Channelling Jeremy Clarkson.

I am not particularly passionate about cars, although I do appreciate the super curves of a well-cut porsche or jaguar...

But I have an irrational hatred of current Mini-Coopers - Which I'll call for the moment-"most stupid car ever".

It's not the car per se. It is deeper than that, as you will soon find out.

Let's hark back to the original Mini-Cooper.




You see, I like this - you can see the charm. Although I cannot be sure of the owner demographic way back then-I would imagine it was considered a fairly innocuous first-entry car. This would have been bought by normal people of all ages. It was not, of course, a powerful car, and nobody would have drag-raced such a car (unless they had souped it up relentlessly at own cost). Even then I doubt it would go that fast.

Then, this came out (a while ago now).




Okay, okay, this is the rally version. But I am trying to make a point (to be made very soon).

Two main points:

1) What GROWN adult would buy a car that looks like a retarded toy car, with huge ugly dials (besides Asian men who have been 'infantalised' by culture-[thanks for that phrase terry]?)- it looks like a 90 year old man dressed up in drag. So who would buy it? I will tell you.

Tossers and nitwits.

Good on BMW for paying the producers of the Italian Job a bomb for putting it all over their movie, because I am pretty sure without that there would only be half as much Coopers on the road.

And that would make it a hell of a lot harder to pick out the worst (and most idiotic) drivers on the road today--besides Volvo drivers.

2) BMW took a car that stood for something very English, proper and quaint. Then- turned it into a tool for wannabe hot-head tossers in rich countries. This is, however, in keeping with BMW's image for the most part. I won't even mention their Z-series, which are crass and stupid (Again, 99% of the time the owners are toss pots).

Okay, I had to deal with a lot of bad traffic today and two moronic Cooper drivers. But I stand by my conviction based on current and previous experience that only morons would ever pay that kind of money for a concept car with wrong and confused tenets. I have much respect for the original Mini-Cooper owners though. Much kudos to you for keeping the dream alive.

Mobile phones and the Oversell.

These days the only shops that continue to do relentless trade are mobile phone shops-I went in on a Sunday thinking they would be empty but all three of them were packed. (I did not get served and just ditched the idea of joining a queue).

Anyway, where do I begin? I just don't get this whole thing.

I have figured out that I am getting financially punished by prudent and conservative use of my phone (that I actually own-how shocking!!!), for the same money per month, I could get a NEW phone for NOTHING, as long as I lock into a fixed plan for 24 months which will give me X amount of calls per month (currently more call time than I get with my pay per call status).

Sounds too good to be true doesn't it?

Usually, I'm the first to jump in for a bargain. On the face of it, it's much better than what I am on currently. But mentally my attitude towards the phone may change. I sort of do not rely on my phone or use it much (especially now barely anybody is on optus!), plus I always forget it so it's not on me half the time. But as soon as I get onto a plan, there will be a different mental view towards the phone-because you are contracted to it literally, this is a gadget you are paying off over two years-it's not actually free. It's a continual sign of debt actually. But this is not viewed as a bad thing in this day and age, it is viewed as the best option, and in fact, as I have already discovered, we are punished by the mobile phone service providers by NOT BEING ON CONTRACT/FUTURE DEBT.

Is it just me or is this nuts?

The other thing that actually pisses me off is the overwhelming choice of phone plans, for some time I wanted an iphone, but now i'm not sure, should I get something basic and smaller, what about blackberries (which are really cheap right now), HTCs, there is even a new social networker plan (INQ unlimited email and facebook access).

At the moment I'm just sitting on it because I really enjoy the freedom of not being a slave to a plan, plus prices and deals keep toppling downwards month by month. I just don't get why the average person chooses to pay for expensive locked in plans ("I get over $500 worth of talk time on this plan!"), unless they are actually using mobile phones for chatting (something I find heinous and irritating in many situations).

Experimental Bubbles/Crashes

I love this experiment. The brilliance in science is its ability to control variables, this is just as important in economics, especially when you are dealing with humans in a man-made system (of economics)-basically, there is no getting past the flaws that will eventuate.

Those around long enough do not find the financial bust surprising-whereas people of my generation are shocked (there is no such thing as never-ending growth-whhhhatttt?). I guess you can extend the facade by making up such bolony as hedge funds, but if this experiment is any indication, boom and bust patterns are pretty much an unavoidable occurrence.

Lab set up:
-Volunteers (uni students and business grads) are divided into groups of a dozen, each is given money and shares to trade with.

Methods
-An average dividend of 24c may be paid at the end of each of 15 rounds (24c is the average, the other amounts are 0, 8, 28 or 60c-average=24c)

-All are given the same info, participants are not allowed to talk to one another, they only interact through trading screens.

-Repeat with many different small groups.

-The expected value of the future dividend at any given time would be as follows: 15X24c or $3.60 @ the end of the 1st round, 14x24 or 3.36 at the end of the 2nd round and so on. Stock should stick close to the expected value.

However, in 90% of cases this is not what happens. Trading prices runs way up above the fundamental value, and at the 15th round it crashes. ie. the bubble and crash phenomenon.


Discussion.

For the price to track the fundamental value, everybody has to know that everybody else is rational. If you put people in asset markets, they do not try to figure out the fundamental value of the asset, they first try to buy low and sell high-that speculation creates a bubble.

People who make the most money are not those who stick to fundamentals. Speculators who buy a lot at the beginning and sell midway through, taking advantage of the "momentum" traders who jump when the market is going up and don't sell until it is going down, wind up with the least money in the end.

Bubbles pop when the momentum traders run out of money and can no longer push prices up. The only way to avoid bubbles is if people stick to a securities fundamental value.

These experiments were conducted in the 80s, and the scientist in question (whose name I don't know, I just read about this on my travels in some magazine and scrabbled the results on a napkin) won a Nobel Prize in economics.

Yes, this was known about in the 80s. When greed was apparently good, and up until recently was pretty much revered.

Trillion Dollar Wonder

This morning I heard that Obama 'promises' to (hopes to rather) cut the current 2 trillion dollar federal deficit in half by end of term (2013).

A trillion is, 1,000,000,000,000 (one million million; 1012; SI prefix: tera-).

That is not counting the economic booster package-which was close to a trillion. Let's say the overall federal deficit after spending is actually in the order of 3 trillion now.

Federal deficit is the money the Government is spending versus it's tax revenues.

This is not to be confused with America's National Debt. If you'll recall, New Yorks National Debt Clock had run out of room back in October because it crossed through ten trillion dollars. The keepers of the clock (the Durst organization) had to drop the dollar sign and make room for the “1″ in the tens of trillions column.

Ten trillion looks like this, by the way -
$10,000,000,000,000.00

- just so you know.

The national debt at this writing is actually 10,838,758,414,164.46. which is

10,838,758,414,164.46/(303,824,640)

(that is, Debt Held by the Public/population)

$35,674US debt held by each individual in the US today.


It was about half that in 2000. Hmmm...that's eerily close to when Bush was first elected isn't it?

Although, to make things more confusing, National deficit is defined as the total outstanding borrowings of a central government comprising of internal (owing to national creditors) and external (owing to foreign creditors) debt incurred in financing its expenditure.

So, whilst it's possible for Obama to cut the federal deficit-(only by increasing taxes). No amount of tax increase is going to adequately overcome the booming National Debt, unless something really radical happens. Is it purely coincidence that the very same morning (ie. this morning) Obama made this proclamation, the Dow Jones posted it's lowest average in 12 years? Clearly, stock holding capitalists are running scared, whilst simultaneously anticipating a tax rise. Oh no!!! The new custom Porsche will have to wait.

Economic redress finally asserts itself.

The Wonder of Stress

Stress has been given a lot of bad press. On a molecular level, it induces levels of cortisol that in the long term is rather bad for you. People seem to imply it ages you and makes you haggard, science has yet to quantify the degree to which this happens in a universal sense. But stress is also unbelievably necessary, at least in my life, and works wonders for making you do things.

Sorry to state the bleedin' obvious, but I find that some of the greatest achievements of my life (too far and few between to really mention) were the product of alternate bursts of stress punctuating extremely long, unproductive bouts of rumination (some might call it the more accurate term-procrastination). That said, I am not on the home-run straight yet, but I definitely felt the benefits of stress overcoming various current setbacks including but notwithstanding, serious sleep deficit, insufficient eating habits (couldn't be bothered to find time), being in a serious tizzy from worry about the stuff I have to do, and working too much in the wrong places. Maybe I should get over the fact that doing some actual work once in a while is not a wondrous thing and I shouldn't have to be borderline broken as a human being before actually doing the things I'm supposed to be doing. Hmmm...


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On what I consider to be a more interesting note, I've had a longstanding fascination with the psychiatric field, but am now gravitating towards an interest in the more social scientist world view, and in particular political social science thinking. (To be honest, this is something I think I could have really done well in if I had started early enough, ie. had already done an undergrad in politics).

Food for thought right now:

"There are…certain freedoms that are like circuses.
Their very existence, so long as they are individual
and enjoyed chiefly individually as by spectators,
diverts men’s mind from the loss of other, more fundamental,
social and economic and political rights." Robert Nisbet.

This is something along the lines of which I would like to explore in my next diatribe, time permitting.