Sunday, October 23, 2011

Dominos of Doom

Reading Zerohedge the past couple of years it's easy to see DOOM
approaching. Now DOOM really seems to be just weeks or months away
for the Euro, probably pretty close for US banks as well, one thing
seems really obvious to me. All credit default swaps should be
cancelled and they should be made illegal.

Banks buy cds' to hedge against losses, but really they just make an
entangled alliance of risk. Banks think they are hedged, so there
is no risk and they can be even more leveraged. When one domino falls
they are all going to blow up like the scene in Finding Nemo, where a
falling torpedo sets off all the mines around the submarine that Nemo
and Dory are hiding in. boom.

Instead of hedging the risk the cds' are just propagating the risk
around the world, and who knows how much of it there is. why they
weren't outlawed after 2008 made me lose the little bit of faith
I had in the congress.

If the OWS people want to protest something concrete they should be
demanding the end to TBTF, and CDS' instead of just demanding cheap
pot.

Thursday, October 06, 2011

Steve Jobs bought me a car

When I got to use the mechanincal engineering department's Mac SE's
back in 1988, I was amazed, compared to the vt100 terminals or
DOS box's we had it was beamed in from another world. My parents asked
me what computer to buy in 1998 and I said buy an iMac. Tricky to use
dialup on that, but my young relatives were able to create creepy
speeches using the speech synthesizer. Around 2002/2003 I was sitting in
a cubicle in houston listening to music playing from the adjacent
cubicle, and it never repeated. over days and of music, it was
always different. I finally went around the corner and asked how
are you doing that? and my neighbor showed me his iPod. I saw that
and immediately looked up aapl stock and saw that it had almost as
much cash as market cap. I used the only gambling money I had, which
was the remains of my dot-bomb account on etrade and bought 2k worth
of aapl.

If I had kept more of it longer or bought more I could have been rich, instead
i made enough to buy a car. I'll give myself credit that I can recognize genius when I see something like an ipod for the first time, but true genius is the guy who could create something like an ipod, or iphone (my iphone 1 being stolen still hurts), an ipad or Mac air, and not compromise with the people who must have been there saying
don't spend the money on designing a new interface, just sell what we have
and maintain profitability.

True genius.

Anyway. sad that you are gone, I hope you find peace.