Friday, July 19, 2002

NYT.  Sell off of Dow stocks get real.  Frankly, this is a repudiation of the insider game on Wall Street by individual investors.  Individuals provided the fuel for most of the gains we saw during the last 20 years.  Insiders made much more (their excessive greed queered their future).  Now the game is moving to homes.  Not much the big money insiders can do there.  Unlike the UK and much of Europe, individuals own homes in the US.  They profit exclusively from the gains.  A pool of undifferentiated sources provide financing.   The gain in homes over the next decade will make your head spin.  Get into as big a home as you can, stretch out your mortgage payments as long as you can, find the best neighborhood you can (remember a home's value is defined by three factors:  location, location, and location), and ride the wave.  This is the retirement cornicopia that can't be matched by the stock market.  One thing though, you need to be prepared to sell your home when you retire.  In a five or so years, most of the US will be in home shortage mode, like CA and NYC are today. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 4:38:29 PM

Economist: Identity rules. The Economist reports on the release of specifications this week by the Liberty Alliance. Allowing for broad input, however, does not guarantee success. On the contrary, reaching agreement is likely to be harder. The first version of Liberty's specification deals only with single sign-on, not with the more controversial exchange of user information, such as payment details and buying preferences. What is more, Microsoft and IBM, which has also decided to stay out of the consortium for now, may yet try to launch a competing standard. On top of this, consumers might not bite. So far, they are not very enthusiastic about identity services. Most register with websites only because they have to, and do not trust technology firms to prevent misuse of personal information. Promoters of identity services will probably have to face the fact that many, if not most, consumers will prefer to stay anonymous—just as they can in the offline world. [Scott Loftesness] 4:36:51 PM

Traction and Radio. Roland Tanglao liked my review of Traction, but reconsidered when Jim McGee pointed out that Traction is a whole lot more expensive: ... [Jon's Radio] 11:58:27 AM

porting open source projects to .net NAnt, Log4Net, NLucene, NDigester, and of course NUnit.  All are .NET ports or reimplementations of Java open source projects.  Anybody know of others?  Updates: Gordon Weakliem: LogKit.NET.  Richard Caetano: Non Java: SharpZipLib.  .NET Specific: NDOC [Sam Ruby] 8:47:17 AM

Greenspan: Housing to Ease Market Blow. iWon Jul 17 2002 12:14PM ET [Moreover - Economics news] 8:38:57 AM

vinge If you haven't read this basic essay on the Singularity, it is a fun entry article on the topic. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 8:34:54 AM

Which 529 Is Best for You?. A 529 savings plan is the best way to save for college. But whose plan should you join? [The Motley Fool] 8:32:35 AM

The Beat of REITs. What's a real estate investment trust, and why would you want to invest in one? [The Motley Fool] 8:25:32 AM

Five Ways of Valuing Options The verdict on the best method: current value - strike price. Simple, can't be manipulated, doesn't unfairly penalize anyone. Compared against several variants of Black-Scholes. 8:21:20 AM

I've been using Mikel's "newsviews" tool for Radio and I like it alot.  It allows you to sort RSS subscriptions by category.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 8:04:37 AM

Fortune.  The tale of Harken gets stranger and more cloudy by the minute:  >>>"It was always suspected that something was fishy, but not because of the Bush connection," says Gheit of Fahnestock. "That for a small company like Harken to be involved in foreign drilling operations getting concessions from foreign governments, things just didn't add up. A lot of people had suspected that this was a CIA front." That particular point, of course, is just a rumor.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 8:00:43 AM

The Economist.  The telcoms bust was 10x larger than the .com bust and will be seen as the biggest bubble in history. >>> The likely winners, it is already clear, are the former “Baby Bells” in America and the former monopoly incumbents in Europe. Because they own the “last mile” of the network that runs into homes and offices, these operators have a firm grip on their customers and solid revenues. Compared with their upstart competitors that proliferated after the liberalisation of telecoms markets during the 1990s, these firms are relative safe havens. Customers can switch long-distance carriers at the first whiff of trouble, but often have no choice of local provider. In theory, regulators should require local monopolies to allow competitors to provide services over their lines, but most local monopolies have successfully obstructed such “local-loop unbundling” using a variety of technical excuses. In a further sign that local operators are seen as a safe haven, Michael Powell, America's telecoms regulator, even signalled this week that he would consider allowing one of the Bells to buy WorldCom. <<<  Unless we can break the stranglehold of the baby bells on the local loop, all bets are off for the rebirth of the Internet. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 7:58:16 AM