Blogs Worth a Click

 
From The Wall Street Ledger:
The consolidation in the cults and loonies industry continues as the Unification Church (ticker symbol UCCO) announced after yesterday’s market close that it will acquire the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). ISKCON is best known for its bald nut cases chanting “Hare Krishna” at airports and bus stations. Spokesman Pie Moon described the merger as “a strategic move into an area where we see tremendous growth opportunities. While there is some overlap in the airport terminal business, we will be able to broaden our range of products. ISKCON is the industry leader in peacock feathers, carnations, and the larger religious tracts.” Lal Admi, CEO of ISKCON, said “There is tremendous synergy between these two leaders in the field of brainwashing and exploitation of vulnerable individuals.”

Industry analysts characterized the deal as not unexpected. Wetherly Merino of E. F. Mutton said ”We told a few of our very best clients this summer that ISKCON was in play, and we upgraded the stock from ‘Whatever’ to ‘Sort of OK’ as early as yesterday afternoon.” Both UCCO and ISKCON have seen their once lucrative airport terminal pest business diminish in the tight security measures implemented following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. “No one wants to see a pack of glassy-eyed zombies hanging around the concourse any more. With the extended waiting we now see at major airports, you would think this would be an ideal environment for rote begging spiels delivered in a rapid monotone. And it would be, except the cops and the National Guard have been kicking them out. Really kicking them, and hard, too.” The college campus and bus station segments of the market remain strong, according to Merino, and the merged cult will be poised to take advantage of any recovery in the national stupidity and gullibility rates.

This merger follows the acquisition of Lyndon LaRouche Associates by the Church of Scientology in June of this year. LaRouche’s paranoia line had attracted interest from cults looking for an entrée into this traditionally steady and cash-rich business. LaRouche had earlier turned back a hostile takeover attempt by Oliver Stone. As a result of the merger with the Church of Scientology, the LaRouche tinfoil hat line was combined with the Scientology tin can product line, and LaRouche’s robotic corgi transceiver subsidiary in the UK was sold to One World Government, Inc. As a result, approximately 1,000 cultists were deprogrammed.

 
If you're in financial services, take a look at More Than Zero, which has a great write-up about the unintended secondary effects of regulation in the brokerage industry. There is a requirement that brokers consider the suitability of an investment for each particular client. In theory, this should mean looking at the client's risk tolerance, tax situation, investment goals (besides making more money), need for current income or capital appreciation, and all the stuff you see in the money magazines. Instead, it meant that there were lists of approved investments at the brokerage houses and investors were funnelled into a narrow set of choices, thereby increasing their risk.

There are a few other things, though, that should be considered. The crash happened after several years of do-it-yourself portfolio building that drained investment dollars from both full-service brokerage houses and mutual funds, which had earlier been the immediate winners from the IRA and 401(k) inflow of investments. In other words, there was comparatively less money available to channel into this small set of approved investments. I should have mentioned this in my previous thumb-sucker on 11/10, because this was driven largely by the dramatic reduction of transaction costs for direct, unaided investment through Internet and other discount brokerages. This frothy investment climate in the late 1990's was what I refer to as a brother-in-law's market, where any damned fool can and does make money and can't stop bragging about it. I'd love to see his COMPLETE set of trade tickets now.

With transaction costs so far down, people were opening and closing positions quickly, with day trading being only an extreme of what was going on everywhere else. Institutions did the same thing. This was no more than momentum investing, which should really be called speculation. Investors, both individual and institutional, were buying things just because they were going up, then hoping to get out before anyone else if things went bad. If they were focused on a small set of equities, I would have said it was voluntary. We all know the names: Henry Blodget, Mary Meeker, Abby Joseph Cohen ... The analysts became stars because they told us what we wanted to hear. No one made us buy JDS Uniphase, CMGI,or Pets.com.

I don't doubt that brokerage lists had something to do with the screwed-up market, but the effect would have been too small to do anything but add to the downhill acceleration.

 

you have an ominosity quotient of seven. you are as ominous as the creators of this quiz. which terrifies us. find out your ominosity quotient

I sure hope my P.O. doesn't see this.

 
My bad -- Le Monde did have an article: Attaque meurtière dans un kibboutz, but it was difficult to find -- I only saw it when reading today's follow-up analysis. Today's analysis seems to wonder whether Arafat is willing or able to control his own Al Aqsa Martyrs assassins, let alone Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Gee, ya think?

 
Update -- maybe I was too harsh on Reuters. Le Monde didn't find the incident worth mentioning at all.

 
Let me see if I have got this straight. Someone breaks into a home, guns down a mother, slaughters two little boys hiding under the blankets, and Reuters describes the perpetrator as a "militant" and as a "gunman," but not a killer or a terrorist. Disgusting.

 
Bloviation alert -- this is one of those "What Does It All Mean?" pieces.

We have all had a chance to get used to the idea that the Nasdaq is going to take a long time, maybe a decade, to recover the 2/3's of its value it has lost. Earnest young consultants by the thousands have sold the Porsche and moved back in with Mom and Dad. Fiber optic demand is still far below capacity. Up until three years ago, the Internet was going to change everything. So what did actually change? Both more and less than we expected.

Item 1: People

Part of what I do for a living is hooking up a big database to a secure extranet for a custodian bank. That means that money managers using our application can click on us in MS Explorer and see what securities they have in which portfolio and lots of other useful things. This is information that used to be faxed to them, entered into a spreadsheet, printed, faxed again... This way is better. You get what you want, when you want it, and can change it to show just what you wanted to see. It is really amazing what has changed since I started in the financial services industry. So what didn't change? Mostly, people didn't change. One of the users of this application was pleased to see that he could get some information for the reporting he had to do just by clicking around. Yet he was still hand-typing other parts of the reports without noticing that this information was also on line,

. If you're an IT professional, you are probably chalking this up to typical "luser" behavior. Maybe it is. Yet one of the guys I work with (web applications are part of the job, remember) has never even ordered a book or a CD over the Internet. Nothing! It is going to take some time before the Internet gets truly integrated into our economy. It is just not part of people's habit sets yet.

Item 2: Markets

The ones making money off the Internet are the ones who reach their markets more efficiently through the Internet than by other means. Think about eBay. It is still primarily an auction site, but have you spent any time looking at the odd things for sale? I bought a handful of trilobites and other fossils for my kids through eBay. The fellow I bought them from tells me that the majority of his business in fossils and raw semi-precious stones comes to him the same way. One of my kids is a model train enthusiast, and when we went to Charles Ro Supply in Malden MA for more absolutely essential stuff, we were often amazed at the number of out-of-state license plates in the parking lot. They have had a mail-order catalog for a long time, but now they have another channel.

Of course, the biggest group of merchants making money in the Internet is the pornographers. This is another case of getting to your customer by changing the distribution method. Just as the VCR's success came at the expense of the local porno theater -- why not watch at home in privacy? -- the on- line porn entrepreneurs are taking some business from the video purveyors and expanding the total market. I'm not saying this is a good thing. At the very least, one does not meet interesting people that way.

The big losers in the early Internet rush were those who had no particular reason for putting their wares on the web. Anyone for a 50 lb. bag of dog food? We'll throw in a free sock puppet.

Item 3: Things We Never Though Of

You're seeing one of them here. Weblogs took off in the aftermath of Sept. 11, as ordinary people (and some extraordinary ones) looked for a way to express themselves, communicate with others, and get around the corporate news blockage. Weblog software meant you didn't have to learn HTML to get your opinions, musings, or free-floating anxiety on the Internet. They say that freedom of the press belongs to the one who owns the press. Well, we all just got the equivalent of a printing press, and pretty cheaply. Anyone for media bias? Forget it. Our local paper is the Boston Globe, which makes the Guardian look even-handed. I still read the paper's editorial pages -- Jeff Jacoby is there -- but in the world of weblogs, the biggest one is Instapundit, hardly a mush-from-the-wimp Globe editorialist.

So what else is out there, after weblogs? The point is that we can never know until they happen, no matter how much money you lavish on Bain, Sapient, [fill in your least favorite consultants] or what have you. Townsend's law of prognostication: The future will resemble the present in every way, except for certain important but unforeseeable differences.

 
Some people just can't help themselves. They just have to go just a little bit farther than the rest of us. Take this letter to a utility company, for example:

Hartford, February 12, 1891

Dear Sirs:

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again to-day. Haven’t you a telephone?

Ys

S.L Clemens

 
Whee, I got Blogrolling going! I put in some of the blogs that I had on yellow stickies, and will start transferring others from my links soon. Big bloggers will have their own lists. I also cloned the blog template in "regular" HTML and will use that as an annex with a different host.

Regarding the election results:

I forget who in the last administration it was, but when he got caught in some fundraising indiscretion, he solemnly averred that he had no regrets over what he had done, because it was done to prevent the right-wing takeover of Congress. In other words, he was saying and may have believed that his noble ends justified his sordid means. My sympathies are with the Republicans, for the most part, but please, winners and losers alike, bear in mind that what this man was trying to prevent was the orderly rotation of power following a regular election. This is our most precious national inheritance, and it goes all the way back to Washington's refusal of a crown. Win or lose, this is far more important than who controls what at one time or another. Remember, in most of the world, people leave power feet first.

 
Well, that was productive. Sort of. I sneaked a JavaScript into the Blogger template that creates a "mailto:" without actually leaving it out in the open for the spam bots to harvest, so I won't see a big increase in spam from putting my e-mail on view. If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, relax, it's just something a geek would care about. If you do, you can click "view source" to see it. The original script is at The JavaScript Source. It was written by Rod Murgatroyd, whose primary interest seems to be a New Zealand variant of N-scale model trains. The script can be adapted to your own use -- just be prepared for a session of wrestling with Blogger's dialect of HTML.

 
Online music sales plummet -- Recording industry blames file-sharing. Jeez, that's terrible. In general, I support property rights as an essential guarantor of freedom. Intellectual property rights, the exclusive right to profit from one's own efforts and inspiration, are particularly sacred.

A friend recently described my musical tastes as bipolar. I don't think that covers it. The CD case I have in my briefcase has works by Sibelius, Beethoven, the Ramones, Al Green, Frank Zappa, Aretha Franklin, Rancid, the Velvet Underground, Mozart, and Sam and Dave. The Sam of this last group is Sam Moore. He had a rather unpleasant experience when he retired. He found he could not do it -- he has to keep working. Here is a link to the article in the LA Times about the lawsuit he and other former stars have filed against these same people who are so upset about being ripped off by KaZaA. Turns out that these defenders of intellectual property have (1) screwed the artists by not paying the required amounts, or often anything, into the AFTRA pension plan, and (2) screwed them again by not paying them royalties. Now AFTRA, which is a separate legal entity from the AFTRA pension plan, is shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find out this injustice has occurred, and is joining the artists in the part of the suit targeting the pension plan (as I mentioned, it is a SEPARATE LEGAL ENTITY, despite the similarity of the names). Did I forget to mention that AFTRA is in the middle of an election to continue to represent the artists? Oopsie, my bad.

 
Election day is Tuesday, which means this is one of those rare times I'll be looking forward to a Wednesday. The stereotype in US politics is that Democrats think Republicans are mean, and Republicans think Democrats are stupid. To combat this, here in Massachusetts we have the Republican candidate for governor, Mitt Romney, looking stupid and Shannon O'Brien, Democrat, being mean.

The ads from the New Hampshire senate race are on our TV channels, too. Shaheen is going with the Social Security scare. One of her ads features an old woman saying "What will I do without my Social Security?" Oh, please. The consultant who thought that one up should have his severed head mounted above the Hooksett toll booth as a warning to others.

Reading:

Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent -- Travels in Small-Town America

After "A Walk in the Woods," "Notes from a Small Island," "I'm a Stranger Here Myself," and "In a Sunburned Country," I wish I had quit reading this guy while I was ahead. This was his first travel book and it shows. At the time he wrote this, he was also writing for the Independent in the UK, which is sort of the party organ for Old Labour. He flatters his core readership by confirming what they already know: Americans are fat vulgarians, they litter their breathtaking vistas with strip malls and trailer parks, and the food is bad. Sigh. Maybe we should let the Brussels bunch instruct us in how we should manage our affairs -- at least they are paying proper attention to regulating sausages and cheese.

Insight: See above. Also, 15,000 miles in a Chevette is probably not as good an idea as it sounds (the book was published in 1989, so there were some still running).

Quote: "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." This should have stopped me.

I haven't been blogging, I know. I've been putting another site together, graphics and all, which you can access through this site.