Reading Roundup (XXI) - Listening to Customers, Google Cache from China, Unnecessary War, Refusing to Save, People's Daily

Articles I've recently read with my comments in italics, and other miscellany:

An Interview with Flickr's Eric Costello, by Jesse Garrett.
["We have not historically been a very metric-driven company. We do look at numbers, but really we just keep our ears open. We listen to what people say to us on our forums ... we release [something] on the site and listen closely to what people like or dislike about that feature, and make adjustments ... because we have a talkative bunch of users and a lot of places for them to talk to us, we can quickly assimilate suggestions from the community." The lesson is: listen to your customers.]

Google Cache Not Accessible from China
["... the filtering of the Google cache can be circumvented by manually adding an ampersand symbol to the GET request e.g. 'search?&q=cache'." This was a source of enormous frustration for me... I never realized how much I used the Google cache until I lost access to it, but the ampersand symbol fix is a sweet one. Thanks, Eyal.]

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over, by Frank Rich.
["... political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start ... To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - 'the central front in the war on terror,' as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it ... What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory... but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves." Sad, but true.]

The Consumer-Dependent Economy, by Gary Shilling.
["... much of the bonuses and commissions go to high-income people who tend to be big savers -- if anyone is saving these days. Meanwhile, lower-income people who depend on weekly paychecks have seen their real weekly pay continue to decline. Note that 80% of Americans have hourly jobs. Part of the reason for the weakness in real wages is that U.S. employment is shifting from high-paid areas like manufacturing to low-pay areas such as leisure and hospitality ... The net result has been a recent leap in the share of income going to the top 20% of Americans while the other four quintiles' shares keep slipping. Indeed, a recent survey found that the number of U.S. households with a net worth of $1 million or more, excluding their residences, jumped 21% last year ... A recent study of Federal Reserve data found that the households headed by baby boomers had median financial assets of $50,700. With a 5% annual withdrawal rate, that would generate only $2,535 annual retirement income ... only 10% of eligible workers in 2003 and 13% in 2004 made the extra contributions to their 401(k)s that Congress allowed in 2001 for people 50 and older, even though 80% of 401(k) plans allow them. Those over 50 could have socked away an extra $3,000 of pre-tax income last year in addition to the basic $13,000 limit." The rich are getting richer. Lots of interesting stats in this article by Shilling, which John Mauldin reprinted in his "Outside the Box" weekly e-letter.]

From the terrace on the north side of our building (we're on the 31st floor), I saw a large leafy-green campus nearby. I thought to myself, what university is that? So I walked over and discovered it's the campus of Ren Min Ri Bao, or the People's Daily, the official Party newspaper. The People's Daily is often referred to as the "Party's Mouthpiece" (Dang de kou she -- "kou she" literally translates as "mouth and tongue," you can see why I love the Chinese language.) I couldn't get in, which I was annoyed by since the place is very lush and peaceful, and it reminded me that the Party has always taken care of their own first.

Outta Crude Earl for Now

Crude broke rather hard out of the coil yesterday (which I feared as the range narrowed the last couple of days), so Fuzzy's exit wasn't as graceful as I'd wish. After "giving back" so much profit, I always laughingly recall Buzzy Schwartz's wise words: "Every trader wants to buy the low, sell the high, and do it three times as large."

Light Sweet Crude, 30-min. Chart