10 Friday AM Reads

Re: RIMM vs Apple

In the late 80s and early 90s, I realized that the electronics tech sector was different from pretty much all the others (other than retail fads) because companies were required to throw themselves out and replace themselves once a decade. Other major sectors typically have half-century types of reinvention timeframes which provide decent moats. As a result, any investing in tech companies is a bet on the management pure and simple. And that management can’t just be good managers, they need to be constantly innovating at a high pace as well as being gurus in management and marketing. This is a very tough order and not many people can do it once never mind three or four times in a row. Steve Jobs is one of the few – even Bill Gates couldn’t do it. So as a result, most good to excellent tech companies have meteoric rises that them crash and burn because they can’t survive the next critical product cycle. What has been interesting to watch is the sheer volume of people tinkering in dorm rooms and garages who have been able to come out with the next big thing. In the industrial age, this was a relatively as much of the advances were done in the big corporations (albeit often in skunk works lost in a corner of them).

Based on this thinking, I skipped both the 98-99 Nasdaq spike and the 2000 NASDAQ bear market. I ended up mainly in value funds from late 98 into the mid-2000s because they were the only ones that had 20% tech or less in them. So my portfolio largely just cruised along with much smaller peaks and valleys. The one that really surprised me was when the financial sector blew up the world’s financial system and the world economy – I wasn’t expecting that from the people who were supposed to be the adults. Unfortunately, I don’t think they have learned enough lessons from that yet for us to be safe.

Reagan and Thatcher Would Mock Today’s Pessimists.

No. That’s how they grabbed power. Remember how optimistic the pessimists were when Romney was sure to win?

Everyone who listened to the Anti-Obama screeds have gotten killed. They used to brag how gold saved them. Rightsplaining their way to a Socialist hell hole right around the corner.

Republican rhetoric is laughable. Their investigations are comic. Their “World’s on Fire” nonsense hysterical

Brownback and Kansas Republicans are panicking into a hasty tax bill to cover tax shortfalls before they have to annihilate education spending. I am sure an implicit threat there was that the university basketball team could have been negatively impacted which would have been a political death knell.

http://cjonline.com/news/2015-06-12/house-breaks-gridlock-narrowly-approves-tax-increases-early-morning-vote

I am sure they have been shocked that businesses have not flocked to Kansas from California and New York to take advantage of their lower taxes. However, I had heard that Goldman Sachs was considering relocating to Topeka to take advantage of the tax reductions and lower cost of living compared to NYC.

No One Knows What to Do With Fukushima’s Endless Tanks of Radioactive Water
Posted By Eliza Strickland on Jun 09, 2015

This is what passes for good news from Fukushima Daiichi, the Japanese nuclear power plant devastated by meltdowns and explosions after a cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami in 2011: By the end of last month, workers had succeeded in filtering most of the 620,000 tons of toxic water stored at the site, removing almost all of the radioactive materials.

After numerous false starts and technical glitches, most of the stored water has been run through filtration systems to remove dangerous strontium-90, as well as many other radionuclides. TEPCO, the Japanese utility that operates the power plant, trumpeted the achievement: “This is a significant milestone for improving the environment for our surrounding communities and for our workers,” said Naohiro Masuda, TEPCO’s chief decommissioning officer, in a press release.

But it’s not quite so easy to bounce back from a nuclear disaster of this scale. For one thing, don’t take TEPCO’s statement too literally: No one is living in the “surrounding communities”—they’re far too contaminated for human habitation. Furthermore, the filtered water is still full of tritium, a radioactive version of hydrogen. (When two neutrons are added to the element, it becomes unstable, prone to emitting electrons.) Tritium bonds with oxygen just like normal hydrogen does, to produce radioactive “tritiated water.” It’s impractical—or at least extremely difficult and expensive—to separate tritiated water from normal water.

Hence TEPCO’s dilemma—which gets bigger by the day.

…

http://nautil.us/blog/no-one-knows-what-to-do-with-fukushimas-endless-tanks-of-radioactive-water

We celebrate a media man who wants to be a woman

http://radaronline.com/photos/caitlyn-jenner-walking-photos/photo/1064560/

and deride a white woman who pretends to be black.

http://www.people.com/article/rachel-dolezal-parents-she-doesnt-want-to-be-seen-with-us-ruin-image

Please let me know when People, ET, and Radar Online have sorted this all out so I know what to think.