Falling stock prices are good
There is no reason to panic in a market downturn, according to Warren Buffett:
A short quiz: If you plan to eat hamburgers throughout your life and are not a cattle producer, should you wish for higher or lower prices for beef? Likewise, if you are going to buy a car from time to time but are not an auto manufacturer, should you prefer higher or lower car prices? These questions, of course, answer themselves.
But now for the final exam: If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period? Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. In effect, they rejoice because prices have risen for the “hamburgers” they will soon be buying. This reaction makes no sense. Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices.
Interesting perspective.
Facebook Timeline
Ben Werdmuller on the new Facebook Timeline:
On one level, it’s brilliant. On another, it’s undeniably, pervasively creepy, to a level we’ve hitherto been unprepared for in human society. These things are designed to be forgotten, but with the Facebook Timeline, much of your life is all but indelible, published front and center until you go through each item individually and hide or delete it.
My thoughts exactly.
Lengthening our lives
Joshua Foer in Moonwalking with Einstein:
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next–and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
9/11: A less told story
A lesser-told story of 9/11:
The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.
Except her own plane. So that was the plan.
No bowl of soup is worth this
Gut-wrenching to watch the finning.
(If you have time, you can watch the full-length version of Gordon Ramsey: Shark Bait)
This is one aspect of Chinese culture we can do away with. And the swelling numbers of affluent mainland Chinese does not bode well for the worldwide shark population at all.
If you have not said no to shark fin soup yet, this is a good time to take a stand. It might make for some awkward wedding dinners but it also provides an opportunity to talk about this problem when people ask why you’re refusing the soup.
If we don’t start to make a difference now, they may not be around by the end of this century. No bowl of soup is worth that.
- Gordon Ramsay
What is Google? What do they sell?
Don Norman on Google:
They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’. But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.
They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.
What is intelligence, anyway?
Isaac Asimov on intelligence:
Actually, though, don’t such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests – people with intellectual bents similar to mine?
…
My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
Have a little faith…
(My thoughts on the Singapore Presidential Election 2011)
Don’t oppose for the sake of opposing, oppose so that Singapore will get better. It is unconstructive to try to bring about change by subverting the proper processes and it sets a bad precedent for the future.
Have faith in the opposition MPs you guys voted in. Have faith that they will do a good job of keeping the government in check.
Having the President challenge the government publicly while having no actually power to change will only divide the country.
Losing the HP way
Robert Cringely on the end of HP in all but name:
We’ve all heard how great it is that Google allows its employees to spend 10 percent of their time working on their own projects. Google didn’t invent that: HP did.
And the way the process was instituted at HP was quite formal in that the 10 percent time was after lunch on Fridays. Imagine what it must have been like on Friday afternoons in Palo Alto with every engineer working on some wild-ass idea.
Sad to see a company like HP lose it’s innovative spirit as the MBA-types took over and gutted it. I feel that the shift towards enterprise software is more a reflection of the new CEO than it is indicative of the state of the PC/mobile business.
Don’t look down
One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions.
The authors ran a series of experiments where students were randomly allotted sums of money, separated by $1, and informed about the “income distribution” that resulted. They were then given another $2, which they could give either to the person directly above or below them in the distribution.
In keeping with the notion of “last-place aversion”, the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the “rich” but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves.