In Search of the Perfect Investment

Good news: From Business Insider this morning:

Markets Around The World Are On A Tear. The world stock markets are playing catch-up with the U.S., where the stocks surged 1.1% following reports of Russian warplanes ending drills in Ukraine, a sign that turmoil in the region may be subsiding. In Europe, Britain’s FTSE is up 0.7%, France’s CAC 40 is up 0.8%, and Germany’s DAX is up 1.5%. In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei closed up 2.4% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rallied 1.3%. U.S. futures are up, with Dow futures up 55 points and S&P 500 futures up 7 points.

Why I like Boeing. The A380 is for schlepping a lot of people between airline hubs. Which is not what travelers want. People want non-stop flights. Fast and no layovers. The kind of planes that Boeing makes. Airbus has it all wrong.

This is the A380 by Airbus. Big, and expensive to buy and run. Note the four engines. Gas guzzlers.

This is the nice upstairs bar for the rich folk. Swap business cards and get your photo taken with your arm around the stew. (Yes, it’s real tacky.)

This is where the Plebians (like you and me) travel. It’s charming and intimate. NOT! There are no bins for the people in the center. It gives awfulness a whole new meaning.

The New York Times did a piece on Oversize Expectations for the Airbus A380. Read it here. BA is cheap.

The most important piece I read this weekend. David Remnick’s Watching the Eclipse in the latest New Yorker.

At first, Putin had little interest in ideology. Then a vision emerged of a Eurasian Russian imperium, fending off Western decay.

There are two main external influences on our stockmarkets today. When they ebb, we go up. And vice versa.

1. Putin.

2. Radical Sunni Islamist militias, especially ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Excerpts from Remnick’s long piece (which you must read in full).

 + In his first two terms in office, from 2000 to 2008, Vladimir Putin made his priority the reëstablishment of a strong state. He disempowered disloyal regional governors, crushed the oligarchs who did not heed his insistence that they stay out of politics, and obliterated the leadership of the separatist uprising in Chechnya. He took complete control of the main television channels and neutered any opposition political parties. He established postmodern state symbols and an anthem that combined features of the imperial and Communist past. But he was not, foremost, an ideologue. Kleptocracies rarely value theoretical tracts. They value numbered accounts. They value the stability of their own arrangements.

+ One of his favorite politicians in imperial Russia was Pyotr Stolypin, the Prime Minister under Nicholas II. “We do not need great upheavals,” Putin said, paraphrasing Stolypin. “We need a great Russia.” Stolypin had also said, “Give the state twenty years and you will not recognize Russia.” That was in 1909. Stolypin was assassinated by a revolutionary in Kiev, in 1911. But Putin was determined that his opportunity not be truncated: “Give me twenty years,” he said, “and you will not recognize Russia.”

And so now, instead of nurturing the business and creative classes in the big cities, he turned on them. He vilified them on TV; he weakened them with restrictions, searches, arrests, and selective jail terms. He sided now with the deeply conservative impulses, prejudices, and habits of mind of the Russian majority. “There was an idea to gain the support of the majority, to distinguish it from the minority,” Boris Mezhuev, a conservative columnist at Izvestia and the editor of the Web site politconservatism.ru, told me. “This was done harshly.”

Putin’s speeches were full of hostility, lashing out at the West for betraying its promises, for treating Russia like a defeated “vassal” rather than a great country, for an inability to distinguish between right and wrong. He denounced the United States for its behavior in Hiroshima and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans and Libya. He cut off adoptions to America, claiming that “our” babies were being abused by cruel and heedless foreigners. The West was hypocritical, arrogant, self-righteous, and dissolute, according to Putin, so he strengthened his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church to reëstablish “traditional Russian values.” He approved new laws on “non-traditional” sexual practices-the so-called “anti-gay propaganda” laws. When the feminist performance artists and political activists Pussy Riot burst into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and performed their “Punk Prayer” (“Throw Putin Out!”), the system knew what to do: Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Church, denounced them for “blasphemy,” and the courts, an utterly dependent instrument of the Kremlin, handed down a Draconian sentence. More and more, Putin spoke about “traditional Russian values” and of the uniqueness of Russian “civilization,” a civilization that crossed borders.

+ Mr Putin has shown that he values his own understanding of Russia’s historic destiny more than the economic well-being of his country and its global reputation. He is making a risky bet that challenging the architecture of the post-cold-war order will reap its own rewards and make up for a drop in living standards.

…Such problems have not yet hurt Mr Putin. Indeed, he is more popular than ever and his propaganda apparatus is proving to be highly effective. A poll released this week by the Levada Centre, a think-tank in Moscow, shows that 74% of Russians have a negative view of America, the highest number in Russia’s post-Soviet history. The showdown with the West over Ukraine has allowed for a “powerful discharge of frustration” built up over years since the Soviet collapse, says Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Centre. And now that Mr Putin knows relations with the West are spoiled no matter what, he may be prepared to up the ante again.

Please read the entire New Yorker article. Click here.

Weekend insights

1. My best shave comes from the newest blade — not the fanciest razor.

2. All *.zip attachments to incoming emails have viruses.

3. Spam is getting seriously creative — from lowering my auto insurance to my expiring vehicle warranty, to my free steak dinner, to how to save thousands on my home loan, “to hooking up with sexy people looking for fun,” to my new $75/hour job at LinkedIn, Google, Apple (or a thousand others), to my free steak dinner at Applebees, to my Genie Zip Bra which “smooths and minimizes my back fat,” male enhancement pills, $50 gift cards at Home Depot, Amazon, Walmart, Starbucks, Walgreens, to “understanding erectile dysfunction and not suffering in silence,” to my background being checked by everybody and his uncle. Never give your real email address out. Get a fake, killable one from Gmail.

4. Want to send large files? Most company servers won’t take more than 10 megs. Gmail will take up 25 megs.

5.  Virgin America has the worst airline web site in the entire world. Well, maybe not the entire world. But certainly one of the worst. Are you listening, Sir Richard Branson?

6.  CFL lightbulbs last longer, cost less to run. But many are big and won’t fit into fixtures, especially ceiling fixtures. Philips seem to be smaller than the no-mames.

7.  Most everyone can lose weight. Eat and drink less. if you’re not aggressively exercising, the body actually requires remarkably little food.

8. The supermoon was cute. You can probably watch it again tonight.

9.  Talk to your bank about a double logon. Two user IDs and two passwords. Much safer for you. I now use a double log-on to get onto this site.

10. CHECK. CHECK. CHECK. Last week I  highlighted a video purporting to show the orchestra conductor addressing Queen Beatrix about the virtues of Islam and then the orchestra walked out in protest. Sadly I didn’t check. The truth (from here)

The man who addressed the queen was not the conductor of the orchestra. According to a September 4, 2011, entry in an Islam in Europe blog, the man had a history of interrupting events. We believe that the incident occurred near that time. The blog post also said that the orchestra was ordered off stage by the security team that showed up shortly after the interruption of the program. The concert resumed after a police check for explosives.

This is spam/phishing. Be ultra careful.

I know it’s bogus because of where it came from:

The last time I checked, E-ZPass did not have offices in Romania, which is what .ro means.

Why women make better assassins. (Old but fun.)

The CIA had an opening for an assassin. After all the background checks, interviews and testing were done, there were three finalists: two men and a woman.

For the final test, the CIA agents took one of the men to a large metal door and handed him a gun.

“We must know that you will follow your instructions no matter what the circumstances. Inside the room you will find your wife sitting in a chair…..kill her!!!

The man said “You can’t be serious. I could never shoot my wife”.

The agent said, “Then you are not the right man for this job. Take your wife and go home”.

The second man was given the same instructions. He took the gun and went into the room. All was quiet for about five minutes. The man came out with tears in his eyes, “I tried, but I can’t kill my wife.”

The agent said, “You don’t have what it takes, so take your wife and go home.”

Finally, it was the woman’s turn. She was given the same instructions, to kill her husband. She took the gun and went into the room. Shots were heard, one after another. They heard screaming, crashing, and banging on the walls.

After a few minutes, all was quiet. The door opened slowly and there stood the woman, wiping sweat from her brow.

“This gun is loaded with blanks”, she said. “I had to kill him with the chair”

Harry Newton who had a lovely weekend with Susan, his wife of 38 years. We played tennis, and even cooked a little together. I replaced the blown bulbs in her dressing room and the battery in her dead watch. I give virtue a whole new meaning.