Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Our favorite African leader, “Wonderful Bobby” Mugabe appears to still be the proud owner of the world’s highest inflation rate. And he seems pretty dedicated to keeping it that way.

Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono said in a statement 10 million Zimbabwe dollars notes will be issued tomorrow along with 1 million and 5 million Zimbabwe dollars bills.

The highest existing note, introduced last month, is for 750,000 Zimbabwe dollars.

The new 10 million note is the equivalent of about £2 at the dominant black market exchange rate. A hamburger at an ordinary cafe costs about 15 million Zimbabwe dollars (£3).

That hamburger has trebled in price this month amid shortages of bread, meat and most basic goods.

Zimbabwe faces the world’s highest official inflation of an estimated 25,000 per cent. Independent financial institutions say real inflation is closer to 150,000 per cent.

When I last posted in early September, the inflation rate was only about 7600%.

Good job, Bobby.

I had not realized that so much time had passed. But since I last updated you in June of 2005, the case of “Smiling Bob” has now gone to trial. And just in case you were still holding out hope that Enzyte’s male enhancement pills worked… don’t.

James Teegarden Jr., the former vice president of operations at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, explained Tuesday in U.S. District Court how he and others at the company made up much of the content that appeared in Enzyte ads.

He said employees of the Forest Park company created fictitious doctors to endorse the pills, fabricated a customer-satisfaction survey and made up numbers to back up claims about Enzyte’s effectiveness.

“So all this is a fiction?” Judge S. Arthur Spiegel asked about some of the claims.

“That’s correct, your honor,” Teegarden said.

When customers ordered a product, the company’s goal was to keep charging their credit cards for as long as possible, Teegarden said.

If customers complained, he said, employees were instructed to “make it as difficult as possible” for them to get their money back. In some cases, Teegarden said, Warshak required customers to produce a notarized statement from a doctor certifying that Enzyte did not work.

“He said it was extremely unlikely someone would get anything notarized saying they had a small penis,” Teegarden said.

And let me tell ya, if there’s one way to please the missus, it’s to spend a load of money on things that don’t actually mighty your tiny penis.














Or so I’ve heard.

Right now, we’re 20 minutes into the new Discovery Channel series Smash Lab. It’s obviously a take-off of Mythbusters, but it lacks the personality, light-heartedness, and humor. In other words, watching Smash Lab is like watching a college engineering lab except with a narrator makings things sound entirely too serious.

UPDATE: Summary of the concept of episode 1: can aerated concrete (not air-rated as I first thought they said) behave like gravel? More specifically, can aerated concrete slow down a car or bus in a way similar to what it can do with an airplane? The answer, narrated dramatically and demonstrated boringly, is “possibly.” Whereas Mythbusters tends to end every episode with an explosive and/or amusing climax, Smash Lab ended with a dramatic rendering of a bus not hitting anything. In other words, Smash Lab was as exciting as my sex life as a teenager.

The video is a little long an painful, but also somewhat humorous. And I have to ask, is there something wrong with the left side (her left, your right) of her face?

From the New York Times via Cafe Hayek, things we learned in 2007:

There has been plenty of talk about “predatory lending,” but “predatory borrowing” may have been the bigger problem. As much as 70 percent of recent early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on their original loan applications, according to one recent study. The research was done by BasePoint Analytics, which helps banks and lenders identify fraudulent transactions; the study looked at more than three million loans from 1997 to 2006, with a majority from 2005 to 2006. Applications with misrepresentations were also five times as likely to go into default.

Many of the frauds were simple rather than ingenious. In some cases, borrowers who were asked to state their incomes just lied, sometimes reporting five times actual income; other borrowers falsified income documents by using computers. Too often, mortgage originators and middlemen looked the other way rather than slowing down the process or insisting on adequate documentation of income and assets. As long as housing prices kept rising, it didn’t seem to matter.

In other words, many of the people now losing their homes committed fraud. And when a mortgage goes into default in its first year, the chance is high that there was fraud in the initial application, especially because unemployment in general has been low during the last two years.

In the recent past, I have read that companies are complaining that new and recent college grads are a bit whiny and have a very high sense of entitlement. I’ve already read/heard that my generation believes that job opportunities were just wonderful 30 or 35 years ago and everyone was making tons of money. Somehow, people on both sides seem to be thoroughly disconnected.

I’m really not sure how companies can be surprised by the attitudes of the new generation. I mean, the new generation was raised by the old generation. It would seem that, having spent the last 20 or 30 years dealing with us as we grew up, the older generation wouldn’t exactly be surprised when we behaved as we were raised. (Or maybe the older generation was just thoroughly distant and uninterested.)

The second point I derive from what I think I heard in a BusinessWeek podcast. It seemed to imply that people in their 20s want the same kind of economic security that our parents had 30 or 35 years ago… whatever kind of security that was. I couldn’t really understand their point, because they also seemed to be complaining about their student loans; somehow their parents had more money than they knew what to do with, but they didn’t have any ability to save money for their kids for college.

Oh well. Despite how “connected” we become. People were, are, and always will be thoroughly disconnected from almost everything.