How to spot a hidden religious agenda

From How to spot a hidden religious agenda:

Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

Yes, you there in the last row, I'm talking to you.

Wild Fire

I have read a couple of Nelson DeMille novels before, and have found them quite readable. I picked one up -- Wild Fire -- after a long gap. I have not made it through Chapter 1 yet, but I have already been assaulted by a combination of cliches, trying-too-hard-to-be-clever quips, an overdose of testosterone and plain old jingoism. Some samples:

• "We are now a mostly paperless organization, and I actually miss initialing memos. I had an urge to initial my computer with a grease pencil, but I settled for the electronic equivalent. If I ran this organization, all memos would be on an Etch A Sketch."


• "Also included in our collegial group are people who, like ghosts, don't actually exist, but if they did, they'd be called CIA."


• "Also, this guy has a bad habit of coming back from the dead - he's done it at least once before - and without a positive body identification, I'm not breaking out the champagne."


• "My wife is a beautiful woman, but even if she weren't, I'd still love her. Actually, if she weren't beautiful, I wouldn't have even noticed her, so it's a moot point."


• "The message read [Ed: It's in all caps in the novel -- BTW, somebody please tell the author that normal people don't type in all-caps anymore -- but in the interest of not hurting the eyes too much, I've changed it to normal text]: Let's knock off early, go home, have sex, I'll cook you chili and hot dogs, and make you drinks while you watch TV in your underwear. Actually, it didn't say that. It said: Let's go away for a romantic weekend of wine tasting on the North Fork. I'll book a B&B. Love, Kate."


• "Like most men, I'd rather face the muzzle of an assault rifle than a pissed-off wife."


• "... who I strongly suspect was once romantically involved with my then future wife. This is not why I disliked him - it was why I hated him. I disliked him for professional reasons."


• Never referring to Osama bin Laden without the prefix "scumbag", a derogatory reference to the Middle East ("Sandland"). We get it -- you are a red-blooded American.


• "Not one of my better cases, but it brought me and Kate together, so the next time I see him, I'll thank him for that, before I gut-shoot him and watch him die slowly."


• "This was one of the reasons. we got divorced. The other was that she thought cooking and f**king were two cities in China."

I think it would have been easier to scan the pages and put them up, as someone recently did for a book with really bad porn.

Update: Surprisingly, the book turned out to be an entertaining read, the Bollywood style climax notwithstanding.

Investors' dilemma

Olga Tellis' columns (by the way, I've always wondered about this: what's a Russian doing, writing finance columns for Deccan Chronicle?) usually make a lot of sense, but I don't agree with this:

A study of asset class-wise returns between 1998 and October 2008 by Fidelity International shows that equity has out-performed all other asset classes, followed by gold, fixed deposits and lastly, gilt.

But one has to have a long term horizon of seven to 10 years.

Tell that to an investor in the Japanese stock market: the Nikkei, after reaching an all-time high of 38,957.44 on December 29, 1989, is currently languishing at 7,376.12. An investor with a time frame of say, 19 years, would be really sore from all the ass-reaming.

She continues:

For an individual, it is difficult to time the market, namely to buy at the lowest price and sell it at the highest.

One has to know one's risk and reward profile and invest accordingly.

That is why it is better to go through the mutual fund route.

Many mutual funds may be performing badly in the present scenario, but it is not true of all mutual funds.

There are several who are doing well and giving good returns even in this scenario.

A quick glance at the financial pages shows that there are approximately 57,483 mutual funds to choose from, run by fund managers with varying levels of competence. In what way is this better than choosing from an even larger list of individual company stocks? Also, unless a mutual fund is able to short stocks, I do not understand how it can give positive returns in a bear market; it's not a hedge fund, after all.

The more and more I think about the whole investing thing, I can't help but come to these conclusions:

1. Investing your money is not a way to become rich. Your aim should be two-fold: a) ensure that you don't lose your principal and b) beat inflation. A regular saving habit [putting your money in rock solid investments (and no, I don't mean mutual funds or stocks)], coupled with the under-appreciated magic of compound interest, will take you a long way.


2. Earn your money by the sweat of your brow, not by clever, get-rich-quick schemes.

If you feel that this advice does not hold good, and inflation is still going to screw you over, blame the government for its deficit financing policies and printing presses (I know, this is not a solution; but hey, there's always Kaun Banega Crorepati).

Quote of the day

Dude, feed him some moon pies and oxycontin and call him Mini-Me. As bread'n'circuses go, it couldn't be beat.
-- Reddit comment about Republican wunderkind Jonathan Krohn.

Off-balance sheet exposure

From Deccan Chronicle:

Among the bank groups, the off-balance sheet exposure of foreign banks was over 28 times of their total liabilities. Private sector banks and public sector banks had off-balance sheet exposures of 251.2 per cent and 61.5 per cent of their total liabilities, respectively.

That's right, it's not 28 per cent, but 28 times. Considering that Citigroup is supposed to have a trillion or so dollars in off-balance sheet SIVs, this is not surprising:

The top five banks with the largest off-balance sheet exposures in India were Citibank - Rs 16,44,729 crore; Standard Chartered - Rs 16,25,608 crore; HSBC - Rs 13,22,985 crore; ICICI Bank - Rs 11,51,349 crore and Barclays Bank - Rs 10,44,134 crore.

Like parent, like subsidiary. Also note that you-know-who is the only Indian bank in this sorry list.

Spot the odd one out

Three headlines:

• Unruly lawyers started violence, police exceeded limits: Srikrishna -- The Hindu

• Srikrishna slams CJ for soft-pedalling row - SC puts ball in high court -- Deccan Chronicle

• Srikrishna report indicts protesting TN lawyers -- Times of India

The report places equal blame on both sides, but you wouldn't know it by reading the TOI or the DC versions (The DC version, by the way, is uncharacteristically wishy-washy).

Speaking of newspapers, is it just me, or has R K Laxman jumped the shark? The You Said It series cartoons are giving Sudhir Talang and Keshav a good run for their money in the "Which newspaper has the most insipid cartoon" contest. Time for graceful retirement, I think.

IIPM voted best B School in the country

... in the non-IIM category.

And by the way, if you didn't know it already, I have been voted the best batsman in the country in the non-Sachin Tendulkar category for the last three years.

LeT shuts down after anti-terrorism pledge

The Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba today announced that it was shutting down. This announcement came in the wake of the anti-terrorism pledge taken by the Orissa Chief Minister, Union Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar and a host of religious leaders. Addressing a group of reporters at a hurriedly convened press conference, Mohammed Aftab, the LeT spokesperson, said that this action left his group completely stunned. "We did not see this coming," he said. "We can handle a military raid, air strikes, even cruise missiles, but this is too much. I mean, how can we defend against something as deadly as a..." -- he quickly emptied a glass of water before continuing, "an anti-terrorism pledge"? He went on to add that they were planning to take this up with the International Criminal Court, claiming that a serious violation of their human rights had been committed.

In related news, the president of the Confederation of Indian Industry announced that an anti-recession pledge would be taken by all its members on March 15. This news was greeted by an immediate 230 point spurt in the Sensex. The rally could not be sustained, however, when the traders realized that the American President, Mr Barack Obama, would not be taking the pledge owing to prior commitments on that day.

Warren Buffet does derivatives?

From Bloomberg, via Mish Shedlock's blog:

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. posted a fifth-straight profit drop, the longest streak of quarterly declines in at least 17 years, on losses from derivative bets tied to stock markets.
...
Berkshire shares have fallen 44 percent in the past year as the value of the firm’s top equity holdings dropped and losses increased on the derivatives.

And here I was, thinking Warren Buffet was conservative and invested only in things he understood.

KDE 4.2

Well, most of the things I bitched about 4.0 have been fixed in 4.2. All in all, a much better user experience, except that things are not very zippy.

BTW, owing to MEPIS not shipping 4.2 yet, I have switched to Debian Lenny. It needed adding the experimental packages to apt, but no issues in the installation, as was the case when I tried it with MEPIS.

Definition of the day

Quantitative easing: A word invented by central bankers because 'printing money' smacks too much of Zimbabwe -- John Mauldin

Inflation, financial markets and fiat money

From a column in the latest issue of Outlook Money:

Don't be surprised if [educational] costs quadruple by the time you need to reach out for the chequebook for your kid's higher studies. This means that, unlike our parents, we can no longer invest in lower-risk, fixed income options since the growth of our investments will be hopelessly outsprinted by inflation.

Now comes the tricky part. To catch up with runaway costs, you will perforce need to mount the high-speed but higher-risk horse of growth investments such as equity mutual funds (MFs), unit-linked insurance plans (Ulips) that have a high equity exposure and perhaps some stocks.

Yeah, nothing like some good old fashioned scaremongering ("Think of the children!") to drive the suckers into the markets so that the insiders can make their killing. On a related note, consider this:

Under a commodity standard, people could save for the future by accumulating gold and silver coins. The coins’ value appreciated over time because of their natural increase in purchasing power, as the relatively slow increase in the production of precious metals was outpaced by the much faster increase in the production of other goods and services. Today, only a fool would try to save for the future by piling up dollar bills. Everyone is forced to enter the financial markets, which are risky even for knowledgeable investors, in order to prevent the value of his retirement savings from vanishing before his eyes

Something to think about.

Managing the jargon-mongers

There is an article entitled "Managing the slowdown" in today's Hindu that sort of sets the bar on how high (low?) you can go with just spouting jargon and still end up with a publishable piece. Rather than quoting portions from it, I'll just let the list of buzzwords do the job:

strategic management, effective management practices, effective management of various processes, operational efficiency, evaluation of all processes and systems, efficiency improvement, value-engineering, re-engineering, efficiency improvement parameters, SWOT, group discussions, formation of task forces, schedule for achieving better results, right sizing, managing human capital, upgrading of people's competencies, improve all round efficiency, human capital restructuring needs, exit route strategies, out-placement, talent development, Management Information Systems, Project and Office efficiency, Training Need Analysis, Train The Trainer Programme, feeling of ownership among employees.

Man, I wish I could write like that -- I would then leverage a synergistic win-win situation for all the stakeholders just like that -- *snaps fingers*.

It would be funny

...if it weren't so sad:

Asked by The Sun newspaper what (the 13-year-old father) would do financially to support his "family", the baby-faced father looked flummoxed and asked, "What's financially?"

Screw it, it is funny, bad karma notwithstanding.

Huh?

From an article about Ukraine's financial troubles:

Kiev Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky — a highly visible politician — had difficulty answering even the most basic questions about the capital's financial problems at a recent news conference. Asked about shortages of gas to schools, city doctors who hadn't been paid for months and a threatened strike by local bus drivers, Chernovetsky responded with mumbles and stream-of-consciousness riffs about the local zoo and his affection for elephants, the need for more trees and flowers in the city, his propensity to dry off naked on a balcony after showering and the importance of the Bible.

The end of the two-state solution

This article talks about how difficult it is to implement a two-state solution. What with Qaddafi's proposal for a one-state solution finding mindshare, the global revulsion at the Gaza war crimes and calls for boycott, it looks like the Israelis have been hoisted with their own petard -- all their efforts to squeeze the Palestinians into smaller and smaller swathes of land and make a Palestinian state unviable seem to be in the process of backfiring spectacularly, with the end result being a single democratic, post-apartheid state with a Palestinian majority. Watch out for a quick scramble to accept the 1967 borders.

Mahesh 'ditches' Mirza, takes Bopanna to movie

From DC:

Sania wanted to watch the much acclaimed film, directed by Danny Boyle, but instead of taking her along, Bhupathi and Bopanna went ahead and saw the movie. "Mahesh and Rohan ditched me and went to watch Slumdog Millionaire," Sania said on Tuesday.

She went on to add, "And they came back and had ice cream cones in their hands and I was very upset that they had ice cream without me and I got angry and I went to my mommy and told her 'Mommy, Mahesh and Rohan went to the movies without me and had ice cream cones. They are bad boys and I don't want to be friends with them', and my mommy said, 'Don't worry honey, you don't need them, go to bed like a good girl and mommy will find you much better friends tomorrow' and that made me happy and I was smiling and I got into bed and fell asleep and dreamt of hundreds of tennis balls with Mahesh's and Rohan's faces drawn on them and I was hitting them very hard with my tennis racket and I felt even happier".

For God's sake, grow up, woman.

"Sweet Rascal" my ass

Today a biker overtook me dangerously on my way to work. Common occurrence, given the below-average intelligence of these Neanderthals, but one thing was different this time: the sticker on the rear of his bike that said "Sweet Rascal". Sweet Rascal? Try "F***ing Idiot".

That reminds me of a car that did more or less the same thing to me a couple of months back. This guy had a big sticker that said "Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven". Not quite, buddy. There is another way, too, and it looks like you've a head start, if you know what I mean.

What revival?

From The Hindu - Exports show signs of revival:

Halting the sharp fall for the past two months and giving indications of a revival, exports declined by a meagre 1.1 per cent in December 2008 over the same month last year showing a negative growth for the past three months but with signs of withstanding the worsening global economic crisis.

Not so fast:

India's exports in January are expected to plummet by more than a fifth as the global slowdown slashes demand for Indian goods, and the trade minister said further government aid for ailing firms may follow.

"We expect exports in January to be down 22 percent in dollar terms," Commerce Secretary G.K. Pillai said, indicating that overseas sales could decline to $11.5 billion from $14.7 billion a year ago.

Spot the hypocrisy

"Judges must make their assets public" -- Jayanthi Natarajan, Congress MP and AICC spokesperson.

In other news, "Ministers' assets not under RTI":

The PMO has decided to keep the assets of ministers and their relatives under wraps saying (this) information is exempted from the RTI act.