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Accelerating downwards today. Excellent.

I was right about Apple. It’s flying today.

Much of the rest of the market is weak and getting weaker as talk of higher interest rates spooks it.

Apple lesson and today’s pullback: Use dips to buy your favorite stocks.

Time to short IBM and Microsoft:

IBMShort3

MSFTShort

I want one. A flying car.

Flyingcar

To watch it fly, click here. No price set, yet. Figure $250,000, or so.

WiFi is good. But wired is better. Measured yesterday.

WiFi, 12 feet from Netgear router:

WirelessSpeed

Wired directly to Netgear router:

WiredSpeed

This stuff is magic. Works on carpets, clothes. You name it.

oxiclean

I really love this monitor:

ASUSBigMonitor

1920 x 1080 pixels. 21.5 inches. Only $130. I used to pay $600+ for smaller 19″ monitors. This one is crystal clear and pleasing to my ancient eyes. Click here.

Recommended weekend reading:

+ Buffett’s 2014 letter to shareholders. Click here.

 + How We Learned to Kill by Timothy Kudo

THE voice on the other end of the radio said: “There are two people digging by the side of the road. Can we shoot them?”

It was the middle of the night during my first week in Afghanistan in 2010, on the northern edge of American operations in Helmand Province, and they were directing the question to me. Were the men in their sights irrigating their farmland or planting a roadside bomb? The Marines reported seeing them digging and what appeared to be packages in their possession. Farmers in the valley work from sunrise to sundown, and seeing anyone out after dark was largely unheard-of.

My initial reaction was to ask the question to someone higher up the chain of command. I looked around our combat operations center for someone more senior and all I saw were young Marines looking back at me to see what I would do.

I wanted confirmation from a higher authority to do the abhorrent, something I’d spent my entire life believing was evil. With no higher power around, I realized it was my role as an officer to provide that validation to the Marine on the other end who would pull the trigger.

To read the entire piece, click here.

+ Government Is Not the Enemy, written by a Republican.

DURING the Obama presidency, the national debt has nearly doubled, federal spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product reached a post-World War II record, and the federal government extended its reach in health care, higher education, corporate governance, the energy sector and much else.

President Obama inherited a financial crisis that his defenders insist required an active government response, but as Rahm Emanuel admitted during the transition, Obama would use the crisis to advance his progressive agenda. Republicans have been rightly alarmed, but their alarm has sometimes given way to a careless assault on the whole of government. “We need to shut the damn thing down,” Senator Rand Paul said several weeks ago. Some Republicans have done literally that.

Too often, Republicans express a purely negative vision of government. This is both politically perilous and intellectually inadequate. Republicans oppose the liberal vision of the role of the state because they support a different, conservative vision. They need to articulate that vision, since many presidential voters will be reluctant to give their trust to leaders who have nothing but contempt for the government they wish to run.

To better understand how the conservative approach to government can succeed, consider several significant conservative public policy achievements, which bettered millions of lives. …

To read the entire piece, click here.

+ How men can succeed in the boardroom and in the bedroom. (Great headline).

IT’S easy to see how women benefit from equality – more leadership positions, better pay at work and more support at home. Men may fear that as women do better, they will do worse. But the surprising truth is that equality is good for men, too.

If men want to make their work teams successful, one of the best steps they can take is to bring on more women. This fall, the Internet sensation Alibaba went public after achieving years of extraordinary growth as China’s largest e-commerce company. The founder, Jack Ma, explained that “one of the secret sauces for Alibaba’s success is that we have a lot of women.” Women hold 47 percent of all jobs at Alibaba and 33 percent of senior positions.

Research backs him up. Studies reveal that women bring new knowledge, skills and networks to the table, take fewer unnecessary risks, and are more inclined to contribute in ways that make their teams and organizations better. Successful venture-backed start-ups have more than double the median proportion of female executives of failed ones. And an analysis of the 1,500 Standard & Poor’s companies over 15 years demonstrated that, when firms pursued innovation, the more women they had in top management, the more market value they generated.

We had more women in our company than men. They were great. Read the rest of the article here.

The intransigent theater goer
An old man lay sprawled across three entire seats in the theatre.

When the usher came by and noticed this, he whispered to the old man, “Sorry sir, but you’re only allowed one seat.”

The old man didn’t budge.

The usher became more impatient. “Sir, if you don’t get up from there I’m going to have to call the manager.”

Once again, the old man just muttered and did nothing.

The usher marched briskly back up the aisle, and in a moment he returned with the manager.

Together the two of them tried repeatedly to move the old dishevelled man, but with no success.

Finally they summoned the police.

The officer surveyed the situation briefly then asked, “All right buddy what’s your name?”

“Fred,” the old man moaned.

“Where you from, Fred?” asked the police officer.

With a terrible strain in his voice, and without moving, Fred replied; “The balcony.”

HarryNewton
Harry Newton who celebrates today. Granddaughter Eleanor took her first steps. She’s walking. Another week or so, the 15-month child will be on the tennis court, chalenging Serena.

A Delta skidded off the short runway at La Guardia and almost went into the drink. No deaths. No serious injuries. A small miracle.

PrayingForSnow

3 Comments

  1. Lucky says:

    Speed Test
    Sun City to Tempe using COX Cable
    WiFi – 57.71 down…6.68 up
    Ethernet – 59.89 Down…6.71 up
    You live in the wrong part of the West!

  2. Tom O'Leary says:

    re: Government Is Not the Enemy
    It seems to me telling that what passes for reasonable in right wing circles today is more or less a simple willingness to admit that government can have value. While it’s tempting to pick apart the author’s typical right wing sophistry (anyone care to remember just WHY spending reached a post WW2 record- something about a global financial meltdown caused by gross incompetence of the previous administration perhaps?), the most damning indictment of the nihilism on the right is the fact that the writer is compelled to offer a defense of the validity of existence of our current government.

    We have laws and elections for a reason. I do not understand how the far right, unable to gain their objectives through the Constitution they claim to admire and support, now feel it appropriate to attempt to hold the nation hostage to their demands by threatening shutdowns of vital government services.

  3. jon says:

    “The Horror! The Horror!”