To fuel our bloated military and social spending the USA pays about a billion bucks a day, or about $1000 per year *per man, woman, and child* in interest, mostly to other countries, mostly to China and Japan. Is this wise for USA long term well being? Nope.
I’ve been assuming that Global Warming was in fact contributing to an increase in the severity and number of hurricanes, but wondering if the alarmists had been exaggerating the effects for psychological effect. But here is the NOAA Hurricane data and this more recent NOAA analysis. Neither suggest any catastrophes are looming. In fact we may have one of the *least* severe Hurricane seasons on record this year unless some big ones are brewing out there in the twinkling eyes of …. mother nature.
Excuse me but I’d like people to separate the politics from the science. Why is this so hard for *scientists* to do these days? I’m rapidly, and with great frustration, coming to the conclusion that it is because alarmism fuels research and focuses more attention on scientists.
Global warming is clear but catastrophic consequences from it appear to be so uncertain, so ill defined that it would be immoral and foolish to base hugely expensive public policy decisons on delaying warming for a few years.
Let’s try an experiment for a few years.
1) Take $80 billion – each year – from our bloated defense and homeland security budgets.
2) Ignore Global Warming
3) Solve *every major human problem* on earth. (The UN estimates that approximately 80 billion per year would solve virtually all major health, water, food problems).
Just back from a fine weekend with other Unitarians up at Camp Latgawa, a Methodist owned camp about an hour into the mountains from Ashland, Oregon. Although I don’t attend “real” church much I really enjoy meeting some of the bright, enthusiastic, and usually fairly old folks who make up our fellowship in Ashland. Talks about astronomy and how the natural world may be seen as encompassing of all human thought and can underpin the notion of “spirituality” were good thoughtful Unitarian fare. Also, by stacking chairs and folding up tables I have redeemed myself and no longer possess the distinction of being the world’s only excommunicated unitarian.
Asked about my CA trip I noted that my second Google party was not as fun as the first. Free (good) beer and mini burgers only go so far. I think the magic of Silicon Valley is wearing off – in fact this was my second trip down in 4 weeks with a Virginia reunion in between, a nice trip to the ol’ Virginia roots and relatives in the Shenandoah Valley.
There was a fun highlight of being in on a conversation between Google and Microsoft’s key search guys at the Google Party, though no spectacular SEO insights came out of it other than unmasking the main MSNdude poster at WMW (who was talking to GoogleGuy).
One thing I noted is how travel industry folks tend to be 1) friendlier than internet peeps, 2) older, often by a generation, and 3) lacking at internet events. This may serve me well as I push ahead with some travel ideas where I’ll be mashing up some databases with flickr, google video, and maps. I think the Travel industry is so mired in the mythologies surrounding print and TV advertising that it will literally take a new generation of travel professionals to realize the lost online opportunities. With the new sites I’ll be putting more of my money where my mouth is.
Steven Berlin Johnson, the clever fellow who suggested that TV and video games often make kids smarter and we should stop fretting so much over screen time, is now defending the indefensible – mainstream journalism.
Here Steven suggests that all sane people would agree that Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should. [emphasis added ].
Well, it should NOT play that role because mainstream journalism’s commercial focus, though natural, is NOT healthy. In fact it’s tragic because the interpretations are so misguided and narrow. Blogs can help fix this, and they will.
I replied:
I think, therefore I’m insane?
Your first point – that professional journalism “should” play something like the powerful role it currently plays is as misguided as a Fox News analysis and simply absurd. Mainstream journalism stinks, and is getting worse. Blogs will help fix this deficiency, and hopefully will replace mainstream superficiality with in depth, smart coverage of complex events.
Although blogs are only beginning to challenge the absurd commercial sensibilities of mainstream journalism I have much higher hopes than you that blogger journalists will prevail over mainstream celebrity journalism which reaches new lows every year. (cf many great mainstream journalists who are impressive but stifled by forced brevity).
Mainstream journalism has fallen very far from reasoned analysis of current events. It no longer pays more than superficial attention to critical news events (e.g. “Oral rehydration therapy saves millions”, “Congo War”, “Global Child Welfare”, etc, etc.
I like to think I’ve got a good intuitive sense of optimizing my investment dollars, but when people ask me how to apply sound investment principles to their potential investments I find it hard to give more than simple equations I do in my head or scratch out on paper. I also caution people to “review your opportunity cost”.
I think the notion of opportunity cost is critical to investment success. Namely, what opportunities from “plan B” investment are you foresaking to invest in plan A?
My favorite investment shortcut is to simply look at the cost of borrowing X dollars vs the expected return on the investment over a very short and a medium term (5-10 year) horizon. If the expected return is close to the cost of the money (or less than that cost which is now about 8% via equity lines) I generally see it as a bad deal. However, if the expected return is immediate with long term prospects even brighter, such as a rental property with positive cash flow in an appreciating market, then I’m inclined to sign myself up.
Vastly complicating matters are taxes, which vary so much by person, state and circumstance that a great investment for me may be a terrible one for you, and it can even be true that a great investment on December 31 is a poor one on January 1. Due to progressive taxes you need to accurately predict future income (hard) and future tax rates (impossible) to know how all the money will shake out even after a few years.If you are reasonably solvent and can borrow reasonably large sums of money the number of potential investments is enormous, though I generally operate on the assumption that “great investments” are few and far between and bad investments are as common as junk emails. I’m amazed by how many people are sucked into the type of investments (e.g. real estate timeshares) that involve high priced sales staff and expensive pitches, because these generally offer some of the *worst* returns on your money, often even negative returns. Those salespeople need to eat, and in many cases they just ate your lunch. The silly charts that show these as good investments usually avoid the concept of the “present value” of your money (money today is worth FAR more than future money due to interest compounding) and inflate the appreciation rates.
In Hawaii we dragged the kids to a Maui timeshare presentation so I could save $175 on some tickets and I was floored by the intensity of the presentation, which would have included a flight over to Maui had we let it continue (a “free” flight if you bought the timeshare, otherwise we’d have been charged).
We did the same thing in Tennessee timeshares in the Gatlinburg area to save a large amount on Dollywood tix and they were not quite as intense but still had the funny charts which, by ignoring present value and opportunity cost fundamentally distort the investment analysis.
wow, this post got too … long…
One of my most read and commented blog posts relates to Ringtone Scams, a scandalous scourge of the internet, with collusion of most of the major phone companies. I’m confident these ringtone scams will soon be making more mainstream headlines.
Along with Pay Per Click fraud, ringtone scams, unlike some other online frauds and deceptions like phishing, have not quite made the big radar screens because they are harder to understand than traditional deceptive business practices such as bait and switch at a store or salespeople lying. In those “storefront” cases you can often confront the scamming salesperson or store directly, a powerful tool lacking in the online world.
What frustrates me is the level of tolerance for these practices, especially in the online community. Very questionable in scope and scale was the recent slap on the wrist of Google for failing to catch what appears to be massive PPC fraud – perhaps as much as a billion dollars per year. Contrary to the claims of all the PPC players much of the fraud could be eliminated with more careful screening and identification of contracted parties in the online transaction. This would eat into profits and therefore has been a low priority, but when as much as 25% of online advertising revenue may be obtained through fraud it’s time to stop expecting advertisers, often unwitting ones, to paying the price. This means the PPC outlets, especially Google who reaps the lions share of PPC profit (and therefore PPC ill gotten gains), should be paying a LOT more attention.
Part of the deal when we bought my son an XBox 360 was that he get the Rockstar Games Table Tennis Video Game, widely reviewed as a masterpiece of realism. I’m a regular competitive Table Tennis player and fan and I’m really impressed by how realistic the game is in terms of *watching* the play. However, since you use controllers rather than paddles much of the play is counterintuitive (e.g. you don’t do anything to hit the ball, rather the controller adjusts for your location, ball placement, and spin.)
I’m glad people will gain more respect for quality Table Tennis, though I doubt much of the viewed skill will transfer to the real game.
My son simply crushes me at the video game.
Ironically this game is made by the same folks who brought the controversial Grand Theft Auto (“GTA”) series of games so wrought with violence and cruelty that they were banned in Australia and have become a poster boy game company for the anti-video game lobby.
No, you can’t shoot or rob your virtual table tennis opponent, though maybe that’ll come in the next version…
What I really like about Tim O’Reilly is that he’s almost always …. right. More importantly he does a fine job of seeing where things are going in our increasingly frantic and complex digital maelstrom.
As a publisher Tim’s insights into the Google scanning controversies are very relevant and over at his blog he’s making a lot of great points about why Google should be cut loose to spread the digital word.
O’Reilly suggests that “Google’s initiative is innovative, useful, and a real boost to an industry that has yet to make significant headway with electronic books….”
Right on O’Reilly.
At a Pentagon news conference I’m watching on TV Don Rumsfeld is explaining to me that with only 3.8% of US Gross Domestic Product going towards military spending nobody should complain since this is lower than back in the good old days of Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear buildups.
I’m complaining.
Neoconservative hypocrisy regarding Government spending has become far more outrageous than the naivete that continues to characterize liberal notions that Governments are a good environment for the allocation of other people’s money. They are not, and they have never been.
Political spending, whether in the social or military sectors, is rarely rational spending, and tends to evolve quickly into territorial “feathering of nests”, inefficient allocations, and choices based on conflicting sets of Government priorities. This was well understood by the founders who wanted Government small and taxes low.
Although “fighting terrorism” is a legitimate Government objective, the current approaches are so recklessly expensive it is unlikely they can continue much longer. Also, military spending does not build infrastructure (often it destroys it), so unless you are truly saving the nation from disaster – a weak argument given the current state of the world – wasteful military spending has far less favorable impact than, for example, wasteful spending on infrastructure. However I’m not advocating wasteful liberal spending either.
Alternatives? Recognize that risk is a part of life, allocate resources rationally, and trust that people will spend their money far more effectively than the neoconservatives have been spending it, or the liberals will spend it when they take control of the bloating corpse of Government spending.
Joe Duck 