A little while back my US portfolio got whacked – it was judgment day.
But while the volatility of the US stock market took its toll, the positions I held are now coming through, and the portfolio is essentially back to where it was a few weeks ago. That’s when the Citibank short position and Apple long positions both went against me. Badly.
Recently Apple has climbed back up, and thus my portfolio has as well. Overall it’s up 29% YTD versus the minus 12.4% for the S&P 500 benchmark. It’s also up 56% from it’s nadir 9 days ago.
I’m not that keen on this volatility, but that’s what happens when you play with options. I also suffered from an unbalaced portfolio. I have been pretty consistent with balancing long and short positions, as well as making plays within industries rather than across industries. For example I’ve been long Apple, short Microsoft, long Toyota, Short Ford. Recently I’ve been long Apple (technology) and short Citibank (Financials) and so the industry movements, which are not so corralated have created a whole lot more volatility.
It’s not rebalanced yet, but I have sold down chunk of the Apple options to reduce the magnitude if that spike turns around.
That’s Mauricio Freitas – Microsoft MVP and fan – in response to iTunes offering videos in New Zealand and Australia.
There’s a critical flaw however. iTunes got big through usability, but most importantly because it made it easy to transfer your CD’s to songs on the computer and iPod. Imagine making do with only the songs that you have purchased from iTunes.
It’s the same with movies. I own a bunch of DVD’s – collected from a variety of countries over the years. iTunes needs to provide me with the ability to rip, catalogue and store (e.g. across multiple hard drives) these.
It is technically not a real challenge for the likes of Apple. It’s the legal stuff that are the issue.
Sony actually has the best play here – if they “got it” they’d release their Sony movies from copyright restrictions for personal use, and provide a decent “iTunes” and hardware to play them on.
Meanwhile I’m waiting for the consumer class application that just works for movies, that lets me rip DRM free, store across multiple devices, play on my Apple TV, and run on my mac. All without thinking.
It seems that if you sponsor the Olympics then you get thousands of TV advertising spots thrown in.
So – for those companies that sponsor the Olympics this is for you:
STOP
By now I now dislike your company, your products, and most especially your advertisements.
It’s only day 4.
By the end of the Olympics I will be at the point where I have a visceral hate for your brands, for your company.
I will short your shares, push your products to the back of shelves, send letters to your board, throw any of your products I mistakenly purchased in the past out of the window on to the street, walk on the other side of the street from your flagship stores, scratch your brand names off any of my friends products, recommend everybody else’s products to my friends, acquaintances and strangers on the street, blog incessantly about how piss-poor your products and company really are, give unsolicited advice to shoppers browsing your brands and start small wars in countries where you have a leading market share.
Please just stop. I have seen your ads, now let me see the Olympics.
There is a way to do this.
Shorten the advertisements. Use overlay ads instead of breaking away from the sport. Make hundreds of different ads. Make half-decent ads. Don’t make your ads look like the actual Olympics. Change your ads when things happen. Break for one ad at a time, not a series.
Above all, don’t give me time to channel surf or to switch on some other entertainment.
I’m so over these Olympics – Actually I was over them in about 1984 truth be told.
Laws against talking on your phone on board commercial Us domestic aircraft are being pushed by US Congress. It seems some Congress-critters are upset at very loud and sometimes personal phone calls from people on planes sitting near them when flying back and forth to Congress.
The Noise
Airplanes (or aeroplanes) are very very noisy and it varies by what is going on (take off, mid flight etc.), where you sit (front best, rear worst), type of aircraft, environmental factors such as temperature, pressure and prensece of babies in the seat behind you.
The impact is a function of how loud it is and how long you are exposed. Long term hearing damage seems to start kicking in above 80-85 decibels, remembering that decibels is a log scale. 550,000 aviation workers in the UA were estimated to be ‘noise exposed’ back in 1992, which would indicate that the noise levels are pretty high, and they are – even (older) 747’s are at the 80dBA mark, and they are relatively quiet.
noise levels on aircraft (pretty old)
Interestingly, I have yet to see a flight attendant wearing ear protection. Pilots – yes – but flight attendants? They must encounter a tremendous level of accumulated noise damage during their careers, especially on the smaller craft.
Apparently levels lower than a Leq of 70 dB are desirable for effective speech communication, which is clearly often not the case on aircraft, hence people shouting into phones.
So remember that – noise levels on aircraft are actually really high. Unhealthily high. Wear ear plugs or use noise canceling headphones..
I wear ear plugs on any flight over an hour, even when I sit in the front of the plane. I use “class 4” or even “class 5” plugs, and bypass the less effective ones that you can buy in the airport or that some airlines dish out. I just bought a box, and you can get one at an industrial clothing supplier or a large hardware store. They cost about $30 to $50 for a couple of hundred pairs, and are useful not just on planes, but at concerts, in big crowds, in the garage, on the motorbike or anywhere where you need to concentrate or sleep.
Back to the aircraft – we also need to take into consideration exactly what type of noise it is. Specifically this article says that we use the 300 Hz. to 7000 Hz. range to communicate, and that we use each part of that range about equally. It turns out that aircraft have a wide range of white noise across this region (as well as some subsonics which cause fatigue, maybe) and it is very difficult to hear what the person next to you, let alone what the person behind or across from you, is saying.
So how do we stop people yelling into phones?
The answer right there – we can actually take advantage of the white noise that airplanes make to mask the sounds of phone conversations. To do so we need to make sure that those conversations are not unnecessarily loud. When you speak on the phone with someone who is in a bar, you often find that they are shouting way too loudly for you, and it is the same on the airplane. We can solve that using technology.
Microphones that filter out ambient noise and just pick up the voice, headphones that filter out ambient noise and deliver low volume but easily understandable sound. We call these devices “noise canceling or unidirectional microphones” and “noise canceling ear/headphones” or “sound isolating earphones”. Phone companies are getting pretty good at making these things, and the cheapest and easiest way to keep your voice down is to use a set of noise canceling earphones with a microphone attached.
It’s also the difference between Skyping using the built in speaker and microphone and using a headset – you naturally speak a lot quieter using the headset as the sound coming in is so much clearer.
So – improve the technology, and we’ll have less annoyed Congressmen and less dubious laws promulgated.
The Behavior
The other side of this coin are the obnoxious people speaking in loud voices, seemingly oblivious to the people around them.
We have been dealing with mobile phones for years, and there are increasingly established behaviors for certain activities in certain geographies. Americans on flights are rude it seems, but on trains in Europe there are cell-phone free carriages (e.g. the Heathrow Express). We also know that answering a phone in a job interview is bad, or that taking a call while dining means walking out of the vicinity of your fellow diners.
Perhaps a social norm needs to be enforced on these folk – either through the power of the mob or the airline code of conduct, but certainly not through draconian laws. On the other hand the proposed law may be designed to fail, but is really about driving a change in behavior through the ensuing publicity.
Great news – Delta is going to offer WiFi on all domestic (USA) flights.
Not so smart – sadly they see it as a revenue opportunity rather than a service, and will charge ($10 for up to 3h flights, $14 for longer flights) for it.
I find it amusing that upmarket hotels typically charge (a lot) for internet connection (which I almost never take up) while, in the USA at least, the cheapest hotels (Motel 6 et al.) toss it in for free.
Those airlines and hotel chains don’t understand that internet access is seen as a necessity these days rather than a luxury or their airline/hotel profit center.
Delta and their ilk could gain massive discretionary customer numbers by including the wifi for free. They could/should even charge more on the airfare. However making people pay an unfair price on board is just going to result in lower usage, and the business case won’t stack up. Hopefully the provider of the service charges per airplane, rather than per Mb,and then everything will be aligned.
Yeah right.
Anyway – I’ll find that “internet on board” is meaningless to me as it is so expensive that I will not use it. Look at that first price – $10 for up to a 3 hour flight.
Let’s take a 2 hour flight, of which probably only 1h20 is spent in the air as there is so much padding in the times these days. Of that flight time, just say 50-60 minutes is available to laptop users after takeoff and before landing. Subtract the time it takes to get the laptop, switch it on, connect and pay, and you are left with 40-50 minutes of usable internet time. It’s not worth the money, and particularly when your iPhone will probably still work anyway.
Delta please set it free – and we will use it and reward you with service. Same to you telcos and hotels – you are charging for services that should be free, and sooner or later your competition will figure it out to your detriment.
I’m moving my stuff and internet around the block here in Fremantle, and so of course I’ll make sure the internet service is provided by iinet – who have been excellent an seem to get it and even read my blog.
Well – not so fast -they have some work to do. More to the point this entire industry has some work to do.
1: It takes 20 to 30 working days to start a new service. I’m guessing this is due to a combination of Telstra giving access to switches and iinet’s lack of people to do the work. Wild guesses. But it takes my company a week to find (well I did that) and sign a new lease, so they really are not running at the necessary pace.
2: It will cost money to move the serivce – $150 (or $79.95 if you sign for a 24 month contract). This is going from a phone+DSL to Naked DSL. If I kept thge same {Phone+DSL) service then it would be $59 for the phone plus $99 for broadband, or $158. It appears that the way they deal with the exchane for naked DSL is quite different from the phone plus plans – and I am guessing the noney flow is quite different as well.
3: Even if I stayed where I am and changed the current account from phone+DSL to Naked DSL it would still cost $150. Yes – at the same location. The monthly rates are such that it makes sense after 5 months or so – if you are like me and do not connect the landline (I have enough numbers).
4: You lose your old iinet email address when you do a transfer – not at all a big deal as I never use an ISP enail address. But still – a pain for some I am sure.
All in, you can’t move from phone to naked DSL account without a technician making changes at the exchange, and you can’t set up a new place that does not have an active phone without a visit from a technician. This just seems so archaic in this day and age. The electricity companies knows the house and meter numbers (at least they sometimes do), so why can’t the telcos know the same?
It looks like the plane wasn’t chocked (at least not properly), and with a gap opening up under passengers feet that was over 2 meters high (3 actually) this was a potentially fatal incident.
It should be recorded as such – it’s a near miss – a zero barrier incident, which means that nothing but luck prevented someone dying. That someone could have been a passenger, or one of the many workers milling around under the plane.
The investigation should (that’s how these things work) understand how this came to be and put in place preventative steps to make sure it never happens again. Typically these sorts of things have a bunch of different causes, such as inadequate procedures (e.g. to cope with wind), lack of adherence to procedure due to lack of training, a culture that allows risky behavior to occur, a culture that didn’t put zero harm first and so forth. It’s important not to blame-fest but to focus on making sure it never happens again.
Heavy industry deals with potential fatalities all of the time, and the airline industry is no exception. The recent Qantas incidents only prove how difficult it is for even the best to maintain a perfect safety record when flying passengers about. You have to get the aircraft maintenance spot on, the pilots and crew need to be near perfect in their approach to safety and air traffic controllers the same. Ground staff probably had it a bit easy in their perceived ability to impact on passenger safety, but they will now get more attention.
At BHP Billiton one of the more frustrating “fatal risk control protocol” rules for many people is that vehicles on a slope, or non “light vehicles” (e.g. cars) on any terrain need to be chocked when they were unattended. This is one reason why.
The alternative to highly paid bureaucrats is lowly paid bureaucrats. Lowly paid bureaucrats are far far worse than highly paid ones. Here are three resons why:
Lack of talent – why work for Government when you can get more money working in the private sector? The talented leave, the not so talented stay.
Corruption – if you can’t make ends meet on your Government salary then there are plenty of other ways earn some cash. This happens all over the world, and we don’t want that in NZ.
Lack of respect and care – if your employer cannot pay you enough money, then you’ll start to get demotivated. This in turn leads to a punch the time-card approach to work and we all suffer from the resulting lower service.
So ‘d far rather keep highly paid public servants.
However – perhaps the survey aproach is flawed:
The flaw in the survey is probably the same as the flaw when looking at average salaries/living costs for occupations in big cities (e.g. NYC) versus small towns where the smallness of the salary gap doesn’t explain the huge difference in living costs.
Where the difference lies is that in big cities and in the private sector you get more opportunities for career advancement – you get promoted more quickly.
I would posit that the problem here isn’t highly paid Government workers, but the lack of highly paid private sector jobs. And where are those highly paid private sector jobs? They don’t exist – which is why so many Kiwis head offshore to move their careers forward. New Zealand offers excellent basic education, excellent early career experience but lousy mid and later career experience. The Government sector is one of the few places where you can have decent responsibility and work that is meaningful for those with advanced qualifications and experience. Even so – those Government salaries are struggling to attract back Kiwi talent from offshore – they are ludicrously low in the Western World’s economy.
So pay the Government folk decent money, but here are some caveats:
a: Aggressive performance management – You can’t have a secure job highly paid job if your performance doesn’t match up. People need to be performance managed to help them stay on top of the game, or fired if required. No tenure please.
b: Encourage Sector switching – The salaries in the public sector may be “better”, so we should be encouraging and pushing for people that actively switch between public and private sectors. That way we will get more rounded people, but also the paper pushers will benefit from injections of private sector rigour, and the private sector will benefit by understanding and working with the wheels of Government..
c: Periodic restructuring – It’s a fact of corporate business that a periodic reshuffling of the deck is required to keep thngs fresh. This may take many different forms, but the outcome is generally new leaders, new structures and a much leaner organisation. It means people will lose jobs, young turks get promoted and, yes, great uncertainty and pain. However the short term pain results in longer term benefit as the organisation is able to move to the next level. Ossification is the enemy, and Government can learn from the private sector and restructure early and often.
Who knew? Turns out Mia Farrow has been travelling to Darfur, Chad and CAR for a while now. Here’s NYTimes columnist Nicholas Krstof, who has been there a few times himself, and been one of the main people that has bought the plight to the attention of the US people and Government, on Mia:
Several years ago, Mia Farrow asked if she could accompany me on a trip to Darfur. I didn’t know her then and didn’t like the idea of traveling with an actress who would probably need a blow dryer and flinch at the dirt and danger. So Mia went on her own — again and again and again…
….I take a light sleeping bag, a tarp and occasionally a tent. All Mia carries is a rope — she puts the rope in a circle in the sand, and goes to sleep in the sand in the middle of that circle. She claims that if scorpions approach, they’ll hit the rope and keep going around rather than climbing over it.
Darfur child: by Mia Farrow
Mia Farrow has now launched a Darfur site for the Olympics – so if you tire of lackluster medal counts then head to darfurolympics.org, and get an alternative perspective.
But wait – there’s even more to Mia. Mia has been adopting children from tough parts of the world for a long time, long before it was “cool” – the last in 1995, the first 3 in the 70’s. She had a total of 15 kids – 4 of her own, 5 adopted with a partner and 6 more adopted as a single mother. Amazing.
The Olympics is pure, about simple athleticism, where nationalistic politics are put aside and we all enjoy the quest for sporting perfection.
Right.
The NYTimes has a really cool Medal Count Tool, which shows the rise and fall of countries in the medal tally over the years.
Watch Australia – they get out-medalled (especially gold) by New Zealand in 1976, almost beaten in 1988, and it scary to see what happens afterwards. The Australian Government decided enough was enough and invested in the Australian Institutue of Sport.
As a result Australia went from 32nd highest medal taker in 1976 (the catalyst year), to 15th in 1988, 9th in 1992, 5th in 1996 and 4th 2000 (at home) and also in 2004. Only giants China, Russia and USA are ahead of them now, and it’s unlikely that any of them will relinquish a place this year.
Digicell is cleaning up – earning dollars by targeting poor countries with their mobile phone services, and earning kudos for liberating their populations from inefficient and often corrupt Governments and incumbents.
Give phones to the masses and they’ll fight your enemies for you.
I wish they’d invade Australia and New Zealand…
a battle plan he would use on other invasions: spend lavishly on the network (1,000 towers in Jamaica), build clean stores with cheery staff (a rarity in many developing countries) and lure customers by offering new services like per-second billing and big discounts from the competition (80% less for phones and 50% less for calls)
Which says it all – be careful what you read when it comes to this stuff, and do check yourself – and follow up with the relevant authority if it is wrong.
Outside the local Burger King, during the day, some yobbos left this mess under their table. I don’t blame the Resto as it was cleaned up immediately by a bewildered employee. I do mark it up as yet another point against Perth and it’s denizens.
{Update: this was posted using WordPress’s iPhone application, which is simple and it works. The photos are as delivered from the iPhone – barely adequate in resolution and image quality.}
Lance Wiggs 