In 1912, one of Sweden’s greatest inventors, physicist Gustaf Dalén, was blinded during an accident involving pressure containment for his gas accumulators. He had created a device for use in unmanned lighthouses. This device lit itself at night and extinguished in the morning, improving marine safety, thereby saving countless lives and immeasurable property. Despite the setback of…
For reasons I cannot entirely articulate, I find that I have a problem with the subsidized hardware business model. There is something about it I find either insidious or distasteful.
The question I tackle this time: “If asset intensive businesses are inferior investments, why would any rational investor ever buy one?”
A reader wanted to know about a blog post I wrote on my Investing for Beginners site at About.com back on October 9th, 2008 during the depths of the financial crisis. Thankfully, I was able to recover it and repost it as it had been de-indexed and removed by the network as part of its routine content changes. I doubt that will be possible much longer as so much of that content is simply lost.
I mentioned the infamous Bob Jones University student handbook in an earlier post after explaining it was the school from which one of the extremist authors I was reading as part of a self-imposed cultural studies program graduated back in 1950. It was the university that famously insisted God didn’t want blacks intermingling with whites and refused…
I don’t talk about it very often, but one of the charitable organizations close to my heart are community food banks and soup kitchens. These non-profits collect groceries for those who can’t afford to feed themselves or their children, allowing them to avoid hunger. They resonate with something very deep in my core, maybe because I…
A few of you know I’m in the middle of my 1970-1990 counter-evidence study, in which I dive into books on both extremes of the so-called culture wars, reading everything from radical feminists to conservative preachers to understand some of the things that were happening in the United States at the time from the perspective…
Hands down, I am strongly convinced the single most incompetent source of regularly published financial advice or business information of any major newspaper in the United States is the money section of USA Today. The conclusions are often outright wrong, the understanding of accounting and economics vapid, and the headlines written to achieve nothing more than clicks without leaving the reader better informed than he or she was in the beginning. It is the fiscal equivalent of fluff, only worse because fluff can be fun without leaving an inaccurate impression on something as important as national economic policy.
The economics of the movie theater industry are interesting. In many cases, up to 70% of the ticket price goes to the movie studio that created the film and the distributor who sold the rights to it, leaving the remaining 30% for the owners. This creates a situation where most of the profit comes from…
We’re working on making our own homemade version of Chipotle’s burrito bowl so we can throw them together fairly quickly (make the salsa in advance, pre-measure the ingredient portions, and all you have to do is a handful of steps in less than 20-30 minutes whenever you want to mass produce them).