{"id":26946,"date":"2014-07-10T09:28:22","date_gmt":"2014-07-10T13:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=26946"},"modified":"2014-07-10T09:47:39","modified_gmt":"2014-07-10T13:47:39","slug":"wheres-portugal-who-lives-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=26946","title":{"rendered":"Where’s Portugal? Who lives there?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Europe is not doing well manufacturing-wise. There’s that troubled Portuguese bank, their biggest. \u00a0 Futures look awful. <\/span><\/p>\n

Our favorite stocks will be on sale this morning. Time to buy more of them.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

A Portuguese bank?<\/p>\n

This is Europe. The red arrow is Google Maps pointer to Europe. Can you find Portugal?<\/p>\n

\"Europe\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hint: Only 10 1\/2 million live in Portugal.<\/span><\/p>\n

From Business Insider this morning:<\/p>\n

+ Europe Is Backsliding.\u00a0<\/strong>French manufacturing plummeted 2.3% in May, while output dropped 1.7%, far worse than expectations. Italian industrial output declined 1.2%, the largest drop since November 2012. “In one line: Horrible; GDP contraction in the second quarter is now base case,” Pantheon Macro said.<\/p>\n

Someone quipped today that the light at the end of Europe’s tunnel has been turned off.<\/p>\n

More stuff I learned:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

+ Don’t push the elevators buttons in hospitals. A new study<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>in the journal\u00a0Open Medicine<\/i> compared elevator buttons with toilet seats. The buttons were worse. “The prevalence of colonization (with bacteria) of elevator buttons was 61 percent.” On the toilets, it was 43 percent.<\/p>\n

+ Gap has online discounts of 15, 25, 30 and 40% — on the same clothing. Which discount you get depends on which credit card you use, but more importantly how much begging you do with the telephone operator. Hint: check the web first to find the highest discount, then call and beg for it. Live operators are better than dead online web sites. And I invented the Internet!<\/p>\n

+ Amazon sells cheap. But its agents and associates don’t. I wrote about an Amazon store that was charging too much for pet food. Better to use another site, like Chewy.com.\u00a0 Writes reader Drew, “I never new about this. I just saved $35 per bag on my ridiculously expensive dog food.” Lesson: Dogs do not believe that their food is worth what you paid for it.” That philosophy only applies to spouses. (I’m on a roll this morning.)<\/p>\n

+ Don’t subscribe or extend your subscription to any magazine over the phone — if they call you. These magazine subscription “services” charge outrageous amounts — many times more than buying directly from the publisher. Offenders include USA Promotions and Magazines, based in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

+ Spam is getting creative. I’ve been offered $90K jobs with Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc. UPS is delivering me packages I didn’t order. My credit rating is being destroyed. Some nice person wants to buy my house, sight unseen. I’ll earn $100 by filling in a “short survey.” All I have to do is open an attached file, and watch my computer go into apoplexy and die.<\/p>\n

+ Browser hijacking is increasingly common and very hard to deal with. You try to open a new web page. Suddenly your computer goes nuts and your browser opens a bunch of pages you don’t want. Sometimes you can close them. Sometimes you have to close your browser — in which case you lose all the tabs you had open and were reading. Browser hijacking, though annoying, doesn’t seem to be lethal. Virus and malware checkers don’t seem to catch this new problem. For pages I want to keep open, I “InstaPaper” them. It saves the link. I can easily reach them again — should I have to close my browser.<\/p>\n

\"HarryNewtonMugShot\"<\/a>
\nHarry Newton whose Fairpoint Communications DSL line at his country palace is still down. It’s been down since Sunday night. There are “reasons.” It rained. And rained again. Fortunately the neighbors are friendly. Their DSL works. Why does Fairpoint hate me?<\/p>\n