In the past gmail has been good with spam filtering. Just now I checked up on a prospect. It turned out that he felt I was interested in his business, since I did not reply to his emails. They were in the gmail spam folder. Nothing special about them. Sadly you can not search the spam folder. Spammers never made a single cent with me. But they cost me and everybody else money. When I was looking at the last 3,000 spam mails I got (2 days) it seems that they peddle only a few items. I am sure that most of the spam tries to benefit just a couple of business. How about somebody going over there to these people and kind of make then reconsider the business attitude?
Category: economy
It really must suck to be Microsoft these days. Their attempt to buy Yahoo for more money that they actually have was a desperate move to begin with. And now they even got rejected. Who know that Yahoo! of all companies had choices. In this whole M$ bid media frenzy everybody seem to have forgotten about the layoff story that Yahoo had coming out. Yahoo is ailing. But they seem to have decided that they rather disolve like AOL or Netscape than to be part of would have been the worst merger in the history of Internet companies. Hitting on the ugly girl, since you think you have a chance is bad enough. Getting rejected leaves you with a little less than nothing. Not that I would know anything about that.
Germans don’t like to part from their money. On average each of them has 57.900 Euro (85,000 Dollars right now) in the bank or in stocks. Per person. Not per household. On average people in Germany spend 10% less than they make. That probably explains why S-Class Mercedes or Porsches are a rare sight here. They get made and sold to people that have the money (these days mostly found in countries with oil) or ones that pretend they have (hm, let me guess where that would be). Tragically much of those saved Euro’s were used to finance US mortages.
Right now the Iraq war seems to have cost 482 Billion US$.
So Germany could have paid for 14 of those. From it’s savings.
Annie Leonard talks about stuff Whoever she is.
I am with her. To a point. The breastmilk part is a bit much, and on technology she is just plain wrong. Which discredits the whole piece somewhat. And that is a real shame. Since the whole consumerism / consumption stuff weighted against diminishing returns in respect to happyness is a very important point. And there are others in this presentation that are pretty obvious and get equally ignored. Still worth the link, and maybe even worth watching.
Still can not get a Wii for Christmas? It’s actually Bush fault. Sounds crazy, still true, and just the tip of some horrible iceberg. Nintendo makes those Wii’s as fast as they can. Then they like to make as much money with them as possible. If they sell them in Europe for 250 Euro they get 40,721 Yen. For the ones they ship to the US they get 27,630 Yen. That’s 47% more profit for them. No wonder there is ample supply of Wii’s in Europe.
But that’s currencies, what has Bush to do with it? Well, he makes the fiscal policy. Before he became President you needed to pay 0.9 US dollars for each Euro. Now it 1.47. That’s a sixty three percent decline in value. That’s just great. YellowCake disciples will be quick to point out that this low rate would help the economy since US exports would become cheaper. This is true, but only 16% of the US enconomy is based on exports. Most of the country is depending on the inflow of capital. Or should I say ‘was’? How attractive is it to invest Euros into dollar when you get less and less back out?
So not getting your sweaty little hands on a Wiimote in the foreseeable future might actually not be your biggest problem.
According to this article China holds 1.4336 trln US$.
Big number. Each Chinese seems to make 1500 dollars a year. There are 1,321,851,888 Chinese. Which would mean that all Chinese would not need to work for 8.6 months if they would just spend the Dollars that the chinese reserve holds.
Or they could finance a seven year Iraq war. Out of the cash they have sitting around. And with the kind of spending the US military got used to. Something tells me that the red army has a different pricelist then the military in the US.
So, it seems that having stuff made over there for years somehow gave them allot of money. And therefor power.
I should start writing invoices in &Euro;
Seriously. From 0.90 US cents to 1.448 in five years. Thanks Mr Bush. Asshole!
According tothis article the war in Iraq costs two billion dollar. A week. I am sure that those 160,000 troops risking their life will be glad to know that that amounts to 12,500 US$ a week for each of them. Or we could just leave and pay each each 75 US$ a week. Does not sound like much, but the GDP per person and week is 64US$. So, yes, the US spends more on the war than the country is producing on its own. It used to be one of the wealthiest countries with a larger population in the arab world. Now this war has been gone for quiet some time.
And, no, we still have not found those weapons of mass destruction. That was the reason why the US had ot go there. So we have been told. That is a old story you might think. Exactly that kind of thinking helps this administration. They told us that war was the only option because of those weapons of mass destruction. We should hold them to their own arguments, instead of falling for their next story version about the ‘front in the war on terror’. Some things are simple. This one is.