{"id":16389,"date":"2012-12-03T09:06:46","date_gmt":"2012-12-03T14:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=16389"},"modified":"2012-12-03T10:18:46","modified_gmt":"2012-12-03T15:18:46","slug":"the-joy-of-creation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=16389","title":{"rendered":"The joy of creation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I spent the last three days talking with entrepreneurs and inventors. Conclusions:<\/p>\n

1. Entrepreneurship is alive and well.<\/p>\n

2. None of them is thinking about The Fiscal Cliff.<\/em> They’re thinking about their shiny new thing. And that’s the way it should be.<\/p>\n

3. There are opportunities in every field.<\/p>\n

4. The key is to drive fundamental change in an industry, using technology and imagination to make it happen.<\/p>\n

5. There’s no shortage of money to fund new ideas or customers to buy them. It’s a wonderful world out there, despite the best efforts of Washington to screw it up.<\/p>\n

I’ll have more examples in coming days. For now … Abe Karem, entrepreneur,\u00a0 created the robotic plane that transformed the way modern warfare is waged-and continues to pioneer other airborne innovations. Read his fascinating story in the latest Economist<\/em>. Click here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

That piece on Karem is in the Economist’s latest Technology Quarterly. Read it, please. Click here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Warren Buffett goes on a book tour.<\/strong> <\/span>From the New Yorker’s Financial Page<\/em> by\u00a0 James Surowiecki, their extremely capable financial reporter (I added the emphasis):<\/p>\n

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Warren Buffett’s tastes haven’t changed much over the years. “I like today what I liked fifty years ago,” he told me the other day. “I like reading 10-Ks. I like playing bridge. I haven’t acquired a lot of new habits. I was happy when I was in my twenties, and I don’t see a reason to change things.” We were having lunch with Carol Loomis, one of his closest friends, who is the editor of “Tap-Dancing to Work<\/em>,” a new anthology of Fortune writings by and about Buffett. As if to illustrate his point, lunch was the same lunch he’s probably been eating since he was a kid: a hamburger and fries, followed by vanilla ice cream, “strong on the chocolate syrup.” It isn’t just his tastes, though: as the new book shows, Buffett’s philosophy of investing has stayed remarkably consistent.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What has changed is Buffett’s reputation. No longer just America’s favorite investor, in recent years he’s become a kind of public sage, a role exemplified by his crusade to get the government to raise taxes on the wealthy-a crusade enthusiastically invoked by President Obama both in last January’s State of the Union address and in the recent Presidential campaign. Somehow, at a time when public hostility toward the super-rich has never been greater, he’s become not only the second-richest man in America but also one of the most revered.<\/p>\n

Buffett’s disdain for the trappings of wealth can be exaggerated-“When I get rid of the plane, you’ll know I’m broke,” he told me-but it’s obviously a big part of his appeal to ordinary Americans. How can you not like a billionaire who still lives in a house that he bought in 1958? But Buffett’s popularity doesn’t stem from his life style alone. More important, his success evokes an economy very different from today’s risky, unstable one. These days, workers are told that they need to adapt to a world of perpetual change, constantly reinventing themselves. The investing world is dominated by a manic-depressive style, in which the average mutual fund turns over nearly its entire portfolio every year. Yet Buffett has prospered by ignoring all this. As an investor, he’s known for his patience-he says that he likes holding stocks “forever”-and he prefers a few big bets to an endless number of small ones. “If you go from flower to flower, you have to find a lot of flowers to make a lot of money,” he told me. “There aren’t that many great ideas out there.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

The way Buffett runs his company, Berkshire Hathaway, which owns more than eighty other companies outright, is similarly out of tune with the times. In the current stereotype of corporate acquirers, firms like Bain Capital load companies with debt, downsize their workforces, and strip them of assets. Buffett doesn’t do hostile acquisitions or major restructurings, and he almost never sells the companies he buys. He admits that this isn’t purely rational, although Berkshire is very profitable. But it plays to his strengths (he likes buying companies and building them<\/strong>) and mitigates his weaknesses (as he told me, he hates confrontation). “You’ve got to create the structures consistent with what your temperament needs to be,<\/strong>” he said. Whatever the personal reasons for his approach, it’s one that seems reassuring.<\/p>\n

Another crucial aspect of Buffett’s public appeal is his unnervingly even persona. He’s not placid-at eighty-two, he’s a garrulous bundle of energy, his conversation punctuated by little bursts of laughter-but he projects an aura of profound cool. During the financial crisis, he was the human equivalent of one of those “Keep Calm and Carry On” signs. It isn’t that he’s indifferent to danger. He was, after all, a prescient critic of the perils of program trading, derivatives, and the boom in speculation, and in conversation he seems skeptical about the prospects of really taming the markets: “Once you let genies out of the bottle in financial markets, you don’t get them back.” But his stern critiques of casino capitalism are leavened by a fundamental optimism about the future. “We’ve still got pretty damn good capital markets<\/strong>,” he said, and added that one should “bet that the intelligent thing will eventually get done.” You can dismiss this as Pollyanna-ish-or, alternatively, as what you would say if you were worth forty-five billion dollars. But it’s part of what makes Buffett likable: his quintessentially American conviction that there’s no problem we can’t solve.<\/p>\n

You can see this at work in his campaign to get the rich to pay more in taxes. There’s certainly a moral dimension to it-he calls the fact that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary “an outrage.” Yet his tone is less hectoring than utilitarian: we need more revenue to narrow the deficit, and having the wealthy pay more in taxes won’t hurt them or the economy. His decision to give away ninety-nine per cent of his wealth feels similarly rational. As he told me, what his wealth amounts to is a giant pile of “claim checks” on the world’s resources, claim checks that are largely “worthless” to him but potentially valuable to others.<\/p>\n

We live in a moment when any argument for higher tax rates is bound to ruffle conservative feathers. Twice in the past year, Buffett has been publicly told to “shut up” about taxation, and last year Fox News labelled him a “socialist.” Yet Buffett’s positions are hardly radical, and the sight of an unrepentant capitalist out there talking about the greater good reassures ordinary people that the system is not beyond saving. Rather than fret about Buffett’s being a traitor to his class, Wall Street and the super-rich should see that his message helps keep the pitchforks at bay. If Buffett didn’t exist, the rich would have had to invent him. \u0004<\/p>\n

The full article here.<\/strong> <\/a><\/p>\n

Check out this 17% dividend yield.<\/strong><\/span> The company is Northern Tier Energy LP (NTI). It’s a Master Limited Partnership (MLP) that focuses on downstream refining and retail operations. The partnership holds a 17% stake in a pipeline company. Northern Tier Energy, according to Seeking Alpha<\/em>,\u00a0 is a new type of MLP called a variable MLP that pays out substantially all its cash as unit holder distributions but does not promise regularity of payments. This is unlike other MLPs which operate pipelines and other energy chain assets under long term contracts and virtually assure unit holders of regular and increasing distributions. In Northern Tier Energy’s case, distributions regularity and levels are not guaranteed.<\/p>\n

Its significant profit margins are due to the refinery’s access to the Canadian oil production and Bakken, North Dakota oil production. Northern Tier Holdings’ refinery is located in Minnesota. This proximity to Canada and Bakken permit a “location, location, location” advantage. Canada and Bakken are two of the cheapest oil sources. This provides Northern Tier Energy a benefit on cheaper oil expenses and benefit by the higher refining revenues.<\/p>\n

For the full Seeking Alpha<\/em> article, click here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

This is what you need to protect your pricey sensitive boiler, and computer, and sound system, etc. <\/strong><\/span>It’s a Furman PL-8 C power conditioner. It’s the black thing sitting on the new shelf above some of the Viessmann boiler electronics (there are more).
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It’s a surge arrestor, voltage stabilizer, linear filter, etc. It smells of overkill. But it’s not.Our weekend house is in the boonies and notoriously prone to storms with lightning strikes and awful electricity.\u00a0 This is the device to protect your computers, printers, scanners, etc. It has nine outlet. The device costs $190. To buy one from (who else) Amazon, click here.<\/strong><\/span><\/a> Thanks for Rob Remler from Dell’s in Ghent, New York, for installing ours.<\/p>\n

Saudi Arabia finds a novel use for mobile phones<\/span>.<\/strong><\/span> This piece is from the latest Economist:<\/p>\n

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No need to call<\/em><\/p>\n

JUST a few years ago Saudi women could only travel in the company of a male relative, whether husband, brother or son. Pressed by reformists, the kingdom eased the rules, allowing women over the age of 52 to travel alone, and younger ones too, so long as their male guardian secured an official “yellow slip” giving his consent. The Saudi passport authority has now made things easier still. An initiative to provide e-government services, launched earlier this year, means that male guardians need no longer wait in queues or fill out forms. By registering online, they automatically receive notification by SMS when any of their dependents, whether women or children, crosses a Saudi border.<\/p>\n

Few of those who registered were aware of this benefit until last week, when a Saudi newspaper carried the story of a man who had just boarded a flight to Europe when he received the puzzling message that his wife, who was seated next to him, had left the kingdom. Yet many Saudis seem dissatisfied with the new service. One woman, identifying herself as Om Khadra, tweeted that perhaps the Saudi Ministry of Interior should expand the scope of its project, and notify wives electronically whenever their husbands decide to take a second, third or fourth spouse.<\/p>\n

Some of the fiercest protest, however, has come from more conservative Saudis, who would prefer to revert to the old ways when women had to be physically accompanied by someone of the more responsible sex. This is not surprising in a country where women are not allowed to drive cars, and where several leading clerics voiced outrage earlier this month when Britain’s Christian prime minister, David Cameron, was photographed shaking hands with students at a Saudi girls’ college.<\/p>\n

The concern to protect women who travel does seem strange, considering how some conservative males view their veiled counterparts. In a recent appearance on a popular television talk show, a Saudi professor of Islamic jurisprudence rebuked a female scholar for suggesting that husbands bear some responsibility for their wives’ health. He likened his debating partner, who happens to sit on the kingdom’s national human-rights board, but who (he insisted) should sit in a separate studio, to an apostate. Her crime? To dispute his reasoning that it is unjust for husbands to bear the cost of their wives’ medical treatment, just as it is unfair to demand that someone who rents property should be forced to pay for wear and tear.<\/p>\n

I cannot stop laughing.<\/strong><\/span> And how’s your day?<\/p>\n

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Harry Newton who is finding that the more he exercises, the better his aches and pains feel. In fact, do aggressive exercise and they all disappear — at least temporarily. You can’t ease up on this regimen. It’s narcotic.<\/p>\n

We’re still trying to clean up the emailed version of this column. Have patience.<\/p>\n

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I spent the last three days talking with entrepreneurs and inventors. Conclusions: 1. Entrepreneurship is alive and well. 2. None of them is thinking about The Fiscal Cliff. They’re thinking about their shiny new thing. And that’s the way it should be. 3. There are opportunities in every field. 4. The key is to drive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}