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December 22, 2008

Lipodiesel?

thanks John for the tip on the Beverly Hills doctor making biodiesel out of LipoSuction fat.  I

 

think.

Posted by Martin at 7:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 21, 2008

more snow pics around the house today

Posted by Martin at 7:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Craig Newmark on Service

Good column Craig.  Yes I hope this is a time of enlightenment as far as engagement in the community and government goes. Use VolunteerMatch.org, use Kiva.org (i have a large account there), use pledgebank.com.  And join the PTA.  All good.

Posted by Martin at 7:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

snowboarding down Queen Anne Ave, Seattle

i didn’t do it last time it snowed enough.

So I did it three times this morning.

Posted by Martin at 12:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Reading about a guy I met

in Indonesia at a surf resort, I met Clay Marzo, said to be one of the best young surfers in the world. He was with a girl but painfully shy.  Reading the ESPN story on him today I find out why. He has mild Asperger’s Syndrome.  That explains alot. The guy can shred the waves like no one I have seen.

Posted by Martin at 7:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 18, 2008

Review of The Faithful Spy

The Faithful Spy: A Novel by Alex Berenson

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
OK. I picked this up at the airport. Was looking for a light airplane read, spy thriller. I got a great thriller and a very engaging read, but not exactly light. You could read it that way if you don't read the newspapers. This one is literally "ripped from the headlines". About a CIA agent under cover with jihadi Islamic extremists trying to prevent the next big attack. We all know it is coming. We all know there are sleepers in the US. This book, although fiction, is a credible and very plausible potential path. The Islamist are not irrational crazies. They are people, deeply hurt, intelligent, just misguided. These people are out there. They won't go away if you sit down and have tea with them. Obama should read this.

View all my reviews.

Posted by Martin at 7:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Review of Robert B. Parker, Now & Then

 

Now and Then by Robert B. Parker

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Read this on a couple plane rides over the last month. Very good Spencer Novel if you know that detective from Robert Parker. Good vacation read.

View all my reviews.

 

trying good Reads instead of AllConsuming. I don’t like it as much. It doesn’t robopost. You have to cut an paste.  Lame.  But more books and way more traffic.

Posted by Martin at 7:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Stitches are cool

Stitches are cool


Originally uploaded by ministeroforder

right after my stitching up from a surfboard in the face. Don't try this at home: Surf in 40mph winds.

Posted by Martin at 4:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

white Christmas

Seattle is finally getting one

Our purple Christmas tree

 

snow at the office

 

snow at the office

Posted by Martin at 4:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Regifting is in, new ebay study

Posted by Martin at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Trail of Toxic waste

Most of you have probably seen it, but if not, you must click over to CBS RIGHT NOW and watch the 60 minutes story on toxic e-Waste.  Hundreds of thousands of computers and hundreds of millions of cell phones are “outdated” each year. Where do they go?  Consumers are getting more concerned about this question and land-fills are actively trying to keep that stuff out of their dumps, but are these systems working?  It seems that there are still plenty of “recyclers” who just want to make a buck. 

With Kashless, hopefully these last year models can go to someone who actually uses them for a bit longer.  One of the best ways to keep things out of the landfill is to keep using them.

Posted by Martin at 10:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blodget called Markopolos Madoff three years ago

No matter what you think of Blodget, he does have good sources and has made some very good calls.  Check out his memo from 2005 calling Madoff a fraud.  It is unbelievable the SEC let it go this long.  Someone was getting paid.

Posted by Martin at 9:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 16, 2008

Recycle your drugs

What do you do with old drugs?  Expired prescriptions?  Washington state has been running a return program with manufacturers and retailers for the last two years.  As with ewaste this is an area I believe where more manufacturers are going to be put on notice to take lifecycle responsibility for their products.  Interesting area.

Posted by Martin at 4:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 11, 2008

Another Google Chrome problem

I have been using DropBox and love it. unfortunately it doesn’t support chrome.  So the updates were not happening. The Dropbox forum says that your default browser has to be IE or FireFox to have sync working.  I switch back to FireFox and sync works.  Sorry Chrome.

Posted by Martin at 6:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 8, 2008

Some background on Freecycle

In researching recommerce, I came across a well written article from Grist on Freecycle and the conflict they had with Waste Management as a sponsor. When WM first sponsored, Freecycle was 1.2M users, now it is > 6M. The "fracas" doesn't seem to have hurt them.

Posted by Martin at 9:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

More reasons to call your senator and oppose the auto bail out

Dear Martin,
Theyve reached a deal with the automakers the same automakers who are investing millions of dollars in lawsuits to prevent states from selling cleaner cars.Congress will take a vote on this in a few days.Let them know TODAY that they should only vote YES on the bailout if it stamps out the auto companies lawsuits against state Clean Car laws.Climate Solutions helped pass Washington and Oregon's Clean Cars bills that will ensure cleaner, more fuel efficient cars are sold in both states starting next year.But, the auto industry has been suing to prevent us from putting this into action. Please call the Congressional Hotline and tell them you want to leave a message for your senators, congressman and for Congressman Barney Frank.
Hotline:(202) 224-3121Here is the message: Vote YES on the bailout ONLY if it stamps out the auto companies lawsuits against state Clean Car laws.
See the related article "Call it "Green Mobility" by Climate Solutions' Policy Director, KC Golden.

Posted by Martin at 2:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Call your Senator and oppose the UAW full employment act

Congress, in bailing out the car companies, is not demanding that the United Auto Workers renegotiate labor contracts that are bankrupting the car companies.In fact, Congress is going to hand over your money without anyone really doing much of anything to fix problems.
This is unacceptable.Call your Senator at 202-224-3121 and tell him to oppose the auto industry bailout.

There is a good piece on this over at RedState. But this should not be a partisan issue. Although the Democrats are playing it as such. The proposal is 100% United Auto Worker pork and payback for them donating tens of milions to the Democrats in the recent election cycle. The auto companies need to go into bankruptcy so they can actually reorganize their businesses and make the hard renegotiations that need to happen. Including the labor contracts. Without bankruptcy, the companies are on the hook for the excessive labor contracts. Did you know that over at Ford when they laid off workers last year, the UAW contract required them to keep paying workers for 2 years! Wouldn't that be nice. That liability is a major factor in the companies not being economically viable.

The other is that they simply make too many cars. Lets do some simple math.
Americans: About 300M
New Cars/year: About 30M
Average life of a car: About 20 years.

See anything there? We are making cars at a 10 year replacement rate when they live 20 years. We are making 2X too many cars, using 2X too many employees, resources, etc. We only need about 15M cars/year to replace the old ones. Anything else is excessive consumption. We need an auto industry half the size. Do not let congress support the industry in the current form.

Posted by Martin at 12:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 7, 2008

so what is with oil?

Can we all go back to driving big SUV's? Was all the "peak oil" stuff just a bunch of crap? Don't believe it. The latest fundamental supply/demand numbers show that oil has peaked. The prices reflect the deleveraging of the financial system. When the people have to generate cash quickly, they sell what liquid assets they have. commodities sell. So prices are down. But demand/supply have not changed. We are still tight. We have overcorrected in price. I predict > $100/barrel by next summer.

Posted by Martin at 10:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Buzz is thinking about recommerce too

The problem of used books. Where to go with them?
Kashless.org will have a solution soon.

Posted by Martin at 10:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 2, 2008

Paper bottle could save the planet

I love it!  I hope they get into production.  More.

 

Posted by Martin at 4:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

the Liquidity trap

Jim Anderson over at SVB published a very insightful piece on the Liquidity trap we are in now (below).  The key take away’s from the Japanese 10 year stagflation and the failure of FDR government led stimulus in the last Depression? 

1.  Higher marginal tax rates make the problem worse and longer (listening Democrats?)

2.  When government expands it “crowds out” private industry taking away the ability of industry to grow, create jobs, recover in any way.  You need private sector demand to drive the recovery.

Don’t let your government do that this time.

 

Liquidity Trap

This year one of the best performing asset classes is cash. People used to boast about hot stocks they owned. Now they crow about how much of their money is in cash. Those holding cash have been richly rewarded with no losses and opportunities to buy assets (condos and equities) at huge discounts. As prices continue to decline those that moved too quickly to buy at the bottom are seen as fools. Consider the massive losses of the sovereign wealth funds, BofA with the Countrywide deal and even Warren Buffet's latest foray into GE and Goldman Sachs. Investors, convinced that prices will continue to decline, sit with their liquid resources on the sidelines. As that investment demand takes a holiday, prices will decline further.

This phenomenon is well understood. In the 1930s it was called the liquidity trap. Households took their money out of the banks and literally buried in the backyard or under a mattress. When that happened the money supply contracted another notch and the lack of transactions cut into the velocity of money. As the supply of money and bank reserves dried up, credit availability declined and asset prices fell yet again. Today, because of FDIC insurance it is not the households that lack trust in the banking system, but rather, the bankers themselves. Even with Fed Funds at one percent, the lending rate among banks (LIBOR) until recently was stuck above four percent. Even now with four-week LIBOR down to 1.21 percent, it is 100 bps above Treasuries. Incredibly, the four-week bill is yielding one lonely basis point. We saw the same effect in Japan in the 1990s when their banks were clogged with bad loans and were unwilling to lend despite funding costs at zero percent. The largest banks instituted strategies to refuse additional institutional deposits because they had no loans they wanted to make. It took more than a decade for a modicum of liquidity and transactional velocity to return to the Japanese economy.

We can hope that our leaders today would benefit from the experience of the 1930s. Some of the mistakes made during that era have been carefully chronicled as extending and deepening the crisis. Chief among them were higher marginal tax rates, increases in import tariffs and a lack of international coordination producing round after round of competitive currency devaluations. Unfortunately, the history is still too fresh to allow a completely rational perspective and the debate now raging among economists is being filtered through a political lens that has as its focal point the historical standing of FDR. The editorial exchanges between Paul Krugman and others found him stretching to defend a political ideology which had little to do with economics. Lest we get to far afield, the data show that the Depression — as measured by economic activity and unemployment — got slightly better, then worse, then stabilized at a very low level compared to the 1920s. The one thing perhaps all can agree on is that the true end of the Great Depression did not occur until after the start of WWII. Employing millions of men in the activity of destroying most of the economically productive assets on the planet was after all an obvious solution. At once, demand was created with all those new jobs and supply was severely constricted. Naturally prices began to rise (rapidly after the war) and the deflationary spiral was broken.

To be sure, global conflagration is not a policy direction anyone would endorse no matter what the effectiveness. So why didn't the New Deal produce the desired results? One concept now gaining a following is the crowding out effect of government intervention in large areas of economic activity. As new projects were created under government control, the productive assets were pulled out of private hands. The government could pay higher wages and command lower materials costs essentially pushing any hope of private sector competition aside. To enhance their commanding position, laws were passed to favor the government entities over private business. As an example, suppose the Big Three of Detroit are nationalized. How long would it take some enterprising congressman from Ann Arbor to introduce legislation making it more difficult for Toyota, Honda and Nissan to compete? To use a catch phrase we hear all too frequently these days, they would do it to "protect the taxpayers' interests." Soon cars would be more expensive and quality would decline. Jobs would vanish as foreign manufacturers moved to other more friendly markets. Finally, the shrinking private sector would be unable to cope with the ever increasing tax burden needed to pay for the expenditures required by more government intervention. If you want a small example of what happened in the New Deal, consider the recent distortions in our mortgage market delivered by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The bigger worry is the case of Japan where for more than a decade they followed every policy prescription Western economists could devise. The failure of these measures is often attributed to their lack of intestinal fortitude in dealing with a banking sector awash in bad loans. Pretending bad loans were solid did not increase trust in the banks or increase their propensity to lend. Now, we also are hearing policy ideas intended to "keep people in their homes." A bad mortgage loan will not become a good loan even with some government edict. If fact, the edict will ruin the market's ability to make loans to creditworthy borrowers because they will never know when the government will allow them to enforce their legal rights to the collateral. A sort of Gresham's law of lending will ensue with the less competent government lender crowding out the more demanding private lender. The disturbing bottom line is we don't really understand in detail what happened in Japan.

There appears to be a consensus that the economy was over-levered from households to corporations to government sponsored entities. Leverage as measured by total debt to GDP grew from 140 percent 30 years ago to over 220 percent today. If that defines the problem then the solution should be a deleveraging over the next thirty years. That deleveraging will cause prices to fall dramatically as the credit supply shrinks, money supply falls and velocity slows. The policy agenda currently in vogue is to maintain the leverage and the asset prices by shifting all that debt from the private sector to the public. Why are we doing this? Because the near term political heat from a deep recession and re-pricing of assets is more than any of our leaders can handle. Eventually that massive intervention and concomitant increase in the money supply will come with a hefty price tag.

Anna Swartz, co-author with Milton Friedman of A Monetary History of the United States, addressed that question in a recent Barron's interview. She speculated that the deflationary impact of collapsing credit will be offset by the inflationary momentum of liquidity currently flooding in from the Fed and the Treasury. Pulling off that balancing act would be the central banking tour de force of the modern era. We wonder if working that delicate arrangement isn't perhaps riskier than simply allowing the short and harsh brutality of the market to work its wonders of creative destruction.

Posted by Martin at 4:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Yes sir it is Christmas

Finn and I brought out Karaoke Santa.  It must be the season.

 

Martin Sing’s along with Santa, Jingle Bells

Hello Santa, what do you think of this economic slow down?

Posted by Martin at 4:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The slowdown hits my Prosper portfolio

I had been feeling pretty good that my Prosper portfolio was paying 11.73% and had no late payments six months ago.  Unfortunately today out of 27 loans there are three late and in collections.  The balances are small, but it is a sign of the times.  I wonder when Prosper writes off the loans and adjusts you average return figures.  Prosper is still in lock-down due to the Cease and Desist order and i hope they get out of it.

Posted by Martin at 9:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Morgan Stanley downgrades Clean Energy sector

Nick over at Morgan issued a good report on Clean Energy yesterday.  Unfortunately the dominance of fossil fuels continues and all the air has been sucked out of clean energy. Even Solar. The ongoing credit crunch means that these new technologies are not getting funded.  I can hear Exxon and the coal industry cheering.

 

What's Changed
Industry View: Clean Energy: Attractive to In-Line

Downgrading industry to In-Line from Attractive. We think 2009 will remain a challenge overall for the space due to access to financing, FX pressures, ASP declines, margin compression, and retrenchment in fossil fuel prices. That said, our long-term positive growth thesis, particularly on solar, is unchanged: We view current energy demand destruction as transitory, while long-term secular drivers - emergence, energy security, environment, and economics - remain intact. We expect a better long-term entry point in 3-6 months.

We remain Overweight industry leaders FSLR and SPWRA relative to the group, for three reasons we think are underappreciated by investors: 1) Both companies' solutions are nearly competitive with peak electricity prices in California. 2) The US is likely to announce aggressive new clean energy policies, disproportionally benefitting domestic leaders. 3) Both companies are benefiting from a flight to quality among project developers and lenders. We've also laid out a scenario framework for how investors should think about drivers and catalysts for the group in 2009.

Key debates: 1) Policy. We expect aggressive policy from the Obama administration to act as catalysts for the group, but implementation will take time; the stocks could be volatile as they react to positive news flow, then trade down on policy execution. 2) Pricing. ASP and margin pressure will likely persist, but developer IRRs and falling input costs should be a backstop. 3)Parity. Grid parity (when renewables are cost competitive with the grid) in the US is closer than many think, driven by US utilities and California policy.

Lowering price targets and most estimates. We are reducing our targets on FSLR (to $175) and SPWRA (to $50) and reducing estimates for ESLR, BIOF and PEIX.

Where's the risk? Macro, financing, and pricing pressures, coupled with slow policy realization, could cause even top names to trade flat or down near term.

Posted by Martin at 8:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 1, 2008

Is free really free?

I signed up to be notified of “free” offers through FatWallet a couple weeks ago.  Since Fatwallet free section is really an extension of a shopping engine, I expected most of the “free” offers to not really be free. I have not been disappointed. 

 

For example today, someone posted a “free” reusable grocery tote from Stouffers.  Over a dozen people wrote to say thanks and that they signed up. The “offer” was rated high on FatWallet, so I checked it out.  Stouffers is doing a standard lead generation campaign.  They want people to sign up for their “dinner club” and enter their Stouffer’s dinners they eat to earn “points” which can be donated or used in “Auctions” for fabulous prizes.  You get 100 points for opening an account. That account costs you your full name, address, valid phone number, and five demographic profile questions about your household and eating habits.  For that you get 100 “points”.  For the month of December, the kind folks at Stouffers are offering to “give” a free meal (value $0.07) to Feed America for every 20 points donated.  So basically the 100 points Stouffers gave you cost them $0.35 cash.  And they got a valid name/address/phone/demographic information and the right to call you (in the TOS they get you to waive your no-call registration) and spam you with any offer they like.  The best $0.35 Stouffer ever spent. 

Oh, the tote.  They say that for every 20 points donated to Feed America, they will deliver one grocery tote 6-8 weeks after Dec. 31 while supplies last.  Let me guess how many totes they have.  I guess less than 10.  And a tote costs $0.99 in the store, in bulk probably $0.30.  I bet I don’t get a tote even though I donated all my 100 points. 

I wish there was an easy way to provide transparency to these kinds of offers.

Posted by Martin at 9:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

More fixies in NYC

I love the simplicity of this one

check out the bars

Posted by Martin at 9:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack