Brian Gongol

The founder of Quicken Loans wants to get some streamlined government approval for a massive redevelopment of the downtown area in America's 14th-largest metro. At some point, as long as the infrastructure for a city remains at least mainly in functional condition, a real-estate market from which the bottom drops out will eventually attract someone who thinks the future return on the investment is worth the risk. And there's no evading the fact that Detroit is on sale. It's possible -- not certain, but possible -- that a model that suspends most government regulation might be the swiftest way to attract the investment needed to get Detroit on the rebound. The city needs it: They're under emergency financial management. And Detroit isn't alone...quite sadly, we need to be aware of the risk that as cities find themselves unwilling or unable to make good on promises made over the years (especially to pension programs), more may find themselves in grave financial trouble. Stockton, California, has 300,000 people...and a $900 million debt to Calpers. That's $3,000 in pension debt for every resident. It's going to get ugly when pension obligations in other cities come due and nobody's prepared to pay. The problem at the municipal level is a reflection of the problem at the national level, too: Too many promises have been made by a government that hasn't been funding those promises adequately. (This tension, by the way, must be kept in mind when the same government makes additional promises to pay for more things in the future.)

The CEO, using some salty but direct language, says mobile phone contracts are unreasonable and argues that T-Mobile's no-contract plan means customers will pay less over time, even if they lose the carrier subsidy for their phones


A huge online database run by the General Services Administration was found to have a big security vulnerability, which the government is now scrambling to fix. And thus we have a great case study in "Why you don't want the Federal government to centralize too many things". Massive national databases are a very attractive target for digital criminals.

The US military has been planning for the possibility, which isn't outside the realm of imagination. The greater the number of threats, the more likely it is that North Korea will do something to prove at least some of those threats to be credible. But the Communist system there is untenable in the long term, and long-term untenability risks short-term instability, and that could happen without a great deal of provocation. South Korea is standing its ground on the provocations, which it must.

They've just overstayed their visas. And the visa process is anything but clear and direct. It's well past time for reform.

An iPhone with Instagram is now all a person needs to take pictures good enough for the front page of the New York Times







And public relations

Yes...it's actually quite likely over the next decade. The US is gaining a big energy advantage with the shale-gas boom, and China's labor-price advantage is diminishing rapidly.



But the country appears to be gaining a really good chair of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. One can only hope he can spread some of the sense of responsibility he brought to his state auditor role.


It's clearly a competitive threat, but Microsoft is a badly-underrated company

They didn't go after a full Facebook phone because selling 10 or 20 million phones "wouldn't move the needle" for the company

Medicine seems to still be working on an answer

A UK think tank points out that early-detection systems give warning of potential famines almost 12 months before they happen -- but the early detection still isn't translating into swift action. We have the means to feed the world, even if nature doesn't always cooperate...but it's human beings that stand in the way of making sure that other people get fed.

It's Google's service for delivering 1 Gbps broadband Internet service -- that's one gigabit per second, or about 100 times faster than the speeds widely found on DSL or cable services. In much of western Europe, 100 Mbps Internet speeds are widely found (that's about ten times faster than American standards...and about a tenth of the speed of Google Fiber). European customers tend to have two things working to their advantage: More competition among Internet providers, and a much higher population density (which makes it easier to get the physical cables in place to deliver high-speed broadband).

A very clever design for a ranch-style home with a huge volume of window space and an open, flexible floorplan

It's possible to do so rather easily, thanks to the Internet, so it should probably happen more often -- as a matter of building and reinforcing credibility and trust

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Show notes for the "WHO Radio Wise Guys"

If you loan money to the Federal government for 5, 7, 10, or even 20 years, you will actually get paid less in interest than you will lose in buying power over that same time. In other words, it's a negative "real" rate of interest. That's exceptional...people around the world remain so fearful of the future that they're willing to pay the Federal government of the United States for the "privilege" of letting the government borrow their money. This behavior is clinically insane.

The progress of technology, the growth in regulation, the hazard of steep tax increases to come, the natural-gas boom, the global marketplace, and the very deep cuts to interest rates all mean that we're in an economic phase that is very bad for people without skills or capital, even though lots of companies are doing quite well. It's all easy to lay out, but seeing where the future lies may be something else altogether.

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A "smart bracelet" is being developed that would track aid workers in faraway lands, giving them the option to trigger a signal that could be relayed both to GPS tracking and to social media if they find themselves in dangerous situations. You can have your Pebble watches and Nike Fuel bands...but this is wearable computing that could make a real difference.

The President's budget proposal that's expected to come out next week may include some new limitations on how much people are allowed to put into their retirement accounts on a tax-advantaged basis. Here's the thing about such a proposal: We can't really evaluate it until it's on paper, nor is it necessarily unreasonable to place limits on the amount to which incentives are given in order to get people to put away more money for retirement. But a government whose first instinct always is to discourage capital investment is one that implicitly discourages all of the things that are necessary to putting people to work and making their lives better.

So eulogizes the Christian Science Monitor. They conclude appropriately: "She had faith in unending progress for all".

There are plenty of problems from a savings rate that is too low: It starves the process of private-sector investment, making individuals and families less well-off in the long term. It puts households at greater risk of trouble if and when the unexpected occurs (like a water heater going bad or a surprise illness). And in an economy as consumer-spending-driven as America's, it means that policy-makers get desperate quickly when they see consumer spending decrease (since people without any savings don't have a well from which to draw in order to take advantage of bargains when the economy slows and prices fall...which is how an economy should naturally self-correct) -- so it encourages those policy-makers, in turn, to try to "prime the pump" through government borrowing and spending (which only further impoverishes the future taxpayer). But, perhaps worst of all, the progress of today's economy is away from human labor and towards time- and money-saving machines (and computers and programs) that make workers more productive than ever...meaning fewer of them are needed. It's nothing new...the John Deere plow was bad news for farmhands. But if people are under-saving (and thus under-investing in capital) at a time when capital is being rewarded proportionally better than labor is, then lots of people are making a deliberate choice to put themselves in a much worse future financial situation than they should. Some people are quick to get indignant about this inequity of payoff between labor and capital, but they're generally not thinking about the big picture -- the effort to discover time- and labor-saving devices is one of the defining currents of all human history. We settled the Great Plains because windmills let farmers get water from the ground with a lot less work. If they'd been forced to rely on hand pumps, they wouldn't have had time or the ability to become homesteaders. Even today, there are people around the world who must waste hours every day trying to collect and carry clean drinking water. Those are hours that children could instead be spending in school, and that their parents could instead be spending in many other productive pursuits. Virtually anything that saves human time and effort makes us better-off in the long run.

Fox and Univision are both starting to drop hints that they might just pick up and leave over-the-air television someday because it's getting so easy for people to watch their programming without tuning a television set at a predetermined time. While it's pretty unlikely we'd see a network dissolve anytime in the coming ten to fifteen years, it's increasingly possible that the future will depend ever less on the big broadcasting networks. After all, who would've thought 15 years ago that NBC would be in 5th place among the networks for viewers ages 18 to 49?

It's a lot more popular to talk about jobs than about capital...but wealth is necessary to buy the tools that make labor productive. Ignoring that necessity is a bad way to run a country.

We can suspend our attention to one matter and give it to another, and even cycle quickly among those things, but we can't really do two thinking things at once. Tragically, that was illustrated by a helicopter crash caused by the pilot's inattention to detail during the pre-flight inspection. He was distracted by text messaging.

A public-health study found that people are quick to believe nonsense (about the flu vaccine, in the case of the study) but not useful information. That suggests we need to think long and hard about how to disseminate public-health messages; apparently, it's a serious uphill battle. A lot more thought needs to go into how to make useful thoughts go viral.

If the Obama campaign machine (which is morphing itself during his second term into a perpetual-campaign machine), despite its much-vaunted online organizational skills, isn't sharp enough to have registered their new name as a domain name before rebranding...well, then just about anyone could probably use the reminder to protect important names as assets early on. Register your own name as a domain; do the same for your children. On a related note, none of us should be surprised at all when the "Obama For America/Organizing For Action" team decides to try to put First Lady Michelle Obama's name into contention for some kind of high office. (Strangely, though, nobody on the campaign's team apparently ever thought to register MichelleObama.com. They'll come to regret that.)



The President has proposed a budget for Fiscal Year 2014. And it's not balanced, nor does it ever estimate becoming so. A deficit equal to 6% of GDP for 2013, 4.4% for 2014, 3.2% for 2015, 2.8% for 2016, 2.4% for 2017, and 2.3% for 2018 (see page 29). Of course, that also assumes the US economy will grow 4.2% in 2013, 4.9% in 2014, 5.4% in 2015, 5.5% in 2016 and 2017, and 5.2% in 2018 (see page 27). Would that be great? Of course. Is it going to happen? No way. A 5% economic growth rate would be a delightful boom, and a 2% Federal deficit would be easily-tolerable under those conditions. But that's not what's going to happen. Even making accommodation for the fact those estimates are not adjusted for inflation, deducting out 1% to 2% for inflation still assumes a much higher expected growth rate for the economy than has been experienced with any consistency for quite a while.

They'd like to see 5% growth; they're expecting 3.3% this year

Why the political left owes Margaret Thatcher a debt of gratitude: She so shifted the political dynamic that the most outrageous statism was revealed for what it was (and is), forcing leftists to get in touch with market economics.


The Iowa town was damaged terribly by a tornado in 2011, but the people there have rebounded admirably.

The more wages rise, the less those countries retain a competitive advantage in selling their wares. Rising wages there will end up spilling over to places with even lower wage rates. Rising wages will also boost automation.

They'll be introduced in European markets first, probably as a test. One is 6.3" diagonally -- bigger than the (huge) Galaxy Note (which is about 5.5").

But Facebook's ranking as "most important" has fallen about ten percentage points over the last year. That's significant. Twitter comes in third. Parents and adults generally need to know how to supervise their kids' use of social networks.

The country's management (we can't honestly call it "leadership") is out of control. But the people didn't choose it, and they're human beings, just like the rest of us. A peaceful resolution to the tension there is badly needed, so that people don't suffer needlessly.

The state legislature is looking at revising Iowa's alcoholic-beverages rules so that home-brewers can get together and share their beers with one another. Current law says home-brewed beer can't be consumed outside the home...because, you know, we also prohibit people from sharing food at potlucks and bake sales due to essential government interest in the safety of its people. Oh, wait.

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The city is trying to cut off private-sector developers by creating a huge planned community with built-in sprawl resistance. Questions of "urban sprawl" sound pretty hilarious when you're from the part of the country that has a county bigger than Connecticut, with a population of less than 6,000.

It lasted a little more than 100 years, but they're adopting the name of the parent (Hiland Dairy) instead. Hard to fathom that it's worthwhile to burn 100 years of brand equity in an instant, but that's what someone has decided to do.

The FHA is extending it through December 31, 2015

The acquisition of Pulse is another effort by LinkedIn to make sure that it remains relevant -- no small matter in a world where MySpace went from pop-culture centrality to oblivion in what seemed like an instant. And good timing, too, as Google kills off Google Reader. Pulse could be a substitute for some users.


The allegations against Kermit Gosnell, a doctor standing trial in Philadelphia, are utterly revolting. One cannot read the account without finding endless cause for outrage.

A preview of the WHO Radio Wise Guys, which airs Saturday at 1:00

Big-city newspapers, including the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune, are for sale right now. Rumor says the Koch brothers are looking at the Tribune (which would be historically suitable; the paper has historically been a pro-business Republican paper, and they're about as pro-business Republican as they come). Of course, big-city newspapers may be highly prestigious, but they're not particularly good investments. Small-town and middle-market newspapers are still much better moneymakers than the metro dailies.

The more we learn about tornadoes, the better off many lives will be.



It'll contact people you designate and give them your passwords after a 3/6/9/12-month period after you stop logging in. Or, you know, you could always just write down the passwords and keep them in a secure location.

Notes from the "Brian Gongol Show" on WHO Radio




The high-school student was sexually assaulted, and the photos ended up online. She killed herself a week later. It's heartbreaking on so many levels.


Inflation, unemployment, and the money supply aren't coordinating quite like the old models used to predict

The Minnesota Senate is looking at raising pay for state lawmakers from $31,000 a year to $42,000 a year. The pay rate hasn't risen since 1999. Some people might argue that anyone in public service should be willing to sacrifice (financially) for the privilege. But it's also worth noting that if you want your laws to be made by an assembly of people who reflect the interests of the mainstream voter, then if the job comes with the duties of a full-time occupation, it's probably necessary to pay enough for someone to live a reasonably comfortable existence. If legislators are required to perform full-time duties but aren't paid the equivalent of a professional salary, then nobody should be surprised if the resulting legislator is filled with people who answer to special interests, working things like no-show jobs at large companies and union halls.

Some are turning electoral success into big business in the consulting and lobbying sphere

They want application developers to take the tool under their wing. But it's still going to require a lot of social adjustment to imagine people comfortably wearing Google Glasses out in public -- it's going to be a clear mark of tech/geek status for some, but it's probably too obtrusive to gain mainstream interest, at least for quite a while. Wearable computing certainly has a future, but some things are hard to imagine crossing the gap from "geek chic" to widespread acceptance. Perhaps when they become little more subtle, we'll see them adopted widely.

They're putting out "bait cars" equipped with tracking equipment to see if they can put some car thieves in jail.


Finding better ways to store energy should be one of the highest technological priorities we have. The natural world provides us with enormous amounts of free energy that we could be using, if only we could store it.


Google is buying out an existing network in the town that's home to BYU, and they'll expand it

Natural-resource wealth can be a great thing -- like winning a lottery. But like many lottery winners, places that gorge on the bonanza without planning for the future often end up in terrible shape later on.

The price of the metal has fallen by double-digit percentages in a matter of months, and that's making people who use it for jewelry very happy. It's undoubtedly driving gold bugs crazy. And the plunge is just one of several reasons why money shouldn't be based on a gold standard. The recent gold fever has been bubble-driven, but people who were smart and converted their cash into skills instead are probably much happier than those who hoarded the metal.


Lots of public-sector pension programs have gone badly under-funded for some time, and now it's time to pay the piper.

It's a promise made in exchange for very significant renovations to and around Wrigley Field

Hugely successful at home, Tesco found the American market just too much to bear. Domestic groceries celebrate the departure.

Take a minute or two and conduct some basic self-screenings for cancer. Early detection saves lives. There's lots of misinformation about cancer that finds its way around the Internet, largely because we've been trained to wait expectantly for some sort of magic-bullet solution to cancer. But cancer risks can be significantly reduced through a balanced diet, exercise, and early detection and treatment. Meanwhile, science is making great progress towards improving genetic detection, which holds great promise for some types of cancer. Instead of forwarding hoax-ridden e-mails about "cancer cures" and false threats, people should instead remind their friends and family to assess their health once a month.

If it's not an essential public service, then the Federal government most likely should privatize it. But it seems strange that there are Republican members of Congress opposing the plan, and a Democratic administration floating the idea. The present White House hasn't show much tendency towards privatization -- in fact, much the opposite. So if nothing else, the idea makes for quite the soap opera.

The Des Moines Register reports "The bank is not seeking government incentive dollars for the Jordan Creek expansion".

It will take the place of the current Argosy riverboat casino. Local supporters think the Hard Rock will bring in twice the money for local charities that the riverboat has.




No high-ranking administration officials were sent to attend. By contrast, Thatcher herself made a personal appearance at Ronald Reagan's funeral.

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What's really important for people is to realize the value of having two specialties -- not just one. One is easily replaceable, but two makes for a better-rounded individual with far more pricing power in the market for labor. Charlie Munger just made a big donation to the University of Michigan in the hope of seeing cross-departmental cooperation among graduate students, saying "Specialization causes a lot of bad thinking."

Students in northwest Iowa schools are involved in a stock-market investment competition in which they team up with one another and "invest" a hypothetical windfall of $100,000. It's great that the schools are doing what they can to encourage kids to learn about investing; something is definitely better than nothing in this regard. But it's impossible to do something tied to the school year that will teach kids the most important lessons about investing -- patience and the search for value -- because there's no way to fairly evaluate deep value investing on a time horizon of six or even nine months. Most people really need to learn how to invest for the optimal returns over many years -- and the way you do that is quite different from short-term speculation. Again, it's far better that these kids learn something about stocks rather than nothing, but it's hard to really instill the most important lessons without a much longer time horizon than the school year permits.

Not to be widely used, but in catastrophic circumstances, they might be the best option

It's not even satire -- it's the truth

Notes for and from the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio for Sunday, April 21, 2013

If an IBM-to-Lenovo sale sounds familiar, that's because IBM sold its PC division to the same company back in 2004/2005. Now, they may be looking to spin off another low-growth division, and Lenovo may be back with its corporate checkbook.

He's skipping the Jackson Hole conference, which is a big one among the American finance and central-banking crowd. His term is due to expire within a year, and he may simply be ready to pull a George Costanza and go out on a (relative) high note. On the other hand, he would be leaving at a moment when the Federal Reserve has to be watching the economy with great intensity. They've pumped lots of money into the system, but it hasn't started moving very quickly; when it eventually does, the Fed will have to show some very good judgment about pulling that money back off the table in a timely manner, or else we'll see high inflation rates.

It's one of the areas where they probably think they have a competitive advantage against Google

Overreaction is too much like surrender

A NOAA tool lets users see how often heavy rainfalls can be expected. Exactly what would be a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall, for instance?

The Des Moines suburb is on the opposite side of the metro area from the data center built by Microsoft in West Des Moines. The company says it's to be the fourth owned-and-operated data center for Facebook. Food farms and server farms can coexist in peace and harmony.

It's no surprise that metro areas in the Midwest like Des Moines and Omaha have some of the shortest average commute times in the country. It's a meaningful contributor to quality of life. Save ten minutes a day over 250 work days a year, and you've just cut an entire work-week (41 hours, in fact) out of your annual time behind the wheel. That's a lot of valuable leisure time to add to a year.

Lots of small robots with small brains might be able to do things very effectively -- just like schools of fish or flocks of birds. The demonstrations of distributed behavior by small robots with tiny "brains" resemble the behaviors we see in nature, and may show promise for what we need out of the robots of the future, like when they're at the nano scale and are used for things like cleaning our arteries. In the words of the lab's chief, how much work can we get done without lots of thinking?

...no, you're not going to get $1,000 for sharing


It's intended as punishment for how they ruled in the decision that brought about same-sex marriage in Iowa. And for making such a ridiculous proposal, the legislators should be ashamed of themselves. Cutting pay (or otherwise seeking to enact punishment) for judges who decide against your wishes is the best way to destroy the safeguarding role that the judiciary plays in a healthy republic. We need the judiciary to make unpopular decisions occasionally, when the popular will is actively (or soon to be found) trampling on the rights of others. Rights aren't a matter of popular will, if we believe our founding documents and their "self-evident truths". So when the popular will is hostile to rights, we need the judiciary to provide a sober backstop.

That, plus cheap natural gas and tools like next-generation household energy-management tools (like the Nest thermostat) could make for volatile times ahead for the major energy utility industry

The Chinese phone-maker plans to focus on the rest of the world's markets instead after running into social and political friction trying to get into the American market

A handful of well-connected people skews the average number of friends inside real and digital social networks



There are so many competing interests for people's attention and time that civic groups are having trouble recruiting younger members. This is a bad long-term trend: We really need to make sure that there is regular, personal engagement within our communities, and if fraternal and civic organizations aren't healthy, then it's time to start looking for the secret sauce to give them some help.

For self-interested reasons, eBay wants an exemption for small businesses (fewer than 50 employees and interstate sales of less than $10 million a year) from a proposed rule requiring Internet retailers to collect sales taxes nationwide. This one's a tough issue: States and local governments are clearly losing out on tax collection due to Internet sales, but the burden of collecting taxes on behalf of nearly 10,000 different jurisdictions would be altogether overwhelming for many Internet retailers. For those small retailers, eBay's self-interest brings deep pockets and first-class legal advice that the many little parties involved can't afford on their own. Anyone who thinks that it's reasonable to expect small retailers to collect taxes in that many jurisdictions at once is someone who hasn't spent enough time dealing with government regulations. The burden would be overwhelming.

But at least 250 of the 2,000 or so people who were inside the building were killed

A Brazilian judge has ordered Facebook to take down the page of a woman who died at age 24, after her mother sued over the distress the lingering page caused her. You don't have to give anyone your passwords while living, but for goodness' sake, write down your essential passwords and store them in a safe location -- in a sealed envelope in a safe-deposit box, for instance. If something tragic (expected or not) should happen to you, whomever you trust enough to go through your belongings should also have your trust enough to do the right thing with the digital footprint you leave behind.

A profile of the editor of the Toronto Star suggests that getting a little spunky has meant good business for the major-market paper. The same formula would never work in a smaller market, but that's the difference between metropolitan-level newsgathering and community-focused journalism.

That means they'll have to buy new phones. Both networks are on CDMA, but the companies claim the antennas within the phones are tuned to the wrong frequencies to make the switch. Strange move on the part of US Cellular to sell off 11% of its customer base, but they did, slicing a meaningful piece out of the carrier's national retail footprint. Customers in other US Cellular markets should still be able to use their phones, but it seems like a signal that US Cellular is trying to boost its cash supply. (Also interesting about the move: US Cellular is headquartered in Chicago, where they paid mightily for naming rights to the White Sox ballpark...$68 million for a 20-year deal. Wrigley Field remains named for the chewing-gum magnate, without a naming-rights deal. The carrier is facing a lot of upset customer comments on Facebook for selling them to Sprint. This is all happening as Sprint fights off losses of half a million customers per quarter and weighs which takeover bid (from Softbank or Dish Network) suits them best.

An Australian publication uses a fake name as a byline for articles written by their editors. On one hand, it's misleading -- if no such reporter actually exists, then the articles are not really accountable to the individual who wrote them. But it's not entirely different from the practice of radio and television hosts who change their names to make them more palatable to the audience. "Mark Twain" wasn't, "Dear Abby" isn't, and the use of house names isn't original by any means. And the number of people who go by contrived identities online probably outnumbers those who go by their own names...so is a "house name" for editor-written articles all that bad?

But the revisions to GDP figures have been large and frequent recently, so it's hard to say for certain what the final number will be. But it definitely won't be the 3% to 5% high-growth, low-inflation rate assumed by the White House in its recent budget proposals.

A preview of the WHO Radio Wise Guys show for April 27, 2013

With clouds the size of Texas

It's hard to argue against a state-owned (or leased) airplane when it takes so long to travel from one end to the other via car


Any individual, company, group, or organization needs to have its own, standalone website as its true home base on the Internet. But it also needs at least one solid backup means of communication in case the site crashes -- as happened to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

To declare or not to declare?

History will show that the stifling of political freedoms has and will continue to cost China dearly in the commercial market as well.

There's only so much encroachment into life that some people will accept. Make that: many people.

The family that owns the Cubs says it's a bunch of new video scoreboards in the outfield or they're leaving the classic park

A teen mother goes from "reality" TV into pornography

CenturyLink says it'll test 1 Gbps fiber-optic service in Omaha

Warren Buffett argues that America's full economic structural advantages over much of the world (built on free markets and the rule of law) haven't even been fully actualized, given how long we have had social obstacles to women's success in the private sector. It's interesting reading.

The UN says that 260,000 people died in a famine in Somalia between 2010 and 2012. That's the population of Buffalo, New York. The famine was detected early, and the crop failure that caused the food to fall into short supply could have been mitigated by humanitarian relief efforts...if it hadn't been for militant groups that kept out the relief workers and used food as a weapon of war. It's shameful that criminals like that exist, and it's shameful that we don't pay greater attention.



Also interesting: A map of Iowa's abandoned railroads.


Big corporations with strong balance sheets can borrow money for 10 years right now at 2.625% (and for 30 years at 4.125%). That's cheaper than the governments of New Zealand, Australia, India, Italy, or Mexico can borrow for similar periods of time.

As they said it, more or less

The White House budget proposed in April called for a limit of $3.4 million on the amount Americans could accumulate in tax-preferred retirement accounts. The budget itself is really just a statement of policy preference -- it's not going to turn into the actual budget -- but it does echo a recurrent theme of President Obama's time in office: That capital accumulation is something to be viewed with suspicion, bordering on hostility. On one hand, $3.4 million is a lot of money -- nobody should doubt that. But we're also nearly completely blind in America to how much is "enough" for retirement. Many people would say the word "millionaire" and imagine Uncle Pennybags or Uncle Scrooge. But consider this: If you wanted to get $40,000 a year in retirement income and do it just on interest payments alone (in other words, if you were trying to avoid taking anything out of your nest egg and just live on the interest), then if you had your money in "safe" 10-year Treasuries earning 1.78%, then you'd have to have more than $2.2 million in the bank. Under those conditions, "rich" doesn't really look so rich anymore. Instead of turning every saver into a villain (or a convenient target for heavy taxation), we should probably start to get really honest with ourselves. Our biggest single fiscal problem is that we can't afford to pay for the entitlement programs we've created at current rates of spending and taxation. That problem isn't going to be solved by discouraging people from saving (and thus making them more dependent upon government entitlement programs). That's the straightest path to a downward-spiralling negative-feedback loop. We will only get out of the fiscal trap by getting the economy to grow meaningfully faster than it is (3% to 5% would be ideal), and that's only done by getting people to save and invest in productive businesses. That also has the very positive effect of creating a larger class of people who don't need those entitlement programs to support them in their old age.

Google has now shifted from calling them the "Palestinian Territories" to "Palestine". It's not a decision that bears any diplomatic standing -- Google is, after all, just an international company...not a state -- but it's worthy of note that decisions like this by commercial entities can have more impact than, say, the same change when it's done by the UN. We may very well be in an era in which the behavior of large companies (like Google) may have greater impact on the world at large than comparable behavior by true nation-states. In other words, balance sheets may matter more than armies. Nothing presently rivals the United States for global influence, and there's certainly a tier of nations (including the UK, China, Russia, and India) that are significant enough for one reason or another to merit true global influence. But if one were to rank the relative influence of the UN Member States, there's no doubt that there are several big companies that would punch well above the weights of many member countries. It's not entirely unprecedented -- the Hudson's Bay Company and the Dutch East India Company are two examples that come quickly to mind. But we may be, as some writers have suggested, in an era when many corporations transcend the powers of nation-states, and that requires thinking about them in new ways.

Proceed with caution. Page 15 of the company's latest earnings report tells a very interesting tale of declining operating margins. It's becoming harder for them to make a profit, even as the number of users grows. That doesn't mean they'll stop making a profit -- but the downward trend is obvious even to the untrained eye. Also of note: On page 4, they reveal that membership growth in the US, Canada, and Europe has basically ground to a halt. If you're not a member by now, you're not likely to convert. The US/Canada "population" on Facebook grew from 183 million to 195 million from the first quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013. Meantime, the US population grew from 313 million to 315 million, and Canada has about 35 million people in all, growing by about 400,000 a year. So, while Facebook's membership is still growing faster than the population overall, it's really at about the saturation point -- especially if one assumes that some of those "members" are second accounts.

Either something is wrong with the data (and/or how it's being collected), or we're blowing off some of the obvious benefits that everyone can see with their own two eyes by wasting time on Angry Birds. Or something. It may also be one of those insoluble paradoxes of trying to account for what we produce without a real measurement of our overall well-being.


When people go hungry, they're far more likely to let go of their civic freedoms in exchange for promises of food. That's what's at risk in Egypt right now: Having clawed their way to greater political freedom, the people are suffering from economic stagnation. That could put the political freedoms at risk if a sufficiently persuasive party or demagogue comes along, offering bread in exchange for those freedoms.

Showprep for the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio for the week ending May 5, 2013

One of the possible scenarios detailed in an assessment of the next 20 years in the Pacific, as changes come to America, China, and Japan. The leading conclusion of the Carnegie Endowment report is that the status quo can't go on. And the evidence supporting that conclusion is clear: Publicly-traded companies in China are experiencing shrinking profits, and there's no escaping the demographic realities wrought by China's one-child policy. But the United States has to make the choice to grow (and to deliberately put policies in place to create the environment for growth), or else a slow-growth economy will choke out defense spending while cutting options for other things we want and need.

Last year was terrible because of drought. This year, it's been too cold and too wet so far. It's hard to get a lot of field work done when you get 31 straight hours of snow in May.

"Psychic" Sylvia Browne went on television in 2004 to tell the mother of a missing girl that the girl was dead. Except she wasn't -- she was one of the women freed this week in Ohio. But her mother died in the meantime, having been told a lie. It's heartbreaking, but it keeps on happening.

A collection of animated .gifs from infomercials that make 21st Century Americans look like the biggest idiots in history.

Intel offers a way to test their robustness

High unemployment among young people. It's partly the result of bad government policy. And the effects will linger for a long time to come.


Photos from the cockpits of several fascinating vehicles

Chicagoans may very well be getting tired of the violence



We may have sidestepped a dramatic economic catastrophe, but we'll have to take off the Band-Aid someday, and that won't be pretty.

It's all a matter of using social cues and tricking people into trusting those they shouldn't

No more downloads...only online, "cloud"-type access

...and other clubs that don't exist

Good reading for everyone

Or, at least, what might. The thing that should really worry him most is whether his successor will be deft enough to take a lot of money off the table when inflation starts to pick up.

Mostly college football and basketball coaches. Probably not a good thing for America.

All things digital may be fleeting, but Twitter and Facebook posts (and their contemporaries) are even more ephemeral than a good old newsletter. That's why newspapers themselves will always have a place -- as the institutional memory of a place.


A woman is said to have been carrying a "smorgasbord" of drugs

Meanwhile, the Pentagon says China is getting bolder about state-backed cyberwarfare. The Defense Department says they've figured out it's easier to steal and copy our work than to invest in their own original R&D.

"Since IDOT doesn't plan for more than five years at a time, pinpointing a completion date isn't possible". And yet some businesses operate on 100-year business plans. That's how you win the future.

The photos can be recovered with some simple file renaming -- or, you know, by taking a screen capture

Some are too nuanced for English to neatly contain...but people feel them anyway

Civilian oversight of police authority is the only way to go in a free society

Notes from the Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio for May 12, 2013

Notes from the WHO Radio Wise Guys show on May 11, 2013

...then there's probably a good chance it really did. The Associated Press says the Justice Department secretly took two months' worth of their phone records. The AP calls it "a serious interference with AP's constitutional rights to gather and report the news". From what has been reported thus far, they appear to be absolutely right. And it should also be noted that this is exactly why people are wrong when they repeat the tired (and incorrect) refrain that "corporations aren't people". The AP is a corporation -- a cooperative, technically, but a corporation nonetheless -- that exercises the same legal rights to report the news under the auspices of the First Amendment as the individuals who work for the corporation. If the corporation (as a "body" of people) doesn't retain the same Constitutional rights as the journalists individually, then how could we really enforce those Constitutional rights for us all? This particular instance, at least, appears to illustrate exactly why it's silly to dismiss the understanding that corporations really are (made up of) people. And it should also be a case to give us all a serious case of concern about how open and transparent the Federal government really is.

This time last year, they had 86% of it in the ground. That's how cold and wet conditions have been.



Iowa and Nebraska have been virtually tornado-free. That's not normal at all.

Paul Bennett: "For most of my twenties I assumed that the world was more interested in me than I was in it, so I spent most of my time talking, usually in a quite uninformed way, about whatever I thought, rushing to be clever, thinking about what I was going to say to someone rather than listening to what they were saying to me." Sounds like a profound statement to the Twitter and Facebook age.

(Video) Maybe. A bold statement from a Chinese businessperson on "60 Minutes" earlier this spring.



The Associated Press is a corporation -- a cooperative, non-profit corporation, but a corporation nonetheless. It is owned by its member newspapers, radio stations, and television stations. The reporters and editors who report for the AP do so in America with the protection of the First Amendment, which applies to the individual reporters -- but also to the organization itself. Why? Because the corporation, ultimately, is made of people -- the people working for it, and the people who own the companies that own the AP. Like it or not, the Citizens United ruling struck down certain campaign expenditures because "certain disfavored associations of citizens -- those that have taken on the corporate form -- are penalized for engaging in the same political speech" as individuals and unincorporated groups. So, for as much as it was popular to jump on the bandwagon that criticized Mitt Romney for saying that "corporations are people", he was right: Corporations are made up of people, and those people do not give up their rights just because they decide to associate with one another. It may, however, take a case like this in which there is near-universal revulsion at the government's behavior for people to see the context.

Specifically, music-writing talent, particularly for popular audiences

The Federal government has stepped in to stop money-transfer service Dwolla from exchanging any of the "virtual" currency called Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a strange thing -- a private currency with no government and no real management, just a pre-programmed rate of creation and a highly anarchical exchange system. Dwolla probably didn't do anything wrong, but it seems quite likely that someone using Bitcoin did, and it's possible that the government wanted Dwolla (and possibly others) to stop touching it while something fishy is being investigated.


35% in Iowa in 2009, about the same as the national figure.


Former Obama administration official Peter Orszag concludes that it's probably time to start looking at ways of making urban life more resilient to things like heavy rainfall and other dynamic weather patterns. His essay expresses frustration that "we seem to lack the will to reduce this threat by cutting greenhouse-gas emissions", but concludes that something can be done about mitigating the consequences. That's a conclusion that may well have been informed by Bjorn Lomborg, who has long argued that (a) there are likely to be climate changes ahead, (b) we humans may or may not be ultimately responsible, and (c) even if we are responsible for it, even the most drastic cuts to things like carbon-dioxide emissions are likely to make life terribly miserable without really reversing the effects of climate changes already underway. Lomborg makes a strong case for focusing our energy and resources on addressing problems that we know with a high degree of confidence that we can solve, rather than on speculative and massively costly efforts to reverse the warming of the global climate. His group concluded that $75 billion spent wisely could massively improve human happiness worldwide.

Gore got wealthy mainly after leaving office. His connections have kept him well-fed.

That's the longest spell without a tornado in recorded history in Iowa. But we can't help but feel sympathy for the people of Texas, who had 12 tornadoes, including at least one EF-4 yesterday.

A great map showing Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado during the gold rush. This is how the Great Plains looked during the Civil War.

They think it's gone untouched by the rest of the environment for that incredible length of time, and they're trying to figure out if it contains anything living. If it does, that could hint at ways we should look for (and at) possible forms of life on Mars.

The main writer behind a Chicago Cubs-related website posts a mea-culpa after relaying some rumors that he turned out to regret. He notes that since his site has evolved from a one-man blog into a much more significant operation, "I can -- and will -- still write 'differently' about the Cubs than traditional media, but I've got to stop thinking of myself as operating in an insular bubble." He deserves credit for recognizing that digital publishing still carries responsibilities, even if those words never make it to paper or the regulated airwaves. It's a lesson a lot of people have to learn, especially now that it's possible to publish to the entire world from a smartphone (possibly while drunk). As Charlie Munger put it at the 2013 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, "I think there's a time when your ignorance and folly ought to be hidden".






Signals from the East Coast hint that the US economy may not be growing very quickly at all. The President, meanwhile, is trying to shift attention away from the scandals of the week and is using the "jobs" refrain as the means to try. What he ignores, willfully or otherwise, is that the private sector has a lot of people who distrust his motives and his moves alike. The budget proposal to cap tax-advantaged retirement savings at $3.4 million was just one example why he doesn't have that trust he needs: A limit like that just tells people not to save or invest. He can make all the speeches he wants, but when his policy proposals tell investors that their services aren't needed or wanted here, they're going to hold back.


People too often use "developing" nation as a euphemism for "poor". China, it should be remembered, is widely recognized as the world's second-largest economy, but with four times the population of the United States, its people are much less well-off on average. And in the course of "development", the country will have to deal with its Communist government and its restrictions on things from land ownership to speech, as well as a host of issues related to the quality of life. In the meantime, Americans will have to figure out how to navigate the inflow of investment capital from China as this country remains one of the best places in the world to invest.


An interesting move by Microsoft to integrate services from a competitor



Take a minute or two and conduct some basic self-screenings for cancer. Early detection saves lives. There's lots of misinformation about cancer that finds its way around the Internet, largely because we've been trained to wait expectantly for some sort of magic-bullet solution to cancer. But cancer risks can be significantly reduced through a balanced diet, exercise, and early detection and treatment. Meanwhile, science is making great progress towards improving genetic detection, which holds great promise for some types of cancer. Instead of forwarding hoax-ridden e-mails about "cancer cures" and false threats, people should instead remind their friends and family to assess their health once a month.

That's a lot of cash, no matter who you are. But it could be a bold move by Yahoo to inflate its relevance. Tumblr is in a category that also includes Instagram -- sites that depend upon users sharing with one another, very much in a "social" way, but not in a manner that directly competes with Facebook. Tumblr counts on rapid-fire posts, sharing, and re-sharing of uncounted sources and types of content. Everyone seems to want to control the "next Facebook", but Tumblr and Instagram (which was purchased by Facebook last year) might just be the logical successors to Facebook, without actually looking much like Facebook. Yahoo, meanwhile, is about as seasoned (read: old) as an Internet company gets. Under CEO Marissa Mayer, they seem to be adopting the conglomerate model for an online company -- putting together a porfolio of services under one ownership umbrella, without actually integrating those services together, and they're treating their properties somewhat independently. For their flagship Yahoo page, they're reaching out to integrate services from other companies (like Twitter) into what they do. What's funny about that move is that many stock traders and investors actually discount the value of conventional conglomerates and pay less for them. It's not a rational thing to do of course, but the "conglomerate discount" is a widely-known phenomenon. Yet, moving from the bricks-and-mortar world into the online world, people seem to shift from discounting conglomerates to valuing them more.


(Video) Anchor Larry Potash calls her out: "You know what? You failed!" The "psychic" responds by accusing him of not being very nice.


Especially with new costs coming for things like mandated health care


He tends to play a total screwball, but it turns out he's been caring for an old lady out of his own pocket and the goodness of his heart for two years now



It's the perfect contrast to the failure of Communist government up north. South Korea's history isn't perfectly free, democratic, or untroubled...but there's no denying that it's used the tools of democracy and capitalism reasonably well and in growing measure.


New episodes will be released this weekend

(Video)

Illustrating how people can voluntarily associate for their own welfare

It's not by intent, to be certain. It's by demonstrating just how awful over-reaching government can be.


And we're woefully unprepared.

They're closing their Australian plants by 2016, leaving behind GM and Toyota as the only two remaining carmakers down under. Ford says it's been building cars in Australia since 1925.


They're sticking with a deliberately once-a-week publishing schedule for now. It's probably a smart move in that it allows the publication to serve an archival role -- marking how the world looks at a particular moment in time. We're so inundated with non-stop, live-streaming information from around the world that it probably should be comforting to know that there are sources to which we can turn for a review of everything that is or was important over a specific period of time. The true periodical probably has a more important role to play than ever.


It may have been caused by a truck crash, but it shouldn't escape our attention that the nation needs a lot of infrastructure work. We've deferred maintenance on a lot more than just roads and bridges for a very long time.


Thomas Watson's command never goes out of style

That's how it's been adjudicated in Ohio for now.

Cheers to the Canadian astronaut who made the most of his time on the International Space Station

Two passengers were arrested after the plane was diverted

(Video) Better coordination of spotter activity with better radar should mean even more warning and more lives saved in the future

Astonishingly, some are coming right back to life. What this says about environmental change is one thing. But what it tells us is biologically possible is quite another.

How IBM's Watson supercomputer is likely to dramatically change health care

The Federal government says that it's becoming a "key point of concern" that China's government is using cyber-espionage (some would say "cyber-warfare") to get things like information on US weapon systems. The Washington Post reports that a confidential report for the Pentagon says that a laundry list of weapons have been "compromised" by Chinese hackers.


They're getting criticized for using the law to avoid paying a bunch of taxes in the UK. Eric Schmidt says in response, "If the British system changes the tax laws then we will comply."

We occasionally need to look back to see just how far we've progressed in just a few generations


What's known as "Gresham's Law" states that if counterfeit money or "debased" currency starts to enter a market, people will hoard the valuable stuff and exchange the junk. It's easy to understand; if you have a 1964 dime, it's worth several times more than its face value for the silver content alone, so you'd be stupid to exchange it for something worth just ten cents. It's not a huge step to imagine that there's a digital corollary to Gresham's law: That in a "virtual" currency, bad transactions will chase out the good. The Federal government just clamped down on "Liberty Reserve", a digital-currency exchange that had its own virtual currency, which the government says was being used almost exclusively for money laundering and illicit exchanges. It's well-known that businesses with high rates of cash transactions are widely used for money-laundering. But if a digital currency exchange allows people to convert money more seamlessly and with a minimum of supervision, there should be no surprise that it attracts illegal activity. Legitimate consumers may not want the government tracking their moves, but they do tend to want Visa or MasterCard or PayPal to offer some kind of reassurance that they will back the security of the transaction and help the consumer in case of fraud. A totally laissez-faire digital currency exchange that does everything it can to avoid collecting information and details on its users offers no such reassurances -- and thus, the "bad" transactions will quite likely crowd out the "good".

One columnist speculates that it's because the company needs Mark Zuckerberg to start talking more like the head of Amazon, promising a big future in return for investment now. In reality, it's because Facebook was severely overpriced when it went public, and there are much better values to be found in the stock market for much more solid companies with much more certain futures.

They've put fiber-optic cable all over the city and promise to turn on the gigabit-speed service the same day the customer requests it. They're the first community in the state to go with fiber to the premises. Not everybody needs it -- 1 Gbps is about 100 times faster than a typical cable Internet connection (running at 8 Mbps to 12 Mbps). But for those parties willing to pay for it, gigabit-speed Internet could be a fantastic service.

Interest rates are very low, so borrowing is attractive. Meanwhile, conventional investments like bonds look very unattractive to investors, so some of them have been switching from bonds to land, meaning there's more demand for the land that goes up for sale. Simultaneously, crop prices are very high. All of these things make for a recipe for high (and possibly inflated) land prices in the Midwest. The conditions are optimal for the highest-possible prices, really. That doesn't mean they won't rise further, nor that they will necessarily crash. But when you see that a market is firing on every possible cylinder, you have to assume that something about it is going to have to come back down to earth.

Gartner can generally be expected to do or say something when he thinks people in government are trying to hide something


Original humor (like The Onion) beats hackneyed, copied content anytime

Just because the company doesn't dominate every market doesn't mean it should leave those markets

A writer for Wired echoes a theme echoed here on May 19th.

Berkshire has treated MidAmerican differently than its other subsidiaries -- instead of shipping the profits back to Omaha, they reinvest them over and over within MidAmerican's own portfolio. This purchase fits the standards for a Warren-Buffett-friendly acquisition: Using a rough back-of-the-envelope estimate for how Buffett appears to have valued other recent purchases, NV Energy is intrinsically worth about $6 billion, and MidAmerican is paying $5.59 billion. If a company in a steady industry (like utilities) where retained earnings can be deployed to create even higher profits (as MidAmerican has done by building a mammoth portfolio of wind turbines), then getting a company for a decent discount to its intrinsic value makes plenty of sense.





Four years seems like an awfully long time. Computers will be a lot faster and more powerful by then.



It's possible that the language used to discuss the program is hard to distill from actuarial-speak to general-public discussion, but it's also well worth noting that the costs of entitlement programs in the United States are still growing as a percentage of GDP, and are expected to keep on growing by that measure.

Microsoft knows that Windows 8 hasn't lit the public's imagination afire, so they're making some changes and will roll them out as "Windows 8.1" late in the summer or in the fall.

It's a highly worthwhile question. "Safe rooms" would probably be a more rational expenditure of money on school improvements than bulletproof glass, but in all cases, the most important question is whether the incremental dollar spent is doing the maximum good it possibly can.

Freelancers and reporters will be expected to pick up the slack

...one letter mailed in 1943 was just delivered in Sioux City



Michael Gartner clearly wishes the Des Moines Register were something closer to what it used to be.

News Corp. and Disney are trying to sell it, and it's reported that DirecTV, Time Warner, KKR, Yahoo, and others are all in the running as potential buyers

The number of chuckleheads who think they're being funny when they joke about domestic violence is far too many

The online-game maker is in trouble, with plans to lay off 20% of its employees soon. What lessons can be taken away from their experience? (1) All bubbles eventually burst; desktop gaming was just another of many. (2) The best way to stay in business is to try to put yourself out of business; Zynga apparently didn't try hard enough to get mobile platforms right, and stayed too long with desktop games. (3) Overspending may be fun, but it's not good business; buying office buildings and overpriced subsidiaries doesn't seem to have helped Zynga's fortunes.

When a bridge is called "functionally obsolete", that means it still works -- but we wouldn't design a replacement in the same way. Unfortunately, even though "roads and bridges" are a popular refrain for infrastructure spending right now (and there are many bridges, for sure, that need it), infrastructure is about much, much more than just roads and bridges. We are generally ignoring dams and water plants and the power grid and many other things, to our peril.

The uproar over the revelations of telephone and Internet surveillance conducted by the Federal government that may very well have encroached on the privacy of a very substantial number of American citizens is clouded in all kinds of mystery and crosstalk. But it does highlight the great danger in any group asserting powers when in office that they wouldn't entrust to their opponents. Everyone thinks their own motives are pure...but the whole idea of the "rule of law" is that we aren't subject to the whims of transitory things like motives, but rather are bounded by a sense of self-restraint that supersedes the stories we tell ourselves about our own purity.

They're a tool the government can use to block the importation of products that infringe on intellectual property rights

The administration's approach to national security and other policies doesn't seem to be living up to the promises of openness and freedom that were made in 2008 and in 2012. The NSA promises that its data-sniffing system is operated carefully and that they correct errors, but who can really know whether that's the truth when everything is conducted under cloaks of secrecy with no meaningful civilian oversight?


They announced plans for most of the new management team to come from US Air. American Airlines will emerge from bankruptcy with its old name but under new management.


Any user can now have 1,000 lists (as opposed to the previous limit of 20), with 5,000 members of each list (previously capped at 500). This is long overdue and a major improvement to Twitter's functionality.

Version 7 is a lot less cluttered, at least on first appearances

The easier it is to access something as addictive as cheap money, the greater the danger that it leads to addiction.


(Video) A "dancing queen" that will leave you with nightmares

The material that has shown itself to be enormously popular for smartphone screens might also have a place in the windshield

Operating systems, what's being shared, who's online...all of it in one entirely overwhelming presentation

There's no escaping the facts: People who feed on paranoia about vaccines are putting themselves and others at risk, including innocent children. It's unconscionable, when the science is clearly in favor of vaccination.

It's big

A semi-secret court will allow the release of a ruling on some of the data-gathering activities that hadn't been previously disclosed to the public

One would think that's a good first step towards greater transparency in the process

"62 percent of Iowa farmland was owned by non-farmers last year, up from 60 percent in 2007". That number undoubtedly includes both disinterested investors as well as family members who inherited a piece of the family farm but who moved to the city.

Says a survey by Manpower, reported in Forbes.

Of high importance: The ones that refer to "remote code execution", since that's how other people can hijack your machine.


There are some fine economists from there -- but isn't a little more heterogeneity in order?

According to one research paper, not as much as we'd likely think. The argument for what are called "agglomeration economies" is that a town with a specialty in one industry should try to attract other businesses from the same industry because that will enhance the economic growth of the city. Des Moines, for instance, is an insurance town. Agglomeration economics suggests that trying to get more insurance companies to reside here would make the city grow, attracting more insurance companies, in a virtuous feedback loop. But, aside from a few outlier cases like Los Angeles, it turns out that the feedback loop is only one of many factors, and not the most important one.

Hashtags got their legs through use on Twitter, but all kinds of other services are starting to adopt them. While occasionally useful, they mostly just make things difficult to read.


Yet nobody's really gotten on the Windows Phone bandwagon

The "Turnip Prize" rewards terrible art that doesn't try too hard

Some people say "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide." Those people need to explain why they still have window blinds and curtains.

(Video) Worth watching to see what happens when a leader gets unequivocal

Variable buoyancy might be just the trick

Europe has a problem with unemployed youth; some of them undoubtedly could do better by moving.

(Video) Very clear footage

A helicopter pilot shot some aerial footage of the damage. Containment of the fire is still quite minimal, at least officially -- just 5%.



Notes forthe Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio for June 16, 2013


A decent question at a time when real earnings are relatively flat

Take a minute or two and conduct some basic self-screenings for cancer. Early detection saves lives. There's lots of misinformation about cancer that finds its way around the Internet, largely because we've been trained to wait expectantly for some sort of magic-bullet solution to cancer. But cancer risks can be significantly reduced through a balanced diet, exercise, and early detection and treatment. Meanwhile, science is making great progress towards improving genetic detection, which holds great promise for some types of cancer. Instead of forwarding hoax-ridden e-mails about "cancer cures" and false threats, people should instead remind their friends and family to assess their health once a month.

When given the choice, go with Kaspersky. For now, it appears to have the best overall record at capturing malware and preventing problems early.

Now they're trying to push real-life gifts, including Amazon gift cards, along with those birthday greetings people leave one another

Ideas that might have seemed outlandish just five or ten years ago are rapidly approaching plausibility due to the rate of increase in computing power available to all kinds of users. That means people are looking at ways of screening schools for handguns without forcing everyone through a lumbering metal detector -- and they have a good shot at getting it to work.

Widely-known Makerbot is merging with Stratasys, but will probably remain a separate subsidiary

Please note that (a) IBM's Watson won "Jeopardy"; (b) music is, fundamentally, mathematical in nature; and (c) Watson won't die of a drug overdose. Long after individual artists burn out (or die much too young), the patterns that made them great can be replicated. Some day soon, a computer will learn to "think" musically like Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon. It won't be exactly the same, but it will be very close, very good, and much better than whatever One Direction is recording.


(Video) But figuring out how to replicate it mechanically turns out to be a little more tricky. But if we get it right, we'll do quite well by ourselves. If we can achieve ready supplies of super-cheap and abundant energy, then more or less every other problem facing humanity becomes easy to overcome.

It's not an Earth-shattering arrangement, but Apple's Siri program will now use Microsoft's Bing search engine to find results when they're outside the normal realm of what Siri can find


With Instagram-characteristic filters. One wonders whether the 15-second limit isn't a subtle nod to Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, but compressed into seconds for a media-drenched world. Is there really a reason to become obsessed with the differences between Instagram video and Vine's 6-second videos, or should everyone just calm down? Probably the latter.


Google's approach to hiring and interviews always sounded a bit gimmick-heavy, and they've apparently determined that giving people brain teasers as an interview test doesn't really tell them anything useful about how those people will perform as employees.

This makes it a lot more likely that Softbank will successful in its attempt to buy out Sprint. But it also highlights the possibility that Dish may just be regrouping and thinking of buying T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom.

Microsoft apparently announced, then reversed, a policy to make it more costly for people to buy and sell used Xbox games. But as major software makers are taking things out of the physical world of game cartridges and discs and making them Internet-based (like Adobe's new cloud-based Creative Suite), used games may already be an endangered species, even without a policy.

A final report from a working group working for the FAA won't come out until September, says the New York Times, but they may be thinking of allowing greater use of electronics in-flight

So much of stock trading is electronic that the NYSE may be headed the way of bell bottoms and mood rings

Iowa is giving the company a tax break to "create 24 high-quality jobs" with a nearly $700 million expansion of the data center

Notes for the "WHO Radio Wise Guys"







President Obama's proposals on climate change include a lot of ideas that could cost a lot of money. Some would be well-spent. Some would be wasted.





The commission overseeing the network rejected the two bids it received from INS


And the train cars appear to be carrying petroleum products, so that's not a great situation for anyone



Did newspapers subsidize the town crier?

Today's children beg you. And John McIntyre asks for no more than one baby picture (of any sort) per month.

Only South Dakota had growth. But among the 49 declines, Iowa's was the smallest.

With high-profile opinions being issued this week, a question: What's the font face they use? Answer: Something from the Century family.

The company lost $84 million in the last quarter, even as sales rose. They're pretty much the last manufacturer left standing with keyboards built into their smartphones, but is that enough to keep users around? It's still a popular corporate platform, particularly for e-mail security, but that might not be enough. Meanwhile, it looks like plans for Microsoft to buy Nokia's phone line died out. It's been noted that Microsoft's phone business depends upon Nokia, so if Nokia changes strategy and turns to the Android platform instead, Microsoft could be without a real presence in the smartphone market.

It's suggested that the problem many frazzled people have today is not so much that they have too much to do, but that they don't reserve adequate amounts of mental and emotional capacity to make decisions

It's as close to the Google Reader as any of the other RSS readers on the market. Just be sure not to enable the widget to follow you everywhere you go using the Chrome web browser.

The two countries dispute one another's claims to parts of the South China Sea, and the newspaper's belligerence may or may not reflect official government attitudes...with a bias towards "may". If one were to make a list of "things the United States really doesn't need right now", towards the top of that list would be "a shooting war between China and one of our allies".


It looks like it's targeting computers in Korea, though that's no real assurance that it won't migrate elsewhere. And that it's hitting Korean computers certainly ought to raise eyebrows and suspicions as to whether the North Korean government and its cyberwarfare squads are involved.


Show notes for the WHO Radio Wise Guys for June 29, 2013