Category: economy

“beyond payments”

economy technology

is Wirecards motto. Those jokers ran a company, and a scheme where they pretended that billions of Euros would be generated by some daughter company in Dubai. That money then was supposedly in the Philippines. Funny that that that division in the middle east was the only part of Wirecard that made all that money. And it was growing. So the Wirecard stock price when up and up. The FT had some articles about stuff being sketchy. I think, no interest to peek behind their paywall. They seem to play the role of Harry Markopolos in this re enactment of the Madoff story: A crisis puts pressure on a Ponzi Scheme until it collapses. Crazy that it is only always one of these that gets exposed.

Not so great is the role of EY KPMG PWC and and Deloitte. Wirecard was running this scheme since 2015. And only in 2020 did KPMG notice. Beyond Responsibility would be a better subtitle for this.

Principles by Ray Dalio

economy

I am usually suspect of people like Ray Dalio. Not because he is very rich. But he seems to have the material that cult leaders are made from. If you look for somebody to follow then he could be a candidate. I still enjoyed “Principles: Life and Work”. It is long, and the later part is more a manual for people working for him than a book for public. But he builds a mostly coherent case for a specific view on humans and – which is not that common – derives from his insights clear guidelines on how to structure interactions. The book is interesting in this respect. I don’t agree on all points, others are really valuable. I am already sad that I forgot so many of them. I am not aspiring to make as much money as he did. But I imagine that if I would have remembered one or another of his Principles and put them to work I might end up this decade being richer than I would have otherwise.

It is a wonderful gesture that Mr Dalio takes the time to write all this down. He does not have to. He does not have to do anything. That he put all the work in to document his process is really amazing.

I would recommend giving what he has to say some attention.

Mosel: ausgebucht

deutschland economy

Vor ein paar Tagen hiess es gefühlt noch das Hotels ausserhalb der Küsten und Alpen in Deutschland kurz vor dem Ruin stehen.

Als ich gerade eine kurze Exkursion zur Mosel planen wollte war es dann schon ganz anders: Das Ausbleiben der Japaner, Chinesen und Amerikaner wird scheinbar durch deutsche Urlauber mehr als Wett gemacht. Nächste Woche (Ende Juli 2020) ist schon das meiste ausgebucht …

denouement

economy politics

probably & thankfully not – but the damage is extensive and growing daily

noise2news

economy media

I wonder if journalists, or Goldman Sachs for that matter, will ever learn to read graphs, and more importantly when it stops making sense willing some trend lines into some randomly scattered points.

obtaining Dow Jones index in Google Spreadsheet

economy google

In order to obtain todays dow jones index (DJIA) in a google spreadsheet one can use:

=GOOGLEFINANCE(".DJI")

The quotes matter. Indexes would be for example:

.DJI Dow jones Index
.INX S&P 500
.IXIC Nasdaq Composite

Getting the dow for a specific date is a bit more involved. This worked for me, but there might be an easier way:

=index(GOOGLEFINANCE(".DJI", "price", to_date(DATEVALUE("11/26/2013"))),2,2)

The date (11/26/2013) was actually a cell reference.

Not related, yet interesting was this page that showed how relative popular search terms are.

Others yielded interesting insights. For instance it seems that Cars are a seasonal product. Even though people tend to use them every day, they care more for them in the months leading up to summer.

Other extremely seasonal terms include: Travel, Shopping, Real Estate, Jobs and Durable Goods.

“Fight Club” in 2013

communication daily life economy history internet marketing media politics

Watching “Fight Club” again today is a strange and very interesting experience.

So much has changed since the book / film came out. It is clearly set in a different epoch.

Its character ‘Tyler Durden’ says:

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables;
slaves with white collars.  Advertising has us chasing cars
and clothes, working jobs  we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.

…

We've all been raised on television to believe
that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods,
and rock stars.

But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact.
And we're very, very pissed off.

It seemed fitting at the time. What happened since then?

Many of those jobs are gone. People in that slice of society
make less money today. Sometimes even in absolute dollars.
Certainly corrected for inflation. In the same time the share
of the upper sliver of society on the other end of the wealth
distribution has nothing but exploded.

So why seems the portrayed unrest even further removed
from reality than less than a score years ago?

The answer might lie in the proliferation of computer games and the Internet
during that time.

Both soak up all that extra male testosterone and time that would
otherwise find not much constructive application in the world of 2013.

Oh, and it looked absolutely awesome. I miss movies shot on film.

waste of time: news

duke of count economy internet media

I found this today on a web site of a pewspaper:


Countless publications show the same AP story.

What is the problem with this?

According to the latest numbers China grew by 8.9%.
Since this is China one could also say: grew only by 8.9%

The US GDP grew 1.7% in the same time.

The headline of the AP story says something else.
So does the first sentence. And 8.9% growth are being called ‘anemic’

This is a very simple thing: growth did decline by 0.3%. Growth did. NOT the actual output.

I wonder what happens to the 99% of topics in the news that are more complex and faceted than this China statistic.

After I wrote this I went back to google news. On CNN one can read that the economy slowed:

I think following this kind of ‘news’ is a complete waste of time.

fun to work with great companies

daily life economy

Moving is not fun. I used Bevery Hills Transfer and Storage before and things worked really well.

When I recently had to plan a move I was delighted that they still around. And everything was as perfect as it can be.

It makes such a difference if one knows that there are actual people who care about the job. I think that this kind of attitude can be found if the size of the company matches the task: If they are too small then stretched resources might make things inflexible. If a company gets too large people often stop caring. Since they do the big company starts to treat their people and customers like cattle. Prodding them into the flow via a byzantine set of rules and call centers.

Luckily Bevery Hills Transfer and Storage is the right size, and the people do care. That makes moving almost fun.

There are probably other companies out there that do a good job as well. Those I just don’t know. These people I have a great experience with. So they are the ones that I will call for my next move. And I am happy that I found them back in the day.

leap second – the buck stops over there …

economy technology

Skimming over the news (a bad thing in itself I must admit) it seems that the leap second addition – one might tempted to say – between June 30 and July 1st caused allot of Java based systems to fail.

While the headlines list who got affected and all that it is interesting that there was no reference to responsibility. Outages in general are news. Like the one on this recent Friday that took AMZN service and then some systems down.

In general it is all in a ‘oh well’ state. “shit happens”.

This attitude is awesome for technology providers: Not once saw I reference to who owns Java in those leap second bug reports. Sun did. Sun got bought by Oracle. Larry Ellison, principal and I guess at least part time owner of Oracle picked up a nice Hawaiian island the other day. How about he offers sys admins working late to work around HIS bugs a complimentary stay there?