Double Blind

This pretty much sums up all of my thoughts on smartphones (web-enabled mobile phones).

I’ve played with friends’ Iphones and Blackberries and other phones and thought when it comes to content creation and ability to crank out material on a keyboard that they don’t at all compare to a netbook. The only missing solution that currently impairs me is the internet access – I have to find free wireless hotspots (Starbucks is very reliable for this), but with the introduction of cheap highspeed mobile USB sticks, this problem might be alleviated and worth the $50/mo cost for the service. It might even replace Shaw Cable, which is getting at that price range, although I don’t know what the capacity of an internet USB stick is when doing applications like Bittorrent.

Reading this article on the New York Times about how increasing unemployment in the Japanese economy is causing people to move out from their company-subsidized housing into “capsule hotels” while people try to find work elsewhere. The even more amazing feature is the cost of living in such a unit is relatively high (about $640/mo), but this is less than residential housing available elsewhere in Tokyo.

I ask myself whether this could happen over here – the minimal example that we have in Canada of a residential safety net is non-market housing, and the costs of that are a percentage (typically 30%) of income. Such housing is much larger than the 30 square feet (plus common areas) in the capsule hotels.

I am trying to not make a moral judgment whether this is a “good” or “bad” system – instinctively, however, I would think that in the USA, people would revolt before letting this happen to themselves. The Japanese culture appears to be more docile to adverse circumstances.

Happy New Year – I hope 2010 will be as good as 2009 was.

I will toss out a few random links for the day:

1. R-Squared wrote an entry on what he learned from maintaining his (much more popular than mine) site – taking out the energy and oil-specific content, his points mirror exactly what I experience here in Double Blind. This is especially true for the “Trying to predict which essays will get a lot of hits is futile” – the items that have gotten a lot of attention here I would have never guessed after writing.

One reason why this site is not popular is because I have not given it a specialization – it is a general site that takes my rants and raves of the day. I’ve carved off the financial side and British Columbia politics elsewhere, however.

2. Justin writes a travel blog entry about his 3 night trip in Okinawa. The part about the different types of salts was fascinating to read about, and I am awfully curious with respect to the taste.

3. Alex Tsakumis never holds back his opinions, and I have very much enjoyed his commentaries that he had in the newspapers. Now he is online and reviewed 2009 and has a fairly good summary – some bullet points I’d disagree with him on, but he is a very entertaining read.

I have posted on Divestor an article of “What makes Vancouver Real Estate so expensive?“. I’m sure there are some holes in my analysis, but it was interesting to write it up and go through some variables of my mental modeling of the real estate market.

One of the reasons why it is so expensive is that people don’t translate dollars into yearly income – if you gave me a stack of money today, I could translate every dollar into an income stream of 10 cents a year with a reasonable amount of risk. So when looking at your typical Greater Vancouver detached home of $749,808, one is actually giving up a future income stream of $74,981/year to purchase that home. Assuming you don’t make any other money, that would be $58,500 after taxes in 2010. If one were to rent a place for half that amount (about $2,400) and continue investing the rest of it at 10%, there is a high degree of probability that you would be up even after factoring in missed capital gains on a home purchase.

Anthony makes a great post about how entrepreneurs seek to be risk-minimizers. I distinctly recall him making this point to me in person a couple years back, and I still remember his comments to this day. It is good to see it in writing, just in case if I get old and senile.

My two cents on the matter is that most people that (unsuccessfully) get in business for themselves get in trouble with capital assets – they tend to be involved in businesses that are capital intensive (e.g. restaurants) and the ability to convert the fixed asset infrastructure into cash flows is not as easy as it seems on paper, as it requires a lot of operational expertise to be able to do so.

This site is full of cartoon satire, but it is quite believable that there is an embedded truth to it in the real world.

This link has a video that compares Star Trek to Star Wars… and they got it pretty much correct.

Sugarstacks looks at various foods and drinks we eat and displays the quantity of sugar in cube-equivalents. I’m sure they are trying to socially engineer people into selecting lower sugar products, but I found the comparisons interesting without any messaging in terms of what is good to eat.

In particular, one can infer that drinking sugar is a lot easier than eating it directly through foods – although soft drinks are a favorite target of anti-sugar advocates, most fruit juices contain just as much sugar.

The trick, as with many things, is moderation. I am also amazed to see 7-Eleven selling the “Double Gulp” which contains 64 fluid ounces of liquid, or 1.89 litres – might as well buy the two litre pop bottle at this point and stick a huge straw in it.

This analysis of Goldman Sachs’ last quarter, and how “not so great” it was despite the media sensationalizing it as being a great quarter is spot on and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Goldman subsequently managed to sucker $5 billion of capital into investing in its common stock, at $123 a share. It traded down to about $115. There are two alarming facts here for investors:

1. That Goldman needed to raise $5 billion instead of just “earning it” (they said they needed it to repay TARP loans).
2. Goldman didn’t float a bond or convertible debt; it took the shareholders to the cleaners.

There are multiple instances in the financial world of institutions trying to goose up their first quarter results to give the perception of a recovery (which may or may not be happening); Wells Fargo wrote down Wachovia when they acquired it, only to write-up the assets in the first quarter. I’m not sure how reliable the results from financial companies are going to be, which is why I’ve been avoiding them and sticking to firms that can produce economic profits instead of financial ones.

Here are the 2008 consolidated financial statements for the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority – for future reference in case if I want to discuss something related to how much money Translink receives.