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the put and call volume at 10 on ovti looks kinda non-trivial
"Saudis STILL want oil in the $22-28 bbl price band- Sure!"
maybe they mean 1999 dollars.
"The Yellow pages analogy is a good one. But, the Yellow pages only contains those ads which are paid for. I use Google for what I hope is an all-encompassing search."
exactly, but they contain LISTINGS for all businesses. in tiny little type, true.
look at yahoo, for example. they haven't actually gotten rid of the huge web directory that they began as. they haven't even modified it to emphasize advertisers. but advertisers are given more prominence etc etc over time, in other places. you have to wade through them to get to the directories. sort of like them going from being the new york times of the web to being the la weekly or the village voice. pretty soon it'll be more like the pennysaver.
"Well, Google has a "do no evil" corporate policy,
which is more high-minded and reeks of integrity."
bah. i think "do no evil" just means "we're not microsoft ... yet". reminds me of those clips i've seen on pbs of bill gates and steve jobs talking of how "evil" ibm was, in the early days.
personally, i can't reconcile a "do no evil" policy and spouting off about warren buffett on the one hand, and on the other hand pricing their ipo at an exorbitant 188 p/e, trying to get the shares into the hands of mom and pop through their auction, and giving average shareholders 1/10 the voting rights of current management. oh, and not providing any guidance.
if they want to act like a private company, fine. stay private.
"it seems like an inherent conflict of interest in the overall model."
actually, i think you're wrong. the business model is kinda like the yellow pages: everyone is listed - because that's what makes it useful and why people actually DO use it - but you can buy ads that make you more promient than your competitors.
that said, its my understanding that their patented "page rank" algorithm is a thing of the past: all these guys merely cache and crunch as much of the web as possible and index it. this is gonna be a game of branding and marketing, not technology. (actually, this is exactly what eric brewer recently said - the guy that founded inktomi and prof at uc berkeley: that, ironically, google isn't a tech company; its an ad company.)
i think the real worry comes from e.g. what bill joy (sun founder, who left recently and rejected a job at goole): the place is a zoo, and they hire all these smart phds to work on numerous different projects, none of which is a killer app. this is exactly what msft has been doing since 1995, to find "the next big thing", and everything goes kaput. they need a plan and a vision and some focus in pursuing "what comes next", whatever that be.
OT actually to be fair to google, the ads don't bias the searches: the ads are labelled as such to the right and up above the searches, but are keyed to keywords. i think goto.com used to be the one that biased it based upon what they were paid for the ad.
see, told ya so:
U.S. Stock-Index Futures Slump After Google Cuts IPO Price
Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. stock-index futures fell as Google Inc. cut the price for its initial public offering and crude-oil futures traded near a record.
Applied Materials Inc. rose in Europe after the maker of semiconductor equipment's earnings beat analyst estimates.
Standard & Poor's 500 Index futures expiring in September shed 3.1 to 1080 as of 8:41 a.m. in London. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures fell 23 to 9959 and Nasdaq-100 Index futures slumped 3 to 1335.50.
Google, the world's most-used Internet search engine, said it will sell shares to the public at $85 to $95 a share, lower than the previous range of $108 to $135 each. Shareholders are reducing the number of shares they're selling by about 6.1 million to 5.5 million shares, Google said in a statement on its Web site.
The company had planned to sell the shares yesterday, with trading to start today. The schedule was delayed because the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission didn't act on Google's request to approve registration for the shares.
Crude-oil futures traded at $46.68 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after peaking at a record $46.95 yesterday. amid concern production may lag growing demand.
Applied Materials climbed 19 cents to $16.28 in Germany. The world's biggest maker of chip-making equipment said late yesterday it had a fiscal third-quarter profit of 26 cents a share, higher than the 25-cent average estimate of 29 analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.
Medtronic Inc., the largest maker of devices that regulate heartbeats, is among three companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index that are scheduled to report earnings today.
Medtronic and Intuit Inc., the No. 1 maker of tax software, may announce results after exchanges close. Big Lots Inc., the biggest U.S. retailer of discontinued and overstocked goods, will probably release figures before the market opens.
Medtronic fell 29 cents to $49.35 in Germany. Big Lots and Intuit didn't trade in Europe.
MSCI Changes
EBay Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. may be active as the two Internet companies will have their representations increased in Morgan Stanley Capital International Inc.'s indexes of global stocks. Cisco Systems Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will have theirs cut, MSCI said yesterday.
Some $3 trillion in funds track MSCI's benchmarks and the changes may prompt some fund managers to mimic the amendments.
EBay, the world's biggest Internet auctioneer, fell 22 cents to $79.35 in Germany and Yahoo, owner of the most-visited group of Internet sites, slipped 9 cents to $28.25. Cisco, the world's largest maker of computer-networking equipment, lost 8 cents to $18.60, also in Germany. Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, didn't trade in Europe.
Network Appliance, Borders
Network Appliance Inc., whose products store and distribute data, reported fiscal first-quarter profit that surpassed estimates. The company, reporting after exchanges closed, also said it expects to earn as much as 14 cents a share in its fiscal second-quarter, better than the average estimate of 22 analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial that predicted 13 cents. The shares didn't trade in Europe.
Borders Group Inc., the No. 2 U.S. bookstore chain, boosted its full-year earnings forecast as it announced second-quarter net income that topped estimates. The company said 2004 profit may be as much as $1.77 a share, up from an earlier forecast of as much as $1.75. The shares didn't trade in Europe.
Asian stocks advanced, led by chip-related companies after Applied Materials earnings report. Morgan Stanley Capital International's Asia-Pacific Index, which tracks more than 900 companies, rose 0.6 percent. Japan's Nikkei 225 Stock Average climbed 0.5 percent.
U.S. stocks rose yesterday for a third straight day after a government report showed an unexpected drop in consumer prices, stoking optimism that the Federal Reserve may slow the pace of interest-rate increases.
The S&P 500 added 0.2 percent to 1081.71. The Dow average gained 0.2 percent to 9972.83, while the Nasdaq Composite Index climbed 0.7 percent to 1795.25.
i posted the news: google lowers its range from 110-135 to 85-95.
okay: also, Lehman lowers rating on japan
janus identifies ING as the folks who are withdrawing $5B
Lehman Cuts Japan Stk Exposure To Neutral Vs Overweight
TOKYO (Dow Jones)--Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEH) has advised investors to cut positions in Japanese equities and put more money in stock markets elsewhere in Asia, particularly South Korea and Taiwan.
In a report dated Aug. 16, the U.S. investment bank said it was reducing its recommended exposure to the Japanese stocks to neutral 9% from overweight 12%. It also raised its exposure to Asia ex-Japan to overweight 11% from an already overweight 8%.
"Valuing the Japanese market has always been difficult, and while current forward multiples of 16X are lower compared with history, they are above those on offer elsewhere in the world," the report said.
"For the moment, we will reduce Japanese exposure to a neutral position, with a strong preference for Asia ex-Japan and Europe."
(MORE) Dow Jones Newswires
08-17-04 2359ET
DJ Lehman Cuts Japan Stk Exposure To Neutral V Overweight -2
Lehman said that since the end of February, the Korean stock market has fallen 13% and the Taiwan stock market has plunged 19% while stocks in Japan are up 3%.
"We think this is overdone," the report said.
In South Korea, where worries run high about a slide in consumer spending in the wake of the credit card-related boom-bust cycle, there have been signs that retail sales are beginning to grow again, Lehman said.
Moreover, the recent interest rate cut in South Korea demonstrates a more proactive policy stance toward the economy and also shows that the Korean authorities can lower rates if needed, Lehman said. Fiscal policy is also working for the Korean economy, while private investment could be poised to gather speed in coming quarters, Lehman said.
In Japan, by contrast, there have been a string of disappointing developments recently, Lehman said.
Japanese gross domestic product figures last weak showed solid personal consumption for the April-June quarter, but Lehman says consumer spending has been running ahead of income growth, while retail sales have been soft.
Lehman predicts Japan's economic growth will slow sharply to 1.2% in 2005 from an expected 4.1% this year. South Korea, on the other hand, appears to be gathering steam. Lehman expects growth there to accelerate to 5.5% in 2005 from 4.8% this year. Taiwan's economic growth will likely ease to 5% next year from 6% this year, Lehman said.
"This is important since stock market earnings forecasts for these markets are very closely related to economic variables," the Lehman report said.
Stocks in South Korea and Taiwan also look cheap, Lehman said.
The Korean market is selling on a forward price-earnings ratio of 6.4 times - much lower than its 13-year average of 12.4 times. The market in Taiwan also looks underpriced, trading at 9.3 times compared with its average multiple of 19 times, Lehman said.
-By Arran Scott, Dow Jones Newswires; 813-5255-2929; arran.scott@dowjones.com
-Edited by Bennett Richardson
do it! do it!
and no, i'm not bidding:
Please be advised that the prospectus for the offering of Google's Class A common stock will be amended to change the estimated offering price range and the number of shares to be sold in the offering. The offering price is now expected to be between $85 and $95 per share. Google expects to sell 14,142,135 shares of Class A common stock in the offering as originally filed. The selling shareholders are reducing the shares they expect to sell to approximately 5.5 million shares in view of this new price range. This is a reduction of approximately 6.1 million shares. In addition, the selling shareholders have granted the underwriters the right to purchase approximately 2.9 million additional shares of Class A common stock at the initial public offering price to cover over-allotments.
Cash balances up as economic worries rise
By Jennifer Hughes in New York
Published: August 17 2004 20:39 / Last updated: August 17 2004 20:39
Fund managers' cash balances have reached levels associated with extreme periods of uncertainty, according to a survey by Merrill Lynch that highlighted growing risk aversion in the investment community.
The net balance of managers “overweight” in cash relative to their benchmarks was 30 per cent. Average cash balances rose to 4.8 per cent the highest in more than a year.
Merrill said the only other times the survey had shown cash balances at such levels was after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks, the October 2002 credit crunch and in the lead-up to the war in Iraq last year.
The survey, of 293 money managers who among them look after assets worth about $940bn, showed that pessimism was deepening, especially regarding US equities, with more than half of managers rating it their least liked region.
Investors also turned negative on global corporate profit growth for the first time in more than three years. A net 18 per cent expected profits to deteriorate, against a net 2 per cent who still expected an improvement in the previous month's survey.
David Bowers, chief global investment strategist at Merrill Lynch, said: “There's a veritable collapse in expectations. They are abandoning corporate earnings and focusing on cash.” The increasing pessimism comes as US markets remain near their lows for the year. For the first time in the survey's history, more fund managers felt that returning money to shareholders was a better use of corporate cash than capital expenditure.
Mr Bowers said: “With investors at the moment, it's a case of ‘show me the money'. “Many of them have given up believing in global economic growth, so if nothing better can be done with corporate cash, they want it back.” A third of the fund managers surveyed by Merrill said their investment horizon was shorter than normal which is usually seen as a sign of risk aversion and more than a third said that they were taking lower risks than normal.
More than half of those surveyed believed that the global economy would get a little weaker over the next year, against a third who expected it to strengthen.
Just over half 51 per cent of managers rated the US their least-liked region for equities, up from 43 per cent in July. Investment opportunities outside the US were viewed more favourably, with 32 per cent ranking Japan as their preferred region, down from 36 per cent in July.
"That and a buck and a quarter or so will get you some coffee."
whoa! where do u get coffee so cheap? around here, for that, they stir some hot water with brown crayons.
actually, i just visited it for the first time tonight, and don't know if its currently the most popular. (i think i just read that there's something similar - futures trading experiments - out of some university in the midwest ... it was in one of those google articles, they're betting on the liklihood of it rising/falling.)
i came across it browsing the googleblog, which took me to a number of messages about people leaving various companies (especially beas) and heading off to google. and this was one of the favorite pursuits of one of their new guys.
it would be fun to see one that was a little more complete and active.
any of u geniuses out there play at the foresight exchange?
http://www.ideosphere.com/fx/index.html
i know that one! with all the pugnosed people. odd, but her hair makes me think of mary tyler moore from the old b&w dick van dyke show.
hmm. that ramp on amat doesn't seem very sticky.
what the market needs is GOOG starting to trade at 135 tomorrow.
interesting
Soros Sells BP, Chevron, Oil Holdings, Buys Microsoft (Update2)
2004-08-17 10:28 (New York)
Soros Sells BP, Chevron, Oil Holdings, Buys Microsoft (Update2)
(Adds average return for macro funds in sixth paragraph.)
By Peter Woodifield
Aug. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Soros Fund Management LLC, the hedge
fund company headed by billionaire George Soros, sold stakes in oil
companies including BP Plc and ChevronTexaco Corp. in the second
quarter as crude prices moved toward record highs.
The stockholdings of the New York-based firm shrank 24 percent
in the three months to $1.33 billion after it sold stakes worth
more than five times what it bought, reducing the number of
investments to 96 from 108, according to regulatory filings.
Purchases included Microsoft Corp., the largest software maker.
``Oil companies have outperformed strongly,'' said Jason
Kenney, an analyst at ING Financial Markets in Edinburgh. ``Maybe
Soros is saying this is the best it's going to be for some time.''
Investors worldwide scrutinize Hungarian-born Soros's holdings
after the 74-year-old made $1 billion in 1992 betting against the
pound and forcing the British government to abandon a peg to a
basket of European currencies.
The quarterly Securities and Exchange Commission filings show
only the stocks the Soros fund owns. The decline in its equity
holdings suggests that Soros is putting his cash into other assets
such as bonds or currencies.
Soros's $8.3 billion Quantum Endowment Fund, once the world's
largest hedge fund, has fallen 0.5 percent in the seven months to
the end of July. Other so-called global macro funds, which invest
in stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities, have returned 5.2
percent on average, according to the CSFB/Tremont hedge fund index.
Oil Stakes
Soros's stakes in BP, the world's second-largest oil company,
ChevronTexaco, the second-largest U.S. oil company, ConocoPhillips,
the No. 3 U.S. oil company, Occidental Petroleum Corp., the fourth-
largest U.S. oil producer, Marathon Oil Corp., the fifth-largest,
and Californian producer Unocal Corp. were worth a combined $372
million at the end of the first quarter, according to Bloomberg
calculations from Soros filings.
The price of all six companies rose by between 2 percent and
12 percent during the second quarter.
Soros Fund Management sold stakes in about 30 companies during
the second quarter, including Time Warner Inc., the world's largest
media company, and Amazon.com Inc., the biggest Internet retailer,
based on the first- and second-quarter filings.
The holdings the firm sold were worth about $610 million at
March 31, based on values in a May 17 filing. Its purchases of
stock in companies it didn't previously own were valued at $114.5
million on June 30, according to a filing late yesterday.
Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Soros, said the firm doesn't
comment on its financial transactions.
Barrier Therapeutics
The biggest single new investment was a holding in Barrier
Therapeutics Inc., a developer of skin treatment products, worth
$38.6 million at the end of June.
As well as buying a $5.6 million stake in Microsoft, Soros
invested $4.7 million holding in Automatic Data Processing Inc.,
the world's biggest paycheck processor and added to holdings in Sun
Microsystems Inc., the fastest-growing server-computer maker,
according to the filing yesterday.
It also took a put option over 150,000 Bank of America Corp.
shares, which were worth $12.7 million. That gives Soros the right
to sell the shares within an agreed period.
Soros Fund Management's largest investment remained its $346.8
million holding in JetBlue Airways Corp., the largest carrier at
John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. The shares rose
16 percent during the quarter. The stake represents 26 percent of
the fund's assets.
Soros left Hungary for England in 1947 and moved to the U.S.
in 1956 to start his investment fund.
After the end of communism in 1989, Soros became more involved
in philanthropy in Eastern Europe, founding the Central European
University in Budapest, which runs courses on democracy, human
rights and social sciences.
America Coming Together, a political group financed by Soros
to defeat President George W. Bush in the November election, raised
$12.5 million last year, disclosure records show.
speaking of scary cheney's, is dick cheney related to lon cheney, the "man of a thousand faces"?
tom ridge isn't scary. how about ashcroft or cheney?
well my bet on ntap is chopping block. but who knows, there's has been almost no correlation between price and earnings in that stock since 1997.
well, i wasn't around in the 70's, though my mom has great stories of her dad hunting around for 20% cd's. all i know right now is that faber has been more right than wrong during the last couple years ... and personally i credit him with convincingly predicting the dollar rally in january - convincingly enough, anyway, that i sold the rest of my gold miners and everything else (because of the correlation between falling dollar, rising market).
"It staggers one to think people WANT the stock only because they use Google and they want to be a part of what they use."
!!!! why staggering? isn't that a commonplace of, say, motley fool and other "investment for dummies" programs? buy what you know ...
re google
fun valuation debate at businessweek. well, not a debate, one guy agonizing over his bid ...
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2004/tc20040817_9348_tc024.htm
"And the big money is selling hard and moving offshore. Swissie anyone!!!!!"
interesting. that's been marc faber's recommendation, exactly. although he mentions that its been made difficult to open a swiss account right now ...
re google ipo
so who's correct: huge number of stories saying that google wants to end the auction today and start trading tomorrow. but ibd and cbs carried the following story. or are they both right? (i.e. nobody is going to bid until the last minute anyway, so google needs to tell them when the last minute is ...)
ps. i'm asking cuz i've been watching yahoo here, under an assumption that its been bid up to support a higher valuation for google and might continue to trade on google expectations. which may or may not be correct, of course.
Google needs bidders for IPO
Company will have to count on last-minute rush
By Bambi Francisco, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 8:45 PM ET Aug. 16, 2004
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Anything from a legal quirk to a paperwork delay can stall an initial public offering, but Google's much-awaited IPO faces the ultimate challenge: Not enough bidders.
It will take a last-minute rush of orders to make the Google IPO work in time for what the company hopes will be a Tuesday evening offering, according to a person familiar with bids received by one of the participating brokers.
It's not even that investors aren't bidding the proposed price of between $108 and $135, but that Google (GOOG: news, chart, profile) isn't getting enough bids at all, according to the banker, who asked not to be identified.
The last-minute orders may indeed come in. Some professional investors have said they'll wait until the last minute to place their bids, hoping that the talk of lower prices or insufficient bids keeps the price down.
But some investors -- including more than two thirds of those who answered an unscientific online CBS MarketWatch poll -- said they're not interested in Google shares at any price.
OT ah, its the nature of open source: enormous diversity and redundancy, and all these programmers who say "oh i want this cool feature" or "i could do that better myself".
i actually make do with a minimum myself: usually i keep my bookmarks open in the side panel (View->Sidebar), and keep those in folders, so i just search from there.
OT well i use linux, so mozilla and mozilla are the main options. oh, and opera its worthwhile to just browse the extensions sometime - under Tools->Options->Extensions->Get New Extensions.
OT firefox
Session Saver
by Pike, rue
Version: 0.2 d1 nightly 21
File Size: 31 KB
Updated: 2004-03-12
Remembers loaded tabs and their history items when Firefox is manually closed, then restores the tabs and history items when next started. The saved session can also be manually restored or updated at any later time via the items in the File menu.
This version is a re-write by rue of Pikes original extension.
http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#sessionsaver
OT re firefox
don't be fooled by the stock features of firefox, which are perhaps a bit sparse. its strength is the set of extensions available. (the browser itself is pretty much "barebones", and you load only the extensions you want.) so extensions include things like special ways for searching, browsing, blogging, managing bookmarks, etc.
more specifically re your question: the answer is yes. there are two ways: you can store all your links in a folder in your bookmarks and then simultaneously open all of the entries in that folder (which come up in differents tabs). or, you can install the extensions for managing tabs, which allow you to create sets of tabs and to save and reload them.
three greatest extensions: (1) block flash (gives you something to click before its loaded), (2) block ads, (3) automatically bypass the "please register for this site" pages everywhere.
"It may surprise this fellow, but there are people out there that actually enjoy thinking all the time, and it's not about getting the best-paying job possible."
well, i don't think that was his point. well maybe a bit, since it was from forbes. but its probably true that the great era of discovery etc in computer science is over, and now its just lots of incremental change. though i'm not sure i'd agree that the next big developments will be in genetic tweaking. maybe. or the sequencing of the human genome might have been the high point there too ... and now biologists go back to what they do best which (i think its in the preface of the watson book) is stamp collecting. i.e. classifying, cataloging, etc.
geriatrics is the next big thing. actually, i remember hearing watson taking about how he felt that cancer would be solved within the next 20 years.
The Bear's Lair: Anatomy of the tech wreck
MARTIN HUTCHINSON, 08.16.04, 2:55 PM ET
WASHINGTON, Aug 16, 2004 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- If you're thinking of studying computer science in college, don't waste your time. The great tech boom of 1965-2004 is coming to an end, and it's not going to return. On a 40-year view, or the average length of a professional career, there will be better opportunities elsewhere.
In the short term, tech shares have been declining more or less throughout 2004. Various Initial Public Offerings have been postponed, for example that for Lindows, a Linux software vendor now surviving on a $20 million legal settlement from Microsoft (under which it promised to change its name) thus demonstrating that it is no longer possible to raise large amounts of money for companies whose direct costs consistently exceed their revenues. Reality may -- at long last -- be returning.
Nevertheless, in the week when Google approaches the market for an initial public offering expected to capitalize the company somewhere north of $30 billion, it may seem eccentric to call for the end of the tech boom, as distinct from just another fluctuation in its expansion. After all, the opportunities for enrichment in the tech sector over the last decade have been legendary. According to press reports, the average stock option profit to be received by Google employees, including the janitors, will be well in excess of $1 million each.
This sounds wonderfully benign, until you pause to think about who the money for the overpriced Google IPO is coming from -- mostly retail investors, generally pretty unsophisticated, many with a net worth well below that to be gained by the average Google janitor. The Google founders proudly proclaimed in their registration document that their central business principle was "Do no evil." They seem by so egregiously overpricing their IPO to have failed in this endeavor pretty well as conclusively as did Bonnie and Clyde in robbing banks.
The unfolding Google IPO fiasco strikes to the core of what's wrong with the tech sector: the excessive sense of entitlement among its youthful and fabulously rich elite, who seem to think that simply because we don't understand the arcane jargon of their cult, we are mere "little people" to be fleeced through overpriced IPOs and moved aside for their luxury housing developments and yacht marinas.
However we didn't understand the detailed mechanics of carburetors and magnetos in the 1920s, we didn't understand the detailed mechanics of turbines and transformers in the 1890s and we didn't understand the detailed mechanics of piston diameters and boiler pressure in the 1840s. Since the Industrial Revolution began around 1780, there have always been new technologies, invented by geniuses, that changed our lives, but the job of understanding the details of their design was for engineers, not for the public at large. These engineers were skilled people, and rewarded as such, but they were not the original inventors, and were not entitled to become fabulously wealthy through working out the detailed design implications of the inventors' inspiration. (By and large the geniuses themselves didn't get rich, either.)
The reality is that tech today has become a mature industry, and both the opportunities and justification for creating new tech billionaires have become outdated. The Internet has been around for a decade and broadband (in any case hardly a technical advance of genius) for half a decade. Any solidly blue collar inhabitant of a Western country not living in the depths of isolation can now have a broadband connection that will allow him to play the same mindless computer games as everybody else.
Further, the quality of the tech experience has significantly declined in the last few years, because of the twin threats of spam and viruses. This did not happen with say automobiles; once they'd been invented they stayed invented, and they became more reliable and effective, not less. However, anyone who has experienced a perfectly decent computer being reduced to a pile of junk by viruses in little over a year, as I have, will have little enthusiasm going forward for buying any but the most basic hardware. The business has been commoditized, and is in the process of moving entirely to China and the like.
Techies at this point will respond that the next generation of chips, soon to appear, will be twice as powerful, or a thousand times as powerful -- I can never remember which -- as anything we've yet seen. To which I respond, so what? Business users of the Internet require primarily text, which has been available perfectly efficiently for several years now. While leisure users want video, with a modern connection, they've got it, and if they want extra high quality, they'll buy a high definition television, and get it that way.
No sane consumer is going to spend a couple of thousand dollars on something that is invaded by spam and attacked by viruses, and possibly useless in a year -- and that no power of God or man, in a modern suburb, can find you a way to get repaired efficiently and cheaply. The only remaining area of advance is new and better video games, which will continue to appear at regular intervals. Like new and better television programs, they are merely a branch of the entertainment industry with no great new technological features on the horizon and few barriers to entry other than the limited number of good designers.
All good things must come to an end. What's more, all high level scams peopled by boring socially-challenged overpaid engineers must come to an end too, which should be a relief for the rest of us. The tech sector will shortly migrate to the low cost manufacturing sectors of Asia, where quality will be excellent and overpaid "entrepreneurs" almost non-existent.
This is not to say that the world economy has gone "ex-growth." Of course not. The next great industry, still several years away from its full flowering into a financial cornucopia, is pretty clearly that of genetic manipulation, whether to create new pharmaceuticals, new defenses against hereditary ailments or, in the long run, new people and maybe even improved people. If you start to postulate all the things that are likely to be technically possible with genetic manipulation in the next generation, assuming that the Luddite political attempts to prevent it fail, you quickly come to realize that the genetic industry potentially dwarfs hardware, software and telecommunications combined.
Of course, in the current political climate, the United States, home of the stem cell research ban, will not be part of this bonanza, but even cautious Britain announced this week that it is permitting the creation of new stem cell lines and less restrictive polities in Asia may well be far advanced in the necessary capabilities.
Neither perpetual tech sector dominance, nor perpetual U.S. economic dominance, are in any way pre-ordained in the long run.
(The Bear's Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that, in the long '90s boom, the proportion of "sell" recommendations put out by Wall Street houses declined from 9 percent of all research reports to 1 percent and has only modestly rebounded since. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)
Martin Hutchinson is the author of "Great Conservatives" (Academica Press, 2004) -- details can be found on the Web site greatconservatives.com.
United Press International
Copyright 2004 by United Press International.
"Cannabis trebles mental illness risk"
is that if we just read his posts? or does it require prolonged conversation?
well, the trin << 1 isn't a whole lot different from last monday. stayed down under .88 and decreasing for 2 days there. (trin, trinq was also down monday but up tuesday.)
1.27B on the nazdog ... that's hardly even a party.
eeeew ...
just a function of the falling dollar? or is POG going to follow POO?
hmm, i suppose they don't want to leave you with the fear that you'll be making repeated visits to the emergency room in your pjs with a raging erection, and yet they've planted a time frame in your mind which suggests that the drug is good enuf to keep you going for hours. priapism isn't such a pleasant thing, i'm told :-P
sbux failed at resistanced today and has already given up most of its move.
OT "however, most spend more on advertising than R&D..."
laff. it always brings a smile to my face when i hear the cyalis commercial and the "warning" about 4 hour erections. now tell me they're not using that warning as a selling point ...
welll so far nazdog volume looking like 1.3B ... doesn't sound like something to chase yet ...