![\"EEM\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/EEM.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThen I looked at a couple of real estate ETFs over the same five years:<\/p>\n Then I looked at the S&P 500 over the same period:<\/p>\n Am I worried because the S&P 500 P\/E is close to 18 — higher than its long-term historical average of 15.3%? Yes and No.<\/p>\n I own VFIAX which is Vanguard’s ultra-low cost (0.05%) fund that mirrors the S&P.<\/p>\n And I eye its attractive returns:<\/p>\n It’s hard to match these returns, unless you latch onto wonders like AF, CYBR, GPRO, ISIS, BABA, NFLX. But you have to stay on top of these — like manage them, dumping as they appear to blow up — or at least taking some of your gains and playing with the bank’s money. For now, VFIAX a nice comfortable place to park money. It’s paying a 2% dividend yield, which is better than a slap in the belly with a cold fish. And its expenses are an amazingly low 0.05%.<\/p>\n UPS is not cheap. <\/strong>FedEx and UPS have their nice big oligopoly going. They can jack prices to the ionosphere. And they do. Last night I tried to send some packages to California via UPS’ cheapest ground service. Their prices shocked me. It’ll be much cheaper (repeat much cheaper) to pay Virgin America $25 a box as checked luggage. Look at UPS:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Even at $106, you’re still getting a 2.52% dividend yield, though P\/E is lofty at 26.4.<\/p>\n 3D printing is changing medicine. <\/strong>The New Yorker<\/em> has a totally wonderful piece called “Print Thyself — How 3D printing is revolutionizing medicine.” <\/em>First know that Jennifer Lewis is a materials scientist at Harvard. Some excerpts:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0For her part, Lewis is passionate about the changes that 3-D printing could bring to the pharmaceutical industry. Billions of dollars each year are spent on drug development that fails. If bioprinted tissues were readily available, experimental drugs could be tested on them to see how the drugs are metabolized and what side effects result. \u201cWe want to provide a fail-fast model,\u201d Lewis said, \u201cso that drugs can be assessed in 3-D human tissue and their toxic properties identified before spending money and effort in animal and human testing.\u201d<\/p>\n But Lewis admits that she does think about the prospect of printing whole, functioning organs. \u201cThe grand challenge is to make a whole kidney\u2014that is our moon shot,\u201d she said. The first step would be to make a nephron, the fundamental filtering unit of a kidney. She noted that her team has already demonstrated the ability to print any pattern of vascular channels that it wants; the blood-vessel patterns of a nephron are just one more option. And recently the team found a way to line channels with epithelial cells taken from human kidneys. \u201cWe see this as a ladder, one step following the next,\u201d she said. \u201cCreating just a single nephron would be a great achievement. But there are a million in each kidney.\u201d<\/p>\n Before I left the lab, Kolesky showed me the incubator, a white box near the printer that was about the size of a dorm-room refrigerator. He opened the door. On a shelf, on a glass slide, was a finished block of printed tissue. A fine plastic tube, the size of a strand of spaghetti, entered it at one end, delivering glucose, amino acids, and other critical nutrients. Another spaghetti-like tube emerged from the other end, carrying off carbon dioxide, broken-down proteins, and other cellular waste. The tissue had been alive for the past two weeks, Kolesky said. There wasn\u2019t much to see, but the tissue was thriving, and it looked to me like the start of something very big.\u00a0\u2666<\/span><\/p>\n You can read the entire fascinating piece here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Super great, latest New Yorker cartoons.<\/strong> They comment so wonderfully on our daily lives:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n