Not me! Not me!"

Summary of Alan 'Not-Me' Greenspan Strikes Again:

My mother said the same person caused every mishap around our house. That person stuck a screwdriver in the TV, broke the talking robot, hid the dirty dishes under the fridge. Who was it? Not Me. I used to always say when accused: "Not me! Not me!"

In Greenspan's WSJ column about subprime, he found fault pretty much everywhere but in his own actions in explaining the current subprime-related credit problems in the U.S.. It was glasnost and the end of the Cold War; it was emerging economies; it was low-priced exports; it was market euphoria, etc. It just wasn't Greenspan.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/57212-alan-not-me-greenspan-strikes-again?source=financialcontent

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The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

Many freeware products are as good as or better than their commercial alternatives. This website lists 46 of the best.

46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

1 Best Free Web Browser	32 Best Free Search Toolbar
2 Best Free Anti-Virus Software	33 Best Free Download Manager
3 Best Free Adware/Spyware/Scumware Remover	34 Best Free Web Site Ripper
4 Best Free Browser Protection Utility	35 Best Free Download/Upload Meter
5 Best Free Firewall	36 Best Free TCP Settings Tweaker
6 Best Free Trojan Scanner/Trojan Remover	37 Best Free File Cleaner
7 Best Free Rootkit Scanner/Remover	38 Best Free Resource Meter
8 Best Free Intrusion Detection Utility	39 Best Free Sticky Notes Utility
9 Best Free Anonymous Surfing Service	40 Best Free Secure Erase Utility
10 Best Free Software Suite	41 Best Free Registry Editor
11 Best Free File Manager	42 Best Free Process Viewer
12 Best Free Email Client	43 Best Free System Information Utility
13 Best Free Web Mail Accessory	44 Best Free Search and Replace Utility
14 Best Free Clipboard Replacement Utility	45 Best Free Outliner
15 Best Free HTML Editor	46 Best Free Rename Utility
16 Best Free Spam Filter for the Average User
17 Best Free Spam Filter for Experienced Users
18 Best Free Popup Stopper

Give the money you save to the charity of your choice!

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Calling all psychotic shoppers.

The holiday season is the busiest shopping time of the year. In fact, more than 147 million shoppers hit the stores on Black Friday weekend this year according to a survey by the National Retail Federation. And annually during this time, economists pay close attention to the shopping trends.

One such economist, Dr. Paul Albanese, Kent State University associate professor of marketing and author of The Personality Continuum and Consumer Behavior, has taken it a step further. In his current research, Albanese examined shopping behavior and classified it into four levels of personality development: Normal, neurotic, primitive and psychotic.

“Normal consumers spend less than they earn and save for future purchases they cannot afford in the future, while neurotic shoppers spend an excessive amount of time shopping, often not buying anything,” says Albanese. In addition, he found that compulsive shoppers usually fall within the primitive personality type, while psychotic personalities go overboard in spending, usually resulting in serious financial and legal problems.


Kent State University

Accidental Landlord

The Sun Sentinel from Florida:

“An accidental landlord last year would have been called a
real estate investor. But now that there are so few home buyers, many
investors are renting their homes. The apartment rental professionals
say the accidental landlords are a pretty aggressive group, too.”

“‘They’re competing with the [apartment] complexes even if it means they only get 50 percent of what it costs them to own that unit,’ said Jack McCabe of McCabe Research and Consulting, a Deerfield Beach firm that specializes in apartment market research. ‘You can rent a $325,000 or $400,000 house for $1,800.’”

“By comparison, the monthly payment — principal and interest, plus estimated taxes and insurance — on a $300,000, 30-year mortgage at 6 percent, would cost you $2,526.”

Sun Sentinel Article

incompetent

Doctors' hearts are in the right place, but their behaviour leaves a little to be desired - particularly when it comes to reporting colleagues' incompetence.

So says a survey of physicians' attitudes led by Eric Campbell at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. His team surveyed more than 3500 US doctors, probing their attitudes to a professional charter introduced in 2002. More than 90 per cent of the 1662 doctors who responded agreed with statements about improving access to healthcare, managing conflicts of interest and regulating the medical profession.

However, when asked about their own behaviour, things looked less rosy. For instance, 24 per cent of physicians said they would refer patients to an imaging facility in which they had invested, without revealing this financial conflict. And 45 per cent of those who had encountered an incompetent colleague within the previous three years had failed to report their concerns (Annals of Internal Medicine, vol 147, p 795).

link to article

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From $130,000 Annual Income to Foreclosure

We all know that foreclosures are on the rise throughout the nation. Most people realize that a foreclosure means that you will lose your home. But how does this process look like? In reality, the foreclosure process is a drawn out and lengthy ordeal. It is a gut wrenching and personal nightmare for most folks. So this article is a story about a couple. A couple who is the poster representation of the housing boom and now bust. In this article, we will examine their profession, income, and monthly budget. Amazingly, folks are very upfront when they are making lots of money but go into clandestine mode when they are having financial difficulties.

the-foreclosure-story-what-does-the-process-look-like

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Temporary 'Pleasure' Marriages

Lust in Lebanon, Low Pay Lead to Temporary 'Pleasure' Marriages
Dec. 4 (Bloomberg)

Firaz, a 24-year-old Shiite Muslim, felt suspended between lust and too little money to afford matrimony.Enter the "pleasure'' marriage, a way-station in tough times on the path to the real thing.

"I had sexual desires and was looking for a girl,'' says Firaz, who consulted a religious scholar before making his first tryst. "Pleasure marriage is a way I could feel good about it.'' This particular pleasure -- in Arabic, mutaah -- is a version of common-law matrimony, a practice that's become familiar in the Middle East.

Relatively high unemployment and low pay make it hard for many 20-somethings to finance the requirements of formal marriage -- opulent wedding, gifts of gold for the bride, furniture, an apartment -- so they're delaying official unions.Mutaah, or temporary wedlock, provides the intimate benefits of marriage without the costs -- and, because it is religiously sanctioned in Shiite Islam, without guilt. Firaz says he's had several such affiliations, for as long as a month and short as a week. He keeps his last name to himself to protect women he's been with.

During the past three decades, first-marriage ages for Middle Eastern men have risen from the mid-to-late 20s to over 30, depending on the country, and from the early 20s to mid-20s for women.

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Belly Dancers Bulldozed by Yuppies

Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Sukru Punduk says his family has lived in Sulukule, Istanbul's Gypsy quarter, for six centuries and he won't be driven out by laptop-carrying, stroller-pushing yuppies. The city plans to bulldoze Sulukule to make way for 620 townhouses as part of its effort to spruce up the area by 2010, when Istanbul will be the European Capital of Culture.

Residents of Sulukule, the setting for the belly dancing and Gypsy fight scenes in the 1963 James Bond film ``From Russia With Love,'' were left behind by Turkey's economic boom over the past five years. Their average monthly income of $250 is about half the national figure.

Homeowners are being offered cash compensation. Those who can afford to stay in Sulukule will get 15-year loans to cover the additional cost of one of the new homes, Demir said. Tenants in the Gypsy quarter will get loans to buy less expensive apartments about 40 kilometers (25 miles) away on the fringes of Istanbul.

click for whole Gypsy story

James Thurber Quotations

"Nowadays, men lead lives of noisy desperation."

"Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?"

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."

"He who hesitates is sometimes saved."

"I hate women because they always know where things are."

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1 in 10 English patients comes to harm while in hospital

The findings are based on a review of the case notes of a random sample of just over 1000 patients admitted to one large teaching hospital in the north of England during the first six months of 2004.The findings are likely to be typical of other similar facilities, however, say the authors.

Surgical patients were more likely to come to harm, but these incidents were less preventable.Diagnostic errors, on the other hand, were less common, but more preventable, the findings showed.Incidents causing harm lengthened hospital stay by an average of eight days.

By far the largest category of problematic incidents involved an unplanned admission or readmission as a result of previous treatment at the hospital. One in 10 caused permanent disability and a further one in 10 contributed to the patient’s death.

http://www.sciencecodex.com/1_in_10_patients_comes_to_harm_while_in_hospital

Madness on a heroic scale

Extracts from "The Great Crash: 1929", John Kenneth Galbraith, First Published 1955, Page 27

"Even in such a time of madness as the late twenties, a great many man in Wall Street remained quite sane. But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them."

The World As Seen From New York’s 9th Avenue

link to more strange maps