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"Mark my words." Oh I have, believe me. :)
Bootz - I installed the Panther update over Jaguar on my new 17 without a single problem. I backed up just to be safe.
The 17 arrived with a dead DIMM slot and has to go back to Apple. Its going to be painful on one of my old machines for a week or two after getting used to the speed and beautiful screen on the 17.
Anyone following SGI?
Up .13 on 6x volume with 2 recent defense contracts. But have the underlying fundamentals changed?
TIA
Warren Spahn By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Warren Spahn, who in a career spanning 21 seasons won 363 games, the major league record for a left-handed pitcher, died yesterday at his home in Broken Arrow, Okla. He was 82.
Confounding batters with a fluid, high-kicking motion and an assortment of pitches that nicked the corners of the plate or darted just outside the strike zone, Spahn was a craftsman on the mound.
He did not win a major league game until he was 25 and had served in World War II. But when he retired after the 1965 season at age 44, he owned a host of records.
Pitching 20 seasons for the Braves — 8 in Boston and 12 in Milwaukee — and a final season with the Mets and the San Francisco Giants, Spahn had a record of 363-245, fifth on the career victory list. He won the Cy Young award as baseball's best pitcher in 1957, was an All-Star 14 times and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1973, his first year of eligibility.
"For the years I was watching him, Koufax was tops," Johnny Podres, a Dodgers pitcher and later a pitching coach, told Donald Honig in "October Heroes." "But for the long haul, for year-after-year performance, Warren Spahn was the best I ever saw. He was just a master of his trade. I couldn't take my eyes off him. Watching him was an education."
Whitlow Wyatt, Spahn's pitching coach at Milwaukee, once said: "He makes my job easy. Every pitch he throws has an idea behind it."
Spahn won at least 20 games 13 times, a record for a lefty. He holds the records for most times leading a league in victories (eight, including five consecutive years, from 1957 to 1961) and complete games (nine). He pitched 382 complete games in 665 starts, and his 5,243 innings pitched places him No. 1 among left-handers.
He pitched 63 shutouts, a National League record for a left-hander, and had a career earned run average of 3.09.
At 6 feet and 175 pounds, Spahn was not regarded as a power pitcher, but he led the N.L. in strikeouts every season from 1949 to 1952.
He pitched two no-hitters, against the Philadelphia Phillies in September 1960, at age 39, and against the Giants in April 1961, five days after his 40th birthday.
In 1963, he matched his season high in victories with 23.
He could hit, too. His 35 career home runs are an N.L. record for a pitcher, and he had a .333 batting average in 1958.
Spahn was honored in August by the Braves, who unveiled a bronze statue of him at Turner Field in Atlanta, where they now play. It depicts his pitching motion, right leg pointed toward the sky.
Warren Edward Spahn was born in Buffalo on April 23, 1921. His father, Edward, a former semipro baseball player who sold wallpaper, built a pitcher's mound in the family's backyard and developed his son's pitching style.
"He insisted that I throw with a fluid motion, and the high leg kick was a part of the deception to the hitter," Spahn told The Sunday Oklahoman in 1998. "Hitters said the ball seemed to come out of my uniform."
Spahn signed with the Boston Braves organization in 1940. He made his major league debut in 1942, pitching briefly for Manager Casey Stengel, who had banished him to the minors in the spring for refusing to throw at the Dodgers' Pee Wee Reese, as Spahn told it.
Spahn was drafted into the Army's combat engineers in 1943. He took part in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and the seizure of the bridge at Remagen, enabling Allied troops to begin crossing the Rhine. One minute before that bridge collapsed, on the afternoon of March 17, 1945, killing many American soldiers, Spahn had been alongside it. He emerged from World War II with a battlefield commission, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart for a shrapnel wound.
He returned to the Braves in 1946, posting an 8-5 record, then emerged as one of baseball's best pitchers with a 21-10 record the next year.
In 1948, Spahn teamed with the right-hander Johnny Sain to pitch the Braves to a pennant in a race inspiring an enduring baseball rhyme.
On Sept. 14 of that season, The Boston Post carried a four-line poem by Gerry Hern, its sports editor, beseeching Spahn and Sain to assume the pitching burden in the final weeks and hoping for some rain to give them enough rest between outings.
The rhyme was shortened among Braves fans to "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain."
Over the next 12 days, Spahn and Sain each started three games and each won twice, with three days off and one rainout in between, as the Braves captured their first pennant in 34 years.
Sain won 24 games that season, Spahn 15.
Spahn was outpitched by the Indians' Bob Lemon in Game 2 of the World Series, then won Game 5 in relief, but Cleveland captured the Series in six games.
The Braves endured lackluster years after that, then moved to Milwaukee in 1953 and enjoyed a stunning revival behind the pitching of Spahn, Lew Burdette and Bob Buhl, the power hitting of Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews and the catching of Del Crandall. Spahn's pitching helped the Braves win the World Series in 1957 and a pennant in 1958. He was 1-1 in the 1957 World Series and 2-1 in the '58 Series, both against the Yankees.
Relying on guile long after he had lost the velocity on his fastball, Spahn continued to thrive past age 40. But in 1964, he slipped to 6- 13.
The Braves sold him in November to the Mets, who made him the highest- paid player in their three-year history with a $70,000 salary. Also serving as a coach and pitching once more for Stengel, Spahn was 4-12.
After having lost 11 straight on a last-place team, he was released in mid-July 1965, joined the Giants and went 3-4 for them to close out his pitching career.
Spahn later managed the minor league Tulsa Oilers, served as a pitching coach for the Indians and in Mexico and Japan, and was a minor league instructor for Cleveland and the Angels. He operated a cattle ranch in Hartshorne, Okla.
He is survived by a son, Gregory, and two granddaughters. His wife, LoRene, died in 1978.
Spahn was a master of control — or the deliberate lack thereof.
"Home plate is 17 inches wide," he once remarked. "I give the batter the middle 13 inches. That belongs to him. But the two outside inches on either side belong to me. That's where I throw the ball."
Even better, he often made the batter swing at a pitch he could not hit solidly. "You have to be able to throw strikes," Spahn said. "But you try not to whenever possible."
Spahn complemented his fastball with a curveball, a screwball, a slider and changeups, all thrown with the same overhand motion.
"I'm smarter now than when I had the big fastball," he told Time magazine in 1960. "Sometimes I get behind hitters on purpose. That makes them hungry hitters. They start looking for fat pitches. I make my living off hungry hitters."
Interviewed in 1999 at the All-Star Game in Boston's Fenway Park, Spahn took a dim view of modern-day pitching, particularly in the American League with its designated hitter.
"One of the things I dislike about baseball today is we've made nonathletes out of pitchers," he said. "They pitch once a week. They count the pitches. They don't hit. They don't run the bases. That's not my kind of baseball."
Who is Warren Spahn? I'm shocked, shocked...
Warredn Spahn was a lefthanded pitcher with the Boston and Milwaukee Braves. His fluid delivery, wicked curve, and smooth pickoff move to first base made him the classiest lefthander it's ever been my priviledge to watch. Highlight of his career was the 1948 series against Cleveland, when he had the Indians lunging after his curve ball. Teamed with Johhny Sain, thus "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain."
Really, Linda, you should get out more:)
Expanded school laptop program gaining supporters
Saturday, November 22, 2003
Portland Maine Press herald/Associated Press
More educators and business leaders are joining former Gov. Angus King in a move to expand the state's middle school laptop program to high schools.
The group hopes to raise enough money to add ninth-graders next year and one grade each year thereafter until students in grades seven through 12 have laptop computers as part of their education.
"I don't think it's fair to say 'you can have these tools for a couple of years' and then take them away," King said.
Maine's first-in-the-nation laptop program was proposed by King in 2000. The $37 million program now puts laptop computers in the hands of all public school seventh- and eighth-graders.
Beginning in the ninth grade, those students no longer get laptops. But a growing number of educators, including former Education Commissioner J. Duke Albanese, and business leaders want to take it a step further.
Supporters would like the program to grow with this year's eighth-graders, adding a grade every year until grades seven through 12 have laptops.
Peter Geiger, a vice president at Geiger in Lewiston and a member of the Maine Coalition for Excellence in Education, is concerned that the state will miss a golden opportunity to enhance education - and the future of Maine's work force - if it doesn't keep the laptops through high school.
"Can you learn without the laptops? Sure. But we have a very good thing going in this state," Geiger said.
"We're getting such excellent results," said Ron Bancroft, a Portland businessman and the chairman of the Maine Legislature's laptop advisory board and the Maine Coalition for Excellence in Education. "We want to extend this kind of opportunity for high school students. It's going to be a little bit of a tragedy if it doesn't happen."
The problem is money.
The middle school laptop program costs about $10 million a year, including teacher training. Supporters of expansion said it could cost between $6 million and $7 million to bring the laptops to ninth grade next fall.
Once the infrastructure is in place, King believes it would ultimately cost $18 million to $25 million a year to run the program for grades seven through 12.
That's about 1 percent of the money spent on education in Maine each year, King said.
"It's not that huge a part of the overall budget. It's really a question of bang for the buck," he said.
Lee Umphrey, spokesman for Gov. John Baldacci, said the governor is open to expanding the laptop program. But the state must also deal with a host of other budget priorities, including a $113 million Medicaid shortfall.
Expansion supporters are working on ways to get around those budget hurdles. Some have talked with private businesses about forming partnerships with local schools or donating money to pay for the computers.
The state has received more than $2 million in donations and pledges for teacher training, but companies don't usually like paying long term for a government-run program, King said.
Profits vs marketshare - Morningstart on HPQ
Hewlett-Packard's HPQ results, released Wednesday, met some short-term expectations, but next year's outlook is uninspiring and our fair value estimate is unchanged. It is strategically important for the company to remain a top seller of computer systems worldwide, and HP is clearly not afraid to cut prices to make that happen. HP's willingness to sacrifice profitability for market share creates an unattractive investment outlook, in our opinion, especially when two units that generated about $35 billion in revenue this year produced zero operating profit. We are going to wait a little longer on this turnaround story.
Trouble in PB paradise...
17 inch PB won't recognize the 2nd 512 mgb chip. MacConnection's promo included a 2nd chip from a Korean mfg. PB wouldn't recognize it. They shipped me a 2nd chip, identical to the one originally installed. PB recognized it but the mouse froze. After two hard restarts the mouse worked but About showed only 512 mgb.
I have AppleCare but this seems to me a MacConnection problem. Panther is known to be very fussy about RAM so I thought they'd be careful about quality. Calling MacConnection tech support again shortly.
Cotton - I'm always amazed that on a tech-savy board there is so much discussion of client-side SPAM filtering and virtually no discussion of server-side filtering.
My current and previous ISPs both use the server-side filter "Postini," and I get at most 1-2 SPAMs a day, plus the satisfaction of knowing that I have made the entire email system more efficient by stopping SPAM one step closer to the source.
If I were to need a new ISP I would put server-side filtering on my list of absolute requrements, right along with reliability and security.
roni -
I now hold 3 listed canroys - San Juan Basin (NYSE), Petrofund (AMEX), and Pengrowth (NYSE). Petrofund has received an underperform from RBC and I will probably sell it in March.
As you may know some of the Canadian trusts, while not listed on the ASE or AMEX, are listed and can be traded in the US as OTC. I own 6 of these. Prices for these are in US dollars.
The best single site for canroys is www.mcdep.com. He has a buy on San Juan Basin and Canadian Oil Sands. These are not among the highest yielding but promise good future apppreciation. I also follow coverage from Raymond James, RBC, and BMO nesbit Burns. There are other resources on the web.
Linda - Cheer up. The sun will shine again :)
But income investing is a whole different world. When the time comes another UK stock to consider is Lloyds (LYG) current yield 11.26 %.
Beyond that are royalty trusts, particularly those that own oil and gas producing properties called Canroys since most of them are Canadian. I hold 9 Canroys, which as a group are yielding me 13.8%. However, these yields are based on depleting resources, so DD is extremely important to determine whether management is retaining and investing income so as to replace oil and gas that is depleted.
Linda - Yahoo shows the current current yield of UU to be 12.15%, based on today's pps. UU is an ADR so the dividend is taxed at 15%. The 11.8% I quoted was a percentage of my basis. I track my dividend stocks this way so that, as interest rates rise, I can see the point where I could realize an equal or greater return by selling the stock and investing my basis, plus capitaL gains minus taxes, in a long muni.
In response to your question I can only show you the annual dividend in dollars:
2003 2.13
2002 1.57
2001 1.46
2000 1.48
1999 1.59
1998 1.42
Well my UU is up .30.
What's UU? United Utilities, UK, yields 11.8%. Perfect for a retirement income portfolio :)
Not just Walmart but CNet too. But cool is indeed the key. I simply can't imagine serious online music buyers going to Walmart or CNet. In fact, take the regulars on this board as representative of the iTunes/iPod target audience. Walmart? I don't think so.
But investors will need numbers to sort this out, and I certainly hope they start to pop in the 4th quarter.
roni - Thanks. My quote was from Fidelity. However, I do know that premarket activitity is often meaningless or misleading. And I really do think AAPL has better prospects than any other time I can remember, And I really do think I'll net a handsome profit from my 4K shares. But sometimes...
nickel, thanks, but I've already changed my pants :)
AAPL -1.42 premarket on Walmart music business news.
Means nothing within the context of Steve's overall product strategy as *we* understand it, but I do wish he would turn his promotional energies to some of the other less cool but more profitable products.
Like the G5. Like this beatutiful new 17 PB on my desk. Or the beautiful Panther purring inside. Or the UNIX inside that, which will gradually but inexorably lead to increased market share.
And "Thank you!" to all who encouraged me in this purchase. It is one beautiful piece of machinery. And has replaced a G3 PB and a deskptop G4.
And pardon my interruption with an on-topic post. The seminar on the religion and the constitution may now continue :)
APPL prospects depend on execution.
On the surface there are more positive things happening at once than I can ever remember.
The product line is extraordinarily robust - PBs, G5 desktops, G5 supercomputer(s), Panther, iTunes/iPod.
The economy will be good through 2004. Bush, Greenspan, and the Republican congress will do whatever can be done to give Bush and the Republicans the best possible chance in the 2004 elections.
But in the product line there are also real quality problems with the 15 inch PB and with Panther and Firewire. IMO these have already impacted 4Q sales and earnings; I just don't know to what extent Fred has included these factors in his projections.
My prediction for the runup to earnings is 24-25 if they continue to stumble and 29-30 if they are effective and decisive in dealing with quality problems. Holding 3.5K @ 22.80. Will accumulate another 1K on dips to or below 22.70.
RichD - I went through that same nonsense with Verizon. I did *not* have to install any of their software. OX X just did it. I eventually found a techie that knew that, and I suspect you can find someone at SBC.
The only drawback was that the router was Linksys, a company with a reputation as Mac hostile, and they certainly were in this case.
A Barron's Interview With Jeremy Grantham (from SI)
Sucker Punch Coming
An Interview With Jeremy Grantham -- Clients of Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co. have been gathering the past two weeks at the venerable investment firm's Boston headquarters for its annual assessment of the state of the world's markets. In other words, to hear "Jeremy's jeremiads." With 35 years experience under his belt and $48 billion under management at the firm he helped found, Grantham is well worth listening to. His foresight and fastidiousness are the stuff of legend, as is the firm's ability to deliver superior results across asset classes around the globe over the long haul. For Grantham's latest prophecies, please read on.
Barron's: New bull market? Bear market rally?
Grantham: The simple story is the market is overpriced and will go to a trendline P/E, which we now believe is 16 times based on research that shows earnings tend to be overstated over time because assets tend to be underdepreciated during times of technological progress. Currently, the market is around 24 times trailing earnings, on a fairly generous earnings estimate. This is not just a bear market rally but the greatest sucker rally in history.
Q: There's nothing comparable?
A: Nothing in American history. In bear-market rallies, in the not-too-distant future, a new low is made. But the new low is only verified in hindsight. The normal characteristics of the leadership in a bear market rally flash back to the old leadership of the prior bubble.
That's not the case in a new bull market. In the three substantial, but not huge, rallies that occurred in 2000, 2001 and 2002, technology and growth stocks led the way, particularly flaky little companies. The scope of the speculation and the leadership of tech and the surviving Internet stocks is just not typical of a serious new bull market.
New bull markets typically start when the great bubbles have broken badly and stocks become very cheap: Eight times depressed earnings and way under half replacement cost. After this bubble burst, the market hit 19 times earnings, barely below the prior peak of the two previous great bull markets. Then it staged a big rally, with all of the indicators of a bear market rally except one: Bear market rallies typically don't have legs and in the U.S. have never lasted a year.
Jeremy's jeremiad: The vast overhang of debt which, unlike in other cycles, continues to grow, means a major "housecleaning" still lies ahead for the market.
Q: But this one will?
A: It is the third year of a presidential cycle. The presidential cycle is enormously important. The presidential cycle for me starts in 1932. Before then, the whole idea of stimulus hadn't sunk in. Keynes explained the concept and in Franklin Delano Roosevelt he had a very interested listener.
From then on, administrations understood it is a good idea to stimulate the economy in year three, so that in year four unemployment -- and this is key -- is dropping. It's fine to have a strong economy, but it is unemployment that really drives the vote, our research shows. The third year in a presidential cycle is not just a bull market year, but one with a bubbly flavor to it where growth wins. It's the only year in the cycle that growth wins. The speculative stocks outperform the quality stocks and small caps do very well.
Q: How does this third year stack up against those in the past?
A: This is a classic third year. The absolute return, minus inflation, is 17% in the third year and believe it or not that is exactly where we are, up 17%. Growth outperforms its normal relationship to value by 5% and that is exactly where it is today, to the penny. Small cap does very nicely and this time has done twice as well because it has benefited from another kicker.
While there isn't a very strong connection between the economy and the stock market, there is one very useful connection: In the 12 months, sometimes 24 depending on conditions, but always 12 following a low in the economy, small caps do very well. Low quality or junk does spectacularly.
What we found, too, is that the third year is fairly indifferent to value. Years one, two and four are reasonably sensitive to value. In year three, it doesn't matter whether the market is cheap, expensive or in between, the market goes up. In 1999, the most expensive year in American history up to that point, the market went straight through the roof, like a pea bouncing off a tank.
Q: What should we expect in year four?
A: Year four is neutral. The market comes in on average, small cap is about average, junk still wins -- a little echo effect -- and surprisingly value comes back and typically has the best year on average in the cycle. Value matters.
This is, of course, a glorious heaven-sent opportunity to take advantage of the rally and reposition portfolios. This is a very important rally and it will probably last through the year and may easily carry over into one or more quarters next year.
But next year is much more up for grabs. It is a very expensive market and that will be a drag. We still have very low capacity-utilization and all the problems of excess spending that went on. We have the problem of debt.
Q: How critical is the question of debt?
A: What is unique to this cycle is debt has not declined. It has, in fact, risen dramatically at the government level, quite dramatically at the corporate level, dramatically at the foreign level and very substantially and steadily at the consumer level. This is not a good picture.
Normally, it rises in bad times and falls in recoveries. This time it has not. This is a long way from today, but 2005 and 2006 will be a much clearer call than most years.
Q: How is that?
A: They will be painful years. A black hole.
Q: Why do you say that?
A: Housecleaning needs to be done, whether a new administration or old, and we have got a really dirty house. There is debt everywhere, and there are problems that have not been addressed, only postponed, by this administration and the Federal Reserve. In addition, we have a horrifically overpriced market. It is the third most expensive year ever recorded.
Q: What should investors do?
A: There are fewer places to hide than any time in my 35-year career.
Bonds are not horrific, but they are vulnerable to someone deciding the way to get rid of all this debt is to inflate. TIPS (Treasury inflation-protected securities) are okay, but fairly priced. The returns at these levels are not terrible but neither are they satisfactory.
In stocks, value has come in and won't be too much help on the downside, nothing like 2000-2001. Same with small cap. Small cap has done brilliantly all the way down and all the way up this year. Small cap is not cheap in the U.S. Do not expect it to provide any material help on the downside; it may even underperform.
Real estate has been like a cat with nine lives. Housing prices have continued to rise to a multiple of income that is dangerously high. The next time at bat, you really have to count on the housing market coming down, not disastrously, but if the S&P comes down through 700, which is our estimate of fair value, it will very likely be accompanied by at least a modest decline in housing.
All the reasons that propped it up will have flowed through the system. It would be hard to imagine a two-year decline in the market that was coincident with a continued climb in real estate. Real estate is getting very expensive and quite unaffordable, and when rates rise that will make it much more so.
Meanwhile, REITs [real-estate investment trusts] went up in 2000-'01-'02 when the U.S. market went down. Then we have a 20% rally in the S&P this year and REITs are six or seven points ahead. Since we spoke last year, REITs are up 33.4% to the S&P's 23.9%, almost 10 points ahead.
Q: Why the outperformance? Aren't REITs out of favor now that other dividend-paying stocks receive a tax advantage?
A: Of all the questions I find hard to answer, that is No. 1. I can give you plausible B.S. but I don't know why REITs have done so well. They changed the tax on dividends, but not for REITs, and therefore other high-dividend stocks should surely handsomely outperform REITs. Yet REITs, without the tax advantage, are far ahead of other high-yield stocks. Go figure.
Everyone knows the fundamentals of office space are terrible and apartment rents have fallen and vacancy rates are up. We've had three years of brilliant outperformance in the worst bear market since 1974, and still REITs are outperforming. I don't get it, except underneath it all there is still a big gap between the expected return from REITs and the S&P. We are down to about a 4.5% estimate in REITs from 8.1% a year ago. Now 4.5% is not enough, but it is a lot better than about negative 1% a year, which we expect from the S&P.
Q: Are you still anti blue-chip?
A: I'm anti blue-chips in terms of absolute return. In terms of relative return, one of the places to hide in the U.S. market will be quality stocks. Quality stocks, whether large-cap, or small- or mid-cap, provide noncontroversial, straightforward return on equity, stability of profits and balance-sheet strength. Meat and potatoes. Those characteristics have underperformed continuously all year. This has been a junk year by every parameter.
The net effect is that quality is already pretty cheap. If this bear-market rally continues for quite a long time, then quality will become about as cheap or cheaper than it has ever been. In the event the market goes another leg down, accompanied perhaps by some measures aimed at the overleverage in the system, quality could be a terrific defense against huge declines. Quality stocks will still go down, unfortunately. But they will provide real resistance to big declines. They will be pretty heroic as will REITs on a relative basis. That's the important idea in the U.S. But the real play, of course continues to be foreign and emerging stocks and bonds.
Q: Still?
A: The dollar has probably not seen its low. Even though we don't score it as cheap on traditional purchasing-power parity, we have a strong suspicion it will continue down because of the trade gap. Now the place to hide in relative terms is in foreign stocks, emerging markets and, paradoxically, high-quality U.S. and, if you insist, REITs.
The problem is, what do you do in absolute terms? Foreign is no longer cheap. It is a little expensive. The best you can say for it is if you are going into the second leg of a major bear market, it is better to go with the sectors that are only a little expensive. They will go down in sympathy with the U.S. but I think they will go down substantially less and the currency kicker will make a big difference.
The only one that may buck the trend is emerging markets. Emerging may actually go up in a fairly serious decline. We've been saying this for a long time and last year the S&P was down 22% and emerging was minus 2%. It almost made it; it almost did the impossible. Emerging is still absolutely a bit cheap. It is the only equity category that is absolutely a little cheap. Its profit margins are improving. Its GDPs are improving. If there is no out-of-left field crisis in, say, China -- and "if" should be underlined two or three times -- they are in better shape than they have been for years in terms of financials and currencies.
Q: Are you mostly focused on emerging Asia?
A: No. We like Brazil a lot. We like Argentina. We like Eastern Europe. We don't like Korea. It is picking and choosing. But emerging is the only category that might actually go up.
I am intrigued, too, by the growing interest in emerging equity. We are seeing fairly massive increases in institutional interest in emerging markets. And that is a market where a little bit goes a long way. If this speculative phase in the U.S. market were to continue for as long as nine months from today, I wouldn't be surprised if emerging markets didn't go up another 40%. It has got everything lined up for it. If the market here fades quicker than that, then it won't happen, but it still might do pretty well.
Q: What are your views on China?
A: It is working out very well, for the time being. Their imports are growing faster than their exports. Their imports are up 40% year over year. Mind boggling. Chinese imports represent almost one-third of the increase in imports globally. A country with an official GDP that puts it No. 7 or 8 in the world is accounting for 30% or so of all the growth in global importing. Stunning beyond belief. If it keeps rolling a lot of things are going to change in the world.
One of the interesting things is commodity prices. I always make a big fuss that there are only two commodity prices that have risen in the long run: fish and forestry.
What do they have in common? They started as free goods. When you start free and move to cultivation, that is known in the trade as an infinite increasing cost. Okay, it is an exaggeration but at least it makes the point that you can have a long, steady increase in price. Fish and forestry have risen and everything else has gone down in price.
It doesn't matter whether it is oil or soybeans, they have all gone down in real terms. And they've gone down because even those that have marginal increases in costs, such as oil, have had their productivity clock in a little higher than the rising marginal costs of extraction. It doesn't have to be that way, it just happens to be that way.
If China keeps up its growth rate, productivity -- which will not change just because China is growing rapidly -- will come in below the increasing marginal costs of extraction, and those commodities will tend to have a rising real price. Even though they haven't for a hundred years, they will have real price increases. If you push resources at the rate China is doing now, we are going to live in a world where commodity prices rise.
No doubt other interesting effects will fan out from that. With China increasing its imports by 40% and its exports something like 35% this year, what effect does that have on shipping? They're growing faster than they can build ships. Shipping rates have gone through the roof. China may push the whole infrastructure of shipbuilding pretty hard. It may take a few years to gear up to build enough ships to keep up with the incremental effect. Now if the rest of the world slows down a bit, that will mitigate the pressures enormously.
Q: So, how do you feel about the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. to China?
A: There are only 14 million manufacturing jobs, down from 17 million four years ago. How many of those 14 for technical reasons are always going to be in America? Say 8 million. So between now and forever you are going to lose another 6 million jobs. You just lost 3 million in the last four years. It is really seriously hard to get too excited in a population of 250 million about the eventual loss of an incremental 6 million jobs.
The huge pain of the economy going from 80% manufacturing in 1900 is behind us. That is really bullish. There are plenty of countries where this is a serious factor, but for the U.K. and the U.S., the two most advanced in this way, what used to be bad news has become the good news. The U.K. and the U.S. are service-driven economies.
Q: What about the migration of services jobs at this point?
A: Migrating service jobs is much more complicated. You certainly wouldn't want them to go too fast because that is the area where we are growing and that's where our comparative advantage always has been.
But in the end, global trade benefits everybody. It may also hurt some people, but net-net, it increases the total wealth of the majority of people and so it will go on. We should welcome it. But it is tough if you are the computer programmer who just lost his job to someone in Mumbai.
Q: And so are you investing in commodities?
A: Commodities will probably be a nice place to hide and well worth looking at. We have been considering doing a real-asset fund using stocks. We probably will not, but we are working on it just to have an extra weapon to consider according to the circumstances.
A fund we will probably do is a quality stock fund. A lot of our funds are tied to benchmarks and there is a limit to how much they can tilt to high-quality stocks or should. A quality fund will allow us to target quality stocks more emphatically.
Q: Thanks, Jeremy.
Deleted.
Well... ordered the 17 AlBook from MacConnection.
Techno-orgasm should begin about 10 am tomorrow.
Discovered level 2 on the Brown streamer... filled 500 shares at 22.91. Nice.
Kevin - Do you have the aluminum 17? I do have a problem with the size, believe it or not. Space is limited. But both the Ti and Al 17s appear to have avoided the quality problems of the 15s.
Linda - I would not recommend the Brown streamer right now for anything other than a realtime watch list. No charts and many of the features don't work. I'll keep using it and working with them on implementing/fixing features.
Will buy AAPL again below 23.
Kevin - PMFJI, but it seems to me much too early to draw any conclusions about the stock price. I am betting (with a humble 3K shares) that we will revert to the classis AAPL runup to earnings in January. This view is reinforced by the economic news out this morning.
IMO the good news about AAPL is not yet out there... it is in the media and here, on this board, where enthusiasm for insanely great products is generalized to the wider world. It is happening, but slowly, and will build gradually through the Christmas season up to earnings.
IMO the downside is execution. I have been really shaken by the 10.2.8 fiasco and the AlBook problems. My checkbook is right
here, beside my faithful Lombard. But still closed. I'm old fashioned enouth to expect that for $2,500 I'll get a product that works.
OhMyGod, you mean I had a Cheetah, right here, and didn't even recognize it? Well, all I can say is it didn't run like a Cheetah...
Maybe nobody else remembers, and we can name 10.4 Cheetah...
the Big Cats... Cheetah has *got* to be in at some point.
ljk - you have mail. eom
Linda - Apples - thousands of apples.
Every nook and cranny is filled with baskets of apples. Of course this is the season when supply is plentiful and prices are down. In January good apples will be hard to find and the price will start going up.
Mike
Still averaging down. But I could run out of money before I run out of buying opportunities...
Linda, I sure hope you're right. I *really* need a computer that can stay ahead of my DSL connection. However, besides the hinges, there are problems with dead pixels and white spaces on the screen, and with 3rd party RAM.
A week or so ago I called the Apple Store and priced the base model ALBook, priced at about $2K to start. By the time I added RAM to 1 gig, Apple Care, shipping, and sales tax, I was just slighly under $3K. I haven't priced a comparable model at MacConnection, but I'll guess it will come in at about $2.5K.
Next week I'll call MacConnection and ask them about reported defects. I've found them to be very responsive, provided you ask the right question.
Back in at $22.77. Agree that it looks like a good run to earnings.
Wish they'd get the glitches worked out of the G4 AlBooks. We now have Verizon DSL and my faithful Lombard simply can't keep up. Painful contrast with my wife's 800 mhz eMac, which is very snappy on DSL.
Back in at $22.77. Agree that it looks like a good run to earnings.
Wish they'd get the glitches worked out of the G4 AlBooks. We now have Verizon DSL and my faithful Lombard simply can't keep up. Painful contrast with my wife's 800 mhz eMac, which is very snappy on DSL.
University of Tokyo buys 1,150 iMacs
By Peter Cohen pcohen@maccentral.com
October 03, 2003 7:20 am ET
The Asahi Shimbun reports that Japan's University of Tokyo has decided to buy 1,150 iMacs from Apple as part of an upgrade to replace 1,600 five-year-old Linux systems now in use at the university. The iMacs will be made available to students, professors and instructors at the university next March.
The newspaper reports that the decision was made because of Mac OS X's ease of maintenance, thanks to its Unix underpinnings -- an operating system that the staff is already largely familiar with. The availability of free software to run on Mac OS X was also considered a benefit.
The Asahi Shimbun reports that the iMac order is part of a larger deal that the University of Tokyo signed with NEC Corp. to install 1,400 computers on Komaba, Hongo and Kashiwa campuses. What's more, the university plans to use Macs -- presumably Xserves -- as network servers on the LAN.
A small contingent of special-purpose computers and Windows based systems -- about 200 -- will remain.
Router for Verizon DSL.
Verizon included a Linksys router, but their mac support is non-existant so I have decided to buy my own.
What can people here recommend?
TIA
dilleet - Thanks. But they were closed.
Rather quaint in this age of 24x7. I'll try again tomorrow.
Is the new 15' PB combo drive in stock anywhere by mail order?
TIA
Well gosh, Zanny, thanks for setting us straight. I thought it was about Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.
Re switch vs stores...
Why does everyone insist on treating this as an either/or? My own experience (Arlington VA) was that the switch campaign and the stores were synergistic. Switch got them interested and the stores sold them.
There is simply no way to appreciate the beauty and functionality of, say, the 17' PB or the iLamp without seeing and using one. I still breathe a little faster when I see one, and at my age that's saying something. But for many, it took switch to get them into the store in the first place.
Of course there are people with beige souls, including some here. We'll never reach them, and should not make the compromises necessary to do so.
Sorry. Double post.
If anyone here as a Yahoo email account...
what are the incoming and outgoing mail servers for Mail preferences?
TIA