In Search of the Perfect Investment

I’m increasingly attracted to Intel. It’s new Haswell chip delivers what users want — long battery life, great graphics speed and improved processing speed. Click here. Is there some reason it won’t be up by 20% — say hitting $30 by year’s end? Here’s a positive piece on Intel saying it will hit $40 by 2016. Click here.

Why I’m selling Netflix.
First, it’s bloody expensive. P/E (if that means anything with this stock) is 510.

Second, Netflix’s future was meant to be $7.95 a month for unlimited streaming. Great idea. EXCEPT they don’t have any of the movies I want to watch. I tested them on the weekend. I gave them the benefit of the doubt on new movies. But old ones like West Side Story, The Great Escape, High Noon …and for God’s sake The Sound of Music.. How can you not have The Sound of Music?

Amazon has a much better business model. if you’re a member of Amazon Prime ($79 a year), not only do you get free shipping on most things, but you also get a lot of free movies. The call it:

For those videos that aren’t free, you can pay a few bucks. West Side Story and The Great Escape are $2.99 to rent. Last Tango in Paris is free on Amazon, but not available on Netflix. That movie’s older than I am. I’m cancelling my Netflix subscription. I can’t even get The Wizard of Oz on Netflix, while I can get it on Amazon for $1.99.

The stupidity of the way we buy cell service. We’re all idiots. The cellphone providers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc — have done a superb job of selling us “cheap” cellphones. Which aren’t cheap, because they rape us on monthly “service” fees. It is far, far cheaper to buy an unlocked 16 gig iPhone 5 from Apple for $649 (click here) and buy prepaid cellphone from one of the biggies, or, my preference,  UltraMobile for $39 a month. I especially like UltraMobile because their international calling is very very cheap (like 2.5 cents a minute to call France). UltraMobile resells T-Mobile domestically for voice and data but provides its own international calling using VoIP. I’ve tested their service. It works fine. Check out UltraMobile’s website here.

Nice thing, too, when you have an unlocked hone, it’s easy to pop a SIM card in from France, or Germany or wherever you travel and still have access to all your contacts, your SMS, your emails,  etc.

For more, here’s a piece on prepaid calling cards and the huge money you can save with the cellphone biggies — AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile. Click here.

I need to do more work on this: Like how I unlock my Verizon iPhone 5 for use in Europe with European SIM cards. Or is it already unlocked? How do I port my present cellphone to a UltraMobile service?

If I could buy just one stock, this would be it. Its Berkshire Hathaway. I don’t disagree. Click here.

The U.S.’s most wonderful trait. We Americans help selflessly. We’re the only superpower ever not to conquer and enslave. This is our endearing quality. It’s one that attracted me to move here and become American.

Our selfless willingness to always help leads to a dilemma. Do we help the needy? All of them? Or say No, knowing now two things: First, we can’t fix everything and second, there are — of late — often horrible consequences we don’t intend, e.g. Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Now to Syria. We’ve been helping them with medicine and food. That’s humanitarian, and good. But small arms and ammunition? That has me worried. The path to being fully sucked in is short. Remember too, Russia and Iran are aiding the other side. And Iran is financing, arming and training Hezbollah. Do we have any idea where this might lead? I don’t.

I know that part of the world, though I haven’t been to Syria. But I’ve been to Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt and India. And the conclusion I always came away with: They make their own bed, and sadly there’s little we can do, except prop up unpleasant regimes. This weekend’s most apt comment:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, said he was “baffled” by Mr. Obama’s decision to become more deeply involved.

“What exactly is our objective?” he asked. “It’s not clear to me that every nondemocratic government in the world has to be removed by force.”

The Syria war is a struggle for power, not democracy, he said. “Is that something we should be engaged in?”

World’s toughest bridge. A railway bridge in Durham, North Carolina is (unofficially) the toughest bridge in the world. At 11 feet and 8 inches high at Peabody and Gregson streets, the railway bridge is an insurmountable obstacle for drivers of large trucks and other oversized vehicles. This is despite the yellow warning lights, which start flashing on the bridge when the electronic height sensor detects that an approaching vehicle is too tall. That so many people can be so dumb. The video is engrossing and hysterical.  Click here.

They don’t want you to fix it. They just want you to listen. When will we ever learn? Friends are endlessly amused by this video. Click here.

All in one strip mall. What more could you want?

Missed this in May. Great marketing?

Sensitive Australian Males….
Three Aussie blokes working up on an outback mobile phone tower: Mongrel, Coot and Bluey.

As they start their descent, Coot slips, falls off the tower and is killed instantly.

As the ambulance takes the body away, Bluey says, ‘Well, bugger me, someone’s gotta go and tell Coot’s wife.

Mongrel says, ‘OK, I’m pretty good at that sensitive stuff, I’ll do it.’ Two hours later, he comes back carrying a case of Beer.

Bluey says, ‘Where’d you get the grog, Mongrel?’ ‘Coot’s wife gave it to me,’ Mongrel replies.

‘That’s unbelievable, you told the Missus her husband was dead and she gave you a case of beer?’

‘Well, not exactly’, Mongrel says.

‘When she answered the door, I said to her, “you must be Coot’s widow.”

She said, ‘You must be mistaken. I’m not a widow.’

Then I said, ‘I’ll betcha a case of beer you are.’

Australians are good at that sensitive stuff.

Harry Newton whose weekend was glorious. For the very first time in 20 years, Harry got close to beating Skip, his life-long tennis nemesis. As Skip said, I was patient and ran every ball down. It was the most exhausting 1 1/2 hour tennis game I’ve ever played. Nice to know I can still run around a court at my age.