Newt: There Are 3 Ways to Lower Oil Prices
I’m a moderate in my views, but I think Newt Gingrich makes some solid main points that not only punish the speculators who continue to bet on the rising price of oil, but also announce to the world that we are taking our energy economy into our own hands while we search for alternative fuels. This isn’t a typical supply-side cry for drilling in our country and glutting the market, but instead a phased solution that ultimately winds up cutting our oil dependence, foreign and otherwise.
Newt Gingrich: 3 Ways to Lower Oil Prices
The Fall of Detroit
Detroit is in the worst state it’s seen in years, and the bureaucracy that runs it is essentially a horde of criminals. I live 20 miles outside of the city border and used to work in the city itself. I’ve been watching this my entire life. The citizen migration rate out of the city is staggering, and the population has dropped below the 1M mark; it is the first American city in history to drop below a million citizens. By way of contrast, in 1950 it boasted 1.8M residents.
Half the housing stock is needed. Many parts of the city are literally a wasteland.
The powers-that-be have a track record of turning down large, entrepreneur-originating initiatives of $200M for new, progressive charter schools. Invariably, the Detroit Board of Education sees the gesture as a white man’s attempt to infiltrate and overthrow the black power structure, not as one to provide a viable option to an otherwise horrible and floundering educational system.
People are starting to talk about Detroit in an urgent fashion, and not just because of Kwame Kilpatrick’s ridiculous troubles. Here’s a spot-on video of Newt Gingrich saying what nobody in Detroit wants to hear — and what I bet nobody will listen to in my lifetime.
Why so pessimistic? Because I’m an analytical person, and I see no data whatsoever that suggests this trend is anywhere near being reversed.
Business spam evolves
I found an interesting spam email in my inbox this morning that’s basically a personalized approach that hints at a risk to an online trademark (domain name) due to a foreign application being made for the trademark name in country-specific versions (.asia, .biz, .cc, .cn, .com. cn., .hk, etc.). It looks valid enough to hook a reader at first glance, and only when some research is done do you discover what it’s all about.
This approach is obviously personalized to the owner/manager of a commercial Internet brand and hints at risk to our online trademark (miproconsulting) due to a foreign application being made for our trademark name in country-specific flavors (.asia, .biz, .cc, .cn, .com. cn., .hk, etc.). Being the nice foreign domain registrar they are, the sender of this message, SK Holdings, is asking us if we want to do business with them and secure all of the miproconsulting variants listed below so that we can protect our Internet brand from this foreign applicant.
This is pretexting: it takes a known fact or truism about an individual or business and uses that piece if information to get someone to divulge information or carry out some other action. In this case, the spammer wants the victim to purchase the extended domain names before the foreign applicant does, thereby allowing the victim to protect his Internet trademark. Not exactly the most aboveboard way to do business, but it is clever. I’ll grant them that.
How to resign from a job in the social media age
Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, has tendered his resignation letter to Yahoo, as has his wife and fellow co-founder Caterina Fake. Check it out:
Put simply, Yahoo lost focus and Butterfield doesn’t feel he has a place anymore. The metallurgical storytelling is just clever metaphor. But that’s not the point.
A great many people are familiar with the ins-and-outs of corporate HR and workplace drama, so resignations and their accompanying letters are nothing new to them. But what do you most notice about Butterfield’s parting shot?
Shameless Plug
I would like to take a moment of your time to announce something that I hope, over time, will become something rather successful.
As many of you know I have a personal blog in addition to writing for this here Clusterflock thing. However, I’ve recently started another blog, called Unfiltered, that serves as my employer’s blog. I want it to be everything most company blogs aren’t: interesting, authentic, transparent, fresh, relevant, not boring. My goal is to make it worth reading on a daily basis, even if you aren’t wholly interested in the consulting business, PeopleSoft or SaaS technology.
So, if you’re inclined, stop on by. Tell others about it if you feel the prospective subject matter would be interesting. Grok the RSS if that’s your thing. The kickoff post pretty much lays out what the blog will and will not be.
Thanks. We now return to the regularly-scheduled ideological chaos.
The World’s Most Expensive Fluid
For the longest time, I’ve tried to tell friends and family members that inkjet printers are a racket and create a completely false economy — they represent the razor blade business model on steroids. Consumers love the low entry price and seemingly have no problem whatsoever paying 40%-50% of the printer’s cost just for ink refills. They also don’t seem to notice that ink — especially black — is used at a supernaturally fast rate.
With my old printer, it took only 1.75 refills and I had bought the printer brand-new again.
With any luck, the jig will soon be up, because as it turns out, inkjet ink is the most expensive substance you’ll ever buy:
And wouldn’t you know, it turns out that printer ink, especially for photos, is probably the most expensive substance per volume you’ll ever buy—more expensive than gold, oil, perfume, even blood in most cases. If you’re buying name-brand ink cartridges, which typically hold a few milliliters of ink, you’re shelling out the equivalent of between $3,000 and $5,000 per gallon. (Suddenly, spending $45 to fill your car’s gas tank doesn’t seem so extravagant, eh?) Just as an idea of how valuable this particular golden goose is, more than 40 percent of HP’s $2.63 billion operating profits from last quarter came from it’s imaging and printing group alone. In other words, ink keeps printer companies in the black.
So what to do about printing photos? I just send mine to Costco or even Apple and have them shipped to me, depending on urgency. That way, I avoid the cost of the printer, ink and paper. My only printer is a reliable Brother B&W laser, which I will replace with a color laser eventually (which won’t be for photos).
Bottom line: these printers are a back-loaded ripoff and have been since day one. Now, most manufacturers (save HP) are even making their ink cartridges impossible to get aftermarket ink into, which means they can’t be refilled easily (or at all).
Universal Advice About Getting a Mortgage
A friend of mine is buying a house for the first time, and he’s going about the mortgage process. He asked my advice and this is pretty much what I told him.
Right now, the mortgage business is like like a giant glass box with a dozen hornets’ nests ripped asunder in it, and the hornets each think the others ruined their home. So they have lasers, which they kept in their bedside tables. And they’re shooting each other with them. And each time one gets hit by a laser, instead of dying and slowly diminishing the larger problem, it splits into three more angry hornets, sort of like the large asteroids in Asteroids did. So eventually the big glass box gets entirely filled with expanding, multiplying, irritable hornets and the box explodes, unable to contain the teeming, angry, burning mass. The the hornets take over the world and we all wind up working for them in cubicles, and the sun sets on humanity. THE END.
The mortgage business is a mess and you call the shots, so shop around. Your credit score dictates your interest rate eligibility. Everyting is normalized against FICO, and some lenders consider that more than others. Others look at payment history and debt payoffs more critically.
Even though your credit is likely good, there is an overcorrection afoot: because the major banks shat the bad so badly by giving ARM loans to high-risk buyers who did nothing but drink cheap wine and play online poker, they’re unnaturally tentative when it comes to new loans, especially if the applicant has no prior mortgage history. Still, if your credit is good (which is all about FICO), then you should get a competitive rate. I wouldn’t touch an ARM, though. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Also: nobody in mortgage banking knows “the market has bottomed.” If you hear this from someone, walk away immediately.
