Fri, 19 May 2006
EU to Print Its Way Out of Inflation?
The EUobserver reports that members of the European Parliament are proposing to print €1 and €2 notes to replace one and two euro coins. They argue that the public doesn't correctly value the coins, and thus, a switch to notes will curb inflation as consumers stop throwing the coins around frivolously. Yeah, that's the cause of inflation. It can't have anything to do with those responsible for actually printing (or minting) the euros or the banks that create money out of thin air.
If the EU wants to get rid of their coins, I'll be happy to exchange each €1 coin for a $1 Federal Reserve Note. Limited Time Offer. While Supplies Last.
Perhaps the US should eliminate the $1 note and make the $2 note the smallest. The latter tends to be overvalued by American consumers.
Naked Shorts
I was forwarded this email:
Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 22:43:49 EDT From: xxxxxxxxx@aol.com To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: If you invest in stocks, listen to this...from Bobby K. Turn up your volume and set aside about 10 minutes to listen to this. Theres a crack in the system whereby people can create bullshit shares of stock and sell it, where in essense creating more shares than there should be and driving a companies stock down and eventually destroying the company. Ive known about this for awhile and so have politicians, however, if they tried to fix it, the entire financial system of the U.S. would collapse. Ive always said that the stock market crash we saw in 2000 that wiped out alot of people would be a walk in the park compared to the next one that will happen. I think within the next 1-3 years the topic of these bullshit "phantom" shares will be the big one that will be the biggest hit the stock market has ever seen. Dont paic, just be careful. The stock market is done. The crooks have made billions in the last 60 years in the stock market and i think the shit will hit the fan soon. Listen... http://www.ultimateuploads.com/audio/view.php?play=10aa902b7bb9763edd29058fb220e350
I wrote the following response before listening to the audio. I should have guessed that it was the Overstock dude.
The CEO of Overstock.com bitches about naked shorts a lot. Read http://jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com/. Mark Cuban talks about it on his blog sometimes too. There was also a 60 minutes story about it, but it wasn't very good as Leslie Stahl is about as financially literate as a chihuahua. While it's fraudulent to sell something that doesn't exist, the purchaser of a share of stock is the one who would have a complaint if he were unable to take delivery of said share. The CEOs who bitch about it are the ones whose compensation is in the form of stock options. If they were speaking on behalf of the company, they should be delighted that people are driving down the stock price. The company can buy back its shares cheaply enriching the existing shareholders. Imagine a company that sells 1,000,000 shares at $10/share during an IPO. If short sellers drive down the stock to $1/share, and the company can buy back all of its shares, it makes $9,000,000 without giving up any equity (neglecting underwriting fees and the upward movement of the stock price as the company starts to buy back a lot of shares). Likewise, if you're a shareholder, and you think the stock is undervalued at $1, you can buy more stock and wait for the profits to come rolling in. If your company isn't making any money, and you expect to make money on the stock, well, too bad. xn
Mon, 15 May 2006
Summer Reading List
Greg Mankiw and Arnold Kling have posted suggestions of books for economics undergrads to read at the beach this summer. Since they include mostly books I haven't read, I'll need to update my wishlist.
I added a couple books I thought would be good for the beach in Kling's comments:
- Walter Block, Defending the Undefendable
- Frederic Bastiat, The Law
- Steven Landsburg, Fair Play
In addition to the required readings for Mises University, I'm going to try to get through a bunch of books I've bought recently:
- Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit
- Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History
- Murray Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States
- Murray Rothbard, America's Great Depression
- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
- F.A. Hayek, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle
- Jesús Huerta de Soto, Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles
And if I manage to get through all of that, I've got Thomas Sowell's The Quest for Cosmic Justice and one of my inBubbleWrap books, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Mon, 01 May 2006
Google and A9
A few days ago, Amazon's A9 replaced their main web search results pane, previously filled with results from Google, with "Windows Live" results. So I changed back my default columns to Google and Wikipedia. Then again this morning, Google was gone and Windows Live was back. But now, the Google results are nowhere to be found.
Sat, 29 Apr 2006
Free Gas
The Perfect Substitute points us to this tip on how to get free gas. Not to be outdone by the senators who want to send voters a bribe in the form of a $100 check representing a gas tax rebate (uhm, why not just cut or eliminate the tax in the first place?), the counties of Orange and Los Angeles in Southern California will give you a free gallon of gas if you run out on the freeway. I guess they need somewhere to spend all the extra cash they've been pulling in from property taxes.
Fri, 14 Apr 2006
Amazon's Photo Yellow Pages
Amazon's new Yellow Pages service with photos is the coolest thing I've seen in quite a while. There are a couple kinks to work out. I saw a couple pictures of buses, and they need to make sure not to take pictures of the rising or setting sun, but overall this is a fantastic service. It will be even better when it covers residential areas and is integrated with driving directions.
If you're coming to visit me, I'm just up the street from this Chinese restaurant.
Update: Russ isn't as impressed. Apparently, they've had something similar in Madrid for years.
Concatenate PDFs
How to Concatenate PDFs
- Install pdftk. I suggest
apt-get install pdftk. - Create a shell script call pdfcat:
- Run
pdfcat file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf > files1-3.pdf
#!/bin/sh pdftk $* cat output -
Mon, 10 Apr 2006
On Illegal Immigration
Immigration, and illegal immigration in particular, is a hot topic in the US Congress and among the population in general. Mark Trahant, in an editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, argues that immigration to the United States is nothing new, and that the same issues which the country now faces have endured since the founding of the country. These concerns are: the failure of new immigrants to assimilate; the fact the new immigrants are entering the country illegally; and that Americans' jobs are at risk because of immigration.
Although there are parallels to the past, it is undeniable that immigration is now out of control in this country. Ninety percent of Americans consider illegal immigration to be a problem.
These immigrants are bringing their foreign culture with them. The immigrants that come from Mexico and Central America have two to three times the number of children as native Americans. These children must then be educated at taxpayer expense. The US cannot afford to feed and educate the world's destitute masses. We must stop illegal immigration now. If we keep the current immigration policies in place or further expand the decriminalization of illegal immigration by granting amnesty to those who have already entered the country illegally, the US economy will deteriorate until it reaches parity with Mexico's.
In addition to the economic war US taxpayers are fighting against the onslaught of illegal aliens, the United States is currently engaged in a war on terror. Mexico may claim to be an ally of the US, but the lack of Mexican troops in Iraq shows that Mexican values are clearly not aligned with America's. Can we really afford to let our enemies into our country?
Just as during the period following World War I, we must again stand vigilant against those that wish to enter our country illegally. Those that spit in the face of the laws of our sovereign nation must be treated like the criminals they are. If one enters this country by trespass, they are criminals by definition. With no respect for the law, they will surely have no qualms about dealing drugs to our children and mugging our elderly.
It has been argued that the immigrants come here to do the work that Americans will not do. In Los Angeles, move than 30% of students drop out of high school. Certainly, these uneducated natives will do the low-skilled work that it is claimed only foreigners will do. These Americans need to have jobs to support their families. How will they be able to survive with immigrants taking their jobs and driving down the wages in those few jobs Americans do find?
Globalization may be improving the standard of living for the world's poor, but we must not allow it to do so at the expense of good, honest Americans.
The above essay is an assignment for my philosophy class in which I am supposed
to use only bad arguments. I tried to avoid good arguments while, at the same
time, not letting my bad arguments become too absurd. Try to find the
following common fallacies of reasoning:
Mon, 03 Apr 2006
kdissert
While working on a paper on immigration for a Model UN-type project, I discovered a great program called kdissert. It's a mind-mapping tool designed to help write papers and presentations. A mind map is similar to an outline, but ideas are laid out radially.
I usually use vimoutliner to organize my thoughts for a paper, but one problem I have when using vimoutliner is getting the text into OpenOffice for final editing. I generally convert to docbook, then to xhtml which I import into OpenOffice. Unfortunately, line breaks within the original text are preserved so the text doesn't wrap properly in OpenOffice. I'm sure I could fix this by either preprocessing the text prior to conversion to docbook or processing the docbook text, but I though I'd try something new.
Kdissert can export directly to OpenOffice and LaTeX. I found a small bug in
the OpenOffice generator in which URLs to linked documents are not properly
encoded, but the author of kdissert, Thomas Nagy, quickly addressed it. A PNG
of the entire mind map can also be generated.
Unfortunately, I never finished my immigration paper; I couldn't
figure out a way to reconcile my position with that of the US government which
I was supposed to be representing in the simulation.
Fri, 24 Mar 2006
Senators and Households
Max Clark points out that American, both the ones who run the government and the ones that run the PTA, are prone to short-term thinking.
If you have paid any attention to the news lately you should be aware that the Republican controlled Senate is discussing changing Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster.
...
What are they planning to do when the Democrats are back in power? And here is where short sidedness takes over. The answer is nobody cares. Why? Because by the time it happens it won?t be their problem.
He points out that a similar short-sightedness is plaguing those buying homes with ARMs and interest-only loans at a time when long-term interest rates are at historical lows.
Maybe they think the end of the world is near, so what the hell.
