Every couple of months I hear a startup pitch how they are going to put the ad agencies out of business. My usual response is along the lines of “have fun with that.” The agency business is not especially big or profitable, as businesses go. By definition, the business is a small fraction the size […]
And then We Approach the Strategic Buyers…
Fortune updates my graph of stock market cap to GDP (they use GNP, but the two are pretty similar.) (Fortune link via Mankiw.) Warren Buffet said “buy at 75%”, about where we are now. What I’d like to know is, why 75%? Looking at the graph, 75% isn’t a great place to invest, historically, except […]
Cap ’em All
Geithner announces salary caps on executives at companies receiving government money. This is fair and good and, in fact, not an unusual demand when putting money into a company, especially a troubled company. No investor wants to fund a company just to see the money flow back out to executives. No taxpayer should want that […]
If the Neighbor’s Grass Always Looks Greener, Rip out Your Lawn and Plant Wildflowers
Everybody complains about the finance industry, but nobody does anything about it. Everybody complains about the advertising business, but nobody does anything about it. I spend a lot of my time talking to people, meeting them, listening to their ideas and what they need to achieve them, making introduction, sharing information and etc. This week’s […]
John Bell, In the Accelerator, With the Polarizer
Last night I had a dream I was playing a card game with my son. It was an interesting game: each card had a piece of Dirac notation on it. He was winning. It could be a real game, I thought, when I woke up. Perhaps there are a few cards on the table that […]
Demand is not Just a Function of Price
The only interesting part of my Feedburner stats that is interesting to me is the part that tells me how visitors landed on this page. Usually it’s through search, of course. I have two general reactions to the most frequent search terms: 1) I should write more about that; and2) Why the hell are so […]
After-Dinner Ruminations in the Highest Bobcat-Land
[This entry is somewhat general (uncharacteristically so, I hope.) I have more specific things to say, but I’m thinking out loud. Also, I usually think reductio ad absurdum, which necessitates the making of positive statements. Judge accordingly.] I was talking with a friend about the right way to make a living. Somehow I got sucked […]
Reconciling Living with Strangers
I’ve been re-reading David Foster Wallace, both as a way of grieving him and as an escape from other, more pressing, grief. Wallace was the complicated inhabitant of his own writing, the uncertain outsider unable to accept the loving embrace of his community. He was an odd jester, exposing shibboleths but also using the mundane […]
And I Suggest Using the Linux Kernel Next Time
The Economist had an article on disease causing genes in a recent issue. Common sense tells us that … the older a gene is, the more likely it is to be part of the irreducible structure of being alive… Another reason for expecting that disease-related genes would be recently evolved is that the older a […]
Whip Deflation Now!
Everybody’s talking about deflation all of a sudden. I was a month and a half early, I guess. (Okay, okay, it was a footnote, but still.) What I said then was, we won’t allow deflation. And we have the means at hand to prevent it. Of course, monetizing the debt only goes so far when […]