From Dodger game 1

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Swinging does not impress me.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

A few billion here and there…

Billion Dollar Gram: putting all the crazy numbers you read and hear into perspective!

Posted in politics | Comments Off

Cool financial blog

For those of you into finance, this blog is well worth reading through the past couple months’ posts:

Accrued Interest

Google Reader found it for me somehow. Best of all, it includes bonus Star Wars references!

Posted in market, politics | Comments Off

My buddy

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Quick market thoughts

  • At this point, the S&P valuation appears to be more than 60 times trailing earnings and at least 25 times future GAAP earnings (the numbers for this estimate are around $40). While market bottoms usually feature a high P/E this is ridiculous.
  • Do a few calculations with other currencies and you will see that many foreign investors playing US stocks are unlikely to have a positive performance in 2009 so far, due to the big headwinds from the dollar selloffs. Will they continue to chase at these levels?
  • I think we’ll need significant earnings surprises, a fantastic holiday season for retailers, and no financial / economic shocks of any kind to stay up at these levels… but hopefully I have missed something.
Posted in market | Comments Off

Greg Gutfeld summarizing exactly how I feel re: politics

From this Q&A with Greg Gutfeld:
“I became a conservative by being around liberals and I became a libertarian by being around conservatives. You realize that there’s something distinctly in common between the two groups, the left and the right; the worst part of each of them is the moralizing. On the left, you have people who want to dictate your behavior under the guise of tolerance. Unless you disagree with them. Then the tolerance goes out the window. Which kind of negates the whole idea of tolerance. That’s the politically correct moralizing. Then when you become a conservative, the other kind of moralizing comes from religion. But if you remove both of those from the equation, what you’re left with is libertarianism.
From the right, you’ve got free markets. From the left, you have free minds. To me, that’s the only sensible direction. As you grow older, you kind of end up there. Especially if you drink and do a lot of drugs.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Could we see the US healthcare system collapse?

Those who began their careers in the dot-com mania, like myself, have now been through two booms and busts. It becomes natural to look for a third one in our future. At this point, we know the only private sector expansion is taking place in the out-of-control healthcare sector, so that is the natural place to look.

Actually, you could find some arguments for a collapse of the vast US government itself, but I am of the opinion that a future administration will be forced to make dramatic cutbacks in certain spending areas and that such an outcome can be avoided. It’s possible that this could include the large medical subsidies and entitlements already in place, so that brings us back to the healthcare system.

Here, without solutions, are a few things that are way out of whack about our system:

  • The vast payee, insurer, and processor structure needed because there are so many private and public entities involved. Similar to alcoholic beverage distributors, a lot of this system is mandated to exist by outmoded policy only.
  • Along similar lines, a lot of the productivity improvements made possible by the IT revolution have largely passed the healthcare system by. A lot of recordkeeping is still paper-based, despite the promises ten years ago that we would all have our complete histories at the touch of a physician’s PDA.
  • The large proportion of jobs, productivity and output that healthcare now represents is reminiscent of the real estate bubble communities such as Las Vegas, here in LA, and Florida, where the majority of new residents coming in were in the construction and real estate industries themselves (or closely tied to it), which created something of a vicious cycle.
  • As a culture we have a long way to go to accept true rationing, which seems completely unavoidable (barring the creation of Emergency Medical Holograms). We demand to have all possible measures taken, by expertly trained doctors, immediately. (In nationalization scenarios we can provide all reasonable care, but there are usually significant waits involved.)bobpicardosickbay.jpg
  • The medical education and licensing world creates an artificial scarcity of doctors. This is perhaps most easily fixed, although we must inject more semi-competent doctors into the system to help out.

A combination of inflation induced by Fed unwinding (a contentious argument but a possibility) and US government cutbacks in the name of solvency could create a wasteland of empty clinics where a simple physical is $5000 (and unaffordable by all but those absurdly rich among us) and emergency patients are kicked out onto the street.

For further reading I am digging into this blog by Bob Laszewski:
Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review
In particular, he has a March guest piece discussing the potential system failure idea.

Posted in politics | Comments Off

Test MacJournal

Testing MacJournal!

hbomb.jpg

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

First post

Hello World,

I needed a sort of home base and content repository, and WordPress was out there. So, here we go. To the right there I will keep FriendFeed for as long as it is still around; then it may have to become a little fancier.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off