Brian Gongol
February 2010 update to the EconDirectory
It's a massive collection of data on the most-visited (and least-visited) websites about business and economics. The evidence suggests that a "long tail" effect persists among these sites just as it is thought to exist everywhere else on the Internet. See the average daily visits of the ranked sites, illustrated on a logarithmic scale:
It's really quite pleasing to see real-world data that fits so smoothly with what the models predict.
Google could be building a babelfish for phones
The babelfish is a fictional character from the riveting Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, capable of instantaneously translating any language into another. (That's why the Yahoo/Alta Vista Babelfish translation site is named that way.) Now it's being posited that Google is working on instantaneous translation using a combination of its voice-to-text software (developed for and through Google Voice) and its text-translation software (widely used around the world, even though most English speakers probably don't know it). This only seems to reinforce the argument that Google Voice is being used as a testing ground for voice-to-text algorithms which have myriad other applications as well. But it may also be one of those early symptoms of Google's eventual demise, since there's already some serious skepticism about whether the company will adequately protect individual privacy if people use such a service. The more skeptical people become of Google's motives, the more likely it becomes that the company will have trouble gaining the returns on investment that it requires in order to keep growing at a pace that keeps with its shareholders' demands. Americans seem to trust the small and upstart online services more than they trust the large and established, and Google is becoming the most established of all. That tilts the marketplace in favor of upstarts, even when Google has mountains of cash to devote to research and product development. Google's best bet right now, counterintuitive though it may be, is to focus on holding its ground in a handful of Internet services where it has a clear competitive advantage (search engines, video delivery, and e-mail would be obvious examples) -- but to diversify away from the Internet everywhere else. Become an energy company. Become a medical-research company. Become a homebuilder or a travel company, for all it matters. But recognize that the early symptoms of Google consumer skepticism likely portend greater skepticism in the future, and an even tougher job to be done to keep asking consumers to trust the company with more of their Internet-related lives.
"How to Report the News"
(Video - with a handful of foul words) Truly a slam-dunk indictment of television news. Brilliant.
Adult women shouldn't make crib sheets of their palms
Sarah Palin appears to have scribbled talking points into the palm of her hand in advance of the "tea party" convention this past weekend. Is it a big deal? Not really. But it's hard to take a person like Palin seriously when she clearly is neither the smartest person in the room, nor seems interested in becoming that person. People of average intelligence can have greater-than-average curiosity that more than compensates for their natural state. She doesn't seem to be one of those people.
Tremendous damage done to public health by the anti-vaccine movement
Show notes from the Brian Gongol Show on January 31, 2010
The better part of a full transcript of the Sunday night radio show about making money and having fun
Plant closure will cut Sioux City sewer revenues by 7%
Lasting success is a matter of getting the little things right with mind-numbing consistency
An amazing number of people seem to think that they can succeed on a fast track -- a perfect example is the person who thinks he'll become wealthy if only he can get five minutes of face time with Warren Buffett or the one who thinks she'll become an overnight sensation if only Simon Cowell will listen to her demo tape. There is no such short-circuit to durable success.
A history of the world, documented via objects
If the objects all around us are really just aggregations of the accumulated knowledge of all human history, then the BBC's attractive display of those objects might be one of the best history lessons around
British company figures out how to make pressure-sensitive screens
And Samsung is among the companies that have licensed the technology.
Should Apple keep an exclusive agreement with AT&T to sell the iPhone?
Short answer: It's a bad business decision, but it's nothing for the government to step in and break up
Retinal implants could allow the blind to see well enough to navigate a room
Iowa Legislature puts stamp of approval on new water-quality rules
Google launches a shot at Twitter and Facebook simultaneously
Calling it "Google Buzz", the company appears to be trying to ape the "status update" concept and integrate it with the tool people still use most online: e-mail. There will be stumbling blocks: Some serious privacy flaws have emerged right out of the gate (not the least of which is that Buzz advertises a user's most-contated friends by default, which isn't necessarily the kind of thing a person wants to advertise), and there are probably as many unanswered questions about the tool as there are posts already on it -- not the least of which is whether Google will show the wherewithal to stick with the project over the long term. But its launch is irrefutable evidence that it's remarkably tough to be in the online-services business. A service like Twitter has to be constantly on guard against new, powerful, and well-funded rivals like Google, and giants like Google have to work so hard to maintain their dominance that they have to be seen as operating in a perpetual state of innovation. Consumers win in the long term, but it's hard not to imagine that these kinds of companies, on balance, are destroying more investor wealth than they're actually creating. Expect vast turmoil for Twitter, Facebook, and Google over the next decade, as well as any of the companies trying to be like them.
Don't expect a Tea Party political party to emerge
It's just a temporary movement built on voter frustration. But "Taxed Enough Already" is not enough of a platform upon which to build a durable political party. Are we taxed enough already? Self-evidently not: We have a $12.3 trillion debt, built not on loans for roads and bridges, but mainly on our failure to pay for things as we go along. Clearly we spend far more than we tax, so rather than saying we're "taxed enough already", perhaps we should talk about how we're "lavishing ourselves too much already". But "LOTMA party" doesn't quite have the same ring to it at "TEA party", now does it?
How American regions can be defined by Facebook relationships
Using data from Facebook profiles, a researcher has come up with his suggested map of the regions of the United States, marking where people have the most connections with out-of-town friends. It should probably come as no surprise that the map ends up looking a lot like the map from Joel Garreau's "Nine Nations of North America", published in the 1980s.
Craig Ferguson arrives on Twitter
He's doing exactly what any smart celebrity should be doing right now -- building a durable online brand that doesn't depend upon networks or production companies to promote the talent. Conan O'Brien would have been much better off had he done the same thing long before it became apparent that NBC was going to push him around for Jay Leno. O'Brien didn't, and now he's silenced by a non-compete agreement. Had he established himself online independently before the need became apparent, it would have been much harder for NBC to have pushed him out.
The rise of the commuter airlines
PBS's often-excellent program "Frontline" did an interesting piece on the rise of commuter airlines, and they've developed an interesting interactive map illustrating where commuter airlines fly and just how prevalent they are at a wide range of airports
Parts of South Dakota go without water service for two weeks
Google's founders are liquidating part of their holdings
Page and Brin will continue to have almost 50% of the voting control of the company, but they're each selling about $2.75 billion worth of stock. From a personal-finance standpoint, it makes perfect sense: They're probably being advised to diversify, and undoubtedly they'd simply like a billion or two in cash just to play with. However, their behavior is a signal to the market that Google is insufficiently diverse. Sure, the company is getting into a lot of different online services, from e-mail to video to mapping, but it's still an online-services company. Until it is more broadly diversified, it's going to be held hostage to the whims of a very fickle online-using public. All that has to happen to really blow up Google's presently-dominant position in the marketplace is for a knockout smartphone to hit the market, built on a competitor's platform and available on lots of different networks (the iPhone could've done this kind of damage, but it didn't in part because of Apple's deal with AT&T) -- and for a competitor like Microsoft to really hit a home run with a novel approach to search (like what they're trying to do with Wolfram Alpha). Cut Google off from the biggest area of future growth (mobile browsing) and current revenues (search-related advertising), and they're going to be in a world of hurt. Google needs to start working on strategically investing in new lines of business where its computing power and corporate culture could give it a competitive advantage, like medical or agricultural research. Undoubtedly, Pfizer and DuPont would rather not face heat from Google's enormous computing resources. But that just doesn't seem to be the direction in which Google is headed, and that's why the co-founders are smart to cash out, at least to some degree, today. The founders of Facebook and Twitter will come to regret someday that they didn't sell out. They're in too unstable a marketplace to stay dominant for long. Of course, the same advice applies to rivals like Microsoft as it does to Google: Instead of trying to eat one another's lunch, get into other lines of business, especially while revenues are high and profits are leaving the corporate coffers stuffed with cash. Tech giants will fall; they always have. It should be noted that Google's Page and Brin are going to pay a hefty penalty in the form of taxes as they sell their stock; it's a penalty that Warren Buffett has avoided by never really selling out of Berkshire Hathaway. Retained and reinvested earnings get much kinder treatment from the IRS than cash payouts.
The United States has a surprisingly low ratio of representatives to people
Other Western countries have far more representatives per voter in their national assemblies and parliaments. Counting the House and the Senate, we have one member of Congress for every 575,000 people (roughly speaking). In Germany, it's something like one for every 137,000. In the UK, it's one for every 93,000 or so. We would be much better off with a much larger Congress, and this is just a small sliver of the evidence in favor. Smaller districts make it easier to "throw the bums out" and renders term limits unnecessary. It's much easier to run an outsider campaign when one's entire district only contains 100,000 people than when it contains seven times as many.
A few predictions for 2020
For a time that's only ten years away, we as a culture seem to have put very little thought into where this train is headed. An exercise in making predictions like this is such an exception to the rule, people only seem to feel comfortable doing it as the decade rolls over. The reality is that every organization ought to have a 100-year plan (with lots of intermediate stops, of course, between now and a century in the future) and ought to update it annually.
Americans keep living longer lives
...and we're not even saving enough (on average) to last through yesterday's life expectancies. This savings gap is growing, and it's a massive problem.
Bill Clinton in a time machine
Omaha plans for higher sewer fees
Haitian earthquake death toll centers on 217,000
A month after the quake, the country is still really just in survival mode. In the near term, they're going to need to construct some form of infrastructure to handle just the essential utilities required to make public health and safety possible. But what really needs to happen is that some kind of economic development needs to take place there. The country receives a quarter of GDP from remittances sent by expatriates. If the world really wanted to do some long-term good in Haiti, it would find ways to make the nation attractive for foreign and domestic investment alike.
Are people looking far enough ahead with their investments?
Short answer: No. One of the best rules of thumb for investing (courtesy of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger) is this: Would you be comfortable buying this stock or bond today and not getting another quote on its price for another ten years? Day-traders and other short-term traders are only fooling themselves if they think they're "investing." Investment usually involves a minimum of trading.
Internet search history admitted as evidence establishing murder suspect's state of mind
It's a new record for snow so far this year