Steve Jobs blames teacher unions

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions Friday, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.

Source: Cafe Hayek

Does change in exchange rates affect international trade?

If yesterday one dollar bought 100 yen, and today one dollar buys 120 yen, each dollar today buys 20 percent more Japanese goods than it bought yesterday.

Source: Cafe Hayek: Hooray for a Strong Dollar

Really! So, presumably, this 20% more japanese products came out of nowhere in a day?

Or did he meant to say that purchasing power has shifted from holders of Japanese Yen to holders of US dollars. But how can we conclude that merely from the fact that exchange ratio between dollars and Yen has changed.

If say, Japanese govt. has printed more Yen. It will simply inflate the prices of all products in Yen. US dollars will also appreciate compared to Yen but (may) not appreciate compared to Japanese products.

So, why would US dollars be able to buy more Japanese products?

If amount of US dollars and Japanese products in the market haven't changed in a day, why would their ratio (prices) change?

Bay Area and House Prices

Burbed.com, is my favorite blog when it comes to housing market. It is witty, sarcastic and informative. This post is just too good to pass!.

If you ask ask most people in the Bay Area “Why did homes get so expensive in the last few years?” you’ll probably here these reasons:

1. It’s not a bubble: They’re not making any more land. It’s special here. (Who knew that land suddenly decreased?)
2. It’s not a bubble: Weather. It’s special here. (Who knew that the weather suddenly got so much better?)
3. It’s not a bubble: Everyone wants to live here. It’s special here. (But why so much so in the last few years?)
4. It’s not a bubble: Web 2.0, Google, The Valley is BACK! Oh, and it’s special here.

The last one is distinctly possible. Google IPOed in 2004, instantly creating thousands of millionaires/billionaires. The job market has picked back up. Traffic is back with a vengeance.

Ok, so maybe that explains these two graphs:

Source: How the Bay Area caused home prices to go up nationally… -- Burbed.com: Your Silicon Valley Home and Mortgage Insanity Blog

Festival of Stocks - February 5, 2007

Welcome to the February 5, 2007 edition of festival of stocks.

Sean Hackbarth says AirTran is Trying to Get Midwest for Cheap.

Paul Smith analyzes "the effect of Magazine tips when used in combination with Fundamental Analysis."

makingourway tackles the challenge of all bad choices in selecting 401k options with Merrill Lynch.

Larry Russell says Most individuals are poor investment portfolio managers

For all the time and effort that many individuals put into stock picking, you would hope that their economic wages would be very high for this activity. Sadly, the opposite seems to be true for most individual investors.

TJP analyzes the investment potential of Crocs (CROX), the hottest footwear company in the U.S in, Crocs: Own A Pair and Buy Some Shares.

wcsinvestor explains, in Reasoning about Two Sub-prime Lenders, how Sub-Prime Lenders can be a good investment.

"Not all sub-prime lenders are doomed. I go through a reasoning exercise to explain why Nicholas Financial and CompuCredit are good investments."

Paul Smith presents Quick Analysis of 0 -10c stocks with PE under 10.

Matthew Paulson presents The Ultimate Guide to Choosing Mutual Funds.

Scott Lee presents Become a Rock Star of Business.

TJP presents 3 Australian Uranium Stocks You Should Know.

H.S. Ayoub presents biotech stocks, news, commentary - BioHealth Investor.

H.S. Ayoub presents Government Contract Could Set Hollis-Eden Stock Soaring.

Travis Johnson presents Doubly Pinky Promise from Blackboard (BBBB):

"Blackboard (BBBB) angered a lot of its customers by trying to enforce a surprisingly broad patent ... now its promising to let open source competition move forward. What does that mean for this near-monopoly software provider?"

Bryan C. Fleming presents Million Dollar Savings Club Update: Week 5.

Brian Schumacher presents Charts of the Week - CLRT and AZL.

George presents Sally Beauty Holdings Question:

"Some thoughts on whether Sally Beauty will be added to a major index and whether the stock has already been dumped by the Big money."

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of festival of stocks using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: festival of stocks, blog carnival.

Festival of Stocks

I am very happy to announce that I will be hosting the "Festival of Stocks" on February 5th here. Please send in your nominations through comments on this post, by email (ahanwadi-at-gmail.com) or through this form at BlogCarnival. You can nomination your own posts also. I am hosting this carnival for the first time and look forward to receiving great posts!

The current edition of the carnival is being hosted by One Guy's Investments blog.

For the first time or new visitors to my blog, here are a few of my investing/economy related posts:

• Investment Strategy - Outlines my basic investment strategy.
• Buy vs Rent House in the Bay Area - Discusses the buying vs renting house in the overheated Bay Area.
• Book Tag - Discusses my various favorite books, including investment related books.
• Low fee Index funds vs Actively managed Mutual funds - The title says it all.
• Pearls of wisdom from Charlie Munger

"Guru"'s Businessman Hero

Those frustrated to see persistent bashing of business as evil in Bollywood (and Hollywood) movies will welcome the "Guru". I plan to see it as soon as the DVD version is released.

Who would ever have thought that one of the villains of a Bollywood film could be import duty? "Guru," the latest Bollywood blockbuster by the respected director Mani Ratnam, is that rare film -- perhaps Bollywood's first -- in which free markets are lauded as a force for good. Aliens emerging from the Taj Mahal would be less surprising.

"Guru" stars Abhishek Bachchan as Gurukant Desai, a character inspired by Dhirubhai Ambani. Ambani was that rare tycoon who went from rags to riches during the worst years of India's license raj, building Reliance Industries, which today is India's largest private-sector company. In the era in which Ambani flourished, the state strangled private enterprise with licenses, regulations and sundry restrictions. Jawaharlal Nehru's dictum that "Profit is a dirty word" about sums it up.

Source: Bollywood's New Capitalist Hero - WSJ.com

An just and efficent land acquisition

Nandigram village, near Haldia in West Bengal, is up in arms against forcible land acquisition for the Indonesian Salim group’s proposed project. In this case, I do support Arundhati Roy and others who are trying to support the rights of the villagers:

Left and left-of-centre intellectuals like Arundhati Roy, Romila Thapar, Jean Dreze, Sumit Sarkar and others in a joint statement said the tense situation in Nandigram is "likely to be repeated across the state if the policy continues to be executed as it has, without consideration for human rights, democratic procedures and livelihoods".

I wonder if what happened in Nandigram, Singur and Narmada will prompt this leftists to support property rights. Without property rights, only way against govertment violation of property rights is case-by-case agitation. With property rights, the courts will be on the side of those whose property rights are or will be affected.

In the end, we need to ensure that land acquisition is possible without force and without excessive transaction costs and veto by mischievous minorities. Swaminathan Aiyar's proposal for community-led land acquisition sounds pretty interesting!

As a libertarian, I instinctively dislike forced acquisition of the property of citizens by governments. So I support the farmer agitations in Singur and Nandigram against land acquisition by the West Bengal government for the Tata and Salim groups.

I do so with some reluctance, since I would love to see a re-industrialised West Bengal. But there are good and bad ways of achieving this. The wrong way is for state governments to acquire land by fiat. The right way is to empower farmers to become partners in industrialisation.

The Prime Minister has promised a new, humane displacement policy. This implies, rightly, that the old policy was inhumane. In the holy name of socialism, the government acquired land for any purpose it pleased, public or private, and decided what compensation to give. The abolition of the fundamental right to property in 1976 meant that compensation depended on the whim of politicians, not farmers' rights.

...

However, a problem can arise when industry requires a block of contiguous land, and a few naysaying farmers exercise an effective veto even when the vast majority of farmers want to sell. The current answer is forced acquisition. Far better will be a new acquisition law that empowers farmers themselves to decide.

After all, if a few naysayers block a deal, they are affecting the property rights of farmers who want to sell. The new land law should provide for state governments or corporations to negotiate acquisition proposals with farmers, and then let the farmers vote on the deal. If a large majority--it could be two-thirds or three-quarters--vote in favour of selling, this should be binding on the minority.
In this scheme, the final decision will lie not with the state government or corporation, but with the community of farmers. It will constitute community-led acquisition. It will respect both the property rights and dignity of farmers, and make them full partners in industrialisation.

...

The third feature of the new law should be to ensure that village residences stay untouched even when surrounding farmland is sold to corporations. A typical industrial estate consists of a core area that has to be walled off for security and tax reasons, and a non-core area with residences, community facilities and parks. The original villages should be incorporated into the non-core zones, which will then have a mixed population of villagers and sahibs, and not be enclaves of sahibs alone.

The U.S. government is a big insurance company, with a side business in national security: Paul Krugman

Found the above quote while browsing the Paul Krugman archive. Wow! It kinda puts the whole attitude of liberals towards the government and national security in the perspective! Isn't it?

Why do they want to dismantle it?

It's hard to understand why anyone would want to return us to the days before the New Deal, when millions of elderly people lived in poverty. But if you really dislike the notion that the government provides a safety net for the poor, then Social Security is the prime target. The U.S. government is a big insurance company, with a side business in national security. Social Security is the biggest social-insurance program that we have. It's been highly successful, and it's extremely popular. It's one of the things that makes people feel somewhat good about government -- and so, therefore, it must go.

The Fake Crisis: Economist Paul Krugman explains Bush's latest con -- Social Security

Pakistan's ISI helped Taliban: A Taliban Spokesman

Abdul Haq, better known as Dr. Hanif, was caught just hours after crossing the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan in Nangahar province.

...

Afghan investigators say that under questioning, Dr. Hanif, who had been working with the Taliban for the past 14 months, told them that the organization would never have been able to challenge Afghan military and NATO forces without the direct assistance of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. "This means that according to his confession, the ISI of Pakistan is directly involved in funding, arming and supporting the Taliban and other opposition groups against the government of Afghanistan," says NDS spokesman Sayed Ansari.

Although the ISI is believed to have played a major role in nurturing the Taliban and bringing it to power in the mid-1990s, Pakistan has routinely denied the accusation that it continues to provide support or a permissive environment for the organization. Just last week, outgoing U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte warned that while Pakistan is "a frontline partner in the war on terror," it is also the country "where the Taliban and al-Qaeda maintain critical sanctuaries." Al-Qaeda, he said, is "cultivating stronger operational connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders' secure hideout in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe."

And on a visit to Afghanistan Tuesday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated the point, saying, "There are more attacks coming across the border; there are al-Qaeda networks operating on the Pakistani side of the border. And these are issues that we clearly will have to pursue with the Pakistani government."

Source: A Taliban Spokesman's Confession -- Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2007 -- Page 1 -- TIME

It's not as if we need further proof of ISI's support of terrorists.

One this I did not understand, though! How is it a confession if a Taliban Spokesman says that al-Qaeda received the help from Pakistan's ISI?

A Good Advise on Software Schedules

This is a bit old post but nevertheless a very useful one. Joel Spolsky recommends using Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Project for software schedules. Among the recommendations are:

1. Use Microsoft Excel
2. Keep it Simple
3. Estimates should be left to programmers
4. Estimates should be fine-grained
5. Debugging and Integration time for each tasks/feature should be added