|||Hinky|||

Friday, February 07, 2003

It's dark, 6pm, time to leave work and make a path in the light snow that fell for the better part of the day. AOL hardly seem worth the cost of carry at 20 plus dollars per month, when checking mail takes 5 to 10 minutes on a late Friday. Dot Conned.

Hinky 6:07 PM

Broadband users: Join the Grid to fight cancer at Grid.org Links for Highly Hinky Recommendations

Hinky was stung last night when he went for the car. There’s nothing like finding an orange ticket on your window, when you are parked legal. Legal, that is, except for the expired inspection sticker (6 days): $55.00motherfucking dollars. Welcome to New York. So, that little violation will be costing Hinky just under the price of one week’s parking indoors. New York City announced, it will be adding another 3000 ticket scratchers this year, making the DOT traffic squad the last growth business in New York we speculate. Anyone with any sense left a long time ago; so adding more ticketing police is just placing a tax on those of us who are dumb enough to remain here. It's like Lotto, which is like a tax on people stupid enough to make bets that have virtually no chance of returning anything. Having a car in nyc as Hinky does, is perhaps the one thing that is more assinine. Hinky also bought a Megamillions ticket today.

Even in a country of 280 million people, where “a one in a million shot” comes true 280 times each day, the Lotto is still a raw deal. Ben Franklin and the other Founders were right in his distain for lotteries. Gambling encourages fatalism, sloth, and false sense of expectation of reward without effort. The Founders didn’t think it was in the national interest to have citizens running around on a pipe dream, hoping and betting that their ships would come in each week with lotteries (or each trading day in the case of some our nation's "investors" who have lost their life's savings-- "Tax free," via the mousepad). After all, if everyone’s ship came in where would they park?

On a more massive note: Bush told the world that the “game's over” for Saddam, which is not that Hinky by itself, but when you think about the phrase you realize it’s a hell of a thing, literally, in an age of video game war. It will be a hell of a thing when they begin bombing with 800 or so missles per day; hell on earth, again. Does anyone even remember these guys? History might show that Dr. Strangelove was just a blip on the video screen over the last 100 years, a tiny peep of dissent like Ike's warning about an emerging "Military Industrial Complex" in his final address a few short years earlier. They are just small specks of time where someone poses the question, "why is the emperor not wearing clothes," even when it's the emperor who asks it. Saddam's hustling aside; who didn't like Ike? Hinky is nursing the small hope that they give the Iraqi people warning and the time to rent U-Hauls and get the fuck out by safe passage to campgrounds with warm showers before they melt Saddam's Godfather DVDs.

On lighter notes about entertainment and war, this week we’ve been looking back at DVDs of movies from the classic Hollywood era because, let's face it, where else does one look when the future looks the way it looks. First was “Body and Soul,” which if you don’t know, you should know, you know? Great movie about a poor kid who makes “good” earning with his hands, Boxing his way to the top until his is chewed up by the corruption of the Boxing business. The second was the “The Bad and the Beautiful,” which looks great even though Hinky fell asleep half way through it again. It this one you’ve got Kirk Douglas acting the part of a Hollywood producer, and son of a slimey movie mogul, making all of dad's two-faced, backstabbing, slimey moves that took him to the top in movie land, as three other stars (we forget their names) tell (and show with flashbacks) how he gave them "the business" in Black and White. Funny with a point, always a good combination in Hinky's blog.

For some reason, Hinky has been drawn to rent these cautionary tales about the perils within industries that thrive on harnessing the public's tastes and imagination: war, boxing, movie making. I am sure there are more. Where is the lesson, what is the reason? Hinky says: it's a dirty business, but which one isn't? Who among us, for example, would stand up to the Milk lobby? (You might start by ignoring all those Lenno or Letterman jokes ending inGot milk?)

Hinky 10:03 AM

Broadband users: Join the Grid to fight cancer at Grid.org Links for Highly Hinky Recommendations

Thursday, February 06, 2003

No time to reflect today, but that Everhard, a "financial reporter" from CNNfn who used to manage money gets the Hinkiest award today. He was busted yesterday for churning up fees on clients, and faking authorizations to trade, all while talking out of his neck on Cable TV about the markets. I think Hinky is going to start tracking these situations, complete with links; and if you have any real outside the bucket type information you'd like to share, the man to see is jcrudele@nypost.com. Pound for pound, the best ball buster in the business of exposing Wall Street's well healed horse hockey.

The problem with all this New York Post reporter's post reporting is that that horse, the one that plays the horse hockey, has already left the barn. There is 7 Trillion dollars in market capitalization missing, zip, poof, thup. Gone, burned like many people's financial futures. Those who used the market to store their life savings must feel 20 years younger, literally. Not in the physical sense, where they'd want to say up for an entire weekend with someone they just met outside a Rave, or driving 600 miles to see some the Grateful Dead. Nope. Right about now, they feel 20 or 30 years younger because they'd be broke, just like they were before working and squirreling away the nickels and dimes for those 20 or 30 years. It's starting at zero again, without so much as a big enough tax break to make them anywhere near whole.

Hinky recalls a question posed by a classmate in Law school who already had a Harvard MBA under his belt. He questioned the government handing over pension investing to the Middle classes with the whole move away from Company-based Pension plans to the self directed IRA, 401K type plans that swept the nation in the 1980's and 1990's. He questioned the ability of the Middle class to get sound information, to know how to use it, or to use it without paying outsized fees to do business with Wall Street. He questioned the dangers of a growing national obsession with Money magazines such as "Money Magazine," and the rest that preoccupied workers with business PR, and investment schemes via Mutual funds and the like. He questioned the promise contained in constant television coverage of the markets by networks such as CNBC and CNNfn.

It was now being left to individuals to save for their own "golden years" as there were fewer and fewer company sponsored institutional pension plans. The basic differences are several. Company plans are run by seasoned Institutional money managers with fiduciary duties to those who fund the pensions. These managers have much better information, access, skill and fee structures to make their investment choices and do business with Wall Street. And, oh yeah, institutional pension plans are also insured by a quasi-governmental agency that will step in to make the plan whole it if tanks, or if the company (such a certain Airliners go bankrupt). On the hand, workers who are left to their own devices could choose better or worse and reap the benefit or not of their good (such as buying Johnson and Johnson in 1980, for example) or bad (such as holding AOL, for example) choices. We all agreed that only time would tell. Well, time told I guess; and war or no war, a lot of folks are stuck and stewing over seeing their life savings within IRAs, 401k, Keoghs and the like dramatically drop by 50% or more while a hand full of companies brought down to settle with regulators who would look to close the gates to save the horse, well after that fire in that barn down on Liberty street. Will slapping the cuffs on a hand full of CEOs bring back the 7 Trillion market cap, or end the horse hockey on Wall Street?

I guess for a nation raised on Mr. Ed, anything is possible.

Hinky 6:02 PM

Broadband users: Join the Grid to fight cancer at Grid.org Links for Highly Hinky Recommendations

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

So what's Hinky today? Well, if the case of the gay guy who gets $11,175,000 dollars from a New York jury for his discrimination case against the Leona doesn't take the cake then what does? But Ronnie Spector shooting someone is a close second. Tabloids have a way of putting your nose in it.

In the real world, Colon Powell has made his case to the UN against Iraq. It's getting to the time for Saddam to lay down or stay down I guess. In the real world, you can also help to fight smallpox, or even cancer, if you have high speed access, and you want to donate computer time here. Apparently, there is trouble in North Korea too, where their ruler threatens to start producing nuclear components that could be sold for use in weapons.

. Makes you think the problems of two people (or 280 million) don't amount to a hill of beans with all this trouble. Having said that, Hinky still thinks people got robbed in the Stock markets; and those who got caught in the headlights owning stock and losing money (many who lost their life savings) over the last few years should be able to write off all their losses against their taxes for the next 10 years. That way, if you lost your life savings, at least you don't have to pay to have been robbed, as the biggest companies in America tanked.
Even if they knock double taxation down to single taxation on dividends, the President’s tax plan doesn’t bail the average Joe grab an Etrade nearly enough. Hinky is not speaking from personal experience, but fair is fair. Unfortunately, all the unbridled Dot Com capitalism wasted a lot people’s time and money.

If all this means nothing to you; then consider if you will, Bobby Valentine, who slammed the cry baby million dollar baby Mets who have been knocking his brains out for the last few weeks because they lost. Does anyone care? It's way to hinky if you ask Hinky. On the other hand, the Rangers are winning., but it might as well be the ponies because who would have guessed? Not me.

Hinky 5:00 PM

Broadband users: Join the Grid to fight cancer at Grid.org Links for Highly Hinky Recommendations

Monday, February 03, 2003

This just in, for anyone with a hair's breath of interest in 9/11, it's the kind of site that is leads to compulsive reading: http://cooperativeresearch.org/completetimeline/AAoil.html

Hinky 5:21 PM

Broadband users: Join the Grid to fight cancer at Grid.org Links for Highly Hinky Recommendations

Damn server is down on one of my sites, and it burns me. Not only that, I came home three weeks ago, and found that my ethernet card magically popped out, and was left broken. Mechanical breakdowns at every turn have got me steamed, but does it deserve any attention? In light of the fallen space shuttle last Saturday, most people would put these computer breakdowns in the "the problems of two people don't amount to a hill of beans" file.

And I agree, but it burns, like turpintine on a cat's ass. And I am not too sure about the entire whole "you have no right to complain" routine. If that were the case, who could? Nothing in most people's lives really amounts to much compared to the epic aspect of a fallen Space shuttle crash that took the lives of the first Black astronaut and the first Israeli (who was carrying a sacred scroll given to him by his father who got it in a concentration camp) among others. Who or what in daily living measure up to such drama? The Human toll.

To measure what can be measured, I've been looking at trading in the public stock of Boeing (BA), which the week before 9/11 dramatically dropped for no apparent reason. It dipped to the extent that CNBC commented on all the unexplained selling. Since then, it's been way up near 49 dollars per share, when war and bomb production was expected. Now, the Monday following the shuttle crash, it's off 1 dollar on the open, from an already deeply drained, discounted and depressed price of 31 dollars per share. Will this country stop making Space shuttles or the billions of dollars worth of products Boeing sells? Most likely not; but that hasn’t stopped Boeing stock sellers from bailing out. Boeing shares 3 billion dollar contract to build these shuttles with Lockeed Martin. Nobody ever claimed those highly profitable put options on United Airlines that were bought before 9/11, a bet that UAL's stock price would drop. I wonder if the proceeds made it to a charity for the families of the people on those United planes. I wonder if anyone claimed the proceeds of that 5 Billion dollar US treasury bond trade that the Wall Street Journal reported as taking place just prior to 9/11. Then again, one also wonders who is managing all those 9/11 charities. I guess It's just a wonderous era.

The WSJ has us wondering if most manned space flight is necessary. For a long time, critics have said they are not, and what's more, they cost a fortune, so why take risks just to make headlines. These critics usually get vocal when it is budget time for NASA; and they are usually very qualified to speak (former NASA employee-MIT professors of Space Policy types). They claim that more science would get done, with less manned trips, which means more room, more trips and less risk for better science. So it makes you wonder why keep doing the Right Stuff routine. Could it be the Entertainment value of a circus in the sky? I mean, we have been doing this for 40 years. By now, everyone knows "they can put a man on the moon" So it's not my small troubles with technology, or your father's problem programming his VCR verses a crashed Space shuttle, the question is: Does manned Space flight, with all that outsized risk, deserve all the attention it it gets in the press? More science with less risk to life could get done for the same budget, with less Human toll, yet the media feeds the thirst for the Right stuff and an endless line of firsts: the first Eskimo spacewoman, the first Beef Wellington served on Christmas day in space; the first cellphone conversation from space; the first honeymoon vacation complete with a heart shaped tub. And they call photos people without their clothes on “obscene.”

Hinky 11:57 AM

Broadband users: Join the Grid to fight cancer at Grid.org Links for Highly Hinky Recommendations