exiledbear

11:57 am: I dunno whether to laugh or cry
http://blip.tv/file/1015028

08:58 am: When I hear a company starting to blame short sellers for the price of their stock
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/11f34932-4795-11dd-93ca-000077b07658.html

I start to get real skeptical. Usually, it's a way of trying to shift blame for poor management performance by management onto anyone else but them. It's not our fault the stock is low, it's those evil dastardly short sellers. Yeah, right.

Nobody likes a bear. They're tolerated during a bull, but during a true bear market, they're hated. Another sign that things aren't good - when bears are hated, you know you're in a bear market.

Truth is, there's not enough short sellers out there to move anything. Hardly anyone other than professionals and a few crazy gamblers do it. I think even during the Crash of '29, people did studies and found only 1-2% of the price action could be attributed to short selling. The rest was just dumb longs panicking.

Nobody seems to mind longs spreading lies to temporarily boost the stock price. And that happened a lot in the late '90s. Funny how that is.

I do agree though, that these sorts of rumors aren't good, and that the odds of 'em being true are greater than 50/50.

04:23 pm: Turtle?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/06/27/cnbarclays127.xml

We are going into tortoise mood and are retreating into our shell. Investors will do well if they can preserve their wealth.

Prepare for an epic turtle? Yay. Everyone turtles. Great. Shrug, the game rules change. Time to go prot.

11:39 am: Been a while since I talked about gold
Mainly because there's not much to say.

It's still in a bull market, as far as I can tell. As far as I can tell, we will see +$1000 again. When, ah, now that grasshopper - I cannot tell at all.

Looks like it's doing its usual cyclic thing - bottoming about mid-summer, to get ready for whatever up-cycle it decides to grant us with in the fall and winter. Usually July is about where it reaches its nadir. It's not a perfect cycle - some years it's longer, some years it's shorter.

Sometimes the up cycle is muted, with some bigger cycle keeping it down, sometimes the up cycle is amplified. This also is something I can't really tell either.

Like I've said before, steady as she goes. I'll let some of you know when I think the winds have turned.

04:12 pm: Everybody does something different when their back is against the wall
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer

Push a man to the wall, take away his livelihood - I'm not saying what he did was right, but there is a rational basis to the decision he made. Having nothing left to lose makes you free. Most people don't really know how to act when they realize they're completely and utterly free. Like this guy. Choices define us. Certainly defined him.

What would you do if given complete freedom? I don't mean the bullshit that you mistake for freedom in this locked down land, I mean real honest to God freedom. What would you do with it? Do you even have an idea of an idea?

03:24 pm: Falling prices on rising volume is - oh you figure it out
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/06/18/america/Real-Estate-Spotlight-California.php

I'm not going to spoon feed it to you. Be quick about it, because time is running out.

12:45 pm: And the Roflcopter drops a Lolbomb today

03:43 pm: Y'know, he's probably being more honest than most people are usually
http://torrentfreak.com/kid-rock-dont-just-steal-music-steal-everything-080618/

Tell it like it is.

02:37 pm: Oh I agree and there will be a new solution that fits the constraints


And like a differential equation with order greater than 1, there are multiple possible solutions. You might not like all the possible solutions that exist. In fact, I guarantee you won't like some of them.

Some of these solutions have odds of happening greater than others...

11:19 am: For a most unusual San Francisco experience...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joestump/2583565053/

04:29 pm: So let's see
We have a pointless war, we have a president that's seen to be incompetent and is generally despised by the public, and we have inflation. And it looks like there's a fuel crisis coming up. And the government is handing out stimulus checks. Clothing fashion has gotten tacky and the typical fashions make you look like you're a trailer park resident, a hooker, or a pimp.

What's the year?

1972? Or 2008? I think it was better the first time around. Someone said something like first it happens as tragedy and then as farce.

I don't think it will stay the '70s forever. Not quite sure what things will transition to next. Perhaps the '20s in Germany? Fuehlen sie die zwanzigen jahren? Dunno. Wouldn't be the first time a paper currency has failed, that's for sure. History is littered with the graveyards of paper currencies. Too tempting to fix things by printing over the problems.

I saw a bunch of middle-aged women with both arms full of bags from Nordstrom walking down the street not too long ago - the economy may be crappy, but as long as I see things like that, it's not as bad as the media is making it out to be. Or we're not at the bottom of all of this just yet.

04:42 pm: Pursuit of Happiness - I'm an Adult Now

02:52 pm: The one thing about Apple's iPhone platform
It's completely locked down, if you play by their rules. Of course, it's possible to get around these artificial restrictions, but then there are things you can't really do, like try to sell software. However, there's a thriving gift economy in the ghettos of the iPwned world.

Anyway, it's time to talk about the steaming pile of crap that beta 7 of the iPhone SDK is. For starters, it's difficult to activate your iPhone after upgrading to beta 7, or to be more accurate, f*****g impossible.

And it goes downhill from there. I gave up on beta 7 and rolled back to beta 6. Thankfully they didn't make any more gratuitous changes to the OpenGL API.

And don't bother contacting Apple - it's like shouting into the wind, they don't care. Oh, I'll probably get a response 3 weeks from now. Useless.

At least with WinCE, they don't make you jump through this many hoops. And somehow MSFT is evil and Apple is supposed to be good. They're both bad, if you ask me, just in their own different ways.

02:50 pm: That actually makes sense
http://kotaku.com/5014193/a-politician-who-actually-games

Except that most (not all, there are a few competent players shining out amongst the stinking pile and those are well appreciated) huntards can't play competently. Playing a huntard means you don't know how to play.

And I don't know what it is with playing badly and not being honest, because I've seen huntards ninja loot more than all the other classes combined.

Making it to 70 on a huntard doesn't mean squat. You could roll your face across the keyboard and make 70 on a huntard. Try making 70 as a holy priest. Or as a resto shammie. Or as a prot warrior.

12:25 pm: In fairness to Apple
I don't really hate Apple, but I am ambivalent towards them. I don't think their products are quite as easy to use as the fanboys like to think they are, but they do some things that are customer friendly.

One thing, they don't crap all over their OS by preinstalling adware. They pretty much stick to the base install, and most of what's installed, even if you don't use it - was meant to be useful to someone, not meant to sell you something. Pretty much you pay for real software, not to let someone nag you to buy something you don't want and never will.

They do nag you at the very beginning about .mac, but they only do it once and then at the very beginning. Then they shut up about it.

And iPhone specific, compared to Windows CE, their programming platform is a lot nicer to work with. Well aside from the OpenGL changes I referred to earlier. Windows CE devices have a 32Mb process address space limit, and due to really technical reasons I'll leave out, you can only use maybe 20Mb of that at the most. So if a WinCE device has 128Mb of memory, it's not straightforward to get at all of it except for that 20Mb.

The iPhone is more or less a unix box, so you get the linear address space of your standard unix process. Which means if the device has 128Mb of memory, you have a shot at all of whatever's free when you start up.

The toolchain to write stuff is about the same in both, although I'm sure people out there have strong opinions about them. I think the debugger in Xcode is somewhat more stable, but the Windows Mobile SDK doesn't require you to sign your app before uploading it. A real problem I have with the debugger on the Apple side is that it handles templates in a very brain dead way. The MSFT debugger is a lot smarter when it comes to detecting templates and skipping over the boilerplate. You don't have to unlock your WM device. You have to pay somewhat more for the WM SDK than the iPhone SDK, although factoring in the cost of buying a mac (why would anyone want to use anything other than a mac, I hear - you'd be surprised, fanboy), it pretty much evens out on both. Perhaps it's somewhat cheaper to get the WM SDK.

As far as C++ vs. Objective-C, they each have their merits. I really like operator overloading and templates. Delegates and selectors are nice too. I find calling functions with null this pointers to be disturbing however. In ObjC they fail silently. The real problem I have with ObjC is that the only people who use it are all at Apple - nobody else out there really knew about it. Or cared. Until the iPhone.

02:09 pm: I don't remember where I read it
But the statement stuck with me. Basically if you looked close at the '70s inflation spike, it didn't really get going, until they publicly admitted that it was a problem that needed to be dealt with. Of course they meant dealt with in our way, but the rest of the populace started dealing with it in their own ways.

There's two parts to inflation, one naturally is printing too much money. That one's easy to figure out. The other part is psychology. Nothing behaves linearly in the markets, and when people realize they're getting screwed, they start to adapt and protect themselves, or maybe even try to profit from the changes - aka what I like to call the Front Run.

And I'll claim that it isn't really printing money that causes most of the inflation, it's the front running. And where do you get front running? When there's mass awareness of too much money being printed. Where do you get a good chunk of mass awareness? When public officials admit it is a problem.

So when the Fed admits that inflation is a problem, after it has been a problem for a while, I'm not expecting inflation to go away.

I'm expecting a front run.

06:15 pm: Well deserved, in my opinion
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/17/1774

They need a pitchfork in their butt.

02:55 pm: Yes, but
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aB9b2rPXKVBY&refer=home

I've been in the trenches over there. It doesn't affect them as much, because their whole living structure is different.

Towns are really compact. One block there's apartments, and then it's cows'ncrops. There are few tract houses. Most ordinary people live in apartments. Compact towns usually have a train station somewhere close by.

Zoning is different. Shops and apartments often share the same building. Basically, you walk to most of what you need to shop for. Once a week, a bunch of farmers usually come into town to sell produce on the street. If you need to travel long distance, you take a train or bus.

If you need to carry something heavy, you usually hire someone to deliver it to you. Your cellphone is more important than a car - with that and knowing the right numbers, you can call in just about anything you need.

But I gotta tell you, most americans would hate those kind of living arrangements. I personally didn't mind them, but I'm - adaptable. I remarked when I was there, if you teleported all the locals out and teleported a bunch of ordinary americans in, they'd oo and ah for about one week. Then the complaints would start and never stop.

A car is a bit of a luxury. Generally if a household has a car, only one is had, it's rather small and then it's used very carefully for only important things. Because of the layout of most towns, a car is more of a bother than it's worth. Finding parking for it is a real problem. And what parking is available, you generally have to pay for.

So yes, gasoline is $9/gallon, but it doesn't affect them the same way. They do ship most things via diesel truck, so it does affect them too, but not to the extent is does here.

04:37 pm: Whispers of the future


Ja.

08:53 am: Of course some people would rather there not be a front run at all


Would be rather inconvenient. Might upset the status quo.