Emotion, Stupidity, and Animal Abuse Laws
For a societal explanation of animal abuse laws, follow this unassailable line of logic:
Fred Thompson Pulls an Al Sharpton
. . . and no, it’s not race baiting. Instead, somebody filed suit at the FEC against Fred Thompson for running a “campaign” without declaring (the same thing Sharpton did in 2004). I apologize profusely that this originates from a leftist blogger (the same one that exposed the Foley scandal), but it appears to be on point and you must brave the liberality of the rest of the site to read the full text of the suit.
If he knows he’s running, he ought to register with the FEC and come into compliance to avoid stubbing his toe on an unconstitutional government entity. However, if he intends to practice civil disobedience, then I applaud him, seeing as how the FEC should be abolished to the extent that it regulates campaigns.
The Fed Bought What (Article)
Anybody see a problem with this? John Koning does.
SSDs Beginning to Overtake HDDs
The market for Solid State Disks - that is flash-based drives with no moving parts - has been slow to come around. The drives that have been available over the past year have been limited in size (<64G), expensive (>$1000), and slower than conventional hard drives. Well it seems that one of these three drawbacks has been conquered. The MTRON 32GB SSD can actually outperform a Western Digital Raptor (the drive series that has held the IDE/SATA performance crown for as long as I can remember).
Flash drives have always held an advantage over conventional hard drives in that they can withstand higher shock, make no noise, produce no heat, require significantly less power, have faster access times, have higher MTBF . . . but that last hurdle of sustained read/write speeds had yet to be breached. As of now, even MTRON’s 32GB versions cost $1000, but I fully expect SSDs to surge ahead of HDDs in the coming months as other players step in with similar performance. After all, speed always leads to widespread adoption in the computing industry.
MTRON, a newly-founded South Korean company, is definitely doing something right. (visit their website) Unfortunately, I have no idea how to invest in this company because they are not listed on the Korea Exchange, though both Samsung and Promise are business partners.
A Penny Saved is Two Pennies Earned
With zinc prices on the rise, it now costs 2 cents to manufacture a single penny. Similar ratios exist for the production of nickels. Don’t bother trying to melt them down and sell their constituent parts, it’s illegal to do so as of December 2006. In the meantime, while this law is on the books and the mint refuses to stop making these coins at a loss to the taxpayer, the proper course of action is to hoard them. You are giving away money if you don’t.
Imagine for a moment that you took your entire life savings and converted it to pennies. You have instantly doubled its value - and it will continue to earn as copper and zinc prices increase. Whenever the mint gets around to nixing these coins, it’ll eventually be OK to melt them down as they are abandoned as a form of payment.
If you had converted all your life savings to pennies in 1982, you would have made 500% on that investment to date - 6.7% return per year. This is based on a commodity rate of copper alone. But the penny wasn’t under-valued by 50% in 1982 like it is today. Over the next 25 years a penny savings plan will earn you an initial 100% just on a decision to hoard and then 5-7% per year as the metal increases in value. This is equivalent to 9.7% return per year. Of course, you’d want to realize that initial 100% increase and sell the pennies at the earliest possible moment, so hopefully a shift in policy would occur before the 25 years passed.
If you’re not going to convert, at least stop giving them out as payment. Save them all!