In Search of the Perfect Investment

How could I not feel optimistic for the American economy when every one of my service people — from plumbers to electricians, from carpenters to networking — is telling me they’re overwhelmed and can’t get to my work for weeks. One electrician is six weeks late starting and is still making excuses. I make a point of paying them instantly.

Nice bounce yesterday and again today.

I fiddled a bit with the list on the right. I’m cogitating today. Been busy with some new real estate syndications and some small private investments — one of which is actually working. Miracles happen.

Cramer pushed Constellation Brands last night. It’s up 4+% this morning.

He’s also pushing restaurant stocks — BWLD, CMG, DIN, JACK, CBRL, FRGI — on the theory that lower oil prices in the U.S. will cause more domestic restaurant visiting.

Same logic for AZO, KMX and KR.

The Tragic Decline of the American Military. That’s the title of an engrossing cover story in this month’s Atlantic Magazine. Excerpt:

America’s distance from the military makes the country too willing to go to war, and too callous about the damage warfare inflicts. This distance also means that we spend too much money on the military and we spend it stupidly, thereby shortchanging many of the functions that make the most difference to the welfare of the troops and their success in combat. We buy weapons that have less to do with battlefield realities than with our unending faith that advanced technology will ensure victory, and with the economic interests and political influence of contractors. This leaves us with expensive and delicate high-tech white elephants, while unglamorous but essential tools, from infantry rifles to armored personnel carriers, too often fail our troops (see “Gun Trouble,” by Robert H. Scales, in this issue).

We know that technology is our military’s main advantage. Yet the story of the post-9/11 “long wars” is of America’s higher-tech advantages yielding transitory victories that melt away before the older, messier realities of improvised weapons, sectarian resentments, and mounting hostility to occupiers from afar, however well-intentioned. Many of the Pentagon’s most audacious high-tech ventures have been costly and spectacular failures, including (as we will see) the major air-power project of recent years, the F-35. In an America connected to its military, such questions of strategy and implementation would be at least as familiar as, say, the problems with the Common Core education standards.

The full piece is worth reading since it blames the failure on us — not the military. You would  not believe how much we wasted on our two most recently failed wars — Iraq and Afghanistan. For the full article, click here.

P.S. The only “wars” we’ve really won since the Second World War are the killing of Bin Laden and the first Gulf War (kicking Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait). We lost Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Somalia. I am not a left-wing pinko. However, I’m also not for wasting trillions of taxpayer dollars in wars that destroy countries and makes other people hate us. with horrible terrorist act consequences.

Eat your heart out. Latest speed bump from Verizon FiOS, as measured at my desk late yesterday afternoon:

Speed is good. It lets you do things faster and more accurately. It also makes the cloud more useful. With slowness comes mistakes and messups.

Run your own test. Click here.

Harry Newton who recommends that his New York friends who are in Florida or California stay there. It’s really awful in New York City.

My home office is 63 this morning. Our building is not coping.

Today’s savior. It’s freezing at my desk. This is first time I’ve ever used this junky little heater at my desk.

 Some readers with .mac and .me in their email addresses may have missed recent columns. Here are links to the last four. In them I talk of Motif Investing, which is exciting me.

Yesterday.  Tuesday.   Monday.Friday.