Nobrainer’s Think Tank

At this point, you may have seen or heard CNBC’s Jim Cramer appear on the Daily Show with John Stewart. I’ve not seen it because I’m actually trying to avoid it. However, while driving Friday night, I heard on the Mike O’Meara Show some clips of the interview. In it Cramer defends his defense of Lehman Bros. from months back by saying he knew the Lehman CEO, that he trusted the Lehman CEO, and that the Lehman CEO lied to him. Stewart hits back suggesting that journalists have some obligation to actually check out what they’re being told. It’s a good point. What good are journalists if they’re just blindly relaying to the public whatever some company wants the public to hear. Cramer didn’t have a good comeback.

However, this appears to be endemic at CNBC (if not everywhere else). Silicon Alley Insider noted in January an instance where a blogger was challenging CNBC and their Silicon Valley bureau chief’s reporting of Apple and Steve Jobs’ health — an instance where CNBC was pretty wrong. The video of the encounter does little to inspire confidence in journalists/reporters.

The bureau chief defends himself by saying that he believes his sources and that the sources believe what they told him. He seems to feel no obligation to investigate whether or not they’d actually have access to the real information. One of the CNBC talking heads adds points like:

The dirty secret of journalism is you have to believe most of what your told.

and

He reported what he was told and that’s what every journalist does.

How’s that for inspiring confidence. And to think that some people trust this information and use it for making investment decisions.

Earlier today in Doug’s RSS feed, there was a link to the Unofficial Apple Weblog’s post, Macs still cheaper when you look at TCO. It’s an interesting topic. Many words could be spilled to accurately assess the situation. Unfortunately, the bloggers at TUAW might as well have spilled fresh baby vomit.

Why does their post suck?

First, they link to another post a Macsimum News, calling it, “a Grade A smackdown on the old argument that Macs are more expensive than PCs.” That description could only be written by someone who has no idea, nay, absolutely no fucking clue what “Grade A” and “smackdown” mean.

They go on to say, “MacsimumNews’ Dennis Sellers pulls out the big guns, and shows that report after report will make it clear that when you compare the quality vs. cost that you get with an Apple to what you get with a PC, the Mac will almost always win.” What are those “big guns”? Well, if you follow the links to “report after report” you find that they’re the same fucking ComputerWorld article! That article from 2007, by the way, doesn’t even get into TCO, and, if you happen to read it, notes:

The comparisons I’ve drawn above are by no means exhaustive. For example, I didn’t address computers at the level of the Mac Pro, Apple’s stand-alone desktop workstation. Nor did I cover the Mac Mini, a computer that I don’t think is much of a bargain from a price/performance standpoint.

I also didn’t address the 15-in. MacBook Pro, and — full disclosure — I feel it’s of dubious value. It’s only $300 less than the 17-in. MacBook Pro but has lower resolution, a smaller hard drive (without an upgrade), a slightly lesser SuperDrive, fewer ports and so on. It’s nowhere near as good a value as the 17-in. model. The only time I wish I was using one is when I’m flying coach.

Maybe the writers have a valid point. Unfortunately they didn’t come close to proving their point. If the evidence is clear cut, they should show it. Otherwise I’m forced to assume that they’re just biased morons who are prone to exaggeration.

That’s the only conclusion I can draw from their editorial/article (hard to say which it’s supposed to be), Science prevails.

The era of stem cells has officially begun.

Why it’s now “official” I don’t understand. They admit that funding was available for “a handful of existing [embryonic] stem cell lines”, that “some experts now believe that adult stem cells also can be useful for medical therapies,” for which there was no federal ban on funding, and that California itself has “devoted $3 billion in bonds to stem-cell research” (which kind of stem cells is not mentioned). And all this despite, as NPR notes, “a legislative ban on the use of federal dollars to create new stem cell lines remains in place.”

They go on glowingly, “But the important thing is that now, scientists will have the ability to make choices based on science.” That’s just more bullshit. Anyone who receives this potential new funding will still be hamstrung by a series of new regulations. Scientists, especially those looking for government funding, then, now, and in the future will have to make choices based on what the government wants to fund. That’s all there is to it.

Recent events in the stock markets have convinced me of some things related to investing. Average people should be never be encouraged, especially by the government, to invest in the stock market without being severely warned. It’s somewhat like buying a house. Buying a house used to be a universally good thing, so universally good that any price was a good price, until things blew up and it dawned on people that the conventional wisdom might be wrong. This is a change from my previous views on the subject. I’ve got 2 reasons for this shift.

The first is that I think it just causes bubbles which will eventually pop. The second is that a lot of people simply do not have the temperament to be an investor, and so they freak out at bad news and lose a ton of money.

The government should really not be involved because it should not encourage people to take risks that they really don’t understand. Because, eventually, when things go south, the government will find itself called upon to pay people back for their losses due to failure by the government to disclose the risks, and/or the government will have to attempt to manipulate the market which will only lead to larger distortions and bigger downturns.

So guess how excited I am that Team Obama is pursuing “universal savings accounts” , which will operate by “siphoning off 3 percent or so of everyone’s salaries and funneling it directly to an individual retirement account” where “there would be a standardized default investment, probably some kind of mutual fund with a mix of stocks and bonds that gets more conservative over time.”

If implemented, this will be great news for investment management firms and anyone who’s good at getting out before the bubble pops and getting in when before the bubble forms.

The language is probably NSFW.

Via TigerHawk.