In Search of the Perfect Investment

Microsoft has gone nuts. First, it misses the tablet and the smartphone revolutions. Then it introduces a tablet to compete with all its customers (the manufacturers). Then it gives money to Nokia to save it and encourage it to use Windows on its smartphones. Now there is talk that it’s going to help save Dell in a buyout to go private.

If you were Lenovo, Asus, HP or Toshiba or any of the zillion manufacturers who license Windows and pay Microsoft billions of dollars, how would you feel? Betrayed? Kicked in the butt? Maybe you’d feel it was God’s gift to encourage you to get in bed with Google and Android?

Calls for Steve Ballmer resignation have resulted in him forcing out many potential challengers, i.e. great, younger, better potential CEOs.

All this is wearing on the stock:

Sad. Once again, the old rule is affirmed: Sell when the founder leaves or dies.

At under 20, it’s not biking weather in New York. Every mile or so I pop in at friendly retail store to get warm. Last night I popped into a Verizon store and played with the Samsung Galaxy Note II phone. For the first time  here was a phone I really preferred to my Apple iPhone 5. Frankly,  I liked the hugeness of it . It was super for reading emails and surfing the net. It’s big enough to watch a movie or a PowerPoint presentation. You could easily run your life easily off this thing. By contrast, Sitting next to the Note II, my iPhone 5 felt positively puny.

I hate the camera industry. The pace of making exciting new cameras that I want is far exceeding my ability to read their technical specs, let alone keep up with my depleting pocketbook. The latest is the Panasonic DMC-FZ200, which a reader turned me onto. This is now the leader in the category known as “superzoom.” The thing has a lens that zooms from 25 mm wideangle to 600 mm telephoto, which makes it useful for shooting birds. (In contrast my Cannon G15 goes only from 28 to 140 mm. Everything about this Panasonic camera is impressive (especially the software). Read the review on dPreview.

 

Features I like about this camera: No shutter lag. Built-in lens. No switching necessary. Incredible zoom. Wide lens. It stays at f2.8 through the entire zoom range. Electronic viewfinder and rear-3″ LED   articulating screen. The price is good — $520 at Amazon. What I don’t like is that it’s not pocketable (it’s large) and weighs about 44% more than my G15. If you haven’t bought a new camera in the last three weeks, you should buy this one.

Zero Dark Thirty is good –if you can take the torture. The movie details the ten-year search for Osama bin Laden by an elite team of CIA intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe. This is a great detective story.

Think beyond it as pure Hollywood  entertainment for a moment. Think about its impact on viewers overseas, especially those in the middle east. Once we as a nation stood for human rights, democracy, freedom, respect fo rhumanity, etc. All those good things. Yet this movie promotes terrible torture, remote killing by drones, lack of respect of national frontiers, etc. All this by America’s key government agencies. It’s not a pretty picture to export. I don’t want to get everyone riled up. But Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has a point when he writes in his review of Zero Dark Thirty:

Zero Dark Thirty is like a gorgeously-rendered monument to the fatal political miscalculation we made during the Bush years. It’s a cliché but it’s true: Bin Laden wanted us to make this mistake. He wanted America to respond to him by throwing off our carefully-crafted blanket of global respectability to reveal a brutal, repressive hypocrite underneath. He wanted us to stop pretending that we’re the country that handcuffs you and reads you your rights instead of extralegally drone-bombing you from the stratosphere, or putting one in your brain in an Egyptian basement somewhere.

The only way we were ever going to win the War on Terror was to win a long, slow, political battle, in which we proved bin Laden wrong, where we allowed people in the Middle East to assess us as a nation and decide we didn’t deserve to be mass-murdered. To use another cliché, we needed to win hearts and minds. We had to make lunatics like bin Laden pariahs among their own people, which in turn would make genuine terrorists easier to catch with the aid of genuinely sympathetic local populations.

Instead, we turned people like bin Laden into heroes. Just like Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, there were a lot of people in the Middle East who were on the knife-edge about America after 9/11. Yes, we were hated for supporting Israel, but the number of people willing to suicide-bomb us was still a tiny minority.

The EIT program changed that. We tortured and humiliated thousands of people across the world. We did it on camera, in pictures that everyone in the Middle East can watch over and over again on the Internet. We became notorious for a vast kidnapping program we called by the harmless-sounding term “rendition,” and more lately for an endless campaign of extralegal drone attacks, through which 800 innocent people have died in Afghanistan alone in the last four years (the Guardian claims we’ve killed 168 children in that country in the last seven years).

Now we have this movie out that seems to celebrate the use of torture against Arabs, and we’re nominating it for Oscars. Bigelow can say that “depiction is not endorsement,” but how does she think audiences will receive it in the Middle East? Are they going to sell lots of popcorn in Riyadh and Kabul during the waterboarding scenes?

This film got nominated for Best Picture – it could even win. Has anyone thought about how Zero Dark Thirty winning Best Picture will be received in places like Kashmir and Waziristan and Saudi Arabia?

But forget about all of that. The real problem is what this movie says about us. When those Abu Ghraib pictures came out years ago, at least half of America was horrified. The national consensus (albeit by a frighteningly slim margin) was that this wasn’t who we, as a people, wanted to be. But now, four years later, Zero Dark Thirty comes out, and it seems that that we’ve become so blunted to the horror of what we did and/or are doing at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Bagram and other places that we can accept it, provided we get a boffo movie out of it.

That’s pathetic. Bin Laden was maybe the most humorless person who ever lived, but he has to be laughing from the afterlife. We make an incredible movie that celebrates his death – a movie so good it’ll be seen everywhere in the world – and all it does is prove him right about us.

You can read Matt’s full review here. Please don’t write that Harry is unAmerican and should, please, go back to Australia. I’m not unAmerican. I’m a naturalized American citizen. That means I chose to be American.

The Australian Tennis Open continues. The previous day’s matches  are on The Tennis Channel during the day. Which means you should watch the Federer/Tsonga match which kept me awake for most of the night. It’s playing live on ESPN2 (and soon ESPN) beginning at 9 PM and going through the night. Australia is 16 hours ahead of EST in the U.S. and 13 hours ahead of the west coast.

The lesson from last night’s matches is that tennis (and life) is a head game. A tennis match compresses life into a few hours. It’s your attitude which counts. Which means minor things like believing you can do it and following up with your prospective client. Re-read last week’s salesperson tips. Click here.

21 Pictures that will restore your faith in humanity. Click here.

Harry Newton, whose friend Rob Douglass sent him a link to an Australian Business Spectator piece on “Five Reasons I’m Bullish for 2013.” Click here.

BRKA continues its remarkable run. Why didn’t I buy Berkshire Hathaway twenty years earlier? Am I just waking up?