Mulling on Obamacare
I own shares in United Health, on the basis that it’s the biggest health insurer and insures Susan and myself when Medicare demurs. UNH takes nice care of us. Its stock has done well recently. Here’s the last year:
I’m guessing Washington won’t be able to destroy UNH, as it destroys Obamacare.
Mulling on Facebook
My friends believe Facebook is due for a nice pop. It’s been desultory of late, probably because of all the news about Facebook abetting its propagation of fake news and issues about advertising effectiveness. I think those issues will blow away. At these prices, it looks good:
A cracked record. I keep nagging you guys:
Netflix (NFLX) and Square (SQ) will get bought out soon.
It’s Time to Ignore Advice About Which Stocks to Buy in 2017.
That’s the headline of a New York Times story this week, which begins:
It’s that time of year when financial advice sites issue their lists of the “Stocks to Buy for 2017.”
Before you take them up on their suggestions, let’s look at how well such portfolios did in 2016.
The portfolios of stocks they were telling you to buy generally did much worse than the stock market over all. The results underline what many personal finance experts recommend: Invest in a broad, low-fee mutual index fund. (The Times’s “Your Money” columnist wrote more on this here.)
Here’s the accompanying chart:
Read the full article here.
Elon Musk moves fast. A pleasure to watch. From Medium.com:
Elon Musk turns a tweet into reality in 6 days
I was recently driving to a meeting in Silicon Valley and had to charge my Tesla. I decided to stop at the San Carlos super-charger on my way to Palo Alto and there were 5 other Tesla cars waiting in line to get a charging space. Most drivers seemed to have gone somewhere else as their cars were charging. The San Carlos supercharger is located within walking distance from Whole Foods, Peet’s Coffee, a gym and some restaurants. Many drivers therefore keep their cars parked at the Supercharger even once their cars have finished charging.
I tweeted at Elon to tell him.
Within minutes, Elon promised to take action
Six days later, Tesla announced that Tesla owners would be charged if they left their cars after they finish charging. Tesla pushed a software update to their entire fleet with a warning.
For the full story, click here.
Nafta working “brilliantly”. American innovation wins out, again.
American-grown marijuana is now more popular and sells at a higher price in Mexico than does the locally-grown stuff, which, of course, they’ve been exporting to the U.S. for eons.
I don’t make this up. And I haven’t been smoking anything. We simply have better technology!
Two new techie products appeal:
+ Roost smart water and freeze detector.
From Men’s Journal:
One of the frequent knocks against smart-home tech is that many of the devices are simply luxury fluff without practical value. The Roost, a puck-like battery-powered water, humidity, and temperature sensor, is decidedly practical. Download the app and sync the device with your smartphone, then place it in any locale in your house where a leak might be particularly devastating – near the clothes washer, for instance – or in the basement where the water pipes come in. Should the temperature or humidity drop to a preset range (you can tweak it to your preference), or water touch its base, it will trigger an alarm notification right to your phone, and even to a friend or family member if you’re out of town. What makes the Roost especially impressive is that it has a three-year battery life using AAs, and it communicates via WiFi instead of range-hobbled Bluetooth. (Pre-order for Feb delivery, $50; getroost.com)
+ Pearl Rear Vision camera for your car. There are a million rear vision cameras for cars which don’t have cameras. Installing all of them involves excruciating work threading wires through your car. Except this one. It’s both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The license plate cover has two cameras and a solar panel to keep it alive. It talks Wi-Fi to a car adapter which plugs into your car’s OBD port — most post-1995 cars have them. And it talks Bluetooth to your iPhone, turning it into a rear vision camera when it’s needed. Your iPhone is held onto your dash by a small magnetic clip (pictured). The whole thing is not cheap — $430. Bit if it saves running over your two-year old, it could be worth it. The thing is engineered by a bunch of ex-Apple engineers. They have other products in mind.
The New York Times wrote a piece on Pearl Automation, maker of this device:
Growing a Different Apple
At Pearl Automation, former Apple employees are blending their old employer’s high quality standards with less paranoia and more openness.
Read the piece here.
Amazon will freak you. It’s the biggest cloud. When you run a cloud, you need data centers everywhere. You also need to offer lots of different cloud services. Amazon offers millions of them. Check out this list. Click here.
Need a nice, small, modern vacation house? Only $62,000. Land extra.
You can see and read more here.
Stuff:
+ Watch for real estate tax bills. If you don’t pay them instantly (if not sooner), your penalties will put you into the poor house. It’s easier to pay online. Don’t pay by credit card. The fees will really put you into the poor house. Pay by EFT (electronic funds transfer). EFT is real easy. Just link to your bank account. If you pay online, your parcel number includes the ward number and the parcel. It’s all one big number, without dashes. They don’t tell you that because they’re the government and you’re not.
+ Wait a little before buying a new TV. The new ones are 4K — have screens with twice the vertical resolution and twice the horizontal resolution of today’s 1080p sets. They’re amazing. They used to be $25,000. They’ll soon be $1,500. Some will be thin, easily able to attach to a wall.
+ French workers can now legally ignore email out of work hours, The Next Web reports. A new “right to disconnect” law came into force on January 1, 2017. And now you know why France’s “silicon valley” is in California.
+ The safest airline in the world is Qantas. Here’s what Conde Nast Traveler says about the safest airlines:
Number one safest is Australia’s Qantas, which has a “fatality-free record in the jet era.” In addition to its astonishing safety record, the 96-year-old airline has been a pioneer in more ways than one: think the implementation of flight data recorders (a.k.a. black boxes) to help monitor plane, cabin, and crew; automatic landings; and engine monitoring using satellite communications. Joining Qantas to round out the top 20, in alphabetical order, are Air New Zealand, Alaska Airlines, All Nippon Airways (ANA), British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways, Delta Air Lines, Etihad Airways, EVA Air, Finnair, Hawaiian Airlines, Japan Airlines, KLM, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airline System (SAS), Singapore Airlines, Swiss, United Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, and Virgin Australia.
Harry Newton, who’s flying with Susan today to Portland, Maine to visit his youngest granddaughter Sophie. She’s a cutie.
Boy – some nasty comments – makes me wonder about the wisdom of posting.
Anyway, why use a cargo container for a house when you can buy a trailer that is made for habitation? I lived in a 35′ x 8′ (a little smaller than the shipping container) for 2 years – it cost me $900 (ok, this was 1972). But the bigger ones are nice and cost about the same as the shipping container.
sorry about the nasty comments. I have a handful of people who enjoy posting rude remarks. I’m trying to delete their comments. For some reason it’s not easy. Disqus is dumb software.
Instead of trying to delete why not recognize that you’ve made some mistakes, and address those mistakes? Life is not about deleting your mistakes. It is about owning them and saying, “I’ll try to do better next time.”