I’ve been called this recently and I would agree. I fell in love with the “it just works” way of Apple. When my wife goes to the mall, I tag along so that I can visit the Apple store. I own a MacBook Pro, and iPhone and and iPod. I also have loads of attachments for the mac; gadgets like the Bose Sound Dock for the iPhone and wireless keyboard and mouse for the laptop. I have tons of software and enjoy working and playing on the mac. I’m messing with xCode and iPhone programming, use parallels to run windows so that I can VPN and RD into work.
I can’t think of anything negative to say about the mac.
My problem… I need to run Visual Studio and Sql Mgmt Studio from anywhere. I picked up a Virtual Machine solution for this but I don’t enjoy it because running OSX and my virtual machines does not give me the performance I desire. I do throttle each but it still does not compare to native speed.
I decided to install the Windows 7 RC1 and boot to it rather than the VM solution. This way I get full dedication of my machines resources to the operating system I choose. It took a little over 30 minutes to do the install, call it 40 if you include the windows and driver updates.
I’m in shock. “It just works”. And it is really really fast. Granted it is bare bones and I am rocking 4gb of ram but this thing cooks. It doesn’t have the bloat of Vista (well it might but they swept it under the rug). It’s snappy, looks great and makes me want to use it. Thank you Microsoft!
Now, for my foot-in-mouth moment: If Microsoft could move Windows 7 to the mobile world and make the Zune HD a little more natural to use like the iPhone, I think they'd really have something they have been missing… A smart phone/pda contender. Let’s be honest, the iPhone, from a human usability perspective, just does it better than any other. They are bound to that silly AT&T contract and Microsoft is not. Ditch the Surface and get this HD phone available from any carrier. Put Win7 on the Zune HD or similar device, nail an app store, destroy Google Android and remind everyone that great software does not have to be open source.
Raise your hand if you like to vent out loud? I sure do and so do millions of twitter users. I've tried to be cautious with what I vent about on twitter because it's public and permanent. You don't want your foul mouth rants following you where ever you go. Sometimes, though, you get frustrated enough that all bets are off and the venting flows freely.
That was the case for me a couple of weeks ago when my recently upgraded Qwest connection went down. For about two days it was randomly disconnecting until finally it just died. Both my wife and I work from home and we go to school full time. Our internet connection is just as valuable to us as water and food. Well, not really, I'm just trying to be dramatic.
I posted the following message on twitter in frustration with my internet connection "#qwest Internet is down. I wish they would tweet or email stating such...". Four minutes after sending that tweet I received a tweet back from @TalkToQwest asking for my billing number. A couple of tweets later I have a phone call from a tech guy at Qwest. When I say tech guy, I mean someone who "knows" tech like I know software. It's almost as if the Fizzbin keyword was spoken for me via twitter.
After my quick tech call, I had a tech person at my door within a day or two and they fixed the issue. No annoying tech call for me where I had to talk to 20 different people and tell my story ten times over. I didn't waste hours of my life trying to solve the problem myself. I simply vented using twitter as my audience and it payed dividends for me.
I'm curious why a company would monitor twitter and provide great customer service on a social network and still maintain such horrible customer service standards via their call-in numbers or normal website. + 1 for qwest on the social front. -1 for paying someone real money to do this and not focus on your other major areas of customer service.
While I'm on this topic, I thought I'd mention my hatred for Papa Johns. Not the food; the food is great. I recieved an email from them with a coupon. While my wife and I were running errands with the offspring, I decided to order from them via this coupon. I clicked the coupon and tried to pull up the phone number of the nearest resturant. No dice, their zip code finder could not find me even though I was standing in the same strip mall that the resturant sits in. So, I used Google maps on my iPhone to get their phone number. I placed my order on the phone with them and gave them the coupon. They rejected and said that it was a website only coupon. Are you freaking kidding me? So I went to the website and tried to order my pizza. They tout a mobile optomized website, one that I don't need because I rock an iPhone but hey, mobile optomized means fast and that is exactly what I wanted. Imagine my surprise to find out that their registration process is more difficult than applying for a freaking credit card. You call that mobile optimized? Why on earth would you serve up a giant registration for to a potential customer on a mobile device?
Needless to say, I opened my big mouth on twitter again "Papa Johns has the WORST mobile experience. Mobile should be fast & fluid. No long a$$ registration process. #fail". Unfortunately for me, Papa Johns does not have a dedicated twitza (that's a pizza twitter person) to review negative comments about them.
More talk about ditching the US Dollar as the reserve currency in this article. What do you think will happen to the exchange rate of the US Dollar if all those countries who use the US Dollar as a reserve start selling those dollars?
The U.S. response to the Chinese proposal was revealing. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner initially described himself as open to exploring the idea; his candor quickly caused the dollar to weaken in value—which it needs to do for the good of the U.S. economy. That weakening, however, led Geithner to reverse himself within minutes by underscoring that the U.S. dollar would remain the world’s reserve currency for the foreseeable future.
Does the US Dollar need to weaken? Higher oil prices, higher food prices, and higher car prices are what we need? Is the problem with General Motors and Chrysler the strong US Dollar? The dollar has been weakening for years. I went to Europe in 2002, and a Euro cost about $0.88 – It cost about $1.60 just prior to the market crash of 2008, where a rush to the perceived safety of the US Dollar caused it to strengthen. That means that a $30,000 Chevrolet Tahoe cost 34,091 euro in 2002, and 18,750 euro in 2008.
It should be the job of the US Government and the Fed to protect the US Dollar – not weaken it. By the way, “overly expansionary monetary policies” is another way of saying “Printing too much money”
The bad news for me is that i often sound like a crazed lunatic when I start describing my beliefs of the coming economic collapse. The good news is that I’m in good company. When people ask where I'm investing, i tell them that I’m mainly into gold and oil ETF’s, since I want to preserve what little savings I have.
I often get the question “What good is Gold?”, and “It’s just a perceived value.” I am not good at countering that argument, especially since I’ve only been buying it for 6 or 7 months, but I do like to refer to this article by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (written in 1966, twenty years before he became fed chairman). The last two paragraphs really hit home with me:
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.
The article is titled “Gold and Economic Freedom”, and it goes into great depth of why Gold is real money, and the best form of currency. A Currency that is backed by and redeemable in Gold cannot be inflated. In fact, for most of the history of the United Stated of America, Gold, along with Silver, was the primary asset backing “gold certificates” and other certificates of deposit. Up until 1971, the US Dollar was redeemable for a fixed amount of gold – not to Americans – FDR made that illegal when he cut the value of the US dollar in half in the 1930’s. The first three sentences of the Alan Greenspan quote above bears repeating:
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.
The US eventually had to drop the Gold standard because they were printing money without actually acquiring the gold to back it up. Foreigners, who could own Gold, were redeeming their US Dollars for the stated exchange rate, causing the real value of the US Dollar to drop. Had the US not made it illegal for it’s own citizens to own Gold, then the US government would never have been able to print money without Gold to back it up.
Gold is real value, paper money is not. If the exchange rate of paper money to Gold goes up (more paper money per ounce of Gold), then it’s obvious that the paper money supply is being inflated. It seems very apparent to me that the real indicator of inflation should always be the the exchange rate of Gold to the US Dollar.
Alan Greenspan says “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.” Which brings up this chart of the past and projected US Budget Deficit:
And then there’s Gold:
It’s a lot easier sounding like a crazed lunatic when the numbers are on your side. I think I’ll continue to put my savings in Gold.
In what was interpreted as a sign of Chinese concern about the future of the dollar, the governor of China’s central bank proposed in March that the US dollar be replaced as the world’s de-facto reserve currency.
In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank’s governor, said the goal would be to create a reserve currency ”that is disconnected from individual nations” and modelled on the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, or SDRs.
Hold on to your hats – the US Dollar is dropping like a stone:
The past 6 months have been very educational for me from a macro-economic standpoint. I have never been interested in technical economics to the point that i am now, except for some things I naturally understand, like free markets. A Free Market economy is easy to understand to me because it’s my natural reaction to the world of trade. If you’ve ever had a garage sale, or sold something on eBay, you understand it too. It’s simple – you put something up for sale, and if people think your price is reasonable, they will buy it. If not, you have the option of lowering the price.
But when all these bailouts started last September, my Father and brother, who are both professional economists to a degree, started teaching me, as a much more interested student, about the macro economics being massively affected by all of this government intervention. So i started really trying to understand the big picture, and at this point, i think i have a pretty good understanding of it. I can say it seems pretty simple – almost exactly like free markets.
The Fed & Money Supply
Not many people know what “The Fed” is, except that Alan Greenspan used to run it, and now Ben Bernanke runs it. And it’s real important to the economy. And they can lower interest rates.
The Federal Reserve System was originally created, from what I understand, to provide emergency cash to banks when there is a potential bank panic – where too many depositors withdraw their money because of fear that the bank may fold. The purpose seems to have evolved to some kind of political entity that sets the interest rates in order to loosen or tighten the money supply, usually because of the hype surrounding a recession, or inflation fears.
How The Fed affects interest rates
Banks loan money to us that they get from two different sources: Depositors, and The Fed. The Fed will create money out of thin air and loan that money to a bank at the discount rate, who, in turn lends money to private citizens and businesses. This increases (or inflates) the total money supply, and when the bank pays the money back, that decreases / deflates the money supply. A lower discount rate will attract more borrowers to banks, causing the lending of money to outpace the repayment of money, resulting in a net increase in the money supply. A person or business may default on a loan to the bank, but the bank still has to pay back the money it borrows from The Fed. If the bank fails, then the unrecoverable money it owed to The Fed is non-performing, and will forever be added to the overall money supply – The Fed will have to raise interest rates in order recoup that.
The Credit Crunch, or recent contraction in credit beginning last summer, began mainly because of ridiculously low interest rates for mortgages, usually in the form of ARM’s, to subprime borrowers began to default at high rates. The free market reaction to high default rates is to increase interest rates (who wants to lend at low interest rates when default rates are increasing?) In order to keep interest rates low, The Fed creates MORE money out of thin air, and purchases debt on the open market. This is called Quantitative Easing, and it also increases / inflates the money supply.
The only way to decrease the money supply from quantitative easing is to sell those assets back on the open market for cash (which will increase interest rates), or when those loans are paid by the original borrowers, in the case that they are performing loans. In the case that they aren’t performing loans, who the heck would buy them? If the loans aren’t marketable (i.e. non-performing) then that money is also forever lost to the overall money supply, and the only way to make up for it is for The Fed to raise interest rates.
And if that isn’t enough pressure…
For the first 6 months of this budget year, the US government has already doubled the amount of money it has borrowed all of last year – at the same time our trade deficit has been cut in half. The US government (not to be confused with The Fed) borrows money by holding auctions for Treasury Bills (short term) and Bonds (long term). In March alone they borrowed $192B. Normally in a market where people with money want to loan less of it (exporters to US, banks, etc), and the number of people who want to borrow money is increasing (US Treasury), you would have a price increase – higher interest rates.
The people who normally buy our treasuries (the Chinese, Japanese, Saudis, etc.) all have seen their net exports to the US decrease substantially. At the same time, the US is selling 4x the amount of debt??? There’s only one way this can unfold – more quantitative easing. Ben Bernanke is going to purchase US treasuries in order to keep interest rates down. I’ve heard that the Chinese will continue to buy our debt, but how much can they buy? Are they going to have 1.7 Trillion dollars extra this year, with exports to the US cut in half? Are they going to even have 5 trillion over four years – let alone 5 trillion to lend to us?
Stealing your wealth 101
This is where free markets come in… Our currency is traded on free markets – anyone with a pile of money can trade it for other “stuff” – groceries, gasoline, stocks, treasury bills, wheat futures, Euro’s, Yen, etc. If you sell stuff, you may decide to take US Dollars in trade. If supply is greater than demand, the price goes down, and if demand grows faster than supply, the price goes up.
The same thing goes for currencies – if the supply of the currency is greater than demand, then the exchange rate of that currency goes down. If you increase the supply of a currency by 10% – guess what? It’s value decreases by about 10%. By increasing the supply of US Dollars, The Fed and the US Government are essentially confiscating wealth from anyone holding them.
To Summarize…
The Fed creates money by loaning money to banks and / or buying assets on the open market, which has the effect of lowering interest rates.
The Fed decreases the money supply only when loans are repaid to it or when it sells assets it previously purchased, which has the affect of raising interest rates.
The US Government is borrowing money like there’s no tomorrow, in times when nobody has any to lend.
Because nobody has any money to lend the US Government, The Fed purchases debt from the US Government with printed money.
More money causes inflation. Lots more money causes massive inflation.
Inflation causes interest rates to go up, causing The Fed to create more money to keep them down, causing more inflation, causing The Fed to create more money… you get the picture.
Holders of US Dollars see their holdings decrease in value, causing them to sell their $, causing the US Dollar to decrease in value even more, causing other holders of US Dollars to sell theirs, causing… you get the picture.
Finally, with exchange rates for US Dollars at very low rates, the sellers of things we import (remember we import about half of our oil, and most of our consumer goods) will want more US Dollars for them – increasing our prices!
How can you prepare?
If you want to watch something educational, check out this 8 part video. Watch the whole thing to get a good idea of what’s going to happen, keeping in mind that this video was made in November of 2006. This set of videos focus primarily of Peter Schiff’s speech, but the Western Regional Mortgage Bankers Association presented two points of view, the “bull market” view coming from Dr. Barry Asmus. Peter’s predictions are uncanny, and Dr. Asmus’ rebuttal’s are embarrassing in hindsight.
How can one guy get it so right – to the “T”, and the other guy be so wrong? How did Peter know? My guess is that Peter Schiff has known for a long time that bad monetary policy is the root of all evil. It’s like government interference that nobody realized is happening.
If you go to the first question in part 7 of 8, there is a dude who explains to Peter how entrenched into the real estate market he is and then asks if he should slit his wrists… I’ll bet that he now really regrets his skeptical attitude, and wishes he would have believed Peter. If he could go back in time and sell all of his houses in 2006, he probably would. All of Peter’s predictions came true, so who knows – maybe he did slit his wrists.
So if you listen to Peter Schiff now, he would tell you to move your assets out of the US Dollar. Buy gold, silver, foreign stocks, foreign currencies, etc. I would recommend that you buy his book – Crash Proof – also written before the credit crunch – and follow his advice.
I'm an amateur photographer. I've enjoyed taking pictures ever since my grandma gave me a Pentax camera when I was a kid. About two years ago I purchased a Nikon D40 and started using the Flickr photo sharing service so that my wife and I could share our memories with our extended family. Since then I have uploaded over 11,000 high quality images to Flickr.
The whole concept of Flickr was fascinating to me because it's really a dirt cheap high capacity storage solution for media. It's backed by Yahoo! and has been a cinch to work with. I've never worried about the data because they offer paid DVD copies if needed. Also, there are third party solutions that do backups locally.
Recently, something happened that changed my outlook on everything...
I had several hundred photos on a machine that I was selling to a friend. I wanted to move those photos to Flickr but had not gone through and touched them up so I opted to move them to an external hard drive. Everything moved over just fine and I was waiting for a good time to get back into the touch-up editing.
About a month after I sold my old machine I bought a MacBook Pro. The first thing I wanted to test was the TimeMachine backup utility. I already had an external drive and figured I could use it both on the Mac and my wife's PC. Keep in mind that this hard drive contained several hundred photos (and songs) that my wife really wanted. So, with the inexperience of a 5th grader, I slapped the drive on my desk, plugged it into the Mac and was on my way.
I recall a modal dialog that was severed up to me. Something about the drive not formatted for that Mac and that it wanted to reformat it. I heard that it was easy to partition drives on the Mac so that's what I did. Half for the Mac half for the PC. I setup time machine and it worked flawlessly.
Once I had the Mac backed up, I went over to back up the wife's computer and hooked up the hard drive. I decided to check on those files just to make sure they were safe. Nope... Something went horrible wrong. When I formatted the drive, it seems like it formatted the entire drive to be Mac friendly, then partitioned out a windows area. The panic ensued!
I immediately went into damage control mode. How do I recover the files? I search and searched until Google called and asked me to stop hogging their bandwidth. I've tried program after program but I cant get these files back. The strange thing is that the files are there, is some binary crazy encoded format. Each utility can locate the files but they can't read them. I'm screwed!
What I have now is a paper weight. I don't want to use the drive anymore because these precious files are on it. I'm in denial that they are unrecoverable because I haven't taken it to a professional yet for an opinion.
The good news from this experience is that I've become much more data conscious. I've got the mac doing monthly/weekly/daily/hourly backups. My wife's computer is SOL for now. I tried to use Windows Live Sky Drive to copy the files that are important to her to a safe place; what a joke that was. I'm using mozy for now but I don't care too much for it.
The solution...
I just purchased an HP EX487 MediaSmart Home Server. It's a 1.5 TB backup solution for the house. It also centralizes all types of media content that can be shared from anywhere with an internet connection. I really like the iTunes centralization so that my wife and I can hook up our ipods to one library. It also offers integration with Flickr for my photos. I fully intend to load my pics on the mac, edit until my hearts content, move the data to the server and have it automatically load my pictures on flickr.
So, in addition to a backup solution for both my mac and pc's, I now have a file sharing server which means I can load all my HD video (got like 100 GB on my mac right now), audio files and other crap onto this server and keep it off of my machines. You can call Flickr my redundant backup solution for photos. I don't like clutter and I hate slowness and I hope to really clean things up. With my new 20 MPS internet connection I suspect that the backups and file sharing will be very fluid. Did I mention this thing has dual 750 GB 7200 RPM drives?
I also have a separate 1 TB drive that I will use to backup the server. I'm currently investigating online storage that is cheap and integrates seamlessly with the home server so that I'm completely covered for any disasters at the house.
I think I've said too much already. I suspect I'm going to be backing up the in-laws machines now, also my brother, my grandma and aunt. See where this is going? Maybe this was a bad idea.
This is where free markets come in… Our currency is traded on free markets – anyone with a pile of money can trade it for other “stuff” – groceries, gasoline, stocks, treasury bills, wheat futures, Euro’s, Yen, etc. If you sell stuff, you may decide to take US Dollars in trade. If supply is greater than demand, the price goes down, and if demand grows faster than supply, the price goes up. 