Author: Willem

So here it is .. today is really my big birthday.   Hip-hip-hooray! (and something such as Homer Simpson’s doh! as well! ).  As astronaut John Glenn said : ‘for all the advances in medicine, there is still no cure for the common birthday’.    So celebrate it! – celebrate life – and don’t look back too much !   But looking back today, I am very grateful for what life has given me, and I look forward to a whole lot more.  Thanks to everyone for the heartfelt wishes I have gotten so far*, in person and by e-mail!   love and hugs, Willem.

*I’m in China, so ahead of just about everyone I know, time-zone wise.

.. to my iPhone from their CD called ‘Zucker’.  Rosenstolz is a very popular German music band from Berlin consisting of AnNa* R. and Peter Plate.   *not sure why the N is in upper case.  Their music combines several styles including rock, pop and ballads.  My favorite song on this CD is Das Ende Meiner Karriere (Eng. The End of My Career).   I smiled when I read on a website from a fan ‘Das lied ist der absolute hammer‘ (translating into ‘This song is ‘da bomb’?).

I got to watch PBS’s documentary program ‘Fixing the Future’ at friends on Saturday.  It profiles communities that are trying to come to grips with the scarcity of jobs (and household income) in the US economy.   For example, Bellingham, Washington, has ‘Sustainable Connections’ which is a network of local businesses that band together to promote the local economy.   In Portland, Maine, there is the ‘Portland Hour Exchange’ : a ‘time’ bank where you ‘deposit’ work hours by performing services such as home repairs or even legal or medical services.  And then you can withdraw hours for services you might need.   (Yes, it’s great that this addresses some needs but does it not raises other issues such as work being done outside agency oversight and potentially not generating any local, state and federal tax revenues?).

The program also pointed out that economic output and economic growth are measured in monetary terms only.  But there are other parameters involved in economic activity that we should start to measure as well.   It used the example of someone bicycling to the store to buy locally grown apples, as opposed to driving there and buying Kiwis shipped in from New Zealand. Which ‘contributes’ more to the economy?  The second example, of course.   But which economies, and where does the money go?  Some of it goes to the oil company (that got its oil from – Saudi Arabia?), and to New Zealand (not that I have anything against New Zealand!).    And should we not measure the health benefits and non-impact to the environment of the first example when we compare the two?  (Yes, we should, but it’s not an easy measurement to make!).

The documentary struck a positive and hopeful note in me, but still left me feeling that there are really big issues out there that need to be addressed that are well out of reach of local communities.

(This is a late post; it is Friday already).  It was quite a whipsaw week in the stock market.  And on Thursday Walt Zimmerman from ICAP Information Services opined that by 2013 the S&P 500 index will be at 570.  (Pictures from CNBC’s broadcast Thursday).  570! Say what?  The index closed at 1178 on Friday.   The market is following the same ‘5 wave pattern’  that it did from 2007 to 2009, Walt says.   Hey, I’m not an expert or a stock market guru (and who is? is anyone anymore?).   But the consensus is that there are not enough similarities when comparing the US economy in 2008 vs 2011, or the world economy in 2008 vs 2011, to justify this gloomy prediction.  We can only hope the consensus opinion has it right.

Here are three books I recently got (I went looking for the first one, liked the second one on the table at Barnes and Noble well enough to buy it, and then got the third one free).   Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart is fiction.  It’s a 2011 publication, has gotten great reviews and has already been translated into German ( I saw it in Frankfurt).  The synopsis from the cover : In the near future, America is crushed by a financial crisis and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess.  Then Lenny Abramov, son of a Russian immigrant janitor and ardent fan of “printed, bound media artifacts” (aka books), meets Eunice Park an impossibly cute Korean American woman with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness.  Could falling in love redeem a planet falling apart?

A quote from the Physics of the Impossible (I love it): If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day. – John Wheeler.   And the third books tells of half-truths, the illusions of patterns and of false positives.    Life is not simple!

Bryan, Gary, Ken, Steve and I went to Columbia City Ale House (the red balloon on the Seattle map) for beers and dinner – and scored some free Newcastle Summer Ale beer glasses!  The Washington state town of Newcastle is not far away (purple balloon), and of course there are several more in the world, and one in South Africa as well, I pointed out.

And when I opened Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, lo and behold, there was a story in about Newcastle South Africa’s textile firms.   It’s a tough business, and the minimum wage laws in South Africa is forcing factories to close up shop.   I think minimum wage laws are good, but then : is any wage not better than none at all?  From the newspaper article : ‘We’ve not gone a direction other countries have gone, where it’s about squeezing workers to the maximum and basically paying them slave wages’ says Etienne Vlok, a research director at South Africa’s clothing union.  ‘We’ll never win by keeping wages low’ he says, ‘just like nobody else will ever win’.

My tennis shoes that I bought on Zappos.com arrived today, one day early.   The Wikipedia entry for Zappos makes for interesting reading.   Zappos comes from zapatos, Spanish for shoes.  Seems I had the same reason for ordering them on-line than founder Nick Swinmurn had in 1999 : couldn’t find my favorite tennis shoe at the mall (in his case it was a pair of brown Airwalks).   Footwear in the US is a 40 billion dollar market, and Zappos sells about 1 billion dollars worth of shoes every year.  That is a lot of shoes! The company is now owned by Amazon but still abides by these ten core values :

• Deliver ‘wow! through Service  .. an anecdote has it that after a late night of bar-hopping, CEO Tony Hsieh (picture from Wikipedia) bet a Skechers rep that if he called the Zappos hotline, the employee would be able to locate the nearest late-night pizza delivery.  The call center employee, although initially confused, returned two minutes later with a list of the five closest late night pizza restaurants.
• Embrace and Drive Change
• Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
• Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
• Pursue Growth and Learning
• Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
• Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
• Do More With Less
• Be Passionate and Determined
• Be Humble

Gliese 581c was mentioned in Discovery’s program ‘Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking’ that I watched on Sunday night.   It’s the first planet really similar to what Earth is like and was discovered in 2007.   Nice to know, since humans will have to ditch Earth once the sun starts to exhaust its hydrogen supply in a few billion years !

Of course, the challenges to get there is of galactic proportions.   This planet is 20.5 light years away .. which means that it will take 75 years to get there with a spacecraft that can travel at 10 times the speed that our little-spacecraft-that-could Voyager 1* travels (11 miles per second).    And where will the resources come from to build it?

*From Wikipedia : The Voyager 1 spacecraft is a 722-kilogram (1,592 lb) space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, to study the outer Solar System and eventually interstellar space. Operating for 33 years, 11 months and 3 days as of today (8 August 2011), the spacecraft receives routine commands and transmits data back to the Deep Space Network. It will be the first probe to leave the Solar System and is the farthest man made object from Earth.

The final picture is from an old 2007 post from the UK’s Daily Mail, showing a possible view from the ‘new earth’.

S&P, you may recall, is one of the ratings agencies (the others being Moody’s and Fitch) that greased the skids of the financial crisis by awarding AAA ratings to tranche after tranche of mortgage bonds called collaterized debt obligations, or CDOs. Recall that, unlike U.S. Treasuries, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S., CDOs were underwritten by garbage mortgages — that is, backed by no-documentation “liar loans” and other Alt-A subprime pond scum handed to borrowers who otherwise couldn’t get a nickel’s worth of credit at their local dry cleaner.

Saturday marked the 66th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.   It made me remember the words from the ‘Forever Young’ by the 80s German technopop group Alphaville :

let’s dance in style
lets dance for a while
heaven can wait
we’re only watching the skies
hoping for the best
but expecting the worst
are you going to drop the bomb or not?

There is no question that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the Cold War ultimately led to Germany’s resolve to get out of nuclear power altogether.   And reports from Japan tell of increasing protests against nuclear power in the wake of the on-going troubles at the Fukushima facility.  Some surveys say 70% of the population want the country to follow Germany and abandon nuclear power.

It’s summer and the squirrels are up and down the trees in my backyard, sometimes jumping from one to the other.  I’ve had trouble with them some years ago, with them getting into the house’s attic.  (The roof is now squirrel-proof).  Their hyper-activity reminds me of Hammy the squirrel in the 2006 animated movie Over The Hedge.

RJ: [after making him look like a rabid squirrel] Now show me that vicious look in your eye, boy. Come on!
Hammy the Squirrel: Oh, oh, I can burp my ABC’s [burping]
Hammy the Squirrel: A, B, C…
RJ: HAMMY! I just really need you to focus right now, okay?
Hammy the Squirrel: Okay.

So as every investor knows by now – Thursday was the US stock market’s worst trading day since 2008 with the Dow Jones Industrial average dropping 4.3%.  The picture is from Friday morning’s USA today.   The red is very appropriate, blood bath that it was!    Being a long-term investor, I almost never sell any stocks in my modest portfolio on days like these.  But with the troubled US and European economies and debt problems everywhere, even the long term looks pretty bleak.   What to do if one has cash?  Sit on it? Buy more gold?