Friday, June 16, 2007: Trois Pistoles vs. Bloomingdales 59th Street

Today's game was the Trois Pistole's first true victory.

The game was held at Field #7 in the North Meadow of Central Park. It was scheduled to start at 5:30 and we barely assembled the team by the 5:45 cutoff point. When I arrived at 5:10, the entire Bloomies team was already there practicing; it looked like they had been there for a while too.

A word about the other team: they were intensely competitive but lacked the skills to match. They made this pitcher extremely tense with their overt desire to walk... instead of hit. In slow pitch softball, the idea is to have fun: when I get up to bat, I want to hit the ball, not watch perfectly good pitches float over the plate. Alas, Bloomies did not share the sentiment.

After starting out the first couple of innings behind by a few runs, the Pistoles' staged an impressive comeback. Samantha is the clear MVP of the game. Her strong hitting and excellent base-running is the reason we won tonight!!











Another standout performance: Michael Bolger showing up early even though he could only stay for a few minutes because of dinner plans. His selfless sacrifice ensured that we were eligible to play.

By the 6th inning the score was 15 to 12 in our favor. Due to time constraints, the Ump announced that this would be the last inning: Bloomies would have to score a bunch of runs or the game was over. In softball, scoring 2 runs is quite simple, especially if you get a couple of people on base. After walking a batter, and allowing a base hit, it was not looking too good.




















With impressive infield play we kept them to 1 run and the game was over. The drama was just beginning, though. The Bloomies were a feisty and cantankerous bunch: they yelled and screamed because we were late and thought they should have been awarded a victory because of it. Regardless, the rules are clear that team's are given a 15 minute window in which to assemble. The confrontation resulted in a yelling match between us, Samantha, Bloomies, and the Ump. There was no argument though, we had won fair and square.

This narrative does not do our victory justice, so please feel free to comment freely. Also, Flickr friends can follow this link for all the softball pics.

Softball

I was hoping to write a story of the Trois Pistole's first-ever softball victory tonight. Alas, it wasn't meant to be: not a single member of the other team showed up!

Nevertheless, our team of NYC professionals made a very impressive appearance: the entire team made it to the field early for a 5:30 game... on a Monday afternoon!

The field (if you could call it that) was on Houston Street & FDR drive. It is a tiney space between the highway and the East River. Left field was so shallow it would've been easy for even the worst hitter to hit a home run on every at-bat!

The umpire patiently waited around until 5:45 when he called the game in our favor. After that, we practiced for a few minutes and then went to the bar for happy hour.

We were drinking and carrying-on for about three hours until we requested the check. It came to $550. We felt this was a bit high but nobody really thought too much of it. On closer inspection, Kara noticed that a veggie burger -- which we didn't order -- had made its way onto the tab. We presented this evidence to the waitress who re-crunched the numbers and presented us with a bill for only $260!!

So with two losses and two forfits, we are well on our way to the playoffs. Enjoy the pictures!

June 9 Linkfest

Investing:

The Consequences of Asia Rising: Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the Asian experience is that economic growth is not a zero sum game where the winners take jobs and opportunities away from the losers. The growth of China, India, and Indonesia is helping all the countries in Southeast Asia. Singapore gets more shoppers from neighboring countries and Hong Kong believes it will remain the financial capital for a burgeoning China since its open and transparent markets can attract more investors.

Similarly the U.S. has much to gain from the growth in Asia. Brand names are very important to the Asians and the consumer market in these developing countries is just opening up.

If we shut ourselves off from developments abroad, we will be the major ones to suffer. Opportunities abound in these developing markets. You can be sure that if the U.S. does not catch them, others most certainly will. (Yahoo! Finance)

U.S. economy’s fate in Saudi hands: Saudi Arabia is running the U.S. economy.
I'm not sure the Saudis want the task, but they've got it. Because the United States still doesn't have a national energy policy, we've thrown decisions about how fast our economy grows and whether our standard of living rises or falls into the hands of Saudi Arabia's oil ministry. (Jubak’s Journal – MSN Money)

How Ethanol Bites you in the wallet: Ethanol is attractive as a solution to high gasoline prices because it promises a free lunch:

* U.S. farmers would grow corn.

* U.S. ethanol companies would turn the corn into ethanol.

* U.S. consumers would go about business as usual.

* And everyone in the U.S. would be less dependent on foreign oil producers.

* But, repeat after me: There is no free lunch.

So far, this not-so-free lunch has resulted in higher food prices and rising U.S. dependence on fertilizers produced by, you guessed it, foreign oil and natural gas producers.

The costs are just starting to work their way through the U.S. and global economies. But it's none too early for investors to revise their portfolios to take account of the costs of this free lunch.

On June 4, corn (No. 2 Yellow, Central Illinois) sold for $3.77 a bushel. A year ago, the price was just $2.25 a bushel. That's a 67% jump in price in a year. (The futures markets say prices will stay here, too, with corn for December delivery selling at $3.83 a bushel on June 4.) (Jubak’s Journal – MSN Money)

Economy/Inflation:

Years of Global Growth Raise Inflation Worries: For the past decade, low-priced labor from China, India and Eastern Europe has helped much of the world enjoy economic growth without the sting of inflation. Now that damper on prices is beginning to reverse -- and global inflation pressure is starting to build. (WSJ)

General Mills Raises Price on Line of “Big G” Cereals: General Mills Inc. is expecting consumers to pay more for fewer Cheerios. By reducing the size of its cereal boxes, General Mills will be selling less for more. The new, smaller boxes will mean a low single-digit percentage increase in the price per ounce of such well-known cereal (WSJ)

Hot Commodities Ignite “Agflation” fears in Europe: Red hot agricultural markets are pushing food prices up in Europe, putting central bankers on alert for a new phenomenon economists have termed "agflation". (Reuters)

Bank of England May Need to Move Faster on “Sticky” Inflation: The Bank of England, which left interest rates unchanged yesterday, may have to move faster to curb the U.K.'s worst bout of inflation in a decade. (Bloomberg)

Globalization Creates Secular not Cyclical Inflation: The conclusion that this round of inflation is cyclical rather than structural is ridiculous. It brings us to the central debate – is globalization inflationary or deflationary? As the article implies, the growth of low-cost India and China has been a deflationary force on labor prices and certain manufactured goods. While this is undoubtedly true, this growth also has created inflation in many other sectors of the global economy. (Will’s Blog)

General:

Why So Many Suicides in Japan: Japan's agriculture minister hanged himself Monday amid allegations of bid-rigging and padding government expenses. The following day, an executive allegedly linked to one of the scams leapt to his death. In 2005, 32,552 people killed themselves in Japan—one of the highest suicide rates among industrialized nations. Why are there so many suicides in Japan? (Slate)

Iran Adding Attack Boats in Persian Gulf: Iran is increasing its fleet of small attack boats capable of challenging warships and disrupting oil traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, the sea route for two-fifths of the world's daily supply of crude oil, the U.S. Navy says. The boats -- up to 70 feet long and capable of speeds up to 57 miles per hour -- are armed with torpedoes and rocket- propelled grenades as well as cruise missiles and also are used to lay mines. The U.S. estimates Iran has 5,000 sea mines. (Bloomberg)

Gay Lawyers Come Out as Clients Demand More Diversity: The number of openly gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered lawyers increased by more than 50 percent from 2002 to 2006, according to the National Association for Law Placement. (Bloomberg)

Hong Kong Winters May Vanish in 50 Years: Hong Kong's winters could vanish within 50 years, with the number of cold days declining virtually to zero due to global warming and urbanization, the head of the city's weather observatory warned on Friday. (Yahoo! News)

Personal Finance

More Advice Graduates Don’t Want to Hear: While there may be a debate among economists about how much 50- and 60-year-olds should be saving for retirement, there is little dispute about how much the young should save: more. (NYT)

Globalization Creates Secular not Cyclical Inflation

Excerpt from a Financial Post article today:

When Tata Consultancy, the giant Indian computer services firm, says it is hiring 5,000 workers in Mexico because rising wages are pushing up costs at home, it is little wonder investors are beginning to get queasy about inflation.

Only a month or so ago most economists figured the U.S. Fed would cut interest rates to fight off spreading housing doom. Now even long-standing bears Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs have rubbed out their forecasts for U.S. cuts, the European Central Bank is hinting at further increases after yesterday's hike, the Bank of Canada is poised to pull the rate trigger, and investors are beginning to worry that even low-cost giants such as India and China are losing their disinflationary might.

But before markets succumb fully to a good old-fashioned inflation scare, it is worth taking a dispassionate look at where global inflation is actually heading. While it may be heading up after several years of gangbuster global growth, the uptick is likely more cyclical than structural.

The long-term forces that have been holding inflation down -- globalization, the adoption of free-market policies and more sophisticated central bank policies -- are unlikely to unravel overnight. (Though the biggest dividends from falling inflation may behind us.)

The conclusion that this round of inflation is cyclical rather than structural is ridiculous. It brings us to the central debate – is globalization inflationary or deflationary? As the article implies, the growth of low-cost India and China has been a deflationary force on labor prices and certain manufactured goods. While this is undoubtedly true, this growth also has created inflation in many other sectors of the global economy.

India and China are consuming massive quantities of energy and other commodities. Since the supply of commodities is not unlimited (unlike the capacity of Chinese companies to produce junk for Walmart), their prices have risen dramatically across the board. As they grow richer, they become accustomed to a higher standard of living and they have more money to spend on food and other consumables. This is why we’ve seen increases in everything for which supply/capacity is not very elastic: energy, food, metals, transportation, construction, etc. The net result is a dramatic increase in aggregate demand.

Globalization has also had a major impact on asset price inflation. The increase in trade (and a host of other factors) has led to a massive increase in the money supply. Much of this new money has sloshed into stocks, bonds, real estate and other “assets.”

As prices for energy, food, shelter, and commodities rise, it’s only a matter of time before wages rise along with them. We are seeing this in a dramatic fashion in India and China, where wage growth in many sectors is in the double digits.

This phenomenon is not a cyclical trend, it is a structural trend and one we will be facing until India & China are done “emerging” and become mature economies.

Sunday Linkfest

Here is delayed version of this week's Linkfest. I apologize for the bad formatting -- I'm working on a weird computer.

General Interest:

Making Yourself More Likeable at Work: Ask yourself: Do people like me? You get promoted in this world because people like you, not because you get work done. There's always more than one person who can get a job done. But everyone's personality is different, so when you want to differentiate yourself at work, focus on your personality. (Yahoo! Finance)

The Best Novels You’ve Never Read: A few ideas for beach reading. (New York Magazine)

Economy:

Another reason why rising real estate values are not a good thing:
To the Barricades! Property Taxes Spur Revolts: John F. Wasik: In a rising market, the local assessor will raise his estimate of your home's worth, which usually results in a higher real-estate tax bill. Nowhere has the burden incensed more taxpayers than in New Jersey. The state has the dubious honor of having the highest property-tax bills in the country, averaging $6,300 last year, a 7 percent increase over 2005. (Bloomberg)

Here is a fascinating article about oil shale and its potential as a huge new source of oil:
Colorado, Utah Rival OPEC Reserves, Lure Chevron, Exxon, Shell: Colorado and Utah have as much oil as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Algeria, Indonesia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates combined.

That's not science fiction. Trapped in limestone up to 200 feet (61 meters) thick in the two Rocky Mountain states is enough so-called shale oil to rival OPEC and supply the U.S. for a century.

``The breakthrough is that now the oil companies have a way of getting this oil out of the ground without the massive energy and manpower costs that killed these projects in the 1970s,'' said Pete Stark, an analyst at IHS Inc., an Englewood, Colorado, research firm. ``All the shale rocks in the world are going to be revisited now to see how much oil they contain.'' (Bloomberg)

5 Myths About That $3.18 Per Gallon: Here are five common myths about why we're paying so much at the pump. (Washington Post)

Investing:

Investors Learn a Lesson as Stock Index Hits High: The Standard & Poor's 500 index — a stock market benchmark for the retirement savings of millions of Americans — hit an all-time high Wednesday, raising hopes that Wall Street's 4 1/2 -year rally will keep on rolling.

But for many average investors, the event is a painful reminder that a key part of their portfolios has done little better than break even over the last seven years. The S&P index has just regained the last of its nearly 50% decline from 2000 to 2002, when plummeting shares of technology companies led the market down in the worst slump since the Great Depression. (LA Times)

Nikkei Climbs to 3-month closing high, techs up: Market participants said the Nikkei's rise may also be a sign that investors are reevaluating Japanese equities. The share average has inched up just 3.8 percent so far this year, making Tokyo one of the world's worst-performing equity markets. "If there is a global sell-off, Japan is likely to see the least amount of damage. The markets have yet to advance this year." (Reuters)

Kuwait Kicks Sand on the Dollar: The combination seems to be heading toward a jury-rigged global monetary system. This system doesn't rely on market mechanisms to adjust the relative value of currencies. Instead, individual countries opt in and out of those market mechanisms as they choose with their policy moves designed to maximize their own return from the rules of the market. (Jubak's Journal -- MSN Money)


Technology:

Google Street Level View Maps. This is incredible! Here's a picture of my apartment from the site:


Health:

Ex-China Drug Regulator to be Executed: China's former top drug regulator was sentenced to death Tuesday in an unusually harsh punishment for taking bribes to approve substandard medicines, including an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths.

The sentence was unusually heavy even for China, which is believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined — and likely indicates the leadership's determination to deal with the recent scares involving unsafe food and drugs.

According to the official magazine Outlook Weekly, a survey by the quality inspection administration found that a third of China's 450,000 food makers had no licenses. Also, 60 percent of the total did not conduct safety tests or have the capability to do so, the survey found. (Yahoo! News)

DRM Controversy

[rant]

When you buy a song or a software program, who really owns it? You or the company who sold it to you?

Songs purchased from Itunes or other sites often come with Digital Rights Management which puts all sorts of restrictions on what you can do with the file. For example, you can't just give it away to all your friends or download it to 300 Ipods.

DRM restrictions are so annoying to me that I refuse to buy any music if it comes with them. I believe that if I buy a song, it is mine and I should be able to do whatever I want with it. As far as I'm concerned, there is no fundamental difference between digital files and CD's. Sure, it's way easier to distribute electronic files than it was to make CD copies but that is beside the point. Steve Jobs certainly agrees and has been trying (with some success) to get the record companies that supply music to Itunes to drop their demands that the music come with DRM protections. So, for music, I think DRM will eventually go away.

For software though, it seems to be here to stay. Have you ever tried to download Turbo Tax, Microsoft Office or Windows on more than one computer? Well, you can't... you have to buy a second copy at full price. This is annoying but tolerable.

What's far worse is usage restrictions on software that you already have downloaded on your computer. Last year, at great expense to my then-employer, I enrolled in the Becker CPA review course. It comes with software which has review questions and practice tests. You have exactly one year to use the software after you download it onto your computer. After that, it stops working and there's nothing you can do about it. To get it reactivated, I was offered a "returning student discount" of $450!

What an insult!! We are talking about basic software, not an online course. What if book publishers put limitations on how long you could read a book before the internal explosive mechanism destroyed it? Obviously, nobody would buy books from that publisher! There is no fundamental difference here. If they wanted to put time restrictions on the practice questions, they should have put the entire thing online. Your access to the website would expire after one year. This is my software and I should be able to use it forever.

Getting By in New York City

The New York Times is lately running lots of articles about the high cost of living in NYC. A May 10 article by Christine Haughney sums up my situation nicely:

As the apartment-hunting season begins, fueled by college graduates and other new arrivals, real estate brokers say radical solutions among young, well-educated newcomers to the city are becoming more common, because New York’s rental market is the tightest it has been in seven years. High-paid bankers and corporate lawyers snap up the few available apartments, often leading more modestly paid professionals and students to resort to desperate measures to find homes.

I fall into the “modestly paid professional” category. In my observation there are three types of people under 30 who live in “nice” Manhattan apartments:

1. Bankers & Lawyers who easily make more than $200k right out of college or law school

2. People who are subsidized with Daddy’s money

3. Modestly Paid Professionals who squeeze lots of people into apartment. For example: three or four people living in an apartment that was originally designed to be a one-bedroom

For the rest of us who want to live here, we have to fight with each other to live in conditions which would be considered squalor in any other city in this country. Demand is fierce and supply of apartments is severely constrained by too many rent-controlled apartments and lack of new buildings with “affordable” units.

To live in the East Village in a trendy neighborhood, I live in a 5^th floor walkup, <500 style=""> We share a bathroom and our bedrooms are big enough for a bed and nothing else... including windows.

But I’m not complaining; I consider myself lucky to have such a great living situation. My roommates are awesome and my rent is less than $1,000 per month. How many people living in Manhattan can say that? Also, it allows me to live below my means and save money – things which are more important to me than living in a doorman building.