From an interesting Mother Jones article by a reporter driven around parts of China looking for pollution and environmental disasters. They were not hard to find. <update – as Dan in the comments points out, I neglected to include a link, which is to the article at Mother Jones>
Author Archives: Lance Wiggs
Subway/Metro/Tube fare barriers are not worth it
Interesting decision: not to install fare barriers at LA’s Metro Rail. You just walk through, and hopefully you’ll obey the sign requiring a ticket. It seems that just 5.5% of people do not obey the sign, but the LA MTA seems to think that this is a problem. They estimate that they lose $5.5m per …
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Opportunity Acquisition Corp – investing with no information
Want to invest in a buy-out company? How about if you don’t know what industry they are going to be looking for acquisitions in? Your chance is now. Opportunity Acquisition Corp is filing an IPO for US$150m, plus warrants potentially for another $112.5m. It’s owned by an outfit called JMP now, and they’ll keep 20% …
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Kongregate
Do not click on this link if you need the next hour or two.
WordPress is dominant
Thinking of starting a blog? WordPress gives yet another reason to blog with them – 3 Gb of storage. This is up from a paltry 50MB, which essentially meant that you had to use photo servers from another site, such as flickr. WordPress is simple to set up, trivially easy to use, and free. You …
Solving the NZ and Australia housing crisis
It takes 18.6 years for the median household to buy the median house in NZ, and that’s excluding rates, taxes and maintenance. That’s via NBR, wo curiously neglect to mention that there is a giant photo of Don Brash on page 2 of the original Household Affordability report, as he is the Chairman of something …
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Apple is clueless about international people
International people are those who travel a lot, or live between two different countries. This tends to happen a lot in Europe, and is just generally more and more common with the cheap price of travel these days. Indeed there were over 800m international tourist arrivals in 2006 – clearly not a trivial market. Steve …
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Set WiFi free
Over on Kiwiblog DPF guiltily confesses to using someone elses open Wireless connection for some internet time, and a trivial amount of data. There are several things wrong with this picture: 1: It isn’t normal to find open wireless connections in NZ. The reason for this, of course, is that we pay for MB usage, …
$15 billion upside on housing
There is a guy on Wall street, John ‘JP’ Paulson, that made big bets against the housing market by taking the other side of those dodgy mortgage backed securities – the ones that crashed to worthless recently. (Basically he bought default insurance really cheaply) His relatively small funds were up $15 billion n 2007, and …
What’s in store for Lance in 2008? A manifesto
No new years predictions from me, as I can barely predict what I’ll be doing in a few months time, let alone markets and industries.This year though I am trying to spend more time starting and nurturing businesses, while continuing to consult, in both NZ and Australia. For now I’m still helping out at BHP …
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Feeding the Apple swag addiction
The master speaks, and Lance reaches for his wallet to feed his insatiable addiction for all things Apple. At least it is a better addiction than Methadone/P/ice or other ilicit drugs. Probably just as expensive though. MacBook air: ordered, but not with the tiny solid state drive which costs AU$1400 more. I’ll use this in …
Some Ed Hillary Pictures worth seeing
A well played innings. Ed Hillary was one of very few Kiwis to play on the world stage and with maintained universal respect. More pictures at National Geographic
msn.nzherald.co.nz launches
So msn and APN have linked up. But to tell the impact you have to dig a little. The msn.co.nz page is unchanged: The msn news page has better news than before: But the links give it away – here’s the one beneath the main news picture: Indeed that news page is the NZHerald news …
BillG retires
Bill Gates’ last day video – starring Hillary Clinton, Obama, Al Gore, Dave Stewart (Daily Show), Bono, JayZ, Brian Williams…..
Aha! Tower of Power
Pretty amazing: Masses of power: up to 4 TB of hard disk drives, 32GB memory and 8 30 inch monitors. That’s a bit beyond the occasional spreadsheet…
Lance Wiggs 