It takes all kinds

I saw an article recently talking about Google's presence in Japan. It is one of the few countries they have not dominated.

"Earlier this year, Google’s splash page for Japan abandoned the company’s classic spare design and added links to YouTube, Gmail and other services — an attempt to lure Japanese users who favor sites decorated with a cacophony of text and graphics." ----NY Times

I am not sure why anyone would want a cacophony of text and graphics. It's distracting, loads slowly, uses lots of memory, and has a tendency not the render the same way across browsers, screens, etc.

Future of Journalism

The old business model for journalism is clearly on the decline as we can see from the bankruptcy filings of major newspapers. No business model is guaranteed to persist in an economy that allows creative destruction, but people's needs still need to be fulfilled in one way or another. It takes a lack of imagination to think that journalism is dead. The 20th century newspaper business model is dying for sure. I think that people still want facts to be gathered and commentators and aggregators still need a primary news gathering as support. I believe that some model will allow companies to make money by producing news whether that involves microtransactions, a separation of content and distribution (similar to ASCAP in the recording industry), or something nobody has thought of yet.

I went to a round table discussion on political journalism and I had a couple takeaways. I may turn this into a more detailed blog entry later.

• Journalism was never that well paid to begin with
• Much of what's available on the Internet, TV, etc. is aggregation or commentary rather than primary news gathering
• Newspaper model is clearly in the past. I wish the roundtable had gotten into some detail about possible business models and payment systems. At some point I will go into more depth.
• The issue with non-profit news gathering groups as a solution is that they don't care as much about interesting stories. They may cover "important" stories that nobody will listen to or read since they don't have nearly the incentive to get eyeballs.

Oh come on

Useless Features

Conversation

MC : have you ever used the web in windows to search what program opens a file type and been successful?
DR: no
DR: it's about the most useless feature
MC: i know
MC: it's laughable
DR: up there with copying a file and relying on the time estimate
MC: hahaha

This Time It's Personal Finance

I have taken some time to clarify my investment style for this blog and for myself without making any specific investment recommendations.

• Value, concentrated investing – While many seek the diversification of the full market portfolio, I speculate on a few investments I believe to be a great value. Growth companies have historically underperformed value stocks as investors systematically overestimate growth. Earnings growth regresses to the mean, and value typically is a better investment. A purely quantitative black-box strategy could evaluate the entire market and find value stocks. However, I am examining a company’s strategic position, financial statements, and conference calls. A portfolio of a small basket of investments that are in different sectors will get most of the benefits of diversification.

• International exposure – Most investors in any given country have a home bias. While there are barriers in understanding and in regulations to investing in other countries, it seems excessive. I seek to invest a high percentage of my investments outside the United States in emerging markets. In the cases where I cannot buy individual stocks, I buy exchange traded funds that give exposure to a particular country or region.

• Liquidity is not all that important – Most of my investments are fairly liquid at this point in time since I am unable to invest in private equity and venture capital. However, I am willing to make illiquid investments if I am compensated for that illiquidity. You can maintain liquidity on tap with credit lines at a very low cost to maintain.

• Leverage – At this time, I have cheap access to credit to borrow against investments in my portfolio. While leverage increases risk, I am in a great position to assume that higher risk. With a greater base of assets, my return on equity will be higher assuming my asset’s returns are greater than my borrowing rate.

Thanks to Dave Albrecht for asking me to write about my investing philosophy

We are HTC

HTC has been a major producer of smart phones for the last several years, but many of their phones barely acknowledged where their origin. I have an HTC Tytn II, which is better known has an AT&T 8925 or AT&T Tilt. HTC is now bringing its name to the foreground with an advertising campaign, "You."

I really appreciated the images and music used in the commercial. Here's the script -

It’s the first thing you see in the morning.

And the last thing you see at night.

It stresses you out.

And calms you down.

It helps you remember.

It helps you forget.

It keeps you connected.

It’s the only thing that is alway within an arms reach.

Which is why you don’t need to get a phone.

You need a phone, that gets you.

And you. And you. And you.

And we are HTC.

It seems that someone really understands how people use their phones and people's connection to their phones. HTC has such a broad line of products across price points, feature sets, and operating systems their advertisements have to be about experience not specific features, apps, and utility. (Contrast to an Iphone ad)

Corporate Speech

I recently found myself in an argument about the rights of a corporation to speak on political issues. To give some context, it was a long discussion beginning with talk of the bailouts and financial regulation and moving towards whether corporations have a right to speak and corporate personhood in general. While there was plenty of fodder for blog entries, I am addressing the corporate speech issue.

Shareholders have interests in a company doing well and sometimes regulation or tax policy is a critical issue. Shareholders and directors acting on behalf of themselves have the right to advocate for or against various issues. I think most people would agree to that proposition.

However, in order to be effective in promoting the interests of the shareholders the speech needs to be coordinated. In practice, the transaction costs are far too high not to do so and shareholders are not neccessarily aware of all the issues that are relevant. They have appointed directors to deal with that and anything else in the day to day operation the the company.

In principle, people do not lose rights when they pool their resources and appoint agents to represent them.(a corporation) "Issue" ads are exactly the type of speech that was intended to be protected. To prohibit corporate speech in favor or against policies is to tie the hands of the shareholders and effectively prevent them from promoting their interests.

Responding to Incentives

I believe that people can be intelligent consumers of health care with the right information like anything else. A big part of the problem with health care is that the true cost is not borne or known by the users of health care. While there will always be a need for catastrophic health insurance to cover unexpected events, the more frequent costs could be covered by consumers. Tax policies have encouraged "all you can eat" health care paid for by a third party. No surprise that people in this regime would consume more health care at greater and greater costs. Not only is the demand higher, there is an incentive to shift costs on to third party payers.

Given this background, I found this piece from the WSJ interesting on new websites to assist with finding pricing information for medical procedures. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704222704574499623333862720.html