think or thwim

As usual, John Mauldin makes some very good points in his latest newsletter:

1. The Dow is only 30 stocks.
2. 20 of those stocks are below their high price in 2000.
3. 15 of them are >25% below their high price in 2000.
4. As Barry Ritholtz has noted, none of them were making new highs as the index was.
5. The Dow is price weighted, which is pretty useless. High-priced stocks can skew the average, but price is a meaningless measure when a company can split or issue new shares at will.
6. The new Dow highs are mainly due to 4 expensive stocks that are doing well.
7. The S&P 500 is market cap weighted. That means larger companies affect the in the average more than smaller ones. The S&P 500 is not making new highs.
8. The return for the Dow-30 since January 2001 is 20.75%, not too bad. However, if the Dow components were weighted like the S&P 500 the return is a dismal 1.13%

“So, the only reason that the Dow is at new highs is the way they calculate the index. On a cap-weighted basis, the S&P 500 is actually doing better!”

Don’t get sucked in by the headlines. I see no reason to change my mind about thinking we’re in a secular bear market.

:: John Mauldin’s | Thoughts from the Frontline

Inspiration is like picking up one of those blinky things in a video game that makes you invincible for awhile. You can do anything, go anywhere, and you don’t have to worry about it.

Those blinky things exist in real life too. It may be a picture, or some words, or a sound, or a idea, or a mistake, or a moment. Whatever it is, pick it up and run with it. Run with it like you stole it.

You can’t bottle up inspiration. You can’t put it in a ziplock, toss it in the freezer, and fish it out later. It’s instantly perishable if you don’t eat it while it’s fresh…

It’s true. I do my best to accommodate inspiration when it shows up. Fortunately, I get inspired easily. Unfortunately, it’s rarely about something that my employer would like me to be inspired about. I’m still trying to figure out what to do about that.

::37 Signals

Comedy Central, you’re on notice!

What are you thinking? By forcing YouTube to remove your video clips, your lawyers removed your best advertising. Here’s the cool thing you’ve just screwed up: your fans picked the very best stuff to share. Not only did they pick the best shows, they edited them down to the best segments. They chose those clips because they were topical, they were funny, and they were worth sharing. If I go to your site, I can watch the shows that you’ve selected, and they are not the same ones. Nice move. Next, the YouTube video player works. Your video player? Not so much… Here’s why:

1. You have tiny little videos that can’t be resized. It’s like watching TV from the next room through the keyhole of a closed door.
2. You use javascript to launch a popup window. Therefore, I can’t send a link to my friends or put a link on my blog to direct people to the video highlight I want them to see.
3. Your popup window can’t be opened in a tab or resized. Give me control of my browser back.
4. Your popup window has an obnoxious background that I’m afraid is going to give me a seizure.
5. Next to your video, there’s an ad that’s bigger than the video. Firefox blocks it, but I can’t decide which is worse: the hole that remains in the background, or the background.
6. When I open a YouTube page, the video starts to play. Isn’t that cool? On your page, I sit and think about how much you suck while the video buffers. The video plays for about 3 seconds until it over-runs and starts buffering again. …and that’s with DSL. It must be completely useless at slower connection speeds.
7. With YouTube, I can embed the videos in my own website. When I visit a site I’m more likely to watch a video if its right there and I can just push play. You’re at least five years away from developing that technology.
8. YouTube’s search feature also works, conveniently allowing me to find what I’m looking for. At your site I end up looking through a list of videos.

While I’m at it, here’s a few more things you should fix about your website in general:

• Flashing banner ads? Is that some kind of a Comedy Central joke that’s over my head? There’s this company called Google that showed everybody that annoying your customers isn’t necessary to get them to click on things. Instead, their idea is to give people what they want. You might also want to check out their website for some layout ideas.
• Thanks for letting me sign in. What do I get from my new membership? You’re not going to spam me are you?
• Your privacy policy and your terms and conditions are very impressive. I’d even go so far as to say they are massive. Why not put a summary of that in English for the 100% of us that don’t read that nonsense?

You have two shows right on the front edge of a cultural wave. I thought that was intentional, but now I see that it was dumb luck. The good news is, it’s not too late. You’ve built up a lot of political capital with those two shows, and I can forgive you if you change your ways now. Here’s what you can do to win me back. You can build a user interface that fixes the all items I listed above, or you could just let someone who has already fixed your problems continue to do their thing.

Get out of the way, and let YouTube and your shows’ fans do your advertising for you. I think you’ll be surprised to find out how much you were doing right when you weren’t doing anything.

*Idealog posted the DMCA letter YouTube sent to their members who had uploaded Comedy Central material.

Update #1:

Viacom, Comedy Central’s parent company, is apparently trying to cut a deal with Google/YouTube to share revenue. Removing the YouTube videos was part of that negotiation. Comedy Central subsequently released their Motherload video player, which is a vast improvement over the previous one I wrote about. However, it’s still slow, they still make you sit thru a commercial, embedding is only possible at a small size, the embedded player looks junky, and the videos become unavailable after 30 days.

Update #2:

The geniuses at Viacom are suing Google for $1 billion dollars. Mark Cuban thinks that’s a good idea. I think it’s idiotic, and it might even be what Google had in mind.

Photo credit: nicksflickpicks.com

Oh if you’re a bird, be an early bird
And catch the worm for your breakfast plate.
If you’re a bird, be an early early bird
But if you’re a worm, sleep late.

:: Shel Silverstein | Where the Sidewalk Ends

Really cool. You can see each individual cylinder fire and see the tires warp:

80% of US votes are cast electronically. That includes the ballots where you fill in the little circles (optically scanned ballots). I was only half kidding when I said that Florida voters ought to use mail-in absentee ballots. BoingBoing just posted a similar article.

In this Ars Technica article John Stokes explains how you could tamper with electronic voting machines in layman’s terms.

In all this time, I’ve yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it’s time to hit the panic button: In this article, I’m going to show you how to steal an election….

::How to steal an election by hacking the vote

This 15 minute video shows how insecure Diebold’s vote tally program is:

Another video from Princeton University demonstrates software they wrote to alter the vote.

The system is broken. I’m not qualified to say how to fix it, but open source code sure seems like the right idea. And, why not put the data on the internet for all of us to examine? If there are enough eyes on it, major tampering would probably show up as a statistical anomaly.

I’ve also read that India’s simple, inexpensive machines are a good system.

::/.

Mark Cuban made $600,000 on his UTEK short today:

Cuban teamed up with Christopher Carey to form Sharesleuth. They investigate small companies with questionable business practices. Before they publish the results of the investigation, Cuban takes a position in the company. In this case he sold 75,000 shares short at about $20.

We’re looking for companies that were built for fraud, for executives who are enriching themselves at shareholder expense, and for businesses whose behavior runs counter to their stated objectives or to the public interest.

They’re like superheros for the investing world, except when they stop a robbery, they keep half of the loot for themselves. More power to them.

:: Sharesleuth

Craig Newmark is too good to be true. This post caught my eye, and I did a little research. He could surely sell craigslist.org for billions of dollars, but he isn’t interested. He says he knows guys with a billion dollars. They aren’t all that happy, and they need body guards. He’s got plenty of money, so why screw things up?

According to his resume, Craig spent 17 years working as a programmer and systems engineer at IBM. He moved to San Francisco to work for Charles Schwab in 1993. There, he started sending out emails to inform friends about upcoming events. The email list eventually outgrew the email format and he moved it to a website. People started asking him to include some of their things in his list, and it evolved into what we use now.

The site gets it’s income from companies posting job openings and landlords posting available apartments. There are 22 total employees. Craig says he works in customer service. The CEO is Jim Buckmaster who is a fascinating guy in his own right. Jim is a former perma-student and Chomsky fan who has never owned a car. He’s responsible for spreading the site from San Fransisco to the 34 countries it serves today. He’s also responsible for the forum error message haiku:

a wafer thin mint
that’s been sent before it seems
one is enough, thanks

Thank you, craigslist for providing a great service and doing it with class.

:: Craigsblog :: The Best of Craigslist

Some of my information is from an informative article by Phillip Weiss in New York Magazine, but they don’t get a link because the author was pretty much a prick.

Scott Adams lost his voice to Spasmodic Dysphonia about 18 months ago. His doctor told him that no one has ever recovered from it.

“The weirdest part of this phenomenon is that speech is processed in different parts of the brain depending on the context. So people with this problem can often sing but they can’t talk. In my case I could do my normal professional speaking to large crowds but I could barely whisper and grunt off stage…”

He had a post about how he uses affirmations a couple weeks ago. It must have worked.

::The Dilbert Blog