Category: hustle

Old people, Sweeden, and Dollars.

As I mentioned, I was at this investment meeting last week. They gave us a bunch of papers, and being a giant nerd, I actually read the stuff. (Hey, I do want to retire, and sooner rather than later)

There were a few things I read that I think are interesting for the long term.

According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute and the US Bureau of the Census, we’re gonna have a lot of old people soon. Yeah, big surprise. Well, let’s put some numbers to it. Here’s the number of people over 65.

  • 1990 – 31.2 million
  • 2000 – 35.0 million
  • 2010 – 40.2 million
  • 2020 – 54.6 million
  • 2030 – 71.5 million

We’re going to nearly double the number of old people in the next 20 years. Buy stock in Ensure. No, really. Buy stock in companies that make stuff for old people. That’s one of the big reasons people are freaking out about health-care. We’re going to need lots more doctors & medical technology, and the price is going up. Apparently, health-care costs are currently increasing 3x faster than the Consumer Price Index.

Oh also, old people? Thanks for taking care of Social Security. And by “taking care”, I mean “can we get some health-care to replace Social Security’s kneecaps after that cool thing you did with the crowbar?” You people just can’t handle credit, can you?

In the early 90s, Sweden had a financial crisis. In the 80s, they had a credit boom which produced high consumer spending and real estate prices. They had a currency crisis, in the 90s, and the boom was reversed. Sounds a bit like now. I think this is what the US is looking to as a model for our current crisis, because Sweden was able to solve their problem in only a few years. They nationalized 22% of banking assets, and then created some private companies to help come  up with values for, and sell off the bad assets. I hope it works in our case.

Investmenting: up arrow good, down arrow bad.

Last night I went to this investment meeting, where a bunch of people in suits told me about the economy, and why they’re doing a good job. I took a few notes and wanted to share.

Oh, and in reference to the title, the first speaker, in one of his first slides, put up two graphics. One was an up arrow that essentially said “good”, and a down arrow that essentially said “bad”. Are you kidding? What’s your fee percentage, again?

Anyways…

Apparently, the Fed has backed 75% of the banking system. I think they’re really trying to bolster faith for the short term that the problems we’re having will be satisfactorially resolved.

A thought of my own: I know that the government can’t just print money to pad things out. If they do, inflation, or hyper-inflation is the consequence. But, even though market values have dropped wildly, the real tangible values are still there. Companies still have huge amounts of assets, both physical and knowledge. The underlying value of lots of these things are still there, they’re just wildly underpriced. As long as the government doesn’t issue more money than the real underlying value, then we won’t see insane-o inflation. I don’t know if this is true, but something sounds right about it.

They made the point that recovery comes way before the worst of the downturn. For example, the recession of 1973-1974 was already recovering by 1974, but unemployment (one of the big indicators that people look to) didn’t peak until 1975, at 12%.

Because of the tech bubble, as well as the current credit crisis, we are in the worst decade of the past 140 years. Some people are calling it a “lost decade”

An idea of mine, based off something they mentioned: just because the money economy is dropping doesn’t mean invention and scientific progress is stopping. Innovation continues & current progress keeps moving forward. Once the current bullshit stops, there’s going to be a big surge.

2008 inflation: .2% — that’s 2-tenths of a percent. Ridiculously low.

They look at investments with a worst-case mentality. They assume $25/barrel oil for oil companies; worst case unemployment for economically sensitive companies; failure of R&D for biotech companies. Right now they’re looking for cheap stocks that will benefit from high government spending.

Merck is one of the companies they look at. Even though some of their drugs are going off-patent soon, there’s still enough for them to be healthy. Existing drug lines will be able to supply 2/3 of their current market capitalization, even as far out as 2012, year-end. I like this, since it means they can have huge R&D failures, but still be very likely to be a safe bet for the longish term.

Martin Atkin made the point that they don’t do as well when the market does something weird, but that when things go back to normal, they position themselves so that they end up doing better than normal. I think this is interesting because there’s always reports/bitching of investment companies missing very successful black swans. I don’t think that is a real problem. Normally, things are normal. So, most of your strategy should be planning for normalcy. When something crazy happens, it is by definition, unusual. So, since you can’t predict it, you do a bit of planning for worst cases, and handle problems as they arise.

Ignite Orlando

Last night, we had Ignite Orlando. For those of you who don’t know, an Ignite event consists of presentations, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide = 5 minute presentations.

I re-presented some of my AAC09 Oauth talk. It was a lot of fun — the presentation format is cool. Everyone seemed to dig the presentation, the XKCD rip off, and the picture of Angelina Jolie 😀 (You’ll have to see one of my presentations to find out.)

Adam Wiggall was on hand taking pictures, here’s the links:

This post took two minutes

When I went to the GTD conference, I saw David Allen use his two-minute timer during the presentation. I thought it was a good idea, and based on a conversation I just had with Thomas, I finally looked one up. Allen’s was only for Windows, but I found free ones for Windows and OSX. Sorry Linux users, go compile your own.

Whoops, 2:15. Gotta go.

acts_as_presenter

Hey kids! Guess who’s presenting at Acts as Conference, 2009! These guys! Also, some guy with a big nose.

I’m giving a talk on OAuth, the greatest way to protect your APIs while keeping your users secure. Simple, easy, fun, and it might even get you laid. The amazing, spectacular, splendiforous OAuth! Yea. It’s gonna be that good.

And now, for the official marketing:

Acts as Conference 2009 is a two-day Rails conference that will make you a more competitive Rails developer by learning from those driving the innovation that is fueling the Rails community. Held February 6th and 7th in Orlando, Florida, Acts as Conference features a great speaker lineup, free food, a chance to meet with Rails innovators, and a live via video Q&A session with David Heinemeier Hansson. At $125 dollars and limited to 175 attendees, the conference will sell out fast, perhaps faster than last year. Register today at http://www.actsasconference.com. See you there!

Thanks Adam Savage

I saw this video of Adam Savage talking at The Last Hope this past year. I recommend it. It’s awesome to see how dedicated he is, and what it takes to produce such great stuff.

Other than getting a preview of (then) new Mythbuster footage and getting  to see a downloaded AVI of The Dark Knight on Adam’s hard drive, I really liked when he showed his projects folder. It was cool seeing that he works on things when he feels like it, and then saves his progress so he can come back later.

I’ve been trying to get more organized lately (what with the Getting Things Done/Agile planning at Cloudspace and all), so it’s something that stuck out for me, that I wanted to share with you.

Capitalist Showers, Economics Showers, and using less water.

I saw my friend Kitzzy’s tweet about navy showers a while ago, and I’ve been trying them out. No, “navy shower” isn’t what you might think.

Basically, it’s a braindead-simple way to reduce water and electricity/gas usage, with no inconvenience to you. Plus, I always seem to take quicker showers, which means I can clear out another blog or two from my RSS feeds.

Before I go off from this, I wanted to share a trick, if you’re interested in trying this out.

Pro tip: I recommend not shutting off the water completely. I find it is useful to wash soap off of your hand when you want to go turn the handle — very slippery otherwise. The Navy probably has foot-activated water valves.

Anyways, this navy shower concept got me thinking about minimizing consumption and efficiently using resources. It’s an economics issue — how do I get the most use/value out of a fixed amount of resources? From here, I started thinking about business.

It should be no surprise that businesses want to minimize use of resources. The less they have to spend on getting raw materials, the more those resources can be applied to other things, like salaries, and stock dividends. It’s even more aggressive in small businesses with slim margins, where becoming more efficient can mean the ability to hire more employees and grow, or purchase better equipment.

And this is where capitalism and the eco-movement intersect. Going with the “saving water” idea; let’s say you’re a business that makes Gadgets, and it takes 1000 gallons of water to make a Gadget. If you figure out how to make a Gadget with 600 gallons of water, you’ve already got a savings on your hands. One of your costs has been cut by 40%. Hooray! Fire up the yacht!

This is how businesses have worked for a very long time. “Efficient use of resources” should be a mantra in every group. But now with the eco-movement, companies are doubly-motivated to use resources more efficiently. Because now, when they become more efficient, they can advertise their “greenness” and get a PR boost on top of their new found financial savings. Some of them even charge more for their new “green” product, giving them a bigger return on the investment.

So that’s it. Your daily dose of economics and business. Of course, if you still want to do more to reduce your use of resources, try navy showering with a friend.

Zentact reaches out to web and says hi. Web waves back.

It’s official, Zentact is live. This is the product that Cloudspace has been building for the past several months for John Sampson, Eric Marcoullier, and Jared Brandt (who also makes some damn fine wine).

The skinny of Zentact is that it’s an address book with a Firefox extension that lets you know when someone in your address book might be interested in the page you’re viewing. Go to the site and give it a whirl.

It has been an exciting day. Watching the comments roll in on Twitter is awesome, and so is watching the emails go out from Zentact.

Mashable loves us. So do the fine folks at ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat. And finally, an excellent review of Zentact from Mr Howard Lindzon. Also, coverage from some unbiased sources, like Cloudspace. 😀

You should check it out. You’ll need a invite code, and you can use TIMZEN. Or, just sign up with this link, which magically includes the Zentact invite code. Let me know what you think.