Driving around yesterday, I tuned into WSUM where the DJ began to read Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, something one would not here on a typical commercial radio station.
John Bogle’s Recent San Francisco Talk
Bogle believes investors should simply buy the lowest-cost index funds available and hold them forever. His rule of thumb is to take your age minus 10 and hold that percentage of your assets in a total bond market index fund and the rest in a total stock market index fund. For example, a 30-year old would put 20 percent in bonds and 80 percent in stocks.
This strategy nearly eliminates “the two greatest enemies of equity investing — expenses and emotions,” Bogle said.
Bogle’s attitudes have barely changed since he started the first index fund in August 1976.
That fund, now called Vanguard Index 500, has about $112 billion in retail assets and is the second-largest fund after American Funds’ Growth Fund of America, according to Morningstar.
Bogle wrote the excellent “Battle for the Soul of Capitalism“.
Live Blogging Halloween 2006
Tonight’s the big night. The Saturday before Halloween. Freakfest on State Street. Riot gear and pepper spray four years running. What’s going to happen this year? That’s the question on everybody’s minds, from city leadership down to every last costumed reveler on State Street.
The Daily Page is collaborating with The Daily Cardinal to provide continuous live coverage about the State Street parties, along with comments from elected officials, city staff, police spokespersons, and other participants and observers in the 2006 edition of Halloween in Madison.
On Google’s Intentions
News: Internet privacy? Google already knows more about you than the National Security Agency ever will. And don’t assume for a minute it can keep a secret. YouTube fans–and everybody else–beware.
Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two former Stanford geeks who founded the company that has become synonymous with Internet searching, and you’ll find more than a million entries each. But amid the inevitable dump of press clippings, corporate bios, and conference appearances, there’s very little about Page’s and Brin’s personal lives; it’s as if the pair had known all along that Google would change the way we acquire information, and had carefully insulated their lives—putting their homes under other people’s names, choosing unlisted numbers, abstaining from posting anything personal on web pages.
That obsession with privacy may explain Google’s puzzling reaction last year, when Elinor Mills, a reporter with the tech news service cnet, ran a search on Google ceo Eric Schmidt and published the results: Schmidt lived with his wife in Atherton, California, was worth about $1.5 billion, had dumped about $140 million in Google shares that year, was an amateur pilot, and had been to the Burning Man festival. Google threw a fit, claimed that the information was a security threat, and announced it was blacklisting cnet’s reporters for a year. (The company eventually backed down.) It was a peculiar response, especially given that the information Mills published was far less intimate than the details easily found online on every one of us. But then, this is something of a pattern with Google: When it comes to information, it knows what’s best.
Schwarzenegger’s campaign Combines Shopping & Voting Databases
AP:
Gin or vodka? Ford or BMW? Perrier or Fiji water? Does the car you buy or what’s in your fridge say anything about how you’ll vote?
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign thinks so.
Employing technology honed in President Bush’s 2004 victory, the Republican governor’s re-election team has created a vast computer storehouse of data on personal buying habits and voter records to identify likely supporters. Campaign officials say the operation is the largest of its kind in any state, at any time.
Some strategists believe consumer information can reveal a voter’s politics even better than a party label can.
“It’s not where they live, it’s how they live,” said Josh Ginsberg, the Schwarzenegger campaign’s deputy political director.
SAIC’S Robert Hirsch on Peak Oil
Defense & The National Interest:
10/24/06 Peaking of world oil production, an update by Robert Hirsch, Senior Energy Advisor, SAIC:
- In-depth introduction to the issue and its complexities. Prepared for the Atlantic Council, 23 October 2006 (735 KB PDF)
- Brief overview of the major issues. To be presented at “Engineering Sustainability in the Global Enterprise” at the University of Wisconsin, November 30 – December 1, 2006 (189 KB PDF)
Political MoneyLine: Congressional & Senator’s Private Gifts of Travel
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. Scot Paltrow has more.
Political MoneyLine: Congressional & Senator’s Private Gifts of Travel
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.
Edgewood College first college accepted into Green Tier program
From a media release issued by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources:
MADISON – Edgewood College of Madison is now the first college or university in Wisconsin to be accepted into the Department of Natural Resources’ Green Tier program. Edgewood joins the statewide program that encourages institutions and businesses to go beyond current rules and regulations to reduce their impact on the environment. . . .
Recent environmental accomplishments at Edgewood include the renovation of the Mazzuchelli Biological Station, for which the contractor, J.H. Findorff & Son, was awarded the 2005 Environmental Excellence Award given by the Association of General Contractors (AGC) for their work. A new residence hall, currently under construction on the Edgewood campus, has been designed to achieve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification as a Green Building. The campus also has several rain gardens designed to capture large volumes of runoff from the campus, largely from campus parking lots, and is active in numerous other environmental and conservation activities.
The Next Capitalism
When he died in 1848, John Jacob Astor was America’s richest man, leaving a fortune of $20 million that had been earned mainly from real estate and fur trading. Despite his riches, Astor’s business was mainly a one-man show. He employed only a handful of workers, most of them clerks. This was typical of his time, when the farmer, the craftsman, the small partnership and the independent merchant ruled the economy. Only 50 years later, almost everything had changed. Giant industrial enterprises — making steel, producing oil, refining sugar and much more — had come to dominate.
The rise of big business is one of the seminal events in American history, and if you want to think about it intelligently, you consult historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr., its pre-eminent chronicler. At 88, Chandler has retired from the Harvard Business School but is still churning out books and articles. It is an apt moment to revisit his ideas because the present upheavals in business are second only to those of a century ago.
Until Chandler, the emergence of big business was all about titans. The Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords were either “robber barons” whose greed and ruthlessness allowed them to smother competitors and establish monopolistic empires. Or they were “captains of industry” whose genius and ambition laid the industrial foundations for modern prosperity. But when Chandler meticulously examined business records, he uncovered a more subtle story. New technologies (the railroad, telegraph and steam power) favored the creation of massive businesses that needed — and, in turn, gave rise to — superstructures of professional managers: engineers, accountants and supervisors.