Preston Gralla:

Whenever you surf the Web, you leave yourself open to being snooped upon by Web sites. They can track your online travels, know what operating system and browser you’re running, find out your machine name, uncover the last sites you’ve visited, examine your history list, delve into your cache, examine your IP address and use that to learn basic information about you such as your geographic location and more. To a great extent, your Internet life is an open book when you visit.

Sites use a variety of techniques to gather and collate this information, but the two most basic are examining your IP address and placing cookies on your PC. Matching your IP address with your cookies makes it easier for them to create personal profiles.

If you’d like to see what kind of information sites can gather about you, head to these two sites, which peer into your browser and report what they find.

Damon Darlin makes some interesting points:

Could it be possible that you are saving too much for your retirement?

Such an idea would fly in the face of almost every exhortation to a nation of spendthrifts that saving more is an imperative. After all, even as people are living longer, corporate pension plans and Social Security can no longer be relied on to ease most Americans through their retirement years. Fidelity, the nation’s largest provider of workplace retirement savings plans, says the average 401(k) account balance is only $62,000.

Beyond that, the national savings rate — the difference between after-tax income and expenditures — is actually negative, government statistics show.

Nevertheless, a small band of economists from universities, research institutions and the government are clearly expressing the blasphemy that many Americans could be saving less than they are being told to by the financial services industry — and spending more — while they are younger. The negative savings rate, they say, is wildly distorted.

Lawrence Summers:

THE YEAR 2007 will begin with a vast divergence between the popular view of global risks and the risks as priced in financial markets. While the commentariat has been more alarmed about the state of the world than global markets for some years, the gap increased in 2006 as markets became more serene and everyone else grew more anxious.

The headlines and opinion writers focus on how the U.S. is badly bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; on an increasingly unstable Middle East and dangerous energy dependence; on nuclear proliferation that has already occurred in North Korea and that is coming in Iran; on the potential weakness of lame-duck political leaders; on record global trade imbalances and rising protectionist pressures; on increased levels of public and private-sector borrowing combined with record low saving in the United States; and on falling home prices and middle-class economic insecurity.

Reuters:

He said that a clear hint from the Fed that rate cuts are on the way could set up further weakness in the dollar. “Once people start to believe that the Fed will have to cut interest rates in the next three to four months, the dollar’s decline is going to accelerate,” he said.


Over the course of 2007 the dollar could fall more than 5 percent against a basket of currencies, Gross said.


Financial markets have cut the chances of a Fed rate cut by March to about 25 percent after Friday’s stronger-than-expected November payrolls report, from over 80 percent following news of weak factory activity issued on Dec. 1. Futures fully reflect a rate cut to 5 percent by June.


Gross said that over time, the housing market downturn would exert more downward pressure on the overall U.S. jobs market and consumer spending, potentially pushing up the jobless rate.


It could be another one to two years before the effects of the housing bubble are unwound, he said.

Mark Blumenthal:

Yes, the television networks will be conducting exit polls today. But if you are looking for the leaked exit poll estimates that typically appear online on Election Day, you are probably out of luck at least until later tonight. More on that below. But as long as you are here, let me tell you a little bit about how exit polls are conducted, how they will be different this year, and why it is probably best to try to ignore the exit poll estimates that will inevitably leak later tonight.

I have always been a fan of exit polls. Despite their shortcomings and the inevitable controversies, the final network exit polls remain our best source of data on who voted and why. Having said that, exit polls are still just random sample surveys, possessing the usual limitations plus some that are unique to exit polling.

Interesting data compiled by Congressional Quarterly’s Political Moneyline. As always, paper heir Jim Sensenbrenner is #1 in these goodies receiving $203,175 in travel over the past six years. David Obey escaped Wisconsin Winters a number of times, coming in 70th at $79,153. Tammy Baldwin was #147 @ $48,173 while Paul Ryan was #142 @ $48,866. Ryan and Baldwin both travelled to Israel and Jordan courtesy of the American Israel Education Foundation. Russ Feingold was #597 @ $1,078.

Jay Rosen:

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

Tim Porter has more.

Gunther von Hagen:

Gunther von Hagens’ BODY WORLDS exhibitions are currently showing in North America. “The human body is the last remaining nature in a man made environment,” he says. “I hope for the exhibitions to be places of enlightenment and contemplation, even of philosophical and religious self recognition, and open to interpretation regardless of the background and philosophy of life of the viewer.”

Body Worlds can be seen now at the Science Museum of Minnesota and is well worth the trip.

Well worth repeated visits. via Doc.

Podcasts go mainstream – fast:

Is this the right move for you? If so, what does it take to be a successful RIA? What challenges lie ahead? And what steps should you take to prepare for a seamless transition to running your own firm? Listen to this program to gain answers to these and many more questions about what it takes to establish an RIA.