- I frequently find that I like to be distanced from my email. Occasionally I will, either intentionally or unintentionally, close Thunderbird and then spend hours forgetting about its existence. It’s sure nice to not be constantly bothered by the interruption of new emails.
- One more thing about BusinessWeek [recent posts here and here]. I googled “who reads businessweek?” in hopes of quickly learning about their readership. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find many instances of people complaining about BusinessWeek. In particular, people such as the folks at 37signals were miffed that BusinessWeek claimed on its cover that the founder of Digg had “made $60million in 18 months” before then admitting in the story that the number was almost completely made up. But I particularly liked the following two paragraphs, particularly the 2nd, as it seems to apply to some of the recent events in the markets [emphasis mine].
Wait a second. This $60,000,000-on-the-cover figure came from multiplying the fictitious “people in the know” number of $200,000,000 by an estimated 30% ownership? 30% of $200,000,000 is $60,000,000. Is that the math that made the number that made the cover? SLIPPERY. And then Rose and BusinessWeek acknowledge it’s “only paper wealth” and “this could be a jackpot” which means it’s not real anyway. So BusinessWeek is using fuzzy math to put a fuzzy number on the cover that isn’t real anyway? All together now: BULLSHIT!
Something my dad always tells me: “No one ever went broke taking a profit.” Last time around plenty of people went broke by not taking a profit. Paper wealth is not money. Try bringing your brokerage statement to McDonald’s and see if will buy you a burger.
- The other thing on my mind is the Clemson coaching search. Frankly I don’t care who is considered. I don’t want updates on the process. I just want to know the outcome.
It bothers me that so many Clemson fans are searching for the SUV of coaches, especially in the context of the following words which I just read this last weekend.
According to Bradsher [author of High and Mighty], internal [auto] industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.
10/28/2008
10/27/2008
In putting together (as opposed to writing) my last post, I searched through the archives to find my previous complaints about BusinessWeek. Surprisingly, there really weren’t any. Apparently I generaly don’t care so much about BW’s errors and omissions to actually formulate a written complaint. However, I did find a post from June 2007 when I was complaining about John Test who was spouting stupid information and citing BusinessWeek. When I re-read the information, I realized the amazing data that is either way wrong or rather shocking.
Consider the quote:
According to a recent Harris poll, one in five North American workers have pretended to be sick to get out of going to work. In fact, 64% of sick days are really just mental health days. But those un-sick days are costing companies $654 per employee every year.
If you have a hunch that someone at work uses this ploy, look for the #1 sign the day before. Your suspect will cough and complain of a sore throat, just to make it more believable when they call the next morning. Men and women are guilty in about equal numbers. It’s estimated that employees took an average of 5.6 sick days last year.
Let’s put all those numbers together. It is claimed that 64% of sick days are fraudulent, that only 20% of the workforce is responsible for them, and that in aggregate, all workers miss 5.6 days per year. If you back things out, the claim is that the 80% of honest workers are taking, on average, 2.52 actual sick days leaving the 20% of pretenders to take, on average, 17.92 “mental health days” per year. The quoted numbers are probably wrong, but HOLY COW!
I’m easily drawn in by lists. But I suspect many people are, which is why every super market magazine cover is half covered by numbers. Today I clicked on “Five Myths About the Election and the Stock Market“. And I should have stopped reading as soon as I saw the one word that guarantees bullshit is present. That word? BusinessWeek. (More like BusinessWeak! Burn!)
Myth No. 4: The market is alarmed by prospects the capital-gains tax rate could be raised.…
Though higher taxes can be a burden on the economy, this theory of a short-term impact from Obama’s tax plans was always open to question. “You try not to let tax implications dictate [investment] decisions,” says financial planner Micah Porter of Minerva Planning in Atlanta.
Holy bull testicles, Batman! Sure you “try” to not be bothered by tax implications, but when taxes change, or choosing the wrong tax treatment destroys your bottom line, that kind of intentional ignorance is pure negligence.
Myth No. 5: Wealthy investors can breathe easier because the next President wouldn’t dare raise income taxes in a recession.…
While higher taxes can hurt, a huge budget deficit is “really a problem in the long run,” says Victor Li, an economics professor at the Villanova School of Business. “Whoever wins, the revenues have to be raised somewhere. Taxes have to be raised.”
“Taxes have to be raised“? BS.
I hope that Ben Steverman feels an intense emptiness in his soul for publishing such drivel.
10/26/2008
Lately, I’ve been trying to be more forgiving. I’ve been trying to be more understanding. Sometimes mistakes just happen and no amount of human effort is going to change that.
However, there are some times when people choose to throw caution to the wind and specifically avoid using tools that help prevent mistakes. These people definitely deserve neither understanding nor forgiveness [emphasis mine].
As readers may recall, a couple of days ago it became clear that the Obama website had intentionally disabled all the basic credit-card-processing security checks and thereby enabled multiple contributions from donors with fake names. The excuse offered in the New York Times story was that, ah, yes, the Obama gang may appear to accept contributions from “Mr Fake Donor” of “23 Fraudulent Lane”, but all those phony baloney contributions are picked up by their rigorous offline checking procedures. As many Obama supporters wrote to point out, simply because you get a message saying “Thank you for contributing to the Obama landslide, Mr S Hussein of 47 Spider-Hole Gardens (basement flat), Tikrit!” is no reason to believe any real money is actually leaving real accounts.
The gentleman who started the ball rolling made four donations under the names “John Galt”, “Saddam Hussein”, “Osama bin Laden”, and “William Ayers”, all using the same credit card number. He wrote this morning to say that all four donations have been charged to his card and the money has now left his account. Again, it’s worth pointing out: in order to enable the most basic card fraud of all - multiple names using a single credit card number - the Obama campaign had to manually disable all the default security checks provided by their merchant processor.
I don’t care if you’re Barack Obama, the Pope, or Wal-Mart, there is no reason to not immediately deny charges with incorrect, let alone grossly incorrect, name and address information.
[Thanks TigerHawk]
10/25/2008
Oh Acorn, thanks for your service.
On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.
I have to wonder how many of these new registrations represent people who wouldn’t have actually registered otherwise. That is the real question of how much value this group provides. If they’re only registering people who would have actually made the effort to register anyway, then they’re not providing much of a service.
