Another cool science vid…

Haha, great remake!

Next Christmas I want this coffee table and a giant vat of liquid nitrogen to keep refreezing the puck!

First up this cool overview on companies and investing by Bill Ackman who runs the Pershing Square hedge fund.  Especially good for teens who might be interested in business and investing, but useful for everyone to watch IMHO:

And, for dessert, the funny and very well done NASA ‘Johnson Style’:

Really great little RSA-type drawing animation on 6 ways to influence people’s decisions.  Worth the ~12 minutes, especially with a cup of coffee / tea before you get rolling Monday morning.

My current profession is tech and I’ve worked for some great companies over the years.  One of those was Intel.  When you went to work at Intel in the mid ‘90’s they sent you through a HazMat (Hazardous Materials) training class.  The instructor led you through a little exercise at the start of the class that went something like this.

Instructor:  What’s more deadly, water or cyanide?

Students:  Cyanide!

Instructor:  Maybe.  How about this scenario - you have to swallow a micro-gram of cyanide or drink a gallon of water - which is more deadly?

Students:  (confused disagreement)

Instructor:  Neither, you would survive both.

Instructor:  What about drinking 2 gallons of water within a few minutes or taking 1mg of cyanide?

Students:  (tentative majority) Cyanide?

Instructor:  No, you’d survive both.

Instructor:  Now, what about 100mg of cyanide or drinking 4 gallons of water?

Students:  (majority) Cyanide.

Instructor:  The water would kill you without medical assistance.

The Lesson - In a given amount of time, with the right dose ANYTHING can kill you.  In other words, too much of a good thing is deadly.

Which is the point of this post and why I’m worried.  Mainly about the markets but also the United States in general.  We simply have too much debt.  The Federal Reserve is printing too much money. The government continues to spend like there will never be consequences to their actions.  We can argue about timing but not the eventual outcome - the US is being destroyed by its political system.

Right now the S&P 500 is sitting just below its highs for the year, up 15% YTD (including dividends, ~12.6% on a pure price basis).  But corporate earnings and revenue growth sucked in Q3.  Europe is in a recession and is kicking the fiscal can down the road furiously, in the process solving nothing.  Japan is, as John Mauldin pounds the table on, a ‘bug in search of a windshield’.  Corruption seems to be at an all time high in every country.  The US political system is so broken it turns off the vast majority of Americans who don’t bother to vote anymore.  And if you think those are big issues, it turns out we’re pretty lucky that the rest of the world is focused on Europe and, to a lesser extent, Japan because if they collectively decided to focus on the US then the reality that the US is actually quite broke might finally start to sink in.

And what is it that we, and perhaps more specifically I, have to look forward to?  Well, lets see.  I grew up not necessarily poor, but certainly not rich by any stretch of the imagination.  That meant I paid my way through tech school, then undergrad, then grad school.  I worked from the time I was old enough to paint and mow lawns all the way through every degree and to this day.  I have a positive net worth now and would be considered, if not the 1%, then certainly the top 5%.  And because I’ve been so ‘lucky’, I should be expected to ‘share’ more and more of this ‘lucky windfall’ with others.  Well, let me share something with you - there’s very little ‘luck’ involved in any form of success.  It boils down to dedication, hard work and a work ethic that makes you successful.  Luck generates lottery winners, not people that work and save for their net worth.

Obama is the worst sort of politician with his, “you didn’t build that” shit.  And Romney was a fucking nut case, war monger, Mormon.  Neither of these guys should have been running for President but those were the choices and now we are stuck with one.  Mish did an excellent blog post on Ron Paul’s farewell speech that everyone should read - like right now.  Go, read it, you can come back here after you’re done.

There was also this great chart from ZeroHedge the other day that no press outlet bothers covering:

What I really think is happening is everyone already knows its too late and the whole financial system the world is built on is going to blow sky high.  If that’s the case, then you delay the inevitable as long as possible.  It actually makes sense from a political perspective.  If you know you’re going to crash the plane and there’s no arguing about the outcome, its just human nature to delay the crash as long as you can.

On the positive side of things, I continue to short my way to on-par performance with the S&P 500 for the year.  I’m up just over 13% for the year and all of that was made purely shorting the S&P 500.

At some point, something is going to die from printing / creating all this money (e.g. debt) from thin air.  Either the USD will die, the market will die, the economy will die (in the form of massive inflation) or, and this is worst of all, confidence in the entire system that has been engineered by the unholy trinity of big government, big finance and the Federal Reserve, will collapse.  People will stop spending on discretionary shit they don’t need.  They will save more, likely a lot more.  And since 70% of US GDP is consumer spending it will be game over until the giant ‘flush’ cleans out the current system and we reinvent things again.

All of the above sounds so negative, and it is going to be painful.  But long term I’m still fundamentally an optimist.  The technology humans create will most likely save us from ourselves, and I’m still betting it will.  I just hope we can get through whats to come quickly so we can get to better times.

Time to step it up a notch as things have been slowing down a bit around here the last few weeks.  So lets ‘resurrect’ Godsmack and their song Awake from 2000.  A factoid I didn’t know about these guys is that they hold the record (at 20) for the most top ten ‘Rock Radio Hits’.  I honestly would have never guessed that.

Don’t listen to the below if you are thinking of turning out the lights and listening to something soothing before bed because this song is the polar opposite - hence the name!

Here’s an interesting singer / songwriter - Paolo Nutini.  I couldn’t find a better version of this song online, but its good enough to get a sense for his talent.  Very good, mellow song just ahead of Thanksgiving.  Enjoy this Scottish musician’s ballad, ‘Last Request’.

Second only to Linkin Park in my MP3 collection is Green Day.  I’ve always liked these guys and their latest trio of albums is quite good (well, at least the first two I’ve heard so far - Uno & Duo).

This song is from Duo and is really catchy.  I like the FX with the guy’s heart running around outside his body like a stick figure too.  

These guys are getting older but aren’t old yet!  Enjoy ‘Stray Heart’:

This week we have a little edge to the music since we’re stuck with Obama for another 4 years (see, I told you).  This one is from Tommy Fields and borrows the chorus from a song of his called Wildfire in the Streets.  Apparently its from the Locked Down soundtrack, but I heard it at the end of a Christian Slater movie I watched last weekend.  I have no idea who’s doing the rap part of the song, but its well done.  This sound sort of reminds me of Linkin Park a bit, probably my favorite all time band based on the sheer number of MP3s I own by them.

Without further commentary….