Monthly Archives: April 2011

Why you shouldn’t own stocks

This guy has some interesting points.

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/04/10-reasons-you-should-never-own-stocks-again/

A couple thoughts – the VFS Investment Contest can be used to see if you are an above average stock ticker – though don’t get too confident till you beat the market for a few years anyway.  Also, my current thought on how you beat the competition he discusses:  stay away from owning big cap stocks – the bigger the stocks market cap, the more crooks are attracted to game the stock.  By sticking with small market stocks (under 10 billion in market cap) – hopefully you can fly under the radar of alot of the crooks.  Just a thought.

 

 

Data Driven News

I remarked to a friend the a few weeks ago that I thought it would be interesting to write a program that reads a sports box score and compose a news story.  It would be an interesting programming exercise – however it turns out that I am too late.  Narrative Sciences has already been formed to auto generate news stories from data.  I have noticed that many financial news releases appear to be purely data driven – i think more robotic stories are on the way.  The quality of the current stories is pretty poor – but I would think in a few years it could probably rival traditional sports summary stories.

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20110129/now-this-is-a-content-mill-narrative-science-raises-6-million-for-human-free-stories/

The net effect of these auto generated stories in the near term will likely just be to flood the search engines with more garbage content.

A 16 on the PGA tour

I was watching the Valero Texas Open this week, and saw something I had never seen – a PGA player shooting a 16 on a hole.   Kevin Na got into trouble in the trees – and it was interesting to watch as it answered a golf rule question I had wondered about.  When you are in the trees, as I am often when I golf, once you hit a shot, you cannot go back to the tee.  It there is no room to play behind you (away from the pin), then your only choice is to take unplayables (2 club lengths) or just whack away at it.

The other interesting thing was I had never seen a golfer lose track of the number of strokes he has taken – if you watch the video near the end its an interesting conversation between the golfer and the caddie.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/666385-kevin-na-video-watch-pga-tour-pro-card-a-16-at-valero-texas-open

Should the Egyptian military be the model for America?

Interesting article regarding how Egypt dealt with a large military that served no purpose once peace broke out.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/10/133501837/why-egypts-military-cares-about-home-appliances

Perhaps a model for the American military since its not likely the military budget will be significantly cut in the near future?  Perhaps that would be the final victory for America’s military industrial complex,  but maybe one of the last remaining options if we dont cut military spending.

Speaking of the military budget – if more people were aware of this chart, wouldn’t you think there would be more political pressure to cut military spending?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures