I bought my current Android phone 6 months ago: it was the first day of the debut of the HTC EVO 4G with Sprint. Overall, my experience with the phone, service, and operating system has been positive. There are a few nits, mostly minor. Let’s get those out of the way.
1. battery life: this is probably the most bothersome, since it often needs a charge mid-day. My collection of micro-USB cables is expanding so I can tap into any USB power.
2. screen brightness: it is both too bright at night, as well as too dim outdoors on a sunny day.
3. sound quality/call volume. Often the callers voice seems too loud, even when the volume is adjusted to minimum. I wouldn’t mind loud, but the crackling of something being over-driven bothers me. More rarely, the reverse where it sounds too quiet on BlueTooth, even though volume was at max.
4. OS stability: Only a few times has it locked up causing me to manually reboot it. I suppose I should be thankful it doesn’t hang mor often, the trade-off being that it spontaneous reboots which happen about once a month, and usually while sitting idle.
5. default MP3 audio user interface: hard to navigate to a precise position in a large file. The old iPod had this perfect with its “wheel” interface. Am I the only one who listen’s to hour-long podcasts, and sometimes likes to “rewind” 30 seconds?
6. paid-for 2 apps that address shortcomings: Taskiller Full, More Icons Widget
The good:
1. YouTube videos on demand, streaming audio
2. unlimited web bandwidth and texting
3. mobile gMail
4. web browsing so good I’m starting to neglect the home computer
5. played some fun games in the first few months, but I’m not into that much. paid for Archipelago and Space Physics.
6. neat free apps that address shortcomings: Timeriffic
7. large removable storage (8 gig microSDram came with)
8. reading Kindle books
As you can tell, my interest in this blog is two-fold: understanding economic principles, learning how Silver can help stabilize my portfolio. Nay, a third: preparing for hard times (or preventing them, depending on outlook.)
My brief blog posts don’t have time or space to go into all the details, so here are a couple of recommendations I have for more info. These are paid products, but worth it.
Some scoff at the idea that the US government could balance the budget without rolling back “the Bush tax cuts.” But not so fast: even IF all 9 major categories of cuts were re-instated (estimated 300 billion dollars worth), that would be a small fraction of the current annual deficit (over 1 trillion dollars), and also less than the interest currently being paid on the national debt.
Assume there are only three ways to recover: 1. Increase income (taxes), 2. inflation and, 3. reducing spending.
The three largest categories of spending are (in order) 1. Department of Health and Human Services, 2. Defense, 3. the aforementioned Treasury
Even aside from the risk of capital flight, tax revenue is a limited finite resource. Inflation is currently being tried, and is risky to the stability of the economy. That leaves reigning in spending. It really is the only way. Reduce entitlements, and reduce involvement in expensive foreign wars.
Let me elaborate a little on the Estate Tax. Imagine a small sleepy rural town, filled mostly with retirees. “Mostly” in this case is a sort of euphemism, since it could never really be more than 50% since retirees are mainly consumers, therefore need to be surrounded by a younger “staff” to produce goods and services. Now lets simplify as a town of 100 people, say 50 retirees and 50 “young” people. The retirees have on average $2 million a piece in the local banks, while the younger set’s average net worth is negative $100,000 (mostly due to home mortgages.) Now assume that the estate tax is re-instated (it was temporarily repealed in 2010) and now big chunks of money are taxed away out of this small community every time a retiree dies, eventually causing the local banks to be over-leveraged. People talk about WalMart sucking the money out of a town–its nothing like the Federal Government via taxation. Now in the case of my hypothetical community, one could argue that new retirees will move in to replace the dying ones. True, but this doesn’t leave much room for the community capital base to grow, especially since a decimated inheritance is more likely to be split up among [out of state] heirs. Especially if Grampa’s cabin has to be sold to pay the taxes. But if it wasn’t taxed, it might be more likely that one of his heirs would move into it and stay in the community.
According to the National Inflation Association, JP Morgan is “short 30,000 silver contracts representing 150 million ounces of silver. This is one of the largest concentrated short positions in the history of all commodities, representing 31% of all open COMEX silver contracts.” This could leave JP Morgan exposed if people go out and buy physical silver in large numbers.
Mike Krieger and Max Keiser have an idea for attacking the weak underbelly of the seemingly invincible too big to fail banks and market manipulators … all at the same time.
Specifically, they say that if everyone buys just 1 ounce of silver, it will force JP Morgan – a giant manipulator of the silver market – to cover its short positions, and drive it out of business.
If the estate tax is re-instated, then Obama’s administration will have presided over the single largest tax hike in the histiry of the U.S.
If you don’t think too hard about it (presuming you are a young whelp not knowing any better), a tax on anything over $1,000,000 (that’s one million dollars) sound like reasonable redistribution from the “rich” to, um, “society.” But to many retirees who bought houses in the 1960’s for $30,000 and have saved up consistently since then, a million dollar estate is common. Divide that by a few kids, and each of them by a few grandkids, and you tell me: Wouldn’t letting the heirs keep “all” of their share of that money stimulate the economy quite meaningfully?
Just like corporate taxes and regulations, only the largest can afford the specialist accountants and lawyers to defend them. Meanwhile, the middle class gets routinely decimated.
1. how much mercury is in a CFL bulb vs. how much is safe exposure, vs. how much may be generated by electrical power plants
2. how to dispose of a CFL bulb when it is burnt out or broken?
non-mercury-related, but still important questions:
3. isn’t it wasteful to throw away the transformer along with the CFL bulb?
4. when does the increased cost of a CFL (upfront manufacturing costs) break-even with the energy savings?
5. should CFL vs. incandescent usage/sales be regulated and/or mandated? Or should we simply allow the competition in the free market economy to decide?
I subscribe to several newsletters and magazines, but my favorite financial publisher is http://www.stansberryresearch.com/ and here’s a snippet that isn’t exactly pure finance, but an example of the punchy style I admire so much. The below is in response to a reader writing in asking for career advice:
You’re unlikely to follow this advice, but here’s what I recommend. First, figure out what you want to do with your time. Not your life. Just your time. If you think really hard about what you want to do every day next week, you’ll stumble onto what you should be doing with your life. That’s actually the hard part, believe it or not. Most people don’t think this way. They have some idea of what they think they should be doing with their lives – and the ideas are usually pretty big and grandiose. In the meantime, they don’t stop and consider what the day to day will be like once they’ve “arrived.”
Take doctors. Lots of folks want to be doctors because it’s challenging to get through med school and because they believe they can get rich in medicine. Then… once they’ve racked up $50,000 in debt (or more) and completed 12 years of training, they suddenly realize they’re going to spend almost every day for the rest of their lives in a hospital, surrounded by sick and dying people. They discover that working every day with the public is simply retail. Wearing a white coat doesn’t actually make it all that much more enjoyable. (Obviously, some people love being doctors… but I’ve met lots and lots of people who didn’t love the long hours or constantly being subjected to the medical emergencies – real or imagined – of their patients.)
So you might think you want to be in finance – but what does that really mean to you, in terms of what you’ll be doing day to day? Lots of folks want to be investment bankers, until they spend five years doing that kind of work, which normally entails spending all night, several times a week, working a copying machine. Or spending days on end in front of a Bloomberg terminal. Or learning how to make love using an Excel spreadsheet.
Figure out the day-to-day stuff first, not last. And don’t kid yourself. You won’t be able to fake it. Here’s why this is so important: Eventually, you’re going to have to compete against people who actually love what they’re doing every single day. They love it so much they literally devote their entire lives to doing it. They will sacrifice everything just to be the best at this thing they do. You will meet people like this, no matter what field you end up in. And they will crush you if you don’t actually love what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis.
In the real world, there’s a huge difference between the 20% at the top and everyone else. If you don’t truly love what you do every day, you’ll never be in the top 20%. And you’ll never be very successful.
Once you’ve figured out what you want to do each day, find the 10 best people in the world at it. Don’t narrow your search to Chicago or New York. Chances are, the 10 best don’t live there. They’ll live in much, much nicer places, like Aspen or Miami or Newport Beach. And you’ll want to live there too, trust me.
Spend a while researching these guys. Get to know every single thing about them. Act like a private detective. Spend three months on each guy. Pay attention to how these guys actually spend their time. Make sure that’s what you want to do with your time, too. Finally… approach them.
The best way to do this is to compliment their work and to send them ideas that mirror their approach. Show them you love to do what they do and you’re good at it. Find a way to make their lives easier or better. Then, volunteer to work for them, for free, for as long as it takes to prove your value to them. Be prepared for them all to say “no” at least a dozen times. They’re just testing you. Very few people turn down a young, hard-working, bright person who is self-directed who volunteers to work for free – if he’s persistent.
I felt bad listening to the story of the LAUSD teacher who committed suicide this week. One of his alleged reasons was a negative score on the “Value Added” list published in the Los Angeles Times. One point that has been made multiple times is that there are multiple factors in judging a teacher “good” and test scores is only one of them. One question I have is what outcome other than public humiliation is to be expected from such a narrow rating system. Another is how does the average parent react to the score of their child’s teacher? But I’d like to step back even further and try to consider the “ratings game” situation from a Liberty perspective:
1. Maybe we should regard public education the same way we regard public retirement (Social Security) in other words as a last-resort safety net rather than the primary method of education. In other words don’t expect boutique creativity and stellar quality from a large-scale mass-produced education system.
2. How about returning to smaller districts with more local control and feedback? This more intimate setting allows both the administrators and the community to be more aware of which teachers have the right stuff.
3. Choice, choice, choice, and more free choice. By free, I mean free as in freedom to choose, not necessarily as in free lunch. Choice is the ultimate expression of a free society, and it spreads the “job” of evaluating the many factors (effectiveness/coolness/niceness) among the entire population and helps distinguish the good services from the acceptable, and eventually culls the least desirable.
If parents and students were allowed to choose, then the ones who cared the most would flock to the best school, even if they had to pay a distance fee. How would they figure out what are the best schools? I don’t know, and I’m proud to admit that I don’t know, unlike meddling bureaucrats who make it their life’s work to dream up arbitrary metrics then use them to perpetuate their jobs. My point is that people will find a way to evaluate the schools in a variety of ways that no one committee can foresee, anticipate, model or predict. So lets get out of the way of the market, and let the people be free to chose.
