March 2009
Tesla Sports Car - All Electric and Very Fast
The Tesla Roadster is a technological marvel and a damn sexy car that's quicker than a General Motors exec scrambling for a bailout.I am extremely happy with my Prius, the car that Detroit just would not build. Although the Tesla has a great range, it is still impractical unless you can find places to charge up, or just never drive more than 225 miles before returning home. Not good for a long trip.
More practical if you can afford it. Why did not Jaguar build something like this? Because they were owned by Ford? Because people who can afford to buy a Jaguar are not supposed to care about the price of gas?
March 5, 2009
Great head fake rally yesterday. Back down today.
Meanwhile, some people think that BAC should get rid of Ken Lewis:
WASHINGTON, March 5 /PRNewswire/ -- In a letter to Bank of America (NYSE: BAC - News) Lead Director O. Temple Sloan, the CtW Investment Group called on BAC's board to remove Ken Lewis as Chairman and CEO in light of his disastrous missteps. Since the September 15, 2008 announcement of the merger with Merrill Lynch, BAC has
Well, I said it was a speculative pick. This could be a lot of fun. I bank there, but I just re-financed my home loan with Schwab. Better interest rate on a HELOC - 0.01% lower than prime. That should be good for a while. More than 40% off what I was paying at BAC.
Also, former Merrill execs invested with Madoff, showing their well-known good judgment.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Top former Merrill Lynch executives, including two former CEOs, invested in hedge funds that lost money with alleged fraudster Bernard Madoff, becoming the highest-level Wall Street victims of the scandal to date, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.How can a company with such a record keep a straight face while giving advice to others on how to invest?
Well, here is something interesting. Everybody thinks Warren Buffet is just wonderful. But guess what your total return would have been if you had bought Berkshire Hathaway 7 years ago? A resounding .54%. Less than a money market. You could have traded in and out of the stock, of course, and done well. Longer term, of course, you would have more, but how long term is your hold supposed to be? Since the beginning of 2007, the stock is down 53%. There is no such thing as a permanently profitable investment.
March 6, 2009
Market opened up, then sold off. Another down day, until the close which was just about flat. Just looking at the S&P 500 chart, we have broken what might be considered support around 760 in April 1997. Then there is 630 in August 1976. We are close to that. If that breaks, guess what the next support is? December 1994 at something like 450. Will we get there? I really do not know. If we do, it will be about 70% off the high. Still not as bad as the 80% drop in the Great Depression. Personally, I think that for support and resistance to mean anything, there has to be something in recent memory, and most people do not remember 1997, much less 1994.
We are coming off a period of great irresponsibility, and the pendulum is swinging back with great velocity.
March 11, 2009
Fantastic rally yesterday, but no such luck today. Looks like we had a one-day wonder, although the market eventually closed a bit higher. Time will tell.
Very fast, and uses a diesel engine to power a hydraulic hybrid. Fascinating. I wonder if it will ever see production. Check out the video at the link to see how it works.
The Ides of March
March 15, Also My Birthday, in 1936
The Romans counted backward from three key dates in each month, the Ides, the Nones, and the Calends.
And speaking of 1936, from the June Popular Mechanics:
March 20, 2009
Dallas public schools should win the prize for stupidity and duplicity. A high school principal and his security staff shut feuding students in a steel cage to settle disputes with bare-knuckle fistfights, according to an internal report by the Dallas Independent School District.... One employee overheard Mr. Moten tell a security guard to take two students who had been at each other for days and “put ’em in the cage and let them duke it out,” the report states, and the practice was so embedded in the school’s culture that one student remarked to a teacher that he was “gonna be in the cage.”...Mr. Moten, 56, is a former Dallas police officer who once lied about being kidnapped and robbed at gunpoint to get out of work, for which he was placed on administrative leave. The district uncovered the cage-fight accusations while investigating a scandal that forced South Oak Cliff to relinquish its 2005 and 2006 state boys basketball championship titles. The district found that Mr. Moten had pressured teachers to change the failing grades of athletes so they were eligible to play.
One might ask how this guy ever got hired in the first place, and why the Dallas School District knew so little, and cared so little, about what was going on in the school. This reminds me of the old joke after Ruby shot Oswald in the Dallas police station. "What would happen if an elephant walked into a Dallas police station? Nothing, nobody would notice."
Frank Hammond, a former counselor at South Oak Cliff who was fired and filed a whistle-blower lawsuit, said that the cage fights were common knowledge, but that he did not report them to the district at the time because he knew nothing would be done.Meanwhile, the Pope is in Africa:
Tony Auth's Cartoon
Why (among other reasons) I Have no Respect at all for Catholicism - Taking that Stuff Seriously Just Might Kill You
And just in case you thought that the pedophile priest scandals are over, note the reaction of the Archdiocese of New York when the legislature approved an extension of the statute of limitations on sexual abuse cases. And when they did it on St Patrick's Day, we have this reaction:
The religious nature of the day was obviously lost on the New York State Assembly. In one of the most stunning snubs directed towards the Church in recent memory, the Codes Committee of the Assembly casually approved a bill yesterday that is a direct attack on the Church.
The bill in question is a revision of the statute of limitations for sexual abuse cases. For the non-lawyers among us, the statute of limitations imposes a time limit during which a civil lawsuit or a criminal case can be brought.
Let's say that again: extending the statute of limitations is "a direct attack on the Church. Can anybody say "guilty conscience"? This reaction indicates to me that there is a lot more stuff that has been swept under the rug which now may come out.
Of course, the child abuse scandals and the cover-up were entirely predictable: (1) An unhealthy sexually repressive set of doctrines (e. g. the prohibition on masturbation) which are idiotic and which require a celibate clergy, (2) An hierarchy ruled by a guy who is infallible. Now no normal person would agree to celibacy. Hence a requirement for a priest is that he not be normal. Out of this batch of non-normal candidates, there are bound to be some whose abnormality involves an interest in young children. There may be others with other abnormalities, of course. And what does any authoritarian hierarchy do when there is a scandal? Hush it up. After all, if people question the hierarchy, then they might even question the pope. And what then? The scandal was entirely predictable, and it will happen again.
Also, a note on gay marriage from Portia De Rossi on Jimmy Kimmel.
March 24, 2009
Nice rally yesterday - maybe it is about time to go back into the market.
Red meat is bad for you, but of course the meat lobby disagrees.
Previous research had found a link between red meat and an increased risk of heart disease and cancer, particularly colorectal cancer, but the new study is the first large examination of the relationship between eating meat and overall risk of death, and is by far the most detailed.
"The bottom line is we found an association between red meat and processed meat and an increased risk of mortality," said Rashmi Sinha of the National Cancer Institute, who led the study published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
In contrast, routine consumption of fish, chicken, turkey and other poultry decreased the risk of death by a small amount.
We are having fish for dinner tonight.
March 25, 2009
Vulca: Over the Top
The Vulca S is the first car entirely designed and built by Italian coachbuilders Faralli & Mazzanti. Just ten - that's right, ten - will be built, every one of them by hand over the course of 11 months. During that time, customers will stay at the coachbuilder's private villa in Tuscany so as to oversee every aspect of construction.March 31, 2009
Well, the little model portfolio is up about 3% since inception, with the results very uneven for the different stocks. The two financials did the best, and ENER did the worst.