Sunday January 19, 2003 10:58
Gigahertz PCs coupled with USB 2.0 and super fast 80C32 SOCs may cause a shakeout in the peripheral microcontroller industry in 2003.
|
Albuquerque Tribune Sunday January 19, 2003 |
So the Javans [old forthians] lose again.
But this is why we want to use BASIC-52 and Forth technology for 80C32 SOCs and USB produccts!
The BASIC-52 and Forth technology is inexpensive and is more reliable than other system software technologies!
Besides most of the work has already been done and is in the open literature!
We can't upload to computersystemsdocumentation or prosefights at Yahoo!/Geocities.
Some time ago Geocities denied ftp services.
Yahoo!/Geocities demanded payment of $8.95/month each to ftp.
Computersystemsdocumentation and prosefight each paid.
We wonder what Yahoo!/Geocities is up to this time?
We'll talk to our credit card company since we are paying for services not rendered if Geocities doesn't respond to repeated email questions about why we can't upload.
It appears our passwords have been invalidated.
Tripod has been fine and is upgrading its services.
New Mexico online has been just fine too once Chavez took over.
 
Deflation?: Harbor Freight again Note black tape holding the cover on the battery compartment. Real world again. |
We sure get into some interesting stuff.
Note the transistor hFE tester - all for $3.99!
Bill uses these on cars.
But he did check accuracy of the yellow meter below with a CEN-TECH 35017 , and a relatively expensive Japanese Soar multimeter. The Soar and 35017 get the same answers on precision resistors. The $3.99 unit is not as accurate.
But gets better results than those who don't digitize at the sensor!
But, of course, you are wisely advised about 80C32s and USB 2.0
Read-up below, Moe has something important to say.
Get the right numbers as opposed to wrong or random numbers.
Remote digitization works but not very well.
- Digitize at the sensor Monday January 13, 2003 09:59
- Gigahertz PCs
- Microsoft's Visual Basic 6.0 integrated into Microsoft Office, Visual C/C++ with exquisite in-line assembler
- USB 2.0
- Super fast 80C32 USB 2.0 SOCs running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems, of course!
- Internet software distribution and maintenance.
- Interactive hardware and software problem diagnosis over Internet with Netmeeting ... using BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems, of course!, on the peripheral end.
Digitizing at the sensor is very important if you want to stay in business - random or wrong numbers shouldn't sell very well.
Friday January 17, 2003 19:06
Csd is scanning the web waiting for Pierre Belec to strike again.
Prolonged stock market declines also zapped GE's pension fund surplus, which fell to $5 billion at the end of 2002 from about $14 billion a year earlier. GE Chairman Jeff Immelt said the surplus could dwindle even more.
"If the stock market performance is relatively flat, we'll have a couple of billion dollars of surplus at the end of (2003)," Immelt said.
GE estimated that pensions would decrease its net income by $300 million this year. That's a far cry from previous years when income from pension plans was a solid contributor to GE's bottom line. In 2001, for example, pension income contributed $1.48 billion to GE's pre-tax earnings.
For years, we’ve all heard about the Promised Land of the New Economy. Loaded up with the latest in new technologies, smart and nimble knowledge workers would ride the productivity curve to a new prosperity. The Information Revolution was supposed to give us all that and more. A funny thing happened on the road to that revolution. First, the asset bubble popped. And then the technology disappoints. Maybe some day it will be different. But for now, call it a failed revolution
But now, after three years of falling stockmarkets, at a time when interest rates (and thus the returns on bonds) are also low, many pension funds have swung dramatically from surplus to shortfall. This week, Watson Wyatt, a consultancy, estimated that pension funds worldwide have lost a staggering $2.8 trillion—21% of their value—since 1999. The persistence of the downturn, and the closer attention to accounting practices following recent corporate scandals, is forcing firms to make hefty top-ups to their pension funds that will cut their earnings and thus depress stockmarkets further.
Reagan became president with promises of smaller government and less taxes, but then he spent money like there was no tomorrow. From the end of World War II until the year Reagan was elected president, the national debt had slowly increased by $649 billion over thirty-five years but during his administration it skyrocketed by 1.7 trillion in just eight years. When he left, the debt was $2.6 trillion-almost three times what it was before he became president. The amount owed for each U.S. citizen shot up to $10,534. As a result, much of today's national debt is the interest owed on the money spent during the Reagan years. This also resulted in the United states becoming a debtor nation in 1985, losing its status as the world's financial leader - a position it had maintained since 1914 - to Japan.
Al-Jazeera: Can you explain that?
Al-Asuquf: The value of a company's shares is directly proportional to the profitability of the enterprise. When a business is just a service provider and doesn't produce any durable goods, the value of its shares depends on its credibility. Which is to say that if the credibility of the USA were shaken, its shares (the dollar) would fall with incredible rapidity and the entire American economy would begin to collapse.
Thursday January 16, 2003 21:46
DEFLATION. Suddenly, with consumers also just beginning to pull in their horns (or in the alternative, sit on their wallets until the next sales materialize) fears have grown that we've only just begun a Japanese-style process that will see years' worth of this most feared of "flations" solidifying its grip on us. ...
As for monetary inflation, we'll continue to get all the Fed thinks we need, and then some. But at best, it will just further postpone the digesting of the trillions in debt that are still out there. At worst, it will fuel more price inflation, taking us back closer to a 1970's-type scenario of a lethargic economy and a rapidly rising cost of living.
Wednesday January 15, 2003 18:35
Csd can't upload to computersytemsdocumentation.
Geocities is not responding to email questions
asking what has happened.
geo-support@yahoo-inc.com
But now, after three years of falling stockmarkets, at a time when interest rates (and thus the returns on bonds) are also low, many pension funds have swung dramatically from surplus to shortfall. This week, Watson Wyatt, a consultancy, estimated that pension funds worldwide have lost a staggering $2.8 trillion—21% of their value—since 1999. The persistence of the downturn, and the closer attention to accounting practices following recent corporate scandals, is forcing firms to make hefty top-ups to their pension funds that will cut their earnings and thus depress stockmarkets further. ..
The pensions crisis is worst at older, heavily unionised firms with lots of retired staff and generous benefits. Last week, General Motors said it would triple, to $3 billion, its annual contribution to its pension fund, to start reducing its $19.3 billion shortfall. Ford, another carmaker, whose pension-fund deficit is $7.3 billion, will suffer a $270m pension charge this year after pensions “income” of $190m last year. A report this week from Fitch, a credit-rating agency, said America’s big airlines now have combined pension deficits of $18 billion. The worst affected are Delta and United (the latter currently in Chapter 11 bankruptcy), each with deficits of more than $4 billion. These longer-established airlines, like the majority of large companies in America and Britain, have “final-salary” pension plans (also known as “defined-benefit” schemes), in which the company guarantees that retired workers will get a certain percentage of their final salary. Under such schemes, the company risks having to top up its pension fund at times of poor investment returns, such as now.
Wednesday January 15, 2003 20:15
Csd can't upload to computersytemsdocumentation.
Motz ruled on Dec. 23, 2002, that Sun had a good chance of winning its antitrust case against Microsoft, and said he would grant a preliminary injunction forcing Microsoft to include Java in its Windows computer operating system.
State pension fund managers have decided to cut their ties with Wall Street asset managers, whom they blame for allowing bad stock market losses to grow even bigger.
All of the state pension funds surveyed by Reuters lost money last year. South Carolina's $21 billion state pension fund dipped a scant 0.53 percent, posting the best results. Arkansas rated worst, losing 15.8 percent for the year. Michigan's main public fund slid by $6.74 billion, or 13.8 percent. ...
Now the state is in a financial crisis. They have to start making contributions again to the pension funds, and guess what? Investments lost money and the pension obligation bonds are coming due. So they have got a mess on their hands," he said. ...
Despite the huge stock market losses, public pensions are not flooding into safer bond investments because the returns are too low, several state officials said. Most states need an 8 percent annual return to keep up with the growing number of retirees.
In the year ended Sept. 30, venture capital funds suffered an average loss of 22.3%, according to a study by Venture Economics and the National Venture Capital Assn., the industry's largest trade group.
That was an improvement from an average loss of 27.9% in the year ended June 30, the report said.
Venture capitalists have been mired in losses for the last two years, and the trend is unlikely to end soon, Mark Heeson, the association's president, said.
Tuesday January 14, 2003 19:15
Bill saw dlp technology demonstrated this afternnoon.
TI, mostly, technology! Carl Zeiss too.
It's absolutely fantastic.
Better than a movie theater. Total clarity!
There is a reason bill posted the below.
bill was demoed regular TV, HD TV, DVD, and digital VHS.
DLP may mash alternate technology..
Bill ordered gobs of chips while at Sandia labs. As a result he know lots of chip reps.
A former [he was over 50] TI employee alerted bill to TI DLP technology.
We are using high tech for our projects.
And, of course, csd is watching TI/BB 80C32 mixed signal technology very carefully.
And firewire v USB 2.0 technology!
| What the hell is DLP and why am I about to
buy it?!?
The beginners guide to better video through projection! Digital Light Processing is HOT! Over 75% of new projectors are now using this radical technology from Texas Instruments that uses hundreds of thou- sands of tiny "micromirrors" to produce the image. LCD is about 20% of sales and less than 5% are CRTs (actually. I believe it is now less than 1%!). And just about 5 years ago. DLP was barely even a blip on the radar screen. When the DreamVision DLP projector came out about 3 years ago, we picked up on it right away because it had a "breakthrough price" of $6800 and, combined with the then new $700 Scan line doubler, it provided an unprecendented level of picture qual- ity. Two years later, the Plus Piano came out and produced a picture that was twice as good for less than half the price AND included the $700 iScan linedoubler internally for free. Now we have an improved version of the Plus Piano and the new InFocus 7200 featuring the amazing new HD2 "Mustang" chip for twice the detail and twice the contrast ratio. Buckle up. DLP it's getting exciting! The big thing about DLP front projeciion is that it looks DRAMATICALLY betrer and more filmlike (even beyond film in many ways) than ANY rear projection TV. Even the finest, most expensive rear projectors look bad after seeing a DLP image. Why? Well, several reasons. One is that rear projectors have to bounce the video off of several mirrors which adds refraction distortion. Then, the image is splashed onto the back of a fresnel screen designed to scatter the light so that you can actually see the image. However, this screen adds even more refraction distortion and blurs the image to the point where computer data looks visibly fuzzy. And, because the screen can't scatter the light evenly and isn't even truly flat, you get "hotspotting" that makes some parts of the screen look brighter than others. Front projectors do NOT have any of these prob- lems. When you look at a front projected image on a screen, you see a crispness so precise, you can count the pixels and even see the dimple in the middle of the DLP mirrors IF you get close enough to the screen. Rear projection TVs simply don't have the kind of resolution required to show this level of detail. And computer generated data looks "pixel-per- fect". More than a few recent buyers of rear projection TVs have seen the Plus Piano front projector and said "Aw....crap. NOW you tell me." Hey we DID send out the info last springl Don't you read the newsletter?!? So, here are our thoughts on video. We DO NOT recommend, nor will we sell Plasma "flat screen" TVs. They are too expensive, too unreliable and not very good looking. We arelukewarm about rear projectors. They are a good compromise of big, day-to-day use video, but do not really pro- duce a "high-end" image because of optical problems. New TFI LCD panels (the new flat screen computer monitors) look promising and already produce a better image than either Plasma or CRT, but are too expensive and are not fast enough to produce a clean image when there is fast motion. However, at the rate they are going, they WILL be price/size competitive with Plasma by next year and will almost certainly supplant it within a few years. In fact. I personally believe that Plasma. rertainly as we know it. won't exist as a technology in 3-5 years. TFT LCD is moving so fast, conventional tube televisions will be in mortal danger in a few years. Until then, we think the BEST way to get great video is to keep your old tube TV for normal day to day use and a DLP front proector for primetime and movie watching in a somewhat darkened room. Then you have the best of both worlds. A good bright image for daylight watching and a huge. high-end theater-like image for movies for more serious night-time watching. TOP 10 REASONS TO DO A DLP FRONT PROJECTION SYSTEM 1. A picture up to 4 times the size of a "big screen" TV A DLP front projector can put out a picture up to 120" (bigger if you have the wall space). That is 4 times the size of a typical 60" rear projector. In a typical house. that gives you an image that appears as large or larger than the largest movie theater. 2. Razor sharp graphics for computer video games - These projectors do double duty with computer graphics and produce a sharper. more precise image than ANY other technology. Simply tell your computer to put out the same resolution as the projector and you have a virtually perfect representation of your computer screen. And there's no burn-in like conventional CRTs! 3. Better reliability than other technologies - DLP is the most reliable technology to ever come out for video reproduction. Each DMD is designed to work flawlessly for approximately 100.000 hours. That's 11 years of continuous use with no LCD pixel drop-outs. no CRT fade or burn-in, no catastrophic failure. All you have to do is replace the bulb every 1000-3000 hours and keep the projector clean. We can't guarantee that the projector itself will last 100.000 hours as that would be about 100 years in normal use, but you get what I'm talking about! 4. Virtually no impact on the sound of your speakers - Unlike a big TV. a projection screen on the wall doesn't significantly impact the imaging of your speakers. And. after all, creating a realistic soundstage is the entire point of 5.1 surround sound. Not only is front projection the ultimate in video quality, it actually can make your audio system sound better! 5. Gives you back the space in your room - Even though you can easily get a 100" or larger diagonal screen, the screen itself, including the frame is less than 2" thick. That's thinner than plasma! And it's bigger AND it's better. Get rid of that enormous rear projector and get something bigger. And smaller! 6. With a drop down screen, disappears when not in use - If you think TVs are ugly, you'll LOVE the idea of a drop down screen. Many of our customers have a beautiful painting on the wall, but when it's time to watch a movie, the screen simply comes out of the ceiling or out of a thin tube on the wall and gives you the movie theater experience of your dreams. 7. Screen investment remains, even if you upgrade the projector - Projector technology is improving almost as rapidly as computer technology, but your screen is an investment you can keep for decades. So. while a newer, more exotic projector may catch your eyes in 4 or 5 years, your screen will be with you for a long time. 8. Looks as good in 20 years as it does today - Unlike a typical TV that begins degrading the moment you turn it on. DLP won't fade or lose color. Simply replace the user-installable metal halide bulb when it burns out. DLPs don't lose quality For as long as they work, they produce their max- imum quality. 9. Better overall picture quality than any other technology or design - DLP is at the cutting edge of image quality. While other technologies are attempting to catch up. DLP is maintaining its edge. Only ultra-expensive CRT's can claim to be as good, and that's only if you have the patience and skills to tune them and converge them properly And if you don't think DLP is good enough yet, you haven't seen the new InFocus 7200! 10. The price/technology has finally become ~right" - Our first DLP projector showed the promise of this exciting technology. The new Plus Piano significantly improved on that and dropped the price to 40% of the award-winning DreamVision. And now, the InFocus has removed all doubts with double the resolution, contrast and brightness of the Piano (for twice the price!). If you're on a budget. you'll be shocked at the per- formance of the Plus Piano and InFocus projectors. especially compared to "big screens". If you're lusting after the hottest picture available this side of $20,000. the new InFocus 7200 will blow you away and keep you sat- isfied for years and years to come. If ever there was a time to "get in" to DLP. NOW is the time. Composite Video - Composite is exactly what it sounds like. It is a "composite" of all of the signals that make up the image. It uses a single RCA type cable and is analog land therefore easily susceptible to distortion I. Unfortunately, to create an image. the signal has to be split out into a three-color RGB signal. Composite is the lowest form of video-only signals because it is difficult to sepa- rate out the signals without significant distortion. However, almost all video components have either composite in or output because it is so common. S-Video - This is a noticeable leap over composite video. By keeping the Y or "brightness' signal separate from the C or "color' signal. there is a cleaner video with much fewer artifacts. S-Video is always preferred over composite. Satellite. new cable boxes. DVD and S-VHS all use S-Video for a better, smoother picture. S-Video uses a fragile DIN connector similar to a computer mouse cable, so be careful when plugging it ml Component Video - Component is the best consumer form of analog video. It has a Y signal. presumably identical to that of S-Video, but the color is created through a "color difference" method. One signal. R-Y or "Pcr' creates colors towards the red end of the spectrum and B-Y or "Pcb" creates colors towards the blue end of the spectrum. This is easily translated into the RC,B standard that TV actually runs on. Component uses three RCA cables. typically marked red. green and blue (green being Y). DVI - Digital Video Interface is a newer. computer-oriented digital connection that is gaining popularity for HDTV. A newly adopted copy-protection scheme (HDCP) is needed at both ends to send and receive high-definition digital signals. DVI is now being used on many new DLP projectors and now for high-end HDTV boxes. both of the oft-air and satellite varieties. Upcoming HD1'V cable boxes may also use DVI. DVI is an exceptional method of transferring video as it is com- pletely lossless. and since DLP is all digital. the signal goes through no analog cir- cuitry or filters whatsoever. Firewire/EE1394 - Firewire is even more advanced than DVI as it can handle two-way communication and audio as well. It is more complicated and a little less standardized. but it is poised to be the other standard for the future of audio/video. Firewire is the standard for HDTV recorders such as D-VHS and hard drive recorders.
NTSC/ATSC - Traditionally. video standards are named after the committee that standardized them. The National Television Standards Committee developed the old broadcast standard. The Advanced Television Systems Committee developed HDTV. NTSC is an analog "interlaced" format. It produces the odd lines of an image in one "field" and then produces the even lines in the following field. ATSC HDTV is digital can be either interlaced or "progressive". Progressive runs at double the speed and can show the entire frame in one field. Therefore, it looks dramatically smoother than interlaced and has dramatically less noticeable "motion artifacts" which is the edginess that occurs when things move on the screen. HDTV is also scaleable to different resolutions. One channel of 120 or 1080 lines (three times NTSC TV) can be transmitted or up to 5 channels of 480 lines can be transmitted simultaneously. You'll see terms like 480~ and 72 Op with HDTV. The first number stands for the lines of resolution. The 'i' or 'p stands for interlaced or progressive. CRT- Cathode Ray Tubes (hence the phrase "the Tube") fire electrons at a grid of posphers to create an image on a screen or via three large "guns" to produce a projected image. These are bulky and are quickly being replaced by a host of new technologies. Within 5 years. there almost certainly will be no more tube TVs or projectors. Once newer. more glamorous technologies reach price parity with CRTs. there will be no desire on the part of consumers to buy the old-fashioned "tube" any more. Plasma - Plasma uses millions of small phosphor coated bubbles that are activated by electrical currents to glow in the right color. In a sense. it is similar to a CRT. but instead of one gun that aims the electrons at each phosphor one at a time, the phospors are fired by electrically and individually operated plasma inside the bubble. Plasma's major problem is expense and reliability. They also do not work well and squeal at high altitudes. It also seems to be stagnating in price/development and is in danger of being overcome by TFT LCDs (see below). We don't recommend or sell Plasma for these reasons. TFT LCD - LCD panels have been around since the first portable computer. However, new models use a 'Thin Film Transistor" design that has individual transisters to drive each pixel element. TFT LCDs are signficantly brighter, faster and have a wider viewing angle than older LCDs. Most, if not all, new portable computers use TFTs. The only major problem with TFTs right now is that they are a little too slow for fast action and therefore blur a bit at times and the price. However. TFT's size/price ratio is advancing at a rapid pace and some of the newer ones don't seem to blur at all. We believe, barring a more advanced technology. TFT LCD will eclispe Plasma within a few years. We are considering selling these, but are waiting for the price to become more attractive. They will never be as large as a projection system. however. DLP - Digital Light Processing uses Digital Micromirror Devices ( DMDs) to produce startlingly clear images on a screen. It is a reflective technology and uses hundreds of thousands. soon to be millions of mirrors only microns across (they all fit on a small chip) to reflect an image through a lens. Despite the apparent complexity, reliability is exceptional. The picture needs to be seen to be believed. Current popular chips are the 480x848 and 720x1280 16:9 chips. Working prototypes for 1080x1920 projectors have been built. but there is no immediate plans for producing these for mass sale. yet. However, it is almost certainly only a few years away as production technologies and the competition improves. DLP now accounts for nearly 80% of all video projectors now being sold. The next big evolution will be more affordable 3-chip designs which will be even brighter and smoother looking, but those are more than $30,000 at the moment. Front Projection - Front projectors send an image that is reflected off of the front of an opaque video screen. It is the best way of producing an accurate image as it is optically simple and there is no distortion due to refraction or the absorption by the screen. It's main liability is that it needs to be relatively dark for a good image. It is best used in tandem with a standard TV for daytime use. Rear Projection - Rear projectors are a good compromise of size and all around use and project an image THROUGH a screen from the rear. However, they ARE a compromise. Video quality is generally poor relative to other technologies. including CRTs and LCDs. This is because the plastic screen that disperses the image adds a significant amount of distortion seen as a blurring of the signal. Also. like most TVs. it is sensitive to bright light and can be washed Out almost as much as a front projector if there is any direct light in the room. If you blew up the size of a rear projection TV to front projection size. it would be immediately apparent how much more blurred the image is compared to a reflective image. Once you see a good DLP front projector. you'll never want to own a rear projection TV again. 4:3/16:9 Aspect Ratios - The aspect ratio is the ratio of the width to the height of the image. Standard TV uses 4:3 ratio. In other words, a screen that is 3' high would be 4' wide. It is also known as 1.33:1. A 16:9 ratio has a wider aspect ratio and is more commonly referred to as "widescreen" or "HDTV format . 16:9 is also known as 1.78:1 and is closer to film's common 1.85:1 ratio (often seen as a "letterboxed" format). 16:9 is the main standard for HDTV. although 4:3 ratios are supported. Even computers are now moving to widescreen format. If you buy a projector, you should get a wide 16:9 screen. Letterbox - Letterboxing is the common method of shrinking a movie onto a relatively narrow ratio screen. When the image is narrowed to fit, the height also shrinks, and black bars appear at the top and bottom of the screen. Buying a widescreen TV does not always eliminate the bars as many DVDs are shown in the wider 1:85 and even as wide as the 2:35:1 aspect ratio. However, most HDTV material and many DVDs are in 16:9 ratio and therefore would not be lerterboxed on a widescreen TV. but would be on a standard TV. Anamorphic - Anamorphic widescreen is a method of squeezing a wider image into a narrower profile. DVD is actually a 4:3 aspect ratio format. at least until a more advanced version arrives in a few years. That means a widescreen film either needs to be shrunk in both height and width and then blown back up (letterboxing) by the TV/DVD OR the picture can be squeezed only in the horizontal domain, making everyone skinny in the DVD and then widened again by the TV/DVD to produce and accurate widescreen format. The advantage of anamorphic is that, while letterboxing loses both vertical and horizontal resolution. anamorphic only loses vertical lines of resolution and the image uses all of the available horizontal lines of resolution. Anamorphic DVD looks better on a widescreen TV than letterbox movies which are inherently lower in resolution. Pan and San/Full Screen - These are methods of showing a widescreen movie on a 4:3 TV and filling the screen. Full screen means that the movie is blown up the TV. but the sides of the image are chopped off by the TV. Full screen typically shows the middle 3/4s of the movie from a fixed postion. Pan and Scan is a more active way of focusing on the more important elements of the movie. Since filling the TV screen means throwing out 25% or more of the image. pan and scan hunts and pecks the scene so that the most important action stays on screen and only the "less important" elements of the movie are discarded. However. letterboxing or widescreen TVs allow you to see ALL of the movie, even if you have to shrink the image slightly to fit all of the width onto your screen. If you were to pan and scan Ben Hur. which is shot in a 2.3 5:1 ratio, you would be throwing out 44% of the moviel If you think letterboxing is a problem. you need a bigger. wider TV. let us help? adnm.com |
Companies will spend their 2003 technology dollars on networking gear and systems to store data but handheld computers and wireless gadgets will fall by the wayside, a survey of global tech buyers said Tuesday.
The pension fund money did not evaporate. The money was stolen. Some of it using high tech!
JDS Uniphase is a financial disaster!
For example, Cronos, having previously heen sold to JDS Uniphase for $750 million in early 2000,
JSD Uniphase makes even Palm look good!
The study, by Wall Street brokerage firm UBS Warburg, also found that businesses intend to spend more on tech products this year than they did in 2002, going against a recent survey by rival Goldman Sachs that showed a spending decline.
UBS Warburg questioned 85 Chief Information Officers, who hold the technology purse strings of global corporations, during the month of December.
According to the survey, the CIO's expect tech spending to grow 4 percent in 2003 over 2002, with spending on storage products and networking equipment topping the bill.
Unfortunately, since the peak in the economy and the stock market two years ago, the expansive credit and monetary policy has not been able to compensate for the fall in stock prices and the credit defaults resulting from the mal-investments during the boom. However, low interest rates and lax credit requirements have resulted in residential real estate appreciation and massive mortgage refinancing. So far, this has kept the consumer part of the economy relatively healthy. It appears that this credit generating engine has about run its course. Overall though, the credit destruction through bankruptcies and the fall in asset prices in the private sector has put our financial system in jeopardy. There are also immense nascent threats to our financial system from many different sources including possible rating reductions in the fig leaf AAA ratings of credit insurance companies that guarantee $1.5 trillion in debt, the potential for massive dislocations in the $75 trillion derivative market, the uncertain financial condition of Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac and the Federal Home Loan Bank that have financed the $2 trillion in residential mortgages and the potential drop in home prices. There is a threat of a run on the U.S. dollar by foreigners who own more that $7 trillion of our assets ($2 trillion more than we own of their assets) and must continue to be net purchasers of our paper at the rate of $1.4 billion per day to finance our balance of payment deficits which now amounts to 5% of GDP. A run could be effectuated by either political or economic reasons. A run could even be precipitated by our own institutions and individual seeking profits or diversification. And, there appears to be impending wars and their aftermath with indeterminate costs. Perhaps, the government (government and Fed are used interchangeably just as Mr. Bernanke does in his speech) is thinking along similar lines. In spite of what they say, they are not worried about the prices of goods but financial deflation which would lead to the mother of all depressions.
Responding to a piece by Gene Epstein, who writes a weekly column about economic issues for Barron's, which stated, "Over the 56 years since 1946, consumer borrowing habits don't appear to have changed at all," The Prudent Bear's Doug Noland recently produced the following figures: In 1946, as a percentage of national income, total personal sector liabilities were 31%, non-farm mortgages 13%, and consumer credit 5%.
At the end of 2001, however, total personal sector liabilities were 133% of national income, non-farm mortgages 70%, and consumer credit 21%. Non-farm corporate liabilities stood at 44% of national income in 1946, compared to 101% at the end of 2001; total mortgage debt was 23% compared to 93%; security credit 3% versus 10%; state and local government debt 7% versus 17%; and total credit market debt 192% versus 359%.
In addition, in 1946, the personal savings rate stood at 9%, compared to around 2% now.
Many high tech businesses are merely fronts for ripping off pension fund money.
The object is to get the investor money then attempt to create the appearance of great technical achievement while taking, say 5% of one billion dollars.
Crace [read other Grace article below] laments investors finally wising up high tech fraud. Want to be injected with a micromachine?
The American Stock Exchange biotech index, a widely used measure of the industry's health, plunged roughly 40 percent in 2002. That put biotech on an even steeper decline than the embattled Nasdaq, which slumped 30 percent, or the S&P 500, which fell "only" 20 percent.
If the closely watched Amex biotech index is any measure, last week's conference gave the industry a mild boost at best. Executives from more than 250 biotech, drug and medical device firms took turns last week delivering 30- minute pep talks to pension fund managers and other institutional investors. The index was flat until a last-minute flurry on Friday pushed it up 10 points to close at 356, a gain of nearly 3 percent. It was better than nothing, but less than a ringing endorsement.
You need a team of highly intelligent high tech swindlers to convince lowly unintelligent money managers to invest.
We will be exposing more of the peripheral microcontroller fraud in the future. They don't have the bucks or talent to produce the peripheral side software!
But there is good stuff too.
Monday January 13, 2003 20:32
Ray Duncan furnished Sandia labs its 8085 Forth using Jerry Boutelle's metacompliler.
We needed interactive incremental assembler support.
Boutelle's metacompiler did not implement <BUILDS DOES> which was required for incremental assembler support.
The morning bill, Joseph, and Konrad arrived to pick up the software at Laboratory Microsystems, Duncan received software from England which implemented <BUILDS DOES> with Boutelle's metacompiler.
Here's who did it in England
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Pelc"
To: Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 8:30 AM Subject:
Re: Nautilus 1 metacompiler, ray duncan, andBill
>Are you the guy that did the for the Nautilus 1?
Yes. Our V6.1 compiler is a linear descendant of v1.Regards,
Stephen
"did the", oops I omitted <BUILDS DOES> but, hey, we all make mistakes.
So if you want to do an ARM project, you fool, and have fun too, buy MPE FORTH!
Bill
Thanks for the link.Despite your qualms about ARM pricing, one of my clients is paying US$7.50 for a 50MHz ARM with 2 serial ports, 2 HDLC ports, the usual I/O and timers, and an integrated 10/100 Ethernet controller.
These days, the CPU core is less than 10% of the silicon.
MPE also sells 8051 Forth!
We can't do it all by ourselves!
So let's have some fun doing it together and sharing code that we would otherwise have to try to reinvent. And probably screw up.
Most windows driver writers are from Russia.
Bill was told he is one of the very few in the US.
Litigation caused bill to get into the driver writing business!
Russian equities continued their world-beating run in 2002, with the benchmark RTS index gaining nearly 40 percent to trump all but Pakistan's main bourse. But market players see little chance of similar returns in 2003. ...
Except for the Pakistan Stock Index's impressive 118.21 percent gain, the dollar-denominated RTS outperformed all other indices in the world, followed closely by the main exchanges in Prague and Budapest, which gained 38 percent and 34 percent, respectively. Indonesia's Jakarta Composite Index rounded out the top five with a gain of 26 percent.
The world's two largest emerging markets -- Argentina and Brazil -- suffered the most, with Buenos Aires' Merval and Sao Paulo's Bovespa benchmark indices losing 47.11 and 45.83 percent of their value on the year.
Beware, say two finance experts in an alarming study recently published in the Financial Analysts Journal. They say that history--or at least the interpretation usually put on stock market history--is bunk. If they are right, the risk premium in coming decades won't be anything like 5% and you shouldn't count on the S&P 500 to provide you with a fat and comfortable retirement. Let's tour their findings and, for those who accept them, suggest an alternative to abandoning equities.
The U.S. has a bad debt problem. Debts can’t be paid from cash flows. Total Credit Market Debt for the U.S. is up to $31 Trillion – that is clearly more debt than a $10 Trillion economy can pay back. Cash flows that are needed to sustain asset prices aren’t there. The debt is bad. As the debt fails, the asset prices it support fall to true value. Indeed, deflation in massively overly valued assets can’t be prevented. Many individual stocks will drop. The general level of stock market prices remain extraordinarily expensive. Moreover, so much new credit has been extended on real estate, that prices have been driven up to unsustainable levels. Deflation in real estate markets has already started. ...
What ought to follow a spectacularly absurd boom is a spectacularly absurd bust....
For the moment, the U.S. economy continues to run ahead of 'all reasonable expectations.' Eventually, reasonable expectations will catch up. Or, at least they ought to.
"This is the most dangerous period in financial history." - John Templeton, The Miami Herald, April 2000
As President Bush courted Democratic and Republican lawmakers Wednesday at the White House, the controversies swirling about his tax-cutting plan include a debate about deficits --- which the plan is almost certain to deepen.
In general, the mix of tax cuts and increased spending spells deficits. And 2001 saw both: a 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut and a huge, post-Sept. 11 boost to the military budget.
The equation became more lopsided Tuesday with Bush's announcement of a $674 billion package. The 10-year plan combines with increased government spending to virtually guarantee that those deficits will deepen --- at least in the short term. ...
"The deficit is now only about 1.5 percent of GDP [gross domestic product].
We survived with deficits of 2 or 2.5 percent during the mid-90s," Dhawan said.
Some states are selling bonds to try to cover pension underfunding.
The PBGC bailed out 150 bankrupt plans in the past year, compared with 104 the year before. The size of your insured benefit depends on when you retire and what kind of pension you take. Workers can get up to $3,665 a month if they quit at 65 with a single-life pension. But if you retire at 55 with a lifetime annuity for your spouse, your maximum drops to $1,484. The PBGC does not insure state and local government pensions, where underfunding may be twice as bad as in the private sector. Taxpayers blindly defer this cost.
Each of these instances reflects a powerful wave sweeping the economy -- overcapacity.
In the factory and in the office, it has a more concrete dimension: Businesses can produce far more than we need. Supply has simply outstripped demand. When that happens, production slows, equipment sits idle, costs go up, workers are laid off, and investments are postponed. ...
U.S. companies overbuilt in the 1990s, believing that the good times would never end. But the ``bubble'' popped with the turn of a new century and with the economy tipping into recession in March 2001 and then stumbling more after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Where did the pension fund money go? It did not evaporate or get erased as some economic journalist would like to have us believe.
These problems have little to do with any change in the number of people retiring, or an increase in their benefits. Rather, investments by the pension funds have fared poorly in recent years. As the prices of stocks and other investments have fallen, so has the return on the money set aside for the more than 44 million current and future private-sector retirees who qualify for traditional pensions.
At the same time, unusually low interest rates are further undermining pension plans. The effect of the bond rates is on the financial calculations used to determine the present value of the pension liabilities, not on the pension funds' return. Falling rates make future pension obligations look bigger on current balance sheets. To meet their obligations to workers, and to stay in compliance with pension laws, companies have been forced to set aside more money. ...
Still other companies, including Lucent Technologies, Boeing and Delta Air Lines, have been forced to reduce their net worth to reflect the way their growing pension obligations have outstripped their assets. ...
The sickest pension plans, by far, are at steel companies, followed by airlines. Other ailing sectors include the auto industry and its suppliers, the rubber and tire industries, and telecommunications. At worst, having to make a large pension contribution can push a company with insufficient cash flow into bankruptcy
Sunday January 12, 2003 19:46
"I don't think we're seeing depreciation in the low- to mid-price ranges," he said. "In fact, it's actually a hot market in the lower-price ranges in many areas. But if you look at the upper-price ranges -- starting at $200,000 to $250,000 for example -- you may see that prices are off by 10 to 20 percent, or more, compared to where they were several years ago."
Thousands of homeowners could soon be facing the prospect of negative equity, the Halifax is warning.
The bank, with two and a half million customers the largest mortgage lender in Britain, said a cooling housing market will soon see many with homes worth less than the value of their loans, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
Frank 't Hart, general counsel to SNS, said that when the bank confronted Citibank with its poor performance, it was assured that the portfolio would not fall much further. But by late 2001, SNS had lost three-quarters of its $15 million investment. Now it is worth $3 million. "With respect to this kind of investment, Citibank had a certain expertise we did not have," Mr. 't Hart said. "We hired Citibank because we believed them to have a certain level of professionalism and integrity and they have violated the trust we had in them." ...
Of the seven debt issues in the Captiva portfolio that have defaulted, five were bought by the Citibank manager. These include obligations of 360networks, a manager of fiber optic networks; Big V Supermarkets, a privately held food retailer; ICG Communications and Winstar Communications, both defunct; and the LTV Corporation, the steel maker. The LTV bond was underwritten by Salomon Smith Barney, another Citigroup unit. ...
Once again: Buyer beware.
Guys, we are interested in things other than computers, 8051 Forth, BASICs, assemblers, real world economics, pension fund fraud, microcontrollers, microcontroller operating systems, killing Iranian kids, counterfeit PhDs,
Bill, Lewis's MS and Ph.D thesis advisor, warned about professional birth control 29 years ago.
William H. Payne: Graduate Education: The Ph.D. Glut. CACM 16(3): 181-182 (1973)
deficient crypto and authentication algorithms, digitizing at the sensor, reloading, Alaska, fishing, hunting, fixing old VWs and Ford trucks, Internet. ..
But there are other interesting things too
February 1, 2003. It was the first day in the Year of the Horse. It is Year 4700 by Chinese calendar.
For those interested in astrology, it is the year of the Goat (sheep, ram).
Patty and bill are working out celebrations plans.
Random numbers or wrong numbers are sure interesting. And can be produced lots of different ways!
We got this thing about random numbers. And their avoidance in measuring sensor outputs.
But this leads to discussion of purple engineers. Those who advocate and use remote digitization.
This doesn't work very well.
In nearly all cases, there are better and more positive things to do.
Like
Patty and bill and working are working our celebration plans.
Aclara, Affymetrix, Caliper, Cepheid, Orchid, and, of course, JDS Uniphase
Then there are peripheral microcontroller companies. Like ARM.
Let's look at the numbers to make a guess what may happen in 2003. Like 3COM.
Below is going to cause a big shake-out in the peripheral micrcontroller industry .... and those do don't digitize at the sensor too, of course.
Tax cuts, while nice, do not increase corporate earnings nor increase the ability of corporations to pay dividends. Overvaluation is the mighty demon that today’s perma-bulls are vainly battling, not socialist taxation issues that can be fixed with the mere stroke of a pen.
The Great Bear is not over and there remains a long, long way to fall yet before we reach The Bottom. Caveat Emptor!
"If there is a fourth down year, many investors are likely to look for a fifth -- or a case of them," says James Dines, editor of the Dines Letter.
"What bugs me is that economists insist America is still in an economic upturn, but I find myself disbelieving their numbers and conclusions," he says. "Are they fools or knaves?" ...
"One of the notions is that the market can't decline four years in a row since the only other time it has done so was during the Depression, and we're not in a depression," says John Hussman, professor of economics at the University of Michigan and head of Hussman Econometrics, a research firm.
"The difficulty is that the market's decline from its 2000 peak began when stocks commanded a price/peak earnings multiple that was fully 50 percent higher than the valuation at the 1929 peak," he says.
In March 2000 when the speculative bubble burst, the P/E ratio was more than 30, the highest of any bull market in history.
What's a P/E? It's a ratio that gives investors an idea of how much they are paying for a company's earnings power. So the higher the P/E, the more investors pay for the stock and therefore, the more earnings growth they are expecting.
Here's another story of a success, not a failure.
This success is having gotten away with the $1 billion ... of likely pension fund money.
In some ways, it's another verse in the dirge heard everywhere in Silicon Valley.
Let's look at the financials of some of the micromachine biomed companies mentioned by Grace.
Aclara, Affymetrix, Caliper, Cepheid, and Orchid
Only Affymetrix finally showed a profit.
2003 looks to be the year for more spectacular high tech bankruptcies.
But, hey, these companies succeeded in what they were trying to do all along. Steal the pension fund money.
The pension fund money did not evaporate which some financial journalist would like us to believe. And Grace has helped us identify four, maybe five, biomed companies which pocketed the money.
Lewis has concerns about bonds as investments.
Moody's Investors Service said today that bond defaults hit an all-time quarterly record $34 billion in the first period of 2002, although the global speculative grade bond default rate fell for a second consecutive month in March to 10.3%. By the end of the year, Moody's forecasts a default rate of 7.4%.
Late 2003?
Pierre Belec, of course, should write about this.
Some companies and even states are trying to fund missing pension fund payments by selling bonds.
JDS Uniphase is a financial disaster!
For example, Cronos, having previously heen sold to JDS Uniphase for $750 million in early 2000,
JSD Uniphase makes even Palm look good!
Let's hope money managers are going to be a bit more careful where they invest the pension funds.
But there's good stuff too. USB 2.0 and may, if Lewis is right, Firewire
> Apple's new portables sport Firewire 800 which runs circles around USB 2.0
> and 802.11g which is compatible with 802.11b but 5 times faster. So, once
> again, Microsoft and Intel will have to back off from 802.11a and complete
> dependence on USB 2.0.
Here's a related article by Grace.
| Financial Woes Mar the Road to
M3 Commercialization Roger H. Grace, Roger Grace Associates The industry known as M3 (that is, MEMS, MST, and micromachines-the microsize sensors that promise to change our world so dramatically) experienced its first slowdown in a decade during 2002. Besides the recent market dynamics affecting high tech in general, many M3 companies- even those that have been in business for years-suffered shortfalls typically associated with early-stage business. The M3 Commercialization Report Card (Figure 1), which I introduced in 1998 and have updated each year since, tracks the industry's performance in overcoming harriers to commercialization by covering the major success factors for M3 companies. (For detailed versions of the two most recent report cards, see Sensors Expo & Conference Proceedings, Fall 2001 and Fall 2002.) The Change column quantifies the difference in grade between 2001 and 2002. The most significant jumps are associated with the loss of gains achieved during 1998-2001. Other variances are positive, however. Here's my grading rationale. Market Research Improvement here is due in large part to the European Union organization Nexus, which in February published Market Analysis for Microsystems II: 2000-2005, a follow-up to its 1998 study. Developed with input from the Nexus User Supplier Clubs, the study provides hoth a top-down and bottom-up classical approach, and appears to he the most comprehensive report yet on M. At least 10 other reports have come out since 1992, when the seminal microsystems market study by Battelle Frankfurt was released, hut most (if not all) were conducted before the economic downturn and the optical telecom sector's extreme plunge. The Nexus report, because of its recent publication, avoids this error. The MEMS Industry Croup formed in 2001 as an association to support the advancement of M3. In addition, two other groups, while not formal industry associations, perform many of the functions of a classical trade croon. MANCEF. the Micro- and Nanotechnology Commercialization Education Foundation (established in 2000), which develops and manages the annual Commercialization of Micro- and Nanosystems (COMS) conference, has created an extensive industry roadmap and is a major supporter of M3 standards with the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) organization. And the European group Nexus has many initiatives, including its very successful User Supplier Clubs, which operate similar to those of trade associations. Venture Capital Attraction Before 1999, M3 companies were considered too risky for most investors, and did not satisfy a number of the critical criteria for venture capitalist and private investor (angel) funding. Among these are a unique product concept, a strong management team with demonstrated industry successes, a large and well-defined (vis-a-vis formal research) market size and growth rate, a served market, a target market definition, and a significant return on capital in the first five years of operation. The advent of MEMS-based optical switches, however, changed this situation. BioMEMS companies, including Aclara, Affymetrix, Caliper, Cepheid, and Orchid, went public in the past three years, and some enjoyed large capitalization in early 2000 when the stock market exploded and biotechnology was so generously valued. But the downturn, especially the technology-rich NASDAQ market, has greatly reduced their values. First-round funding is minimal in all high-tech sectors, including M3. Many of the acquiring companies' stock prices have fallen 75%-80% from their highs of March 2000. For example, Cronos, having previously heen sold to JDS Uniphase for $750 million in early 2000, was sold to MEMSCAP in July 2002 for $8 million. JDS stock now lists for less than 10% of its previous high. In all business areas, venture capital investment in 2002 is expected to he the worst in the last decade: $20-$30 billion, down from $55 billion in 2001 and $108 billion in 2000. In early 2000, seed and first rounds accounted for 60% of total investments; they are currently running at 30%. A Price Waterhouse Cooper/ Venture Economics/National Venture Capital association Money Tree survey done in August shows that for every dollar invested in a new company, five to seven times this amount was invested in existing portfolio companies (although new deals in biotech and software received one third and one fourth, respectively, of all new funding in their categories). This is not good news for startups in general and certainly not for M3 startups-unless, perhaps, they are bioMEMS startups. Bucking the trend of traditional venture capitalists is Ardesta, the first MEMS-specific venture capital/technology accelerator firm. Formed in 2000, Ardesta has helped to launch a number of exciting startups that might otherwise not have been funded, and to accelerate companies such as Sensicore, IonOptics, and Tessera. Ardesta's strategy is to license intellectual property from leading institutions, including Sandia National Laboratories, University of Michigan, and University of California, Berkeley. Creation of Wealth Many people who became millionaires on paper as a result of optical telecom buyouts (based largely in stock and on future performance) saw their fortunes evaporate over the past two years. Acquisitions still continue, as with General Electric acquiring TRW Novasensor in September. The IPO of MEMSCAP in 2001, the first in the history of M3, has not fared well as a result of the dip in high tech, especially in the worldwide stock markets. Industry Roadmap M3 roadmaps have been developed by three organizations: Nexus (issued in late 2000), MEMS Industry Group (issued in late 2001), and MANCEF (issued in late 2002). Each takes a different approach, with MANCEF's being the most thorough. In 14 chapters it addresses such factors as foundries, standards, EDA tools, market analysis, and reliability. The Future The year 2002 was pivotal for high tech worldwide. Within M3, expansion in many important areas-including infrastructure, roadmaps, standards, and industry associations-portends maturation. But the business climate worldwide is still turbulent. Many U.S. M3 companies that had hoped to emulate the early successes of Cronos, Xros, and Intellisense are finding themselves out of business or canceling development in optical MEMS telecom systems. If M3 companies are to succeed during these trying times, they must define exactly what the market wants and what their competitive and sustainable advantages are. Roger H. Grace is President, Roger Grace Associates, Naples, FL; 415-436-9101, rgrace@rgrace.com, www.rgrace.com. Sensors January 2003 www.sensormag.com |
Saturday January 11, 2003 20:50
2003 may be the year of technical occupational migration.
• Determine how committed you are to your old field. Do you actually want another job like the one you had, or would you rather try something different? If you want to stay in the same field, get as much information as you can to determine how realistic that is. Are jobs in your area expected to come back in Silicon Valley, or are they being automated or moved overseas? If they do come back, do you have the qualifications employers want? ...
• Consider a career change. Perhaps you never really liked the field you were in. Or you realize that you're not likely to get another job like the one you had, no matter how much you want it.
Csd bought a CEN-TECH 35017 for the reason our previous multimeters didn't have capacitance and frequency measurements.
Deflation?
First use was measuring tachometer output of an MSD electronic ignition connect to white ford.
Search for Here's the compressor
The CEN-TECH works great. As well as do their cheaper, about $4.95, digital counterparts!
We've measured electronic components with it and our previous expensive multimeters. The CEN-TECH gets the same answers!
The CEN-TECH is a microcontroller product!!!
Pierre Belec strikes again at Yahoo! Finance.
In Austin the prices of houses once doubled, then fell back to less that where it started!
How many people will have been lured into a debt trap once the value of their home starts falling? Trust me, unless you've had it happen to you, you have no idea what it feels like to owe $130,000 on an $80,000 house, as happened to many people in the Texas real estate bust. (In most areas, you can probably double or triple those dollar amounts for today. How many people have that much cash laying around to make up the difference?) Thinking that asset prices can forever be levitated is a pipe dream. Ultimately, the payments on loans have to be paid, and that depends on how well capital has been allocated to meet the real demand of the economy. ...
The U.S. economy suffered a surprise 101,000 jobs drop in December, the government said on Friday, underscoring gloom among retailers and other employers and raising the political stakes for President Bush as he touts a $674 billion stimulus plan.
Here's neat email recently received from Kim Komando
MY WEEKLY COLUMN: Making the PC-Gadget Connection
So, you got that new computer up and running. And now you're looking at all the wondrous things you could add to it--digital cameras, music players, printers, memory card readers, wireless keyboards and mice, to name a few. Unfortunately, the boxes tell you to hook it up with USB 2.0, or Firewire, or, maybe even, Bluetooth. These are all protocols to link things to a computer.
Let's demystify them, starting with USB (Universal Serial Bus) 2.0. Of the really high-speed connectors, this is the most common. As its name implies, USB 2.0 is the second iteration of the universal serial bus standard. The original, 1.1, is still around.
The difference? Speed. USB 1.1 moves 12 megabits of data per second. USB 2.0 moves 480Mb of data per second. This means USB 2.0 is about 40 times faster than its predecessor, USB 1.1.
Why is this important? Think about MP3 music files. These are normally 2.5 to 3 megabytes per song. If you were transferring 1,000 songs (some people have that many!) to an MP3 player, you could spend a half hour using USB 1.1. If you used USB 2.0, it would take less than a minute!
How can you tell which you type of USB port is in your computer? Unfortunately, the slots look the same. Check the documentation that came with your computer. If the computer is new, at least some of your USB slots should be 2.0. If it is more than six months old, you may be stuck with 1.1. If that's the case, and you need a faster slot, you can install a 2.0 card in your computer.
Some peripherals don't need a screaming-fast port. Keyboards and mice come in USB versions. They're normally 1.1, because they just don't move that much data. You can hook 1.1 peripherals to 2.0 ports, but they will still run at the 1.1 speed.
Firewire is another screamer. It is known formally as IEEE 1394. It was developed by Apple, and is often used to download video. Those are huge files, and like a slew of MP3s, can take forever with a slower method. Firewire is less common on PCs than USB 2.0. It is built into all Apple machines. Firewire is slightly slower than USB 2.0, running at 400Mbps. That is still awfully fast.
Firewire comes in two flavors: four-wire and six-wire. Six-wire is handier, because it uses power from the computer to run the peripheral. So, if you're downloading pictures from a camera, for instance, you don't have to use the camera's batteries. Four-wire ports require the peripheral to be powered. You can buy Firewire cards to add this port to a computer. If you buy a card, get six-wire.
Both Firewire and USB 2.0 peripherals must be connected by cable to the computer. Bluetooth is entirely different. It is a wireless standard. It is talked about much more often than it is installed. If you decide to retrofit a computer with Bluetooth, you'll find few parts. And there are even fewer peripherals equipped for Bluetooth.
Nonetheless, Bluetooth has been the subject of continuing hype for several years. It is a low-power system, good for about 30 feet. Therefore, it is impractical for networking computers. But it should work well with peripherals.
Bluetooth was named for King Harald II of Denmark. He reigned in the 10th century and had--guess what?--a blue tooth. Used on a computer, Bluetooth runs at 721 kilobits per second one way. A fast parallel port, traditionally used for printers, runs about as fast. Bluetooth is much, much slower than USB or Firewire. When you look behind your computer, what do you see? Mine is a jungle of wiring. Conceivably, Bluetooth could alleviate that condition.
The bottom-line: If you're using a PC and want to buy a peripheral, concentrate on USB (hopefully, 2.0) and Firewire, if you have a Firewire port. If you're using an Apple machine, concentrate on Firewire. Bluetooth is a good choice for wireless keyboards and mice, but not much more than that.
--> MORE ABOUT ME--KIM:
Whew! In addition to my weekly newspaper column, I have a weekly column on MSN's bCentral, this newsletter, a weekly column for USA Today, and other editorial products. Oh, and I have a weekly radio show heard by almost 8 million people.
--> HAVE A WEB SITE? Link your site to my site. The easy instructions are here: http://www.komando.com/fanlinks.asp
California has to pay about $800 million into the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the largest U.S. pension fund, and the California State Teachers' Retirement System, the third largest. Both funds lost money in the stock market during the past three years. If the state decides to borrow, the pension bonds would be sold in the fiscal year starting July 1.
Assumption v reality!
In slides released in advance of an analyst meeting, the world's second-largest automaker said its worldwide pension underfunding totaled $14.5 billion. Its U.S. pension funds had a negative return of 9.7 percent in 2002 as U.S. stock markets suffered their third straight year of decline
Ford said it was changing the assumptions for future returns on its U.S., Canadian and British plans to 8.75 percent from 9.5 percent.
Over a long period of time the S&P 500 has sold at an average P/E of 15 with a range of 7 to 22 excluding the late 1990s boom. At bear market bottoms the P/E lows have averaged about 11 with none higher than 16. Now the index sells at 30 times estimated earnings for 2002 and 24 times the estimated consensus earnings for 2003, which are probably too high. This is not only far above the level at any bear market bottom in history, but is higher than the P/E at the 1929 peak.
The valuations for leading technology stocks are even worse. Fred Hickey, publisher of the excellent monthly, “The High-Tech Strategist” calculates that 16 leading tech stocks with earnings are now selling at an average of 52 times trailing earnings and 42 times estimated earnings for the following fiscal year. While some will say that this is a result of depressed earnings, the average P/E in 1990, when earnings were also depressed, was 17. For those who don’t trust earnings numbers, the four-quarter trailing price-to-sales ratio is now 7.7 compared to only 2.3 in 1990. We note that the 16 stocks in the calculation account for 32% of Nasdaq’s total capitalization.
Thursday January 9, 2003 18: 46
There are the batteries too.
U.S. technology companies lag foreign rivals in reducing hazardous materials in electronic devices, exposing gadget-hungry Americans to toxins whenever they use computers, according to a new report.
Within the next five years, up to 680 million computers will become obsolete in the United States, producing more than 4 billion pounds of plastic, 1 billion pounds of lead and millions of pounds of other waste products, according to the National Safety Council. According to the CTC report, less than 10 percent of outdated computer products will be refurbished or recycled.
GM said it expects pretax pension expenses to increase from $1 billion in 2002 to $3 billion this year. The company said an analysis showed that its U.S. plans were underfunded by $19.3 billion at the end of 2002.
GM's U.S. plans were underfunded $9.1 billion at the end of 2001.
Based on a study by asset managers and actuaries, the automaker has decided to reduce its assumption for how much it will earn from investments to nine per cent in 2003 from 10 per cent in 2002.
The stock market just wrapped up its third straight year of losses, but when it comes to pension accounting, that reality has yet to catch up with much of corporate America.
Many companies are feeding their bottom line by assuming their pension assets will grow by at least 10 percent in the future, even though the stock market slump shows few signs of abating. ...
International Business Machines Corp. (nyse: IBM - news - people), for example, notes in its 2001 annual report that since 1986 its actual returns exceeded its projected returns by $5.3 billion. In 2001, the company's pension plans lost $2.41 billion, despite projecting returns of $1.45 billion.
"Phantom pension earnings are portrayed as income," she says. "It's a ticking time bomb."!
GM, the world's largest automaker, also said it is cutting the projected rate of return on its pension fund to 9 percent annually from 10 percent in 2002.General Motors Corp. (NYSE:GM - News) said on Thursday that its pension costs before taxes will triple to $3 billion this year because assets in the fund, hammered by three years of stock market declines, fell short of anticipated obligations by $19.3 billion in 2002.
The move by GM, which has the largest private U.S. pension fund, had been expected. Analysts have said many companies are likely to follow suit, depressing earnings across corporate America this year. ....
What U.S. papers say about Bush plan
Faced with a sluggish economy that bears some similarities to the one that helped sink his father’s 1992 re-election bid, President Bush proposed a stimulus plan Tuesday that would return $674 billion to taxpayers over 10 years.
President George W. Bush's $670 billion tax-cut proposal is his biggest risk on the economy because he can't guarantee success, analysts said. Democrats portrayed the plan as fueling deficits and benefiting the rich.
Wednesday January 8, 2003 11:14
On Saturday morning I opened the Business section and found an article by Richard Lambert headlined “US dollar faces year of living dangerously”. He makes many of the points I was planning to make, and makes them very well — the overvalued and declining dollar, the “enormous” US deficit on current account, “the sorry state of the world’s second and third biggest economies, Japan and Germany”, the Asian central banks propping up the dollar, the sharp rise in the price of gold. ...
There have been a number of reasons for this strength of the gold price. Between 1997 and 2002 the US current deficit tripled from an annual rate of 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product to just below 5 per cent. Some projections expect it to reach 7 per cent by 2007; even the present deficit is unsustainable.
The Clinton presidency in the years of the boom between 1997 and 2000 lost control of the US current balance; despite an economic slowdown, the Bush Administration has not regained it, and does not even appear to have a proper understanding of the problem. Gold is priced in terms of dollars. Gold has risen by 36 per cent in terms of the dollar since 1999; that revaluation probably has further to go. Some American commentators now believe that gold has entered a ten-year bull market against the dollar
Feeling even more sick?
The stock market just wrapped up its third straight year of losses, but when it comes to pension accounting, that reality has yet to catch up with much of corporate America.
At the start of 2002, companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 on average estimated that their pension assets -- the bulk of which are invested in the stock market -- would post lofty returns of 9.3% for the year, according to a study by Merrill Lynch & Co. ...
That's because on average, pension portfolios have 60% of their assets tied up in the stock market while the rest usually are locked up in debt or other assets that generate even lower returns.
According to its annual report released in March 2002, Verizon Communications Inc., the nation's largest local phone company, had a strong year in 2001. In the opening pages of the report, the company announced an annual profit of $389 million.
Only those investors who dug into the small print at the back of the document learned that Verizon's reported earnings included $2.7 billion in gains from its pension fund investments -- profit that didn't really exist.
The company pension fund actually lost $3.1 billion in 2001, a footnote on page 58 of the 68-page report revealed.
Martin Weiss believes that the pension fund timebomb will be one of the factors driving the Dow down to 5000. GM owes $12.7 BILLION to its pension fund. The September issue of Safe Money Report lists some 50 companies that owe money to their pension funds; ranging from hundreds of millions to billions.
Microsoft will officially end technical support for Windows 98 and Windows NT 4 on June 30. The financial implications for Microsoft and others could be significant, even in the short term.
We realize this page is getting too big. But there is important stuff to add.
We have often been accused of inconsistency for criticising the Federal Reserve’s recent promises for radical monetisation to avert a Japanese-style deflation, whilst simultaneously arguing for exactly that sort of policy prescription in Japan. We have chosen to open the New Year by addressing this apparent contradiction. Although both countries share many comparable symptoms of a post-bubble distress, they are clearly at different stages of the economic cycle and concomitantly different phases of economic adjustment. We think the relative time frames of the respective economies highlight a crucial distinction. Yes, the vigorous production of “Why We’re Not Like Japan” articles has some validity; but such analyses should not provide US investors with any degree of comfort. On virtually any current comparison, Japan is far more amenable to improvement given the savings swing from deficit to surplus in its private sector, than the US, which has spent all of its monetary bullets pre-empting, as opposed to accommodating, painful, but necessary, economic adjustment.
Wal-Mart is introducing basic financial services for US customers, using the same low-margin strategy that has turned it into the world's biggest retailer.
The entry of the discount superstore giant into financial services has always been feared by financial competitors worried that it could undercut their margins while facing a lighter regulatory burden.
The Walmart of software is advancing. Forth and BASIC-52, of course! And fun too!
Senior citizen problems
Blowing the whistle on Remote digitization and 2003 microcontroller shake-out.
Isn't it fun to be in an industry leading deflation? We simply love these inexpensive gigahertz PCs!
In that context, today’s deflation risks are global in scope. That’s a key by-product of our baseline forecast of the world economy -- a 2.9% estimate for world GDP growth in 2003 following two years of gains averaging just 2.1%. Not only did the 2001-02 outcome fall a cumulative 3.0 percentage points below the global economy’s longer-term 3.6% growth trend, but our 2003 scenario adds another 0.7 percentage point to the global output gap -- perpetuating the deflationary tendencies of this subpar global growth cycle. Moreover, our first cut at 2004 -- a 3.9% increase -- is only 0.3 percentage point above trend, thereby barely making a dent in the outsize imbalance between global supply and demand. Consequently, notwithstanding the recent pop in commodity prices, traditional macro tells us that a persistently wide global output gap makes it difficult to envision the return of pricing leverage at any point in the foreseeable future. The risk of global deflation can hardly be ruled out. ....
Tech show attendance last year slumped 10% from the year before, twice as much as other shows. Key3Media, the producer of Comdex, the granddaddy of North American tech shows, says it may file for bankruptcy protection because of dwindling crowds. And Macworld Expo in Tokyo, a big Apple Computer-related show, was canceled this year because not enough major exhibitors signed up. Even the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one of the industry's healthiest, expects only slightly more visitors this year than last. It starts Thursday in Las Vegas. ...
"Trade shows mirror the health of a sector, and the tech industry is in disarray," says Douglas Ducate, CEO of the Center for Exhibition Industry Research. He expects some tech shows to consolidate and more companies to copy eBay and Oracle, who do smaller conventions targeted at customers and developers. ...
Closures and mergers in the tech and telecom industries erased hundreds of companies and about 470,000 jobs last year. Many were habitual attendees of trade shows.
Lewis warned of the Crash of 2000.
Let's see what going to happen in 2003. A microcontroller shake-out?
Bill, Lewis's MS abd Ph.D thesis advisor, warned about professional birth control 29 years ago.
William H. Payne: Graduate Education: The Ph.D. Glut. CACM 16(3): 181-182 (1973)
2002 may be the year of technical occupational migration.
John Young forced bill into the internet business.
13 November 1998
William Payne promises that he and Arthur Morales will shortly have a Web site for offering information on their activities and those of others. A URL for that site will be available soon.
Enclosed is a Grand Jury subpoena requiring that Cryptome produce certain records.
Reality?
Only those investors who dug into the small print at the back of the document learned that Verizon's reported earnings included $2.7 billion in gains from its pension fund investments -- profit that didn't really exist.
The company pension fund actually lost $3.1 billion in 2001, a footnote on page 58 of the 68-page report revealed. ...
Csd does not advocate inventing new operating systems when there are acceptable operating systems - especially Forth and BASIC-52, of course!
Likewise there is no sense reinventing analog circuits.
While Bill is not into analog circuit design, he works with people who are. And naturally he got curious about what they are doing. Here's two neat books if you want to learn the rudiments of analog circuits.
Hey, analog circuit designers borrow circuits of others. No sense reinventing!
 Bill was told that Forrest Mims lives and Albuquerque and works for the Air Force Weapons Laboratory.  Companies like Analog Devices, Linear Tech, Burr-Brown ... offer seminars to teach about their products. And frequently publish these informative manuals. If you come-up with a hardware design, these companies also have engineers who will look at your design and point out what you are possibly doing wrong and a fix! Free! |
Don't count on higher earnings. So far, during this 'recovery' stage, profits have been falling - an unprecedented experience. And there is not much reason to think they will get much better soon. Businesses have already cut expenses. Expense cuts produce quick increases in profit margins for an individual company. But one companies expense is another's income...so the net effect throughout the economy is negative. What produces profits is capital investment...of which there has been very little. Companies typically build new factories, hire new workers, and sell new products at a profit - that is what gives them earnings to distribute to their shareholders.
But policy makers have encouraged consumer spending, hoping to hold off a worse recession. This consumer spending by Americans has done wonders for the Chinese economy - currently expanding at an 8% rate. But it merely deprives the U.S. economy of the savings and capital investment it needs to produce profits.
The amount of retail PCs sold over the 2002 holidays dipped from an already dismal 2001, with desktop computers sliding 15 percent to 20 percent, according to preliminary estimates from research firm NPDTechworld. ...
There were bright spots. Notebook computers continued to gain popularity as their prices fell, with retail sales units rising 10 percent to 15 percent, according to NPDTechworld's preliminary figures. ...
With those lower prices, of course, comes shrinking profit margins. Meanwhile, businesses and consumers remain spooked by the threat of higher gas prices, war and an unstable stock market.
Fundraising in the international capital markets fell sharply in 2002 as issuance was hit by a weak global economy, falling stock markets, rising corporate bankruptcies and political instability.
Securities underwriting volume totalled $3,900bn for the year, down from $4,110bn the previous year, according to new data from Thomson Financial.
Guys, Tice at Pudentbear are publishing negative economy articles because they are selling short.
A rising number of U.S. mutual fund managers, chastened by steep stock declines, are using a tactic once reserved mainly for the riskier world of hedge funds -- they're selling stocks short on a hunch they will fall.
ADVERTISEMENT "After really tough times, people are realizing something we believed was prudent all along," said Paul McEntire, who manages the Marketocracy Technology Plus Fund and uses the strategy. "It's not a bad idea to do some hedging in adverse markets. It does allow you to play both sides of the street."
Deflation?
Pioneer is struggling mightily to keep its Tijuana factory complex open in the face of fierce competition from China, which has undercut Mexico as a cut-rate producer. The Japanese electronics company already has slashed 900 jobs at its three plants here, moving the manufacturing of smaller speakers to Shanghai, where they can be churned out for as little as $3 each -- half of what they cost to make in Mexico.
"China's cost competitiveness is very strong," said Hirokazu Tsujimoto, another Pioneer executive who makes his home in nearby San Diego. ...
Since 2000, the Mexican government estimates, the maquiladora industry has lost nearly 250,000 jobs and seen its roster of plants shrink to about 3,200 from a high of more than 3,700. Among those that have shuttered operations are Hasbro Inc., Sanyo Electric Co. and Canon Inc. Landing another good position "will be very difficult," said 50-year-old Victor Hernandez, an engineer from Monterrey who was a manager at Canon's printer plant here.
Saturday January 4, 2003 20:21
Heads up, Wall Street. If the market doesn't rally this month, stocks may be on track to post their fourth consecutive losing year.
The month of January is an incredible forecaster of things to come for the market. It may predict whether the year will be good or bad.
On Thursday, the first trading day of 2003, the S&P 500 index jumped 3.3 percent, its best start to a new year since 1988, according to MarketHistory.com. Both the Nasdaq and the Dow Jones industrial average ended up more than 3 percent, with the Dow scoring its third-biggest opening-day percentage gain since the average was created in 1896.
“In our view, risk remains to the downside for consensus 2003 estimates [for technology companies] while tech valuations remain at lofty levels relative to the S&P 500,” Goldman's analysts said. ...
It found that the outlook for spending in 2003 had deteriorated to a 1 per cent decline compared with estimates of 2-3 per cent growth in a previous survey conducted just two months ago. “
We are surprised by themagnitude of the decline,” Goldman said.
The lack of “game changing technologies” and little pent-up demand indicates a bleak beginning to 2003 for technologycompanies. It also dashes hopes that IT spending in 2002 hadstabilised and would offer moderate growth in 2003.
This has led to a price war in some IT sectors as tech companies have been forced to compete by discounting prices. The Goldman survey indicates that the discounting of IT products is likely to continue, with 56 per cent of respondents saying that discounting is on the rise.
The technology shift caused by USB 2.0 and gigahertz PCs, Visual Basic and C++ 6.0 coupled with super fast 80C32 SOCs is doing to do bad things to powerful peripheral microcontrollers where Java is one software solution. So it will be interesting to see is Java is going to do about as far as its underlying technology, Forth.
Look what Mentor graphics is doing with USB 2.0 and 8051s!
The Java platform was introduced by Sun in 1995 as a way for programs to run on all computers regardless of the operating system.
But Java, which has been criticized for being slow, faces stiff competition not only from Microsoft but also Macromedia Inc.'s Flash, which is less robust but considerably easier to program than Java.
The weak economy isn't just putting the squeeze on people on the unemployment line - it's also hurting recruiters and consultants who used to command big salaries to fill jobs that have dried up.
Analysts say the stalled economy has sapped the recruiting industry, replacing double-digit revenues its enjoyed through much of the 1990s with double-digit losses, layoffs and lost firms. Overall, analysts estimate the industry has lost $3 billion in revenue and as many as one out of three firms in the past two years.
The bankruptcy business is booming in Chicago, even as the city's hometown airlines struggles to emerge from the biggest such filing in aviation history.
Delaware long has been considered a prime spot to file, partly because many companies are incorporated there and because attorneys say judges there were easy to work with.
However, ``Delaware as a venue became unfavorable because of its backlog,'' said David Newby, a Chicago attorney for property owners leasing to Kmart. ``Ironically, it became too popular.''
Thursday January 2, 2003 11:41
Others point out that many companies whose share prices plunged have reported lower profits, and that their stocks still trade at higher multiples of earnings than in pre-bubble years. That is particularly true of large technology stocks
Respondents to the Goldman poll now see 2003 IT spending falling 1% instead of the 2%-3% average gain they previously saw. As a result, Goldman argued that current multiples among technology companies remain "lofty" on a relative basis, particularly with no obvious buying catalysts on the horizon.
Two-thirds of the managers surveyed think reduced IT spending is more likely, while 56% expect discounting to rise and 15% expect spending to pick up in the second half of 2003, the survey found.
Bill is not an analog engineer. But he worked with analog engineers at Sandia lab.
One of his job assignments was to evaluate a/d converters for Sandia labs' seismic program.
Reason was that he could get the software written in Forth for a 8051 microcontroller controlling both the a/d and d/a converters at a fraction of the time using other technologies!
So will pass along information gleaned from a/d experts on how to get the right, or at least consistent, answers and avoid random number components contaminating sensor values.
With the 80C32 USB and mixed signal SOCs coming to market we are entering a very exciting time in collection and processing, on gigahertz PCs of course - not weird software-starved peripheral microcontrollers, of sensor data.
Pricing power is possible with a technically superior product.
Wednesday January 1, 2003 20:51
The anticipated peripheral micrcontroller core shake-out this year could worsen the outlook for high tech.
After years of being the epicenter of hot initial public stock offerings, Silicon Valley was an IPO ghost town in 2002.
With investors shunning new stocks amid a third year of painful market losses, only six companies headquartered in Silicon Valley went public in 2002, raising $1.19 billion. That's a fraction of the $8.5 billion raised by 78 local companies in 2000, when the IPO frenzy peaked.
ARC could be a victim. However, ARC is apparently selling USB 2.0 IP!
Synopsys is apparently also selling USB 2.0 IP!
Ford Motor Corp. (NYSE:F - News), for instance, said in early December that it expects its pension fund to be underfunded by about $6.2 billion at the end of 2002.
At least nine times out of ten, the prediction du jour is growth, growth, rapid growth of some new-fangled technology, bullish predictions built on five year timelines....
Five year growth projections are bunk – If it didn't work for the Commies in the '50s and '60s, why should it work for capitalists today? ...
Challenge the herd. Too many pundits and analysts end up following a single lead. Why? Because everyone else is at the same place. It's nice and warm to be in a crowd of like-thinkers. The dot.com boom to bust has numerous examples of one allegedly credible voice staking out a position, followed by a stampede of others. Don't be intimidated by an alphabet soup of letters. Some of the most wrong statements I've heard emerged out of the mouth of a Harvard MBAs
"Workers have less leverage at a point where the unemployment numbers are growing and the economy is weak," but health care cost disputes may still lead to strikes, said Harley Shaiken, a professor specializing in labor issues at the University of California at Berkeley. "From the point of view of many unions, what they see is an unraveling of what it has taken many decades to put together, which is the employer paying most of the costs of benefits."
Companies across the board are facing double-digit inflation in health care costs. The cost of health insurance rose 12.7 percent between the spring of 2001 and the spring of 2002, a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust found. That was the highest rate of growth since 1990, according to the survey, which predicted that the increases would continue.
In his 2002 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Rehnquist said no new bankruptcy judgeships had been created since 1992 although the number of cases filed has increased by more than 570,000 since then.
He said each bankruptcy judge now handles an average of 4,777 cases, compared to an average of 2,998 in 1992.
Rehnquist said the number of filings in bankruptcy courts grew 8 percent in the year to an all-time high of 1,547,669 cases filed. He said bankruptcy filings have risen 72.5 percent since 1993.
Tuesday December 31, 2002 15:18
For the year, the blue-chip Dow fell 16.7 percent, while the Nasdaq plunged 31 percent - the biggest loser out of all the major averages. The S&P 500 sank 23.3 percent, while the broader Wilshire 5000 tumbled around 22 percent. The Russell 2000 of small-cap stocks lost 21 percent.
Donald Selkin, director of equity research at Joseph Stevens, called 2002 an unmitigated disaster. "By all statistical accounts, it was a historically awful year," he said, noting that this was worst decline for the S&P since 1974 and the Dow since 1977.
The Morris Township, New Jersey-headquartered company has contributed $800 million in cash and stock to its pension plans in 2002 to improve the funded status of those plans, said Honeywell in a statement. Honeywell said in a November filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that its employee pension plans would end 2002 with a $1.7 billion deficit without new funds.
Many pension plans that have defined benefits to be paid to retirees have developed deficits in recent years as the value of equities fell since 2000. Federal law requires companies to protect the solvency of pension plans, which prompted many companies to increase funding to cover future retiree benefits.
We're going to try to reduce the size of this page and at the end of 2002 and try to kill, one way or the other, improper digitization.
We're thinking how to do this the most succinct way!
Various people had their various methods for destroying vampires as well. In some Slavic nations a spike made of ash wood, if driven through the chest, was believed to kill a vampire -- this is everyone's favorite method, a stake through the heart. In different lands, however, the wood used sometimes needed to be from a certain tree. For example, oak wood did the job in Silesia, while hawthorn wood was required in Serbia.
The federal agency responsible for failed pension plans is discontinuing a supplemental monthly benefit for many retirees of GST Steel Co., which closed last year.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which took over GST's pension plans in August, informed several hundred GST retirees that the agency does not guarantee supplemental benefits payments and thus will be discontinuing them as of January. Normal monthly payments will not be reduced, according to a letter the agency sent to one GST retiree.
An official with the United Steelworkers of America said he was still trying to get some clarification and additional information from the agency on what benefits are being terminated. "Our retirees received letters saying their pension supplements will be stopped in part or in whole for some people," said John Wiseman, international staff representative for the Steelworkers union. "It's my understanding that some of our people are over the guaranteed maximum (from the agency) because they retired at an earlier age."
After the unbridled gusto of the dot-com era, the ensuing downturn has been a throbbing headache. Workers in high-tech went from hoping to be millionaires to running out of unemployment benefits.
Monday December 30, 2002 20:30
U.S. public companies shattered bankruptcy records for a second straight year in 2002 as accounting fraud and the previous decade's spending spree felled a number of corporate heavyweights -- and experts are bracing for more filings in the coming years.
A total of 186 public companies with a staggering $368 billion in assets filed for bankruptcy in 2002, according to tracking service BankruptcyData.com. That is the largest asset total ever, sweeping past last year's record $259 billion.
The wreckage included five of the 10 largest bankruptcies ever, led by phone company WorldCom Inc., with $104 billion in assets. Filings by Conseco Inc., Global Crossing Ltd., Adelphia Communications Corp. and UAL Corp. also were among the top 10. Accounting scandals figured in the failure of all of those but UAL, which was hurt by the Sept. 11 attacks.
Just The Beginning
-- December 30, 2002We have been issuing warnings about the looming bankruptcy crisis for months now. Years of exaggerated earnings and ever-increasing piles of debt are beginning to take their toll -- crushing companies and forcing them into bankruptcy. But it's just the beginning. We expect several large companies and hundreds of smaller ones to declare bankruptcy in the coming months.
And it's not just the failed companies and their shareholders who take the hit when bankruptcy is declared. The ripple effects are vast and devastating, reaching the companies' creditors and suppliers.
As this bankruptcy avalanche continues into 2003, it will continue to strike the earnings of good and bad companies alike. Bottom line: Nothing can kill earnings more than the aftershocks of large and multiple bankruptcies.
Secondly, I'm afraid that deflation is going to be the big story coming up. Deflation in the face of the massive amounts of debt that has been built into this country can be an horrendous problem. Remember, high levels of debt are difficult enough to deal with during slightly inflationary times. But in deflationary times, high levels of debt = bankruptcies.
All told, 186 public companies with a staggering $368 billion in debt filed for bankruptcy in 2002, according to tracking service BankruptcyData.com. That is the largest asset total ever, sweeping past last year's record $259 billion.
The wreckage included five of the 10 largest bankruptcies ever, led by phone company WorldCom Inc., with $104 billion in assets. Filings by Conseco Inc., Global Crossing Ltd., Adelphia Communications Corp. and UAL Corp. also were among the top 10. Accounting scandals figured in the failure of all of those but UAL.
Bankruptcy experts are bracing for a new crop of failures by companies that depended on companies that went bust.
Deflation?
Austin American Statesman Friday December 27, 2002
DEFLATION VIGILANTES
By James Grant
Bulls believe, as we do not, that the page has been turned on the Age of Inflation. They interpret the persistence of deflationary symptoms - 99-cent Whoppers, free cell phones and $500 PCs - as evidence of a new phase of our price history. According to the historian David Hackett Fischer, grand cycles of inflation and deflation carry everything before them. They are more powerful even than central banks.
Stocks are still preposterously high...with the S&P trading at near 30 times earnings. The late, great bull market was the biggest ever...shouldn't the following bear market be equally impressive?
Profit margins are the thinnest since the Great Depression. And debts are the fattest they've been in many decades...perhaps ever. In the manufacturing sector, interest expense has risen from just 23% of profits in 1997 to almost 100% today. ....
"2002 was an amazing year and 2003 promises to be even more exciting!" Geech!
At this stage of the game in the 145th week of its devastating Great Bear bust the NASDAQ is down about 73% since its bubble top, sickening by any standard. At the same week 145 the Nikkei was ‘only’ down 56% but the infamous Dow 30 of 1929 had plunged by a catastrophic 88%. The raw magnitude of these enormous losses almost defies belief. If investors haven’t done their homework and happen to get trapped in one of these supercycle busts, their capital doesn’t recover for decades after, if ever. ...
But, if you are one of the tens of millions who has already painfully rode the kamikaze NASDAQ down 73% in the past 145 weeks since its March 2000 top, you have an unenviable Herculean task ahead of you. To recover your capital, just to get back to square one, from a 73% loss requires a monumental 270% gain. 270% gains don’t just grow on trees and are extremely challenging to track down and bag. ....
A supercycle Great Bear bust has a single mission in life. It exists solely to destroy the manic euphoria rampant in general stock valuations during a bubble and maul stocks back down towards undervalued levels so the whole great cycle can begin anew like a phoenix from the ashes. While equity valuations on average run about 14x earnings over decades and centuries, they are bid up ridiculously high in a bubble when everyone lusts for stocks and they plunge to silly lows at a supercycle bear bottom when virtually everyone hates stocks with a passion.
Venture capitalists who were optimistic last year about an improving landscape in 2002 have long since recanted and are singing a much darker tune as they look ahead to the coming year. Paul Ferri of Matrix Partners sums up the current mood with his characteristic frankness: ''This is not going to be a great period for anybody in our business.'' ...
Look for some high-profile tech infrastructure crashes in 2003, Beach says.
According to its annual report released in March 2002, Verizon Communications Inc., the largest U.S. local phone company, had a strong year in 2001. In the opening pages of the report, the company announced an annual profit of $389 million.
Only those investors who dug into the small print at the back of the document learned that Verizon's reported earnings included $2.7 billion in gains from its pension fund investments -- profit that didn't really exist.
The company pension fund actually lost $3.1 billion in 2001, a footnote on page 58 of the 68-page report revealed.
In reporting gains it hadn't made, Verizon didn't violate any rules. Like other U.S. companies, Verizon was following accounting practices as written in 1985 by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets U.S. accounting standards.
The FASB rules say that in preparing income statements, companies should include estimated gains -- not actual gains or losses -- from pension fund investments. ....
As the stock market plunged during the past three years, the pension funds of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index lost more than $200 billion in value, according to studies by actuaries and several investment banks, including Credit Suisse First Boston and UBS Warburg LLC.
Because of FASB accounting rules, many of those losses weren't reported on balance sheets.
If pension liabilities had been counted in financial statements, aggregate earnings for the S&P 500 would have been 69 percent lower than the companies reported for 2001, or $68.7 billion rather than $219 billion, the CSFB study found.
"We expect a big, quick shift to cash-balance pension plans when that happens. There's enormous pent-up demand among employers who have been holding back because of a lack of clarity."
While pension advocacy groups continue to study the new regulations, many say they've already concluded that the proposals fall short of offering adequate protection to older workers.
Sunday December 29, 2002 20:21
The cutoff Saturday came because Congress failed last month to reconcile differences between a Democratic plan for a $5 billion extension of benefits and a Republican plan for a $900 million extension. Bush declined to take a position on an extension of benefits until two weeks ago, when it was announced that November's unemployment rate had reached 6 percent, the highest in more than eight years
"Even in such a time of madness as the late twenties, a great many man in Wall Street remained quite sane But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them." ...
As noted, all this might logically be expected. It may not come to pass. This is not because the instinct for self-preservation in Wall Street is poorly developed. On the contrary, it is probably normally and may be above. But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound."
Let's hope men of reason arise to the occasion.
Here are some ideas to guide you through 2003.
Do what you need to stay employable. Fight hard to make your work maximally relevant to your company and customers. Attack problems and avoid complaining.
Be prudent with your expenditures, and teach your children the same habits. Contribute, don't complain.
I just got my hands on this year's version. Here's a choice piece: "[Associate Editor Marcia] Vickers predicts that the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index will end 2003 with a percentage increase in the mid to high single digits."
She's an editor at a renowned business publication, so she must have some insight, right? Well, on a lark, I went back a few years to see what BusinessWeek said in past issues.
December 1999:
"... the 51 analysts we polled this year expect limited gains in 2000. The average prediction: an 8.3% gain, to 12,154, for the Dow; a 10% rise, to 1559, for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index; a 5.1% increase, to 3805, for the Nasdaq;"My review: The Dow closed 2000 at 10,788; the S&P 500 at 1320; the Nasdaq at 2470 -- losses of 6%, 10%, and 40%, respectively.
December 2000:
"According to BusinessWeek's survey of 40 investment strategists, 2001 will be a year of controlled growth. The average prediction: a 12% rise, to 12,015, for the Dow Jones industrial average; a 14% rise, to 1,558, for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, and a 23% jump for the Nasdaq Composite Index."My Review: The Dow closed 2001 at 10,021; the S&P 500 at 1148; the Nasdaq at 1950 -- losses of 7%, 13%, and 21%, respectively.
December 2001:
"Indeed, the seers' predictions for 2002 are downright moderate. They are, on average, looking for a 13% rise, to 11,090, for the Dow Jones industrial average; a 15% increase, to 1292, for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index; and a 14.5% jump, to 2236, for the Nasdaq Composite Index."My review: As of the close on Dec. 26, 2002, the Dow closed at 8432; the S&P 500 at 889; the Nasdaq at 1367 -- losses of 15%, 22%, and 30%, respectively.
There's no reason to take the assumptions of BusinessWeek's experts as anything but wild guesses, and not particularly good ones. I won't fault BW for being optimistic -- to a point. The long-term trend of the stock market is up, and at some point, the market will get better. It's the fact that they still have the temerity to think they can predict when this will happen that I find galling.
A lot of companies were able to generate better earnings by cutting prices to attract customers while offsetting the negative drag from lower sales prices by firing workers. How long can they pull it off? The answer is probably not much longer before their strategies come back to bite them on their bottom lines.
In a recent note to clients, Paul McCulley, managing director at the bond mutual fund company Pimco and one of the nation's most savvy Fed watchers, wrote that the central bank's new focus on deflation amounts to nothing less than a regime change.
Sunday December 22, 2002 07:09
Economists at leading investment banks believe growth in the euro area slowed to a standstill during the final three months of 2002, and will contract early next year, the Business newspaper reported. ...
"We cannot even exclude an outright recession, two or three consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth."
Saturday December 21, 2002 20:39
Alan Greenspan's speeches are economic poetry. Each word is carefully chosen.
So it was exceedingly interesting that the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board used the first section of his speech to the Economic Club of New York Thursday night to declare "the United States is nowhere close to sliding into a pernicious deflation."
That he even mentioned deflation is telling. The possibility of a generalized price decrease is beginning to concern many economists, so the Fed chairman had to talk about the subject.
But parse the words of poet Greenspan. What he said is that deflation may show up, but if it does it will not be "pernicious," that is, it will not be fatal or deadly.
Later, Greenspan reassured his audience, "If deflation were to develop, options for an aggressive monetary policy response are available." In other words, don't worry, if deflation comes, we can handle it.
Pierre Belec strikes again!
But so do we at pro se fights.
Don't hold your breath waiting for the stock market to hand you a pot of gold next year. Deflation -- an earnings-eating monster that robs companies of the chance to raise prices -- may hold a gun to corporate America's head. ...
In today's intensely competitive environment, chief executives have lost their pricing power. The pricing issue has meant earnings problems for a slew of companies. And, if profits can't grow, how can the stock market recover? ...
"There is historical precedent that the economy exhibits a lack of pricing flexibility following those once-in-a-generational changes in the economy," Engelke said, referring to the boom of the late 1990s that was followed by the bursting of the speculative bubble in 2000. ...
The economy is still not out of the woods yet, and at this stage of the game business spending will decide the direction of the economy. The problem is businesses have become much more dependent on the stock market to finance their growth. ...
So the prospect for 2003 doesn't appear to be good. Investors who have been anticipating a return of the good times, may be in for a rude awakening if their rosy outlook does not materialize. We're talking stock portfolio survival after three straight years of awesome losses.
So here we are, 160,000 unhappy Direct TV DSL customers left hanging. Other than being told we have thirty days the company has said nothing else or provided any guidance to its soon to be former customers. Considering that Direct TV is going to continue operating, at least that is what they have told us. You would think that they would have planed a less painful transition as not to sour relations with current and potential satellite TV customers. I know that if I had satellite TV with them I would have canceled it because of the shoddy way they are handling this.
I understand that companies can't keep operating money-losing operations, but I think they should have the decency of letting customers know they are going to discontinue them so they have time to find adequate replacements instead of just shutting the doors out of the blue like Direct TV has done.
High-tech manufacturing jobs have been leaving the United States for years in search of lower-cost labor abroad. Computer companies can no longer compete on price without relying on inexpensive labor offered by countries like China.
As Silicon Valley endures a protracted economic slowdown and waits for the ``next big thing'' to propel it forward, intellectual work may now be following manufacturing jobs in search of low-wage workers. ...
It's likely that Silicon Valley will continue to be an expensive place over the next several years, prompting businesses to continue to move jobs and expand overseas. Will young engineers, visionaries and entrepreneurs come here, as the last generation routinely did in the '80s and '90s? Or will they find that they can adopt the valley's essential values and culture without being physically present here? Will technology and an open global economy allow future entrepreneurs to create virtual global companies that have no particular stake in Silicon Valley?
In other words, will Silicon Valley continue to be relevant as a place?
Bill got a letter from Social Security today.
1 Your Social Security benefits will increase by 1.3% in 2003.
What If I Work? If you are "full" retirement age (age 65 in 2002) or older, you may keep all of your benefits no matter how much you earn. But if you were under age 65 all year, there is a limit to how much you can earn before your benefits are reduced.
We paid you benefits in 2002 based on the amount of money you estimated you would make. When your employer(s) reports your actual earnings for 2002 to us, we will adjust your benefits if necessary The earnings your employer reports are the amount that will be on the W-2(s) you will receive. If the earnings on your W-2(s) for 2002 include money you earned in another year, you should contact us before April 15 to let us know. We'll also ask you to estimate your earnings for 2003, so we can pay you correctly What Are The Earnings Limits In 2003?. The earnings limit for workers who are under "full" retirement age (65 and 2 months in 2003) is $11,520. The earnings limit for people turning 65 and 2 months in 2003 is $30,720. If you earn more than the earnings limit, your benefits will be reduced. |
Debt and pension funds may do bad things to corporate profits in 2003. On the other hand, some senior citizens might be in big trouble!
Lawyers may target their pension funds. But we're working on the lawyer industry problem!
Mr Greenspan, speaking to the Economic Club of New York, said growth could accelerate next year with little risk of inflation, provided global tensions ease and corporate profits improve. However, he said the US economy was still working through a soft patch.
All in all, we believe that the rally off the October low has gone about as far as it can go and is showing clear signs of petering out. In our view the next significant move will be down.
Computers, fortunately, are leading in deflation. We buy computers with our pension checks!
Chairman Greenspan went on to say "Moreover, a major objective of the recent heightened level of scrutiny is to ensure that any latent deflationary pressures are appropriately addressed well before they become a problem." This statement confirms the statements of Governor Bernanke that the Federal Reserve intends to use the tools at hand that have historically (1930 - 1934) been used to stimulate economic activity when decreasing interest rates fail to push business activity forward as is possible, if not probable, now.
Now the Chairman says, " Although the US economy has largely escaped any deflation since World War II, there are some well-founded reasons to presume that deflation is more of a threat to economic growth than is inflation." This confirms to me that the Federal Reserve and the Bush administration will move to whatever is required to whatever degree is required in order to stave off the political implications of deflation. I have said before that deflation would not be entertained. The Federal Reserve and the Bush administration will burn the barn down before accepting the political implications of deflation. I have defined the barn as the dollar. I am now more than ever convinced that I was and am correct in this assumption. The US dollar on the USDX is headed, IMO, to between .73 and .80 as I see it.
Credit cards are the most obvious weak point. Hell-bent on growth, issuers pumped up solicitations from 1 billion in 1991 to 5 billion last year. With 37% of credit card loans now subprime, defaults have doubled since 1991.
Greenspan last night did make the comment, “Cash borrowed in the process of mortgage refinancing…is bound to contract at some point.” Well, we will add that the degree of extreme Credit excess we are experiencing currently in mortgage finance is indeed bound to contract one day. Wild inflationary (speculative) Bubbles invariable do collapse. And as Greenspan stated correctly, “History indicates that bubbles tend to deflate not gradually and linearly but suddenly, unpredictably, and often violently.” One of these days there will be a dramatic shift in the financial and economic landscape. In this regard, think in terms of what Governor Davis faces now that inflated state receipts have collapsed along with the tech Bubble. That the economy and financial system are today struggling in the face of unprecedented mortgage Bubble excess and extreme Credit market speculation does not bode well for the day when the Next Shoe Drops.
Friday December 20, 2002 07:14
What we were's going to see soon is a single chip [an 80C32!!!] on a board surrounded by some capacitors with a USB connector and a second connector going to custom hardware.
Most of the work will be done in software. But in PC not in the 80C32.
The peripheral microcontroller companies have not solved their software problem. And didn't anticipate the damage that USB 2.0 will do to them.
USB 2.0, super fast USB 2.0 80C32s, other mixed signal 80C32s, Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, and Microsoft office is simply going to drive most peripheral microcontroller companies out of business - likely in 2003.
Internet is helping to bring to investors attention the high tech peripheral microcontroller scam.
So it is probable that investors will not invest in harebrained peripheral microcontroller companies thus speeding their demise.
Prior to Internet, trade magazine controlled technical opinion and advice. And could promote bad advice and technology for business reasons. Advertising.
No longer!
“…Speculative manias typically commence with a displacement which excites speculative interest. The displacement may come either from an entirely new object of investment or from an increased profitability of established investments. It is followed by positive feedback as rising share prices induce inexperienced investors to enter the stock market, and results in euphoria—a sign that investors’ rationality is weakened. During the course of the manias, speculation becomes more diffuse and spreads to different classes of assets. New companies are floated to take advantage of the euphoria, investors leverage their gains using either financial derivatives or stock loans, credit becomes overextended, scandal and fraud proliferate, and the economy enters a period of financial distress which is the prelude to the onset of a crisis…although no two speculative manias are identical they develop along similar lines…It is often said that speculation never changes because human nature remains the same…the early stock markets were moved by hopes and fears as much as their later counterparts. These emotions are released during moments of speculative euphoria. They follow the path of least resistance, molding each mania, regardless of its historical context into common form. This explains why all great speculative events seem top repeat themselves…”
- Digitize at the sensor
- Gigahertz PCs
- Microsoft's Visual Basic 6.0 integrated into Microsoft Office, Visual C/C++ with exquisite in-line assembler
- USB 2.0
- Super fast 80C32 USB 2.0 SOCs running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems, of course!
- Internet software distribution and maintenance.
- Interactive hardware and software problem diagnosis over Internet with Netmeeting ... using BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems, of course! on the peripheral end.
to avoid being shaken out.
“Many who, for a brief season, had emerged from the humbler walks of life, were cast back to their original obscurity. Substantial merchants were reduced almost to beggary, and many a representative of a noble line saw the fortunes of his house ruined beyond redemption.” - Charles Mackay
And get some neat products ready for 2004.
"We don't see the economic environment for material earnings growth having developed yet," said the portfolio manager and chief investment officer of the Signature Funds at Toronto-based C.I. Fund Management Inc. "As we get closer to 2003, we have had further negative . . . GDP growth revisions and further layoffs and this generally supports our view that we are not going to see the earnings recovery that is widely anticipated."
With an estimated $10-billion in net outflows through November, stock funds are poised to suffer the first negative flow year since 1988, when skittish investors cashed out following the October '87 crash, fund tracker Lipper said Thursday.
Lipper estimates investors pumped $10 billion into stock funds in November, snapping a five-month streak of outflows. And it's not likely December will reverse the decline.
"December is typically slow seasonally for fund buying, and stocks have declined a bit since Dec. 2," Lipper senior analyst Donald Cassidy said. "It seems unlikely the net inflow this month can make up ... the year-to-date shortfall."
The key factor to remember in assessing the economic and stock market outlook is that this is not a typical post-war bear market, but the unwinding of the mania that occurred in the late 1990s. The bursting bubble has left the economy with a number of structural imbalances that can be corrected only with further severe damage to the market, which remains excessively overvalued. The repeated occurrence of manias and their consequences is well recognized in economic history, and a number of economists have studied them in great depth. In his book, “Manias, Panics and Crashes”, Charles P. Kindleberger, discusses the Fisher-Minsky model, which “attached great importance to the role of debt structures in causing financial difficulties, and especially debt contracted to leverage the acquisition of speculative assets subject to resale”. Edward Chancellor, in his book, “The Devil Take the Hindmost”, summarizes the Minsky model as follows.
With war looming perhaps just a few weeks away ... soaring oil prices (over $30 a barrel and headed higher) ... and the soaring mountain of personal debt -- at a record $1.8 TRILLION now -- you can easily see the U.S. economy is in a heap of trouble.
"The Great Crash: 1929" by John Kenneth Galbraith is simply fantastic.
In a speech to the Economic Club of New York, Mr. Greenspan repeated past assertions that the United States was "nowhere near" falling into deflation. But he dwelt on the subject at considerable length in a somber speech that made it clear he is worried about the possibility. ...
Thursday December 19, 2002 11:54
The "semiconductor recovery" has to be one of the most enduring myths on Wall Street. About once a year, the myth emerges from hibernation, mauls a few investors and then returns to its den until the following year.
Back in the early fall, many Wall Street analysts predicted a recovery in the semiconductor sector. But, as usual, no recovery has materialized. Quite the contrary, as Apogee Research recently observed: "Novellus Systems Inc. (NVLS) is hearing increasingly glum news from the semiconductor industry, but you'd hardly know it from watching NVLS shares trade. Last week, the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials trade group (SEMI) said that total equipment sales this year will plummet 32.4% below last year's level of $28 billion.
The group forecasts a 'recovery' in demand during 2003, but the so-called recovery is for industry sales of $21.8 billion, which would still be 22% below the 2001 level. In fact, expectations for $26.4 billion of sales in 2004 and $27.5 billion in 2005 still wouldn't match the 2001 level. Yet NVLS trades at over five times trailing 12-month sales and at 3.3 times its peak fiscal-year 2001 sales. How can that be, we wonder, when the industry is not expected to revisit such levels for at least three more years?
The money did not evaporate. The money was stolen using high tech as the bait.
Rarely has one small company touched so many and left such a wake of ashes.
Two more once-promising Arizona companies have dot.bombed.
DevelopOnline Corp., the first Arizona spin-off from Intel Corp., sold its technology last month to a Massachusetts competitor and closed down. And Opnix, a start-up that raised $8 million, is soliciting offers for its software that speeds Internet traffic.
Both companies were founded in mid-2000 when the fervor for new Internet technologies was high.
India will introduce in two months a super computer capable of 1 trillion calculations a second at about half the price of such machines made by companies in the U.S. and Japan.
The super computer, Param Padma, has been developed at a cost of about 500 million rupees ($10 million), R.K. Arora, executive director, Center for Development of Advanced Computing, said in an interview. It plans to sell the new computer at about $5 million each.
``We are clearly cost-competitive, and we can sell these machines at the half the price of a similar machine available in the market,'' Arora said.
India's engineers are turning their lower salaries into a cost advantage in areas such as computing and aerospace. Indian software companies are winning business from customers such as General Motors Corp. because of their lower costs as code writers are paid less than their counterparts overseas.
And for those who think this is simply an extremely pessimistic and baseless viewpoint, consider this sobering thought offered to me this past week by my friend Dr. John Whitney. Wall Street may be happy enough to see companies it bankrolls move to a low cost environment like China, but from where will a lasting recovery come from when core manufacturing jobs – jobs which actually produce wealth for a nation – no longer exist in America? Wall Street has loved the strong dollar because it was a major factor in pumping up the bubble. But now we face the destructive aftermath. With aggregate demand plummeting, it is my contention that the forces of deflation will overwhelm the forces of inflation. Thus I remain a deflationist.
Conseco's bankruptcy filing on Tuesday reinforces what we've been telling you for quite some time now: The Bankruptcy Avalanche is underway. Enron, Kmart, Global Crossing, Adelphia, WorldCom, US Airways, United Airlines, and hundreds of other public companies have filed for bankruptcy in the past two years, according to BankruptcyData.com. In fact, 11 of the 20 largest bankruptcies of U.S. companies occurred during the last two years -- that's $395.9 BILLION in assets affected, based on court documents and corporate filings.
But the Bankruptcy Avalanche isn't over yet. We expect several more major companies -- and hundreds more small companies that you may not have even heard of -- to declare bankruptcy in 2003. We are currently monitoring these companies closely because it's only a matter of time before many of them go belly up. When they do, their shareholders will be the big losers. Plus, it will only add to investor concerns about the health of the economy and the safety of their own holdings. And when investors are uncertain, they invariably sell everything they can. The stock market sell-off we've been telling you about is already underway. Still, there's much further to go before we hit bottom.
Wednesday December 18, 2002 21:19
The stock market is headed for a serious wreck and only those with the knowledge to see the light for what it is will get off the track before it’s too late. Let’s look at several issues we are facing. Wall Streeters (including brokers, money managers, analysts and commentators), will never mention these facts to you the investor. Many don’t know themselves, because the spin-doctors feed them what they want them to know and then, most won’t read additional information to educate the customer.
First, S&P announced on October 24, 2002 their study of earnings for the S&P 500 for the year ending June 2002. S&P calculated the reported earnings, instead of the operating earnings we are given. Instead of the operating earnings of $44.93 per share that Thompson First Call reported, the reported earnings were $26.74 a share. That is until the new accounting standards, which include the expense of options and pension liabilities. These new standards will be enacted next year by the accounting industry. Subtracting the option and pension liability expenses reduces the reported earnings to $18.48 a share. This is a Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio of 48.6 based on a close of 897.65 on the S&P 500. This is real important. I repeat this is real important. The 50-year average P/E ratio is 15.9. No bull market has ever started from such high valuation levels. Also, the market is trending back towards the mean. Imagine the drop in the market valuation that will occur to get to 15.9. That is a 67% drop in the market from where we are now. Imagine that train wreck! ...
Let’s look at pension liabilities. There are over 350 companies in the S&P 500 with defined benefit pension plans. (If you don’t have a 401K, but have a pension plan, it is a defined benefit plan.) These companies have guaranteed their retired employees a defined income during their retirement years (hopefully).
Goldman, Sachs & Co. estimates that contributions are grossly under funded. They estimate that companies need to add $80 billion to these funds this year. Credit Suisse First Boston estimates the under funding to be $243 billion this year. Morgan Stanley estimates it at $300 billion. Whichever, estimate you use, the numbers are staggering. Federal regulations require corporate pension plans to be at least 90% funded. If a plan meets this requirement, the additional payments can be spread over a 30-year period. But if the funding drops below 90% of what the actuaries say is needed, companies may be required to make the additional payments within three to five years. These additional payments will be expenses against income in that year. How will earnings grow enough to absorb this expense and still net a 6%-12% increase? So why hasn’t the Securities and Exchange Commission required
Last year, companies reported a gain of $104 billion from their pension funds, when the funds actually lost $90 billion. Makes you wonder how do they turn a lost into a gain. The secret is a company will hire a pension fund consultant to estimate its earnings in the future years, and if the estimated earnings are more than the estimated pension liabilities in the future, that positive difference is added as earnings. If you want more earnings, you get a higher estimate. Do you see the train coming?
Senior citizens become very concerned with the economy. Pension checks might stop coming. Or inflation might set in.
There are definitely reasons to worry!
The scent of deflation continues to waft through the economy along with still-meek signs of recovery. ...
The nation's manufacturing is using just 75.6 percent of its capacity, about 6 percentage points below its average for the past three decades, said economist Andy Kish of Economy.com. ...
While the economy overall seems nowhere near deflation --- a broad decrease in prices --- the measure of core goods prices has slid for 11 consecutive months. And results have been mixed, according to Mark Vitner, senior economist for Wachovia Securities. ...
"For many goods producers, the current economic environment is already devastating profit margins," he said. "Businesses have not been able to pass on their higher costs to consumers for nearly three years now."
And because the service side of the economy is not deflating, businesses must also find ways to swallow --- or avoid --- added costs of health care and insurance, Vitner said.
See what happens with good products which cost a reasonable amount.
On Tuesday rival Toyota Motor also predicted it would have a record year in 2003, with a 5% rise to 6.5 million vehicles.
Then there are the other cases.
Looking for a robust global economic recovery? You may need to look past 2003 - and think 2004.
After a year in which U.S. corporate scandals, talk of a war in Iraq and a global plunge in stock prices torpedoed hopes for a strong rebound from recession, pundits are pessimistic about the coming year.
The global economy will speed up only slightly from the current becalmed levels. Growth rates may not return to the average levels of the last half-century until at least 2004.
"Economists are always predicting a recovery. We are condemned to expect a recovery," said Eric Chaney, an economist at Morgan Stanley in London. "But the coming year could still be difficult."
A recovery of any sort, of course, would be better than the alternative: a renewed slump into recession that would heighten fears of deflation. That condition - a sustained drop in prices that depresses business and consumer activity alike - is something Japan has lived with for more than a decade. Economists speak about the possibility of it spreading in guarded tones, for fear of turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Though global deflation still seems to be an unlikely, worst-case scenario, economic growth remains persistently sluggish in all of the world's biggest economies.
The Dollar's bear market is probably going to extend for many years, but as is always the case during any long-term trend there will, from time to time, be substantial counter-trend moves. In other words, if we are right that the US$ has embarked on a long-term bear market there will still be periods, possibly quite lengthy periods (6-12 months or longer), during which the Dollar will trend higher and those investments that benefit from a weaker Dollar will trend lower.
Here's what O'Neill wrote on the Treasury Department Web site: "Accrual based financial reporting is critical to gaining a comprehensive understanding of the U.S. Government's operations. For fiscal 2001, our results were an accrual-based deficit of $515 billion in contrast to a $127 billion surplus reported last Fall."
Let me put it more simply. If the government kept its books the same way companies are supposed to account for profits and losses, the U.S. would be in the hole last year for more than half a trillion dollars.
I'll say it again. That's a one-year deficit of more than half a trillion dollars.
Tuesday December 17, 2002 19:44
Guys, we have to keep system software costs low. And have some fun too using the ideas of others!
NIH is a disaster!
Conseco Inc. may file for bankruptcy protection as early as tonight to stem mounting losses and restructure more than $6 billion of debt incurred while the insurance and finance holding company acquired smaller rivals, people familiar with the matter said.
Tokyo's Nikkei hits one-month low on Micron's loss
Brokerage houses including Nikko Cordial Corp (Tokyo:8603.T - News) were also hit by selling as the benchmark Nikkei average (^N225 - News), down 1.63 percent or 139.01 points at a one-month low of 8,371.72, was poised to finish lower after having just snapped a nine-day skid.
Micron knocked U.S. tech stocks back in after-hours trade. Traders are betting the Nasdaq will take a tumble later today," said Ken Masuda, senior dealer at Shinko Securities.
Guys, others are saying this too.
But as important for USB 2.0 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth, hardware and software maintenance is possible over Internet using Netmeeting!
'Wage Collapse', reads a headline in Newsday.com. The articles details the stories of three people in the New York area, who've joined the growing ranks educated workers, formerly employed in well-heeled positions, "filling salt shakers, selling sweaters or cell phones, making telemarketing calls, imputing medical billing information - even passing out fliers on street corners."
"People who have jobs had better be glad they have jobs," says Charlene Ruiz, a former consultant with US Trust Co. now working for $7.25 as a cashier in Manhattan cafe. "If I continue to work at this wage," says Ruiz, "I'll never get out of debt." She owes, says the article, $20,000 to credit card companies...and another $4,000 to the IRS. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that country the number of people working part-time jobs who would ordinarily be in high-paying salary positions has lept up to 18.3% of all part-time workers - or...4.2 million Americans.
"This is just fall out from the boom," says our own Dan Denning, editor of Strategic Investment. It’s the beginning of the ‘long bust,’ where some Americans will see their standards of living fall, their incomes stagnate, and their prospects for anything like retirement dwindle. The labor market is telling us something: America is just beginning to pay for it’s over-consumptive sins. Americans might not like it. And who knows what they might do about it...
Patty's father was born in 1912 and, too, has some wild stories of the Great Depression.
He was in the CCC fighting forest fires in Idaho.He told bill last March if a depression were to occur today he thinks there would be major riots!
Kay said the danger is that PC prices always drop. ``If people know there is cheaper stuff coming, they might just wait,'' he said.
"...resources have been misallocated because of the cheapness of credit in both stock and credit markets. So, you're not going to solve the problem by making money cheaper again." - Al Friedberg, March 23, 2001
The net loss increased to $315.9 million, or 52 cents a share, in the quarter ended Nov. 28, from $265.9 million, or 44 cents, a year earlier, the company said in a statement. Sales rose 62 percent to $685.1 million from $423.9 million. Last quarter's loss was the company's eighth in a row.
Micron's selling price last quarter fell an average of 12 percent from the fourth period, mainly because of sagging prices for dynamic random-access memory chips, the company said. Competition from rivals such as Samsung Electronics Co. and slowing growth in sales of PCs using DRAM are creating a glut for the chip, an analyst said.
The spot price for a benchmark 256-megabit double data rate memory chip was $8.30 in March, fell to $4.78 in June and is now about $6.45. Micron bases sales on the average price per megabit, or million bits of capacity in a chip.
Tracking the high tech economic meltdown, while reading Axelson and Hyde USB books, is nearly as interesting as litigation!
The ability of companies to make too much has grown into a problem with potentially profound and unpredictable effects on the world economy. The glut of world production is challenging old assumptions about trade relationships and raising questions about whether the United States can continue to be the economic powerhouse it has been for generations while so much of its manufacturing capacity, especially high-tech production, is increasingly shifted overseas.
I know there are millions of others in my leaky boat: Last year alone, the average 401(k) account balance slumped from almost $41,000 to $36,390, according to one research firm. Wilshire Associates, an investment advisory firm based in New York, says stocks have lost about $8 trillion in value since peaking in March 2000 -- an amount equal to the annual economic output of Japan, Germany and Canada combined.
We have to try to keep those 80C32 SOC systems software costs down.
Credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's said on Tuesday that the dollar amount of debt defaulting will vault to a record $157.3 billion this year. But the agency said default rates are declining globally after peeking this summer. Telecoms and European companies have been hit hardest during 2002, but prospects look better for 2003 as default rates are expected to decline gradually throughout next year. "The U.S. and EU switched places this year compared with 2001. During 2001, 6.92 percent of speculatively (or "junk") rated companies defaulted in the EU compared with 9.72 percent in the U.S.," said Brooks Brady, Associate Director for Standard & Poor's Risk Solutions
Robert Half Technology's 2003 Salary Guide (www.roberthalftechnology.com) predicts that information technology salaries will decline 1.3 percent on average in 2003.
Next year's U.S. gross domestic product growth in this so-far jobless recovery will be roughly the same as this year's 2.5%. But deflation tops the list of his concerns -- "If you don't see deflation risks, my advice is to go see an optometrist."
That's not his only worry. The strong housing market that has propped up the U.S. consumer's spending is showing signs of fatigue and the U.S. dollar, which has stayed relatively strong, could come under greater pressure that would be felt in stock and bond markets.
But not now. Schembry, 58, joined hundreds of other Lucent workers this year in taking a buyout at the company, one of many telecommunications companies to face a sudden slowdown after extensive overbuilding in the industry in the 1990s
The future looks daunting. Her husband, 61, is disabled. The $58,000 buyout package won't go far without a job. Her 401(k), once valued at $30,000, has dwindled to $3,000 because of a plunging stock market.
"At my age, where am I going to find a job?" she asked.
Workers age 50 and over are putting early retirement plans on hold because of the losses they've suffered on Wall Street, according to a new poll by AARP, the lobbyist organization for retired persons
Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed said they had lost money in the stock market since 2000. While 54 percent said they had losses of less than 25 percent of the money in their accounts, 9 percent said their investments had fallen by more than 50 percent.
The survey of 1,013 households with individual retirement accounts, 401(k), pension and stock investments also found that 77 percent had lost money in the stock market over the past two years. Thirty-four percent said they would take fewer vacations and 30 percent had postponed a major purchase in the past year. The survey, released today, also found that one-third of those who retired before 2000 had returned to full or part-time jobs to compensate for their stock losses. Among workers 50 to 70 years old who said they lost money in the stock market in the last two years, about one in five said they had postponed retirement because of the losses, according to a survey released today.
Monday December 16, 2002 20:17
We have a good practical problem to solve in 2003.
USB 2.0 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth connected to Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office apps!
And lots of fun too! A positive contribution to computing.
Jon Johansen, known in Norway as "DVD Jon," is charged with having unlocked a code and distributed a computer program enabling unauthorized copying of DVD movies, angering Hollywood studios who fear mass piracy and loss of vast revenues.
The crypto problem was solved in 1917. But that didn't stop the retards.
The one-time pad is a series of random numers/letters that can be used once to encode a message. It was first described by Mauborne and Vernam in 1917. Each new message requires a new pad, otherwise it will be possible to break the code. Also, each one-time pad must be truly random series of digits/letters (a computer generated random series is only pseudo random and can be decrypted eventually). Given now a one time pad (where, say, the symbols are digits 0-9) and an encoded message (also using symbols 0-9), a simple table that links every message symbol and one-time pad symbol to a cypthertext symbol can be used to encrypt the message (this table is a more sophisticated alternative to the binary XOR operation that is normally used for bit-stream data and one-time pads):
Swiss banks which accept electronic payment orders use a similar mechanism to verify the identity of the issuer of an order. When a client authorises the bank to accept electronic orders, the bank delivers, by registered mail, a list of individual session passwords (usually numbers of 4 to 6 digits). The customer agrees to keep the list of passwords physically secure, and to not hold the bank liable if the customer allows the list to fall into unauthorised hands. Each time an order is given, in addition to the regular user identity and password, the next key from the list must be entered, and then crossed off by the user. The bank verifies the key against a copy of the list stored in their own secure computer, and only if the key matches is the order accepted. Multiple incorrect entries block electronic access to the customer's account until re-enabled by the customer providing suitable verification that an unauthorised access attempt did not, in fact, occur.
Patty in the Hauptbahnhof in Zurich.
Bill gave a talk in Zurich on the dangers of high tech espionage. Like getting caught! 1 2
ATLAST (Autodesk Threaded Language Application System Toolkit) is a (very) FORTH-like language kernel designed to be embedded into applications, rendering them extensible to a degree far beyond normal macro languages. Indeed, using ATLAST, it is often possible, in the spirit of FORTH, to "factor out" much of the control structure from an application, reducing it to a set of data-driven services whose interaction can be modified by the user with ATLAST. ATLAST is written entirely in portable C, and has been tested on MS-DOS, Windows, a variety of Unix machines, and the Macintosh. Complete documentation is included in PostScript, Microsoft Word (PC/Mac RTF format), and LaTeX source code form. ATLAST has been placed in the public domain and may be used without restriction or compensation.
Postcript is a variation of Forth.
Think USB 2.0 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth connected to Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office apps!
There appears to be shake-out of unparalleled proportions underway in high tech in 2003.
USB 2.0 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth connected to Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office apps!
As if a lousy business climate wasn't bad enough, semiconductor makers have more to worry about.
"The simple fact is that we won't be needing so many chip vendors in the future," Dataquest analyst Jim Tully said last week. "Many firms that are now fabless chip houses should seriously consider becoming IP [intellectual-property] vendors instead."
As for that next "killer app" for which the industry is holding its breath, Tully says forget about it.
"We are always asking, 'What will be the next killer application?' "he said. "The truth is there will be no more killer apps. There will just be a growing network of hardware resources onto which increasingly compelling software applications can be loaded."
We have to watch the system software bucks.
Atlanta gained possibly more high-tech jobs than any other city in the nation.
Across the South, the economic landscape has turned upside down. Atlanta, where all arrows once pointed up, is hurting most: 61,800 jobs were lost in the 12 months that ended in October — more than in any other city in the country, according to the federal Department of Labor. And the job losses are continuing.
Even North Carolina's powerhouse area, Raleigh-Durham, which is normally all but immune to hard times thanks to a largely tenured work force of university and state government employees, has seen its unemployment rate double this year. In Hickory, N.C., and the surrounding area, entire fiber-optic cable factories have been mothballed in recent weeks, and 3,200 jobs have been cut since spring 2001.
But plummeting corporate profits — one of the hallmarks of the national slowdown — resulted in an average shortfall of 14 percent in corporate income tax collections, the study found.
Still, the most poignant illustrations of the downturn are the roughly 20,000 highly skilled but suddenly unemployed workers who were laid off from telecom and technology companies with headquarters or major operations in Atlanta. The companies include Cingular Wireless, WorldCom and Internet Security Systems, and even national consulting concerns like Accenture.
EEPROMs and Flash may get serious competition this year.
ferroelectric memory was chosen over EEPROM because it can offer high-speed rewriting.
Get rid of the old ideas and adopt the new good ones, of course.
USB 2.0 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth connected to Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office apps!
After spending some $80 billion since 1996 to upgrade its systems, the U.S. cable television industry is just about finished with an overhaul designed to offer high-speed, digital broadband services to nearly every U.S. customer. The good news is that a range of new offerings — from video-on-demand to telephone service — will now become more widely available. The bad news is that basic cable television rates have been rising much faster than prices for other consumer goods and services — and they’re going up again next year....
Meanwhile, despite the heavy investment, new subscriber growth has stalled — largely due to an onslaught by the direct broadcast satellite industry. Some 76.5 million U.S. households now get basic cable service, compared to some 19.7 million satellite subscribers. But the satellite universe is expected to grow to 21.8 million subscribers next year, according to Kagan World Media, while the cable industry is forecasting little or no growth. Some cable companies, including AT&T Broadband (which was recently bought by Comcast) and Charter Communications, have even seen their subscriber bases shrink.
Is cable going to become an obsolete technology?
At a time when Americans are living longer, more than half the paid workers ages 25 to 64 don't own retirement savings accounts of any kind. About a third work for employers who don't offer retirement benefits, a recent study shows. ...
"Our savings rates here are a disaster, and the study continues to beat home the crisis in savings overall," said Derrick Max, executive director of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, which represents business groups and favors overhauling Social Security to add personal retirement accounts. ...
Max said the report bolsters support for Social Security private accounts, which President Bush supports but Democrats oppose. Social Security is projected to start paying out more in benefits than it takes in from payroll taxes by 2016 because the large baby boom generation begins retiring. The workforce size will be smaller, and demand for benefits will grow.
A Web Of Fallacies About Consumption And Investment
"...A central bank should have no concern with the level of stock valuations, but it ought to have an indirect concern when rising stock values disturb the equilibrium between investment and saving. In the U.S. case, the decline of saving after 1997 was so dramatic and so spectacular that it ought to have alerted Mr. Greenspan and American policymakers in general. And net investment is close to historical lows..."
What the U.S. economy truly experienced in the past few years was the wildest and most reckless consumption boom ever in history, associated with collapsing saving and an extremely low level of net investment. But we think that low net investment is only part of the problem. Another part is a grossly unbalanced investment structure. Protracted, gross underinvestment in manufacturing has contrasted with protracted, heavy overinvestment in the new information technology, retail trade and finance. ...
The truth, rather, is that post-bubble adjustment has not even started.
Sunday December 15, 2002 21:23
Imports from Hynix Semiconductor Inc. and other South Korean chipmakers threaten to hurt Micron Technology Inc, the US International Trade Commission said in a ruling that may lead to import tariffs.
Micron, the world's second-largest maker of computer memory chips and the last one based in the US, complained that its Korean rivals were illegally subsidized by the Korean government.
A final ruling isn't due until the middle of next year. "[Saturday's] decision sends a strong message that the US will not tolerate unfair trade practices," said Sean Mahoney, a spokesman for the Boise, Idaho, company.
2The Nikkei <.N225> was down 0.81 percent or 69.27 points at 8,446.80, poised to post a nine-day losing streak for the first time since 1991.
The broader TOPIX index <.TOPX> of all first section issues fell 0.90 percent to 828.27.
In this new role, Mr. Desmond, 44-years old, will oversee the transfer of much of Time Inc.'s magazine Web content to America Online, part of a broader revamp of the online service announced earlier this month. Mr. Desmond previously was president of Business 2.0, a Time Inc. business and technology magazine. An announcement is expected as early as today.
Google may help all of us in this legal fight!
Pro se fights is number 3
Results 1 - 10 of about 4,860. Search took 0.34 seconds.
< Pro Se Fights ... Antonin Scalia Associate Justice United States Supreme Court One First Street, NE ... state lawsuit and that my rights to resprent myself pro se have violated ... www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/8327/ - 101k - Cached - Similar pages
Preserving our rights guaranteed under the constitution for right by trial by jury, especially for two prima facie cases, and to represent ourselves pro se against crooked incompetent lawyers is perhaps one of the most important fights of our lives.
But you may have guessed this. 2
Dee Vance Benson may be an honest judge? We'll see.
And maybe even Scalia too?
Dig this
What we are doing with gigahertz PCs, super fast 80C32 SOCs, and USB 2.0, Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office, ... hopefully 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth is much more important than
5 T. G. Lewis , W. H. Payne, Generalized Feedback Shift Register Pseudorandom Number Algorithm, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.20 n.3, p.456-468, July 1973
And what happened here and its resolution is more imporant than about anything.
Get this settled!
Atmel builds an 80C52. So we looked at the financials. Geech!
We are into a technology shift.
gigahertz PCs, super fast 80C32 SOCs, and USB 2.0.
Most important, software! Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office, ... and hopefully 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth!
Hey, the peripheral microcontroller vendors know they don't have the software. Smell a hardware vendor scam? The pension funds again!
And, of course, Keil is handingly the software problem, they will say. TI, Cygnal, Cypress, ....
Those who get to market with 80C32 USB 2.0 SOCS, like TI, will do just fine when we come out of this high tech mess - maybe in 2004.
Then there are the others. Old high tech goes goodbye quick. Into the ewaste heap.
Keep in mind when USB connects to a perihperal 80C32 SOC, then RAM is The Way, not eeprom, flash, OTP ROM ....
Cypress saw this! No ROM with their design!
"Today's economy was probably experiencing a once-in-a-century acceleration in innovation, but people may well conclude that a good deal of what we are currently experiencing was just one of the many euphoric speculative bubbles that have dotted human history." - Alan Greenspan, January 2000
As a result of the re-ranking, the companies' stocks to be removed are Abgenix Inc. (NasdaqNM:ABGX - News) , Andrx Group (NasdaqNM:ADRX - News) , Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (NasdaqNM:AMCC - News) , Atmel Corp. (NasdaqNM:ATML - News) , Charter Communications Inc. (NasdaqNM:CHTR - News) , Conexant Corp. (CNXT), Cytyc Corp. (NasdaqNM:CYTC - News) , Integrated Device Technology Inc. (NasdaqNM:IDTI - News) , ImClone Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:IMCL - News) , i2 Technologies Inc. (ITWO), Protein Design Labs Inc. (NasdaqNM:PDLI - News) , PMC-Sierra Inc. (NasdaqNM:PMCS - News) , Rational Software Corp. (NasdaqNM:RATL - News) , Sepracor Inc. (NasdaqNM:SEPR - News) and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (NasdaqNM:VTSS - News) .
Bill has been defamed too. Fortunately in writing! This is libel!
The libel broke both federal and New Mexico state criminal laws in writing!
The decision was another timely reminder that cyberspace gave no special immunity when it came to defamation.
Collecting for a prima facie case of libel is a bit more complicated in practice than in theory.
But this involves lawyers who make money, our taxpayer dollars, attempting to protect the crooks.
Pension fund money will, of course, be used to pay lawyers to protect the crooks who stole it!
The real world again.
It's a sign of bearish times: As the Nasdaq Stock Market did its annual reshuffling of the Nasdaq-100 Index Friday, analysts expected more than a dozen technology issues to be booted in favor of safer consumer and industrial companies. ...
"Literally, in the index, the weight of technology has declined," said Nicholas Gulden, an analyst with Salomon Smith Barney.
The Nasdaq-100 closed Wednesday at 1,039.95, down more than 75 percent from its 2000 high, largely due to the protracted slide in tech. ...
Gulden predicted chipmakers PMC-Sierra Inc. and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. would be removed from the Nasdaq-100. He also expected troubled biotech ImClone Systems Inc. to be deleted.
2003 may prove to be a very interesting year, unfortunately.
COULD THIS DECADE BE THE NEXT 1930S?
A REVIEW OF WORLD STOCK MARKETS IN THE 1920S
But are looking good!
"The length and severity of depressions depend partly on the magnitude of the 'real' maladjustments, which developed during the preceding boom and partly on the aggravating monetary and credit conditions." - Gottfried Haberler, Prosperity and Depression, 1937 1
The credit bubble and pension fund woes may do bad things in 2003. Along with China and those neat Harbor Freight sales too!
So we must be conservative and not blow our money on expensive antiquated 80C32 development systems! Which aren't fun either!
Bill's father bought stock during the depression. He had some money. The army was paying him. By 1957 he was doing well in retirement. But not before that!
Bill's father in law said the economy really didn't get good until the 1960s.
Bill is scanning Axelson's second edition book. It is outstanding!
Saturday December 14, 2002 18:06
Here's some more economic BS.
Companies will, or should - which is not certain, send checks to their pensioners.
Investing in more speculative ventures should not,
but may be, in the future.
Beijing, Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) -- China sold a record $106 billion of government bonds this year to pay for roads, dams and other projects that fueled the fastest growth of any major economy.
Bond sales to domestic investors such as banks, insurers and individuals by the Finance Ministry and the state-owned China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank of China rose 16 percent to 877.4 billion yuan from 758.8 billion yuan last year.
China is boosting spending on railroads, airports and other projects, helping the economy to grow 7.9 percent in the first three quarters of this year from a year earlier. The government needs growth of more than 7 percent to absorb 8 million new urban job-seekers each year. With debt levels a fraction of those in Japan and the U.S., China can afford to borrow, analysts said.
Dig the underline.
Some are going to eat the Big Budungee Bird this year, aka bankruptcy.
Those who have too much debt. And didn't limit their software costs!
And, of couse, we're not going to have to spend too much bucks on 80C32 system software if all works out as planned.
Then there is the fun too. Over Internet!
Who is funding most of the Chinese student education in America?
Their parents.
Their parents will give up about everything to make sure their children do better than they do.
Mr Lam is a bill ms student. And hopefully doing well!
WASHINGTON -- In naming Stephen Friedman to a key post Thursday, President Bush finished a clean sweep of his bumbling economic team. The question now is: Will it matter?
The early signals are unpromising, and that's bad for the administration, the economy and the country.
Conservative activists gloat that they exacted a pound of flesh for Friedman's appointment, as well as for Bush's choice of rail executive John W. Snow to replace Paul H. O'Neill as Treasury secretary.
They say such administration heavies as political advisor Karl Rove were forced to assure them that both men, but especially Friedman, will put aside past worries about budget deficits and fiscal probity in favor of the White House's tax-cutting, "pro-growth, pro-jobs" agenda.
"They told us [Friedman] will be a solid salesman for supply-side policies," said Stephen Moore, who heads the conservative political action committee Club for Growth and spearheaded an anti-Friedman drive.
Bill's father was born in 1888.
He had some very interesting stories of the Great Depression. About bank failures in North Dakota.
He was in the Army during the depression supervising CCC workers.
Patty's father was born in 1912 and, too, has some wild stories of the Great Depression. He was in the CCC fightin g forest fires in Idaho.
He told bill last March if a depression were to occur today he thinks there would be major riots!
Patty's father, is going to be 90 on December, lives in Florida, of course,
He is buying a laptop!
There are old people, then there are the really old people in Florida. Bill feels like a teeny bopper when he visits Florida!
Then, ensuring that I wouldn’t get invited to any Wall Street Christmas parties in 2001, I wrote a controversial essay published May 11th, 2001 called “Equity Bulls in Denial” with the audacity to brazenly claim that “the bear market in the US is just beginning, NOT ending as most bulls and bullish-bears assert today. This current NASDAQ, DJIA, and S&P action looks and smells like a bear market rally, as there is no fundamental foundation for the spectacular gains since early April.”
U.S. corporations have been struggling against a slumping economy and the bear market for about three years. But NOW, they're about to face an even tougher opponent -- deflation. In November, producer prices plunged 0.4% overall, and 0.3% if you exclude food and energy. Specifically, the wholesale prices of items such as cars, sporting goods, and computers fell sharply. And falling prices destroy pricing pressure -- businesses aren't able to raise the price of goods -- which then annihilates profit margins.
US satellite TV operator Hughes Electronics is to shut down its high-speed internet service. The loss-making internet service, DirecTV Broadband, has 160,000 subscribers and is linked to the DirecTV satellite broadcaster.
Friday December 13, 2002 21:35
China's economy has the highest rate of growth of productivity in tradables of any economy in the world today. At a constant remnimbi-dollar exchange rate, Chinese competitiveness has also improved by leaps and bounds. That means that the swing that we are now witnessing in Asian trade balances toward greater and greater surpluses will largely come at the expense of U.S. trade. For all of the current discussion about deflation, and China's alleged role in exporting it, a longer-term perspective would see such deflationary pressures as a direct consequence of an ill-conceived effort to sustain a dollar exchange rate well above what long-term fundamentals would have otherwise justified. In perversely pursuing this strong dollar policy since the days of Robert Rubin's tenure as Treasury Secretary, the U.S. has unwittingly catalyzed its own economic demise and hastened the rise of Asia's ascendancy, notably China. ...
Above all, China has proved resistant to Western ways. Its relatively closed borders to volatile Western leveraged capital (notwithstanding the pleas of Wall Street) enabled it to emerge from the regional crisis of 1997/98 relatively unscathed. As the recent data suggests, it is now well prepared for growth on its own terms (which is why one should not expect imminent capital account liberalization and a corresponding revaluation of the currency). It will be the economic leader in the global recovery. Asian development strategies will continue to deepen further as China's regional economic dominance expands. China is not the source of the world's current problems; it is not, as is commonly argued, "exporting deflation." Rather, it has been the persistent refusal of the American government to conduct economic policy with an eye toward preventing a loss of U.S. competitiveness, and a corresponding rise in huge external imbalances, that has caused the relative shift in economic fortunes in regard to America and Asia. The source of potential U.S. deflation, and today's quandary for American monetary and financial officials, is very much home-grown.
Bill wrote
Payne. W. H., Graduate Education: The Ph.D. Glut, Communications of the ACM, 16 (March, 1973).
when he was a member of the graduate studies committee at Washington State University.
Bill looked at Douglas L Jones graduate student lists.
Jones is only one of hundreds or thousands of college profs turning out MS and PhD degrees in computing.
There is a reckoning for this overproduction coming!
Graduate educating mainland China may have a downside. But we sure get great deals at Harbor Frieght!
Hyde shows lots of hardware test equipment.
Some of us can't afford all of that expense. And don't need to!
The stock market was in double-digit rally mode for more than a third of the calendar days in question. Any one of those rally days could have been called "the low." Some probably were. The overall period was the Dow Industrials from April 1930 to July 1932, and it devastated investors. The Dow lost 86% of its value, rally days notwithstanding.
These rallies were the moments when the bear was catching his breath.
"The Great Crash: 1929" by John Kenneth Galbraith is simply fantastic.
Csd is taking a fast tour through the Hyde book and accompanying cd.
Hyde documentation is in html with web links.
Csd usually develops software on a machine off line and with lots of disks since we occasionally have some horrible windows crashes.
Dig this warning from a Hyde 8051 software example.
In 80C32 Forth assembler and high level Forth source code is assembled and compiled on the 8051 so binaries are usually not distributed!
Only source code is usually distributed. But you can metacompile in forth assembler which would be in binary form.
Loading binaries on any machine is very dangerous.
So let's try to get Hyde thinking about what to do. john.hyde@intel.com
The Hyde book, other than using backward [Keil] 8051 software tools, looks to be real valuable!
We're tracking a technology shift bought on by gighertz PCs and USB 2.0. And the accompanying economic havoc!
Here's a very interesting comparison of RISC and CISC processors which shows how DSP functions have been implemented in a PC with MMX 1, SSE, SSE2, 3DNow extensions.
The computer industry is leading in deflation.
Washington, Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve policy makers raised a warning about deflation at their Nov. 6 meeting and said the economy was at risk of further weakness rather than strength, minutes of the gathering show. ....
Deflation is a general fall in the prices of goods and services in an economy. Profits collapse because the prices of finished goods can drop faster than the costs to make them; debt levels become more burdensome as interest rates rise in inflation- adjusted terms. The U.S. economy isn't experiencing deflation currently. It is passing through a period of disinflation, which means that inflation is accelerating at a slower rate than previously. ...
Before the November meeting, Fed officials learned that the economy lost 5,000 jobs in October and that the unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent, following a decline of 13,000 jobs in September. Both numbers were subsequently revised by the Labor Department, which now says the economy gained 2,000 jobs over the two months. The economy lost 40,000 jobs in November, and the unemployment rate now matches April's eight-year high of 6 percent.
Initial scanning of both the Hyde and Axelson second editions indicate that both books should be very helpful.
The Hyde book comes with a cd. The Axelson book does not. This is no doubt attributed to Internet. Why include cds when you can download software?
Csd recently bough a copy of Nero cd rom burning software. Version 5.5 of the cd did not work. But when the v. 5.5.9.17 was downloaded over Internet, it worked more or less okay.
Shift left click would not select multiple files to drag and drop.
Nero express, supplied with a cd rom burner, appears to do about everything Nero does but is simpler.
In addition, for those who are exhibiting a high degree of impatience waiting for the market to decline, let’s remember that at the October low, the S&P 500 was down 51% from its March 2000 peak, making this the steepest bear market since 1929 to 1932, and one of the steepest in U.S. history. In the past 33 months the S&P 500 has spent only about four weeks above its 200-day moving average, and is still below that today. Moreover the 200-day average is still declining as well.
Other major technical indicators are negative as well. The percentage of bears in the Investor’s Intelligence Survey has dropped to 24%, a level more associated with market peaks than bottoms. At every other major market trough the percentage of bears has amounted to 60% or higher. Strangely enough, new bull markets begin in an atmosphere of deep pessimism, not the excessive bullishness characteristic of bear rally tops. In addition, equity mutual fund cash is at only 5.1% of assets, compared to 10-to-12% at previous bottoms.
Patty and bill had dinner with John Gilmore and his girl friend in Albuquerque several years ago.
Gilmore was one of the founders of Sun computers.
Gilmore told patty and bill the story of how Forth 1 got started at Sun.
Owner of Firmworks , mitch bradly, orignally wrote the Sun boot software in Forth.
Thursday December 12, 2002 15:46
Hunker down in 2003! And prepare for 2004 with some neat USB 80C32 SOC products.
T-Online International, Europe's biggest Internet service provider, expects 2003 to be "a lot harder than 2002," its chief executive said in remarks published Wednesday, sparking a sell-off in the company's shares just nine days after the stock went public.
"I do not see light at the end of the tunnel before mid-2004," Thomas Holtrop was quoted as saying in an interview with the German edition of the Financial Times daily
But is this new vision alone going to save AOL and allow it to remain the powerhouse of the online world? Probably not. To the degree that its existing customers switch from narrowband to the new broadband option, AOL's revenues will decline-by about $9 per customer each month. AOL will have to grow its membership base aggressively and also find ways to sell more services to its existing members just to keep revenues from shrinking. ...
I suspect not. Consumers will gravitate to online services that give them superior ways of working, socializing, manipulating media, and organizing their lives online. I don't hear nearly enough talk about that from AOL. Those are software challenges, and they take money and commitment to develop. AOL TW spends a negligible amount on R&D, especially in software, in contrast to competitor Microsoft which spends $5 billion a year. AOL TW executives say there's just no money for it. That's a tragedy, because there are many ways that the service could be pioneering new functionality for its members.
Bill once counted 11 Chinese restaurants in the Pullman, WA - Moscow, ID area. All are very good.
Graduate schools are compelled to give graduate degrees - even if they don't have qualified graduate students. Or faculty for that matter.
But this doesn't stop any of them from giving, or perhaps counterfeiting, graduate degrees.
No graduate students, no money from the state.
Graduate schools were running out of students in science and engineering.
But then they discovered a source of lots of students. China.
Foreign graduate students comprised more than 94% of computer science and electrical engineering at Oregon State University, Lewis told Payne more than 10 years ago.
The gap fell from a revised record $127.6 billion in the previous three months, the Commerce Department said. It was the first improvement in a year.
The U.S. needs to attract almost $1.4 billion a day in foreign investment to fund the shortfall and keep the value of the dollar stable. While foreign investors still have faith in the world's biggest economy, some say that may not be the case indefinitely.
``Gold has rallied due to dollar weakness. With continued risks of Iraqi and terrorist tension, we believe that a short position in gold is too risky for most players and this prevents the gold market from coming under too much pressure,'' said John Reade, analyst at UBS Warburg.
The dollar fell to its lowest for a month against the euro, sliding in thin trade ahead of U.S. retail sales and other data expected to paint an anemic picture of U.S. economic recovery.
Traders said the U.S. currency was also under pressure after a U.S. newspaper said Washington had a credible report that Islamic groups linked to al Qaeda received a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late October. A weaker dollar makes bullion more attractive to holders of non-dollar currencies.
Economists had expected a third-quarter deficit of $132 billion after a previously reported shortfall of $130 billion from April to June.
Over the past 12 months, the deficit equaled 4.5 percent of gross domestic product, up from 3.9 percent in 2001.
An imbalance between the goods and services the U.S. imports and those it exports accounts for about 85 percent of the gap in the current account. The nation imported $110.9 billion more than it exported in the third quarter compared with a $109.3 billion trade gap the prior three months.
The trade portion of the deficit is likely to worsen in coming months as imports continue to grow faster than exports and U.S. economic growth outpaces growth abroad.
And look at what some of these likely US-educated students are doing now!
Csd spends lots of money at Harbor Frieght! And gets great deals!
Digital calipers used to cost on the order of $79!
Csd purchased an exquisite auto-range digital multimeter which measures, the addition to voltage, resistance, amps, diode test, hFE, capacitance and frequency!
In a yellow rubberized case!
For about $28!
Csd waits for sales!
It works great!
Economists, like
lawyers, are BS artists.
Dig this paragraph as
another example of muddled thinking.
Members commented that the potential costs of a policy easing action that later proved not to have been needed were quite limited in that there was little risk that such a move would foster inflationary pressures under likely economic conditions over the next several quarters. Moreover, the policy easing could readily be unwound without significant effects on financial markets if the reversal appeared to be warranted by growing pressures on resources in a strengthening economy. In contrast, a failure to take an action that was needed because of a faltering economic performance would increase the odds of a cumulatively weakening economy and possibly even attendant deflation. An effort to offset such a development, should it appear to be materializing, would present difficult policy implementation problems.
Today Hyde's second edition arrive from Amazon.
Two days ago Axelson's second edition arrived from Softpro.
Here's a just taken jpg. There is the Cypress EZ-USB-FX both Princeton and Harvard architecture 80C32 development board on top of the email from Russia and CAVE algorithm description.
Csd keep its driver development disks outside the pc for easy access.
Now that the legal project is well in control, we're switching focus to USB and THE FUTURE.
We have to keep 80C32 USB system software costs down in a possibly deflating economy.
Greenberg's outstanding article on the Lucent pension funds has been spiffied up.
Bill has never been interested in administrative jobs. You quickly become technically obsolete in those jobs.
And when the pension checks possibly stop coming you are deep kim chee!
And we are project oriented. Both technical and legal.
Debt, Deflation, Default, Deficits, Demographics...
For example, the "deciduous dollar declined" yesterday against the yen in anticipation of a report, due out today, which is expected to show that the U.S. current account deficit widened to a whopping $132 billion in the third quarter.
At that rate, the U.S. must lure in $1.3 billion a day in unsuspecting foreign capital just to keep the consumer binge alive. The dollar has dropped 1.3% since Treasury man O'Neill, the administration's formerly vocal proponent of a strong dollar policy, was shown the door on Friday. Is there more where that came from? Probably, we suspect.
The surplus countries Kohn must have in mind are countries like Japan and China," says Denning, attempting to unpack the Fed governor's comments. "China alone accounts for 21% of the U.S. trade deficit, even more than Japan. And that's after China raised its U.S. dollar reserves $62.4 billion in the first 10 months of the year. Japanese dollar reserves are up by over $60 billion in the same time. What does this mean?"
Second edition of Axelson's USB book arrived yesterday. So maybe csd can get back on to tech stuff now we have met a deadline in our legal project.
From Silicon Valley to Boston's Route 128, technology companies are waiting for a rebound in business spending to pull them out of their slump. But when the Bay Area and other regional hotbeds emerge from the deep hole left by the technology crash, they'll find that the landscape looks a lot different. Many of the jobs lost will not be back.
The global tech bust has forced a dramatic restructuring of the industry as firms struggle to return to profitability. Companies have shed thousands of jobs in the United States and Europe while shifting production to lower-cost countries, mostly in Asia.
Answer—We share your concerns and believe that you are correct in highlighting these problems. Unfortunately, however, mainstream economists are ignoring the credit bubble, and think that the banking system is in good shape. In fact, their solution to the economic malaise is for consumers and corporations to go into more debt so that they can spend the economy out of the doldrums. We don’t see any of the items you mentioned being discussed as a problem within the Administration or Congress. As you probably know from his speeches and testimony, Greenspan has repeatedly praised derivatives as having reduced risk throughout the economy. As is true throughout financial history, the problems won’t be addressed until they reach crisis proportions. We might add that the problems now being addressed—Enron, WorldCom, corporate governance, Wall Street research, investment banking, and the anemic economy—only became key issues after they began making headlines in the media. The attitude of the government and the media is that if a problem has not become apparent to all, then it’s just not a problem.
The ever-growing federal deficit will weigh on interest rates even more than investors realize. That's because the deficit is already even BIGGER than what the government reports. The government is projecting a deficit of more than $200 billion in fiscal 2003. But if you strip out all of the smoke and mirrors and look at what the government actually owes, the government is running a deficit at the annual rate of more than $940 billion -- and that's according to the Federal Reserve's own numbers. If the U.S. needs to pay for a war or implements tax cuts to try to stimulate the economy, the deficit will grow even more!
Result: The government will likely flood the bond market with more long-term bonds -- and will need to increase interest rates in order to bring in investors. That's bad news if you're hanging onto long-term bonds right now. When reams of long-term bonds are dumped on the market in the months ahead, prices will plunge.
Csd is anxious to spend more time on the USB project and less time on the legal project. But lots of thinking on the technical project has been done while doing legal work.
Wednesday December 11, 2002 19:54
What is going to happen when senior citizens don't receive their monthly pension checks in the mail?
And their medical benefits stop.
They may go to a lawyer.
But we have bad news.
The lawyers will steal their remaining money.
There is a reason for this website and what what Morales and Payne are trying to do at pro se fights.
VIEWPOINT editorial Barry Greenberger, Managing Editor Beneath the dry industry statistics are people who have been seriously hurt EBN December 9, 2002 |
Wednesday December 11, 2002 10:44
Grove also addressed the diminished likelihood of an upturn in the chip industry in the near future. "Over the course of the past year (the industry) has been bounding along on the bottom," he said, but he warned that the threat of a "war" on Iraq doesn’t bode well for the future employment rate in the US and a may spark a consequent "meltdown" in some South American economies.
Grove also later warned that the trend of migrating chip manufacturing to far eastern fabs could shift the balance eastwards. "It is easy to project," he said, "that the interdependence becomes more one-sided, with an adverse impact on our educational system because so much of the university funding comes from industry. There is a spiral there in the wrong direction."
The CPU upgrade rat race is over. The commodities war is on
WHILE INTEL AND a select number of other companies bet tens of billions of dollars on the next generation of chip fabrication technology, a good chunk of the industrialized world is happy with the machines they bought last year or two years ago. Today, accountants to video heads have enough horsepower at their fingertips to keep themselves sated. Why shell out $1500 in next year's technology for a measly 3-5% performance bump on the most bleeding-edge applications? It is buy and keep for consumers and businesses alike, not buy and dump every other year in the climb from the 8088 to the Pentium.
Is Carpenter trying to tell us that 53% of companies selling stock have a P/E = 0? Or maybe even negative? Like Palm!
Where's The Mean?
by Lynn CarpenterIs the market too high? Wall Street says it's cheap. But many of the folks on Main Street think it's still too expensive. Which street is right? The short answer is, "both."If the market really is too high, then we have no business buying stocks at all.
The average P/E ratio for the Dow Industrials is 20 these days, not too bad. But that's a pretty stodgy group of stocks. For the S&P 500, the average P/E is 33... and to us value investors, 33 is generally too high. By the way, the S&P Industrial Index sports a P/E of 48, pretty stiff for a box of 15 industrial stocks chosen for their high dividends. Worse, the yield on the S&P Industrials is now just 1.5% compared to the Dow Industrials at 2.2%! ...
In fact, even if we stretch the average a bit, allowing for a range of 14–16, the P/E ratio has been at its historic average for only moments in time. It happened more frequently from 1880 to 1912. The S&P P/E ratio hit the average nine times in those 32 years. One of those times it stayed there for nearly two years. Every other time it landed briefly, for six months or less.
The next time the P/E ratio was "average" on a regular basis was... oh boy, you don't want to hear this... 1928 to 1941 – roughly bracketing the Great Crash, Great Depression and Second Great War. If that's average, I am sincerely hoping we never see average again. ...
The U.S. stock market has 9,175 stocks including those with very small caps and infrequent trading. So let's talk about those 9,000 stocks. Of those stocks with earnings, only 16% (1,444) are currently selling for P/E ratios over 20. However, an awesome 53% of the available stocks have no P/E ratio at all. (Yikes! That's not good.) They might as well have a P/E of 300, which some of them would if they had a quarter-penny's earnings.
LYNN CARPENTER EXPOSES WALL STREET 'S FRIGHTENING NEW "DARK SIDE!"
"Back When The Stock Market Went Mad, I Warned You,' STAY AWAY' From Enron..."I Begged You, 'DON'T TOUCH' Tyco or Global Crossing...
"Some of my readers even took my advice and bought puts on Enron early... on THREE separate occasions... and one investor wrote me recently to say my warning helped him pocket over 200%!
"But please don't think the worst of the Wall Street crisis is isolated to a few companies or corrupt financial firms. FAR FROM IT...
"These recent wipeouts are nothing compared to the TIDAL WAVE OF BANKRUPTCIES ahead. Disney, Ford and General Electric have already sent up emergency flares. And they're not alone. Not at all...
"If you do anything in the next 5 minutes, make sure you check out my shocking 'WALL STREET BLACKLIST' where I name 26 stocks you shouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole! You'll find the list inside, please read on..."
We have to hold down software costs while producing reliable easy to maintain apps. And have fun too, of course.
How close is the US to deflation? Fed chairman Alan Greenspan told anxious members of Congress in October that "we are not close to the deflationary cliff". But how good are his forecasting skills? The Fed, by its own admission, utterly failed to foresee Japan's slide into deflation seven years ago.
And a solid core of serious analysts now believes it to be a very real risk. The Fed's own behaviour betrays a distinct unease. A month ago it cut the key official interest rate by an aggressively large increment - from 1.75 per cent, already the lowest in over 40 years, to 1.25 per cent.
Consider the evidence of deflation so far.
The broadest measure of price pressures in the US economy - the gross domestic product deflator - is barely above zero. In the year to the end of September, it was up by 0.83 per cent, its feeblest in half a century.
"The essence of deflation is that business leaders know they do not have pricing power," the ability to raise the price of their products, points out Wayne Angell, a former governor of the Fed and chief economist for the Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns.
And the prices received by US firms overall have declined in each of the past five quarters, the longest run in more than 50 years. For the latest quarter, they were down 1.3 per cent.
"They expect that pricing power will return with recovery." With deflation, it doesn't. "This is precisely what is happening in the US economy today.""They expect that pricing power will return with recovery." With deflation, it doesn't. "This is precisely what is happening in the US economy today."
Software is a breeze on the PC side with Visual Basic, C++ 6.0, exquisite in-line assembler, and Microsoft Office.
Software development is easy too on the 80C32 side with BASIC-52 and Forth ... with a bit of interactive incremental assembler too!
Both software and hardware maintenance is easy on the 80C32 peripheral side using Internet. The Brazilians in Santa Caterina are on to this!
Let's look at bit more carefully where the Brazilians are that are doing the really neat BASIC-52 and Forth work. Here's a map of Santa Caterina. Look at Florianopolis on the island and Blumenau.
Then let's look at the German influence.
Germans migrated, or escaped, to south America at the end of the second world war.
Picture of the kubelwagen might bring tears to the eyes of some of the FURB and Federal University of Santa Catarina students' grandfathers.
The practical constraints are that we don't want to spend lots of money of system software.
Consumers are maxed out. Personal bankruptcies surged 15% from 2001 to 2002, credit card write-offs recently rose by more than 35% to their highest level in decades, and mortgage foreclosures have hit their highest level in history. On top of that, the unemployment rate just jumped to 6% in November, and 40,000 net jobs disappeared from the economy. Millions of consumers are buried under mountains of debt and are worried about the prospect of long-term unemployment if this economy doesn't turn around quickly.
And you're thinking about sending several K$ to Keil?
Think 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, instead!
The high growth experience of the 1990s has unfortunately trained people to expect to be able to achieve high levels of growth under any circumstances. This is a fallacy. The three years of the new century have seen but three years of declines. The speculative Nasdaq has fallen over 75% from its ultimate Y2K peak to its low so far. The broader S&P 500 fell 7% in 2000, 15% in 2001 and approximately 22% year to date in 2002. ...
Nystrom states
What many people thought of as "money" in their brokerage accounts has simply evaporated with those declines.
Some people got the money. The money did not evaporate. Much of the pension fund money ended up in silicon valley!
And look what the tech creeps are doing now!
According to Thomson Financial, insider selling skyrocketed 125 percent in November to $2,6 billion from $1.2 billion in October. Tech insiders were especially busy as the level of selling increased to $861 million from $244 million, a whopping 250 percent rise. And insider buying? That was up just 5 percent, to $193 million from $184 million. ...
Insiders at semiconductor company Maxim Integrated Products also sold a sizable amount of shares last month. The stock is up more than 65 percent in the past two months. Nine Maxim insiders, including CEO John Gifford, sold more than 440,000 shares for about $14.8 million. This was the largest group sale by Maxim insiders since March, according to Thomson.
Investors are wising-up to high tech.
The year's biggest technology initial public offering got off to a bumpy start on Tuesday, raising nearly $230m less than its more optimistic backers had been expecting.
Shares in Seagate, the world's biggest maker of computer hard disc drives, were priced late on Tuesday at $12, below a range of $13-$15 that some of the deal's promoters had thought might even have been exceeded.
The transaction raised $870m, rather than the $1.1bn that would have come from the more optimistic pricing - still almost as much as all the other tech IPOs this year combined. ...
"It is hard for buyers to feel good about a deal where the sellers are going to make a ton of money," said Ben Holmes, president of Morningnotes.com. "There is not a lot of upside for buyers. That's why there is no expectation that this deal will trade up."
Tuesday
December 10, 2002 18:30
Try this video link if you want some deadly high tech stuff
We are fed information by organized media to try to make us do things. Like buy or sell stock. Or change our opinion. Or tell us about new microcontroller hardware without the complete hardware software picture.
Media suppresses things the paying establishment doesn't want us to know about.
But with internet things have changed.
Organized media and those who pay them don't have as much control over what we are told.
Also the establishment has no advantage in the technology over others. And it costs the establishment lots of money to use this new technology!
Without personal computers, lots of disk space, scanners, ink jet printers and, of course, internet Morales and Payne would be in real trouble. But this time the establishment may be in some real trouble.
We need to switch to USB.
Bill hasn't done USB before. But we all must arise to the occassion.
Bill hasn't done this
before either!
Let's hope!
After an 8 percent decline for the Nasdaq in the past five trading days -- and a near four-percent rout on Monday -- here's some more bad news for tech: Earnings estimates may be way too high. ...
The S&P 500 is now trading at about 17.3 times 2003 earnings estimates. That's not overly expensive by historical measures. But considering that the index was trading at 15.6 times 2003 earnings estimates on Oct. 1, when the earnings outlook was brighter, it's a cause for concern. Even if fourth-quarter earnings for this year are better than expected, stocks might not head higher on the news.
"There is a huge disconnect between the magnitude of what is likely to happen with earnings and what stocks have already discounted," says Richard Williams, strategist for Summit Analytic Partners, an independent research firm.
Valuations for technology companies in particular have climbed to lofty heights. Cisco Systems, for example, has a P/E of 25 times calendar 2003 earnings estimates. And multiples for smaller technology companies are even higher. Cisco competitors Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks trade at 34 times and 37 times 2003 earnings estimates, respectively.
This charts shows how much money 50 insiders reaped since from selling stock in companies that ultimately saw their stock values plunge.
The main page got too big again.
So Belec and other fraud articles are archived at Hi tech fraud.
Beginning in 1942, however, U.S. stocks finally shook off the lingering effects of the Great Depression and began the longest secular bull market in history. The advance started with four consecutive up years, pushing the S&P index higher by 100% over that period. In fact, the S&P closed lower over a calendar year only five times between 1942 and 1961. ...
While history may suggest that stocks are due for a meaningful surge, investors shouldn't expect anything close to the bull run that erupted after the attack on Pearl Harbor 61 years ago today.
Back then, equity valuations had fallen to extremely attractive levels amid deflation, unemployment, economic stagnation and the complete absence of Main Street participation in the stock market.
Today, valuations are reasonable at best, and borderline ludicrous at worst. The difference in interpretation stems from the fact that creative accounting practices have obfuscated the true worth of many U.S. businesses, even as the economic outlook remains unusually murky. ...
Since 1896, the S&P 500 has fallen for four consecutive years on only one occasion. That period was between 1929 and 1932, when the index dropped by 70% on a calendar-year basis, but by almost 90% when measured from top to bottom. ...
Of course, the similarities to the current environment are at least a little scary.
Most of the microcontroller hardware or IP vendors have obscured system software costs. Perhaps this is part of another scam? To steal pension fund money.
And we know there is a technology shift under way. Gigahertz PCs running Microsoft Windows, USB 2.0, and super fast 80C32 SOCs which may simply clobber peripheral side microcontrollers in the marketplace.
Consider clockspeed, a measure of how fast computer chips process data. While many PC users now work on computers with clockspeeds of around 400 to 600 megahertz, Kay expects hardware makers to introduce chips that are 10 times as fast within the next year or so, at about 4 gigahertz. Intel recently rolled out a 3-GHz processor.
Three new Athlons--the 2600+, 2700+ and 2800+--were announced in November and run at speeds between 2.13GHz and 2.25GHz, according to PC makers. The model rating system compares the new Athlons' relative performance to a previous version of the chip. But it also serves as a rough comparison to Intel's Pentium 4. The Athlon XP 2800+, AMD contends, performs the same or possibly better than a 2.8GHz Pentium 4.
ARM, ARC, MIPS, Tensilica, PMC-Sierra, UBICOM, ... and lots of other microcontrollers even manufactured by big semiconductor companies such as TI and Motorola may flop.
Fred Hickey, who writes the monthly “High-Tech Strategist”, has been dead right on the group for the past three years, and titles his latest report, “Another Return to Stupidville”. He points out that any sub-sector strength we see sporadically is based on inventory filling, and that virtually all the end markets are dead in the water. Most companies are reporting disappointing results and are continuing to slash capital expenditures and layoff their employees. Demand for PCs, wireless phones and telecom equipment is still very weak and this is feeding back into the semiconductor manufacturers and the equipment companies.
TI, of course, sees this and looks to be giving the big push toward 80C32 USB SOCs!
Csd's business interests are in wdm drivers and 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, of course! And having fun too!
Monday December 9, 2002 20:50
Consider all expenses. Especially 80C32 operating system expenses, of course!
Carrie Wolford never sat down and did the math to see how the cost of her commute from Paulding County to Buckhead compared with her mortgage.
"I didn't even think about," said Wolford, 34. "We just didn't care. We wanted to be able to get a nice house, and we just couldn't do it intown."
Wolford and her husband, David, moved a long way from Atlanta for a bigger, less-expensive home.
They found --- and love --- their four-bedroom, two-story traditional at the Menlow Station subdivision near Hiram. They carpool together and drive nearly 30 miles each way to work.
Csd bought 3 books last week as an investment for the future.
Csd doesn't plan to buy a Keil 8051 development system, however!
Which 80C32 hardware looks good? Csd has a Cypress board EZ USB FX.
But this is not SOC. In fact, there are about 11 chips on the development board.
Csd expects too see in 2003 a single chip 80C32 USB 1 or 2 on a board with only external capacitors, on USB connector and possibly one more connector!
This will dramatically change board manufacturing. And shift emphasis toward minimal peripheral software. The majority of computation will be done inside a PC.
Will Cypress be a winner?
What about Warren Buffett, probably the most lauded investor still trading today? He doesn't look at PE, or O'Neil's PEG, or price-to-sales or yield, other measures you'd expect a traditional value investor to use. Instead, Buffett really scours a company's debts, and buys shares only in firms that can pay off their long-term debt with two years of net earnings... last year's earnings. His ratio? Long-term debt must be less than twice last year's earnings.
Cypress's stock is down. And the Cypress debt to earning ratio is marginal according to Buffett.
Dig the Cypress interest payments.
Not up in smoke. The pension funds were stolen.
Free lance journalist Pierre Belec seems to have some really good no-BS high tech and pension fund economic articles.
Csd wanted to find other articles written by Belec, so csd entered in google pierre belec December
Oh dear. Number 1
csd homepage Saturday December 7, 2002 20:19. ... Believe All the Hype About B2B, It's the Real Thing By Pierre Belec Reuters NEW YORK (March 3) - The New Economy is changing at ... www.geocities.com/computersystemsdocumentation/ - 101k - Dec. 8, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages
Google knows all, we think. Also google catches all. Like Bush1, Turner, and Inman. And Morales and Payne!
Even not digitizing at a sensor and psychotic fits at the keyboard!
We're following high tech fraud.
Ticking Sound May Be Your Pension Fund.
By Pierre Belec.
NEW YORK (Reuters) -
Wall Street is waiting for the next shoe to drop. The ...Corporate underfunding, as it's called, is a ticking time bomb that will cast more doubt on the profitability of the nation's largest companies and the market's rebound.
"In the years ahead, earnings are likely to be depleted by pension liabilities," says John Hussman, publisher of Hussman Econometrics and professor of economics at the University of Michigan.
"Many companies continue to make assumptions about the probable return on stocks that has no relationship with the rate of return that stocks are actually priced to deliver," he says.
Investors should wise up to the implications of companies clinging to expectations the stock market will deliver double-digit gains because what's left of their battered 401(k) retirement money is at risk, Hussman says.
The pension fund issue is creating a newer and perhaps a bigger problem for the stock market. Many investors are staying on the sidelines, preferring to focus on the market's probable sub-par return. And they're ignoring the bizarre assumption of companies like GM, which are not operating in the real world, with expectations that their pension investments will grow by 10 percent.
Bill has been in high tech long enough so that he has a keen nose for high tech fraud.
Also bill has been into academics so he also has a keen nose for academic BS and BSers.
Bill once wrote an article for ACM on the Ph.D. glut [fud glut].
Bill is keenly aware of counterfeit PhDs and PhD counterfeiters. But later for this.
Mushashi again!
Know the ways of all professions
and
Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything
Especially fraud artists and lawyers. In both high tech and academia.
Bill got an email from his MS and Ph.D. student lewis on Sunday
Today's San Jose Mercury has a list of people who made millions off the doc.com bubble.
Seems someone got took. Guess who?--ted
Ted Lewis, Ph.D.
tedglewis@friction-free-economy.com
Ted, of course, is an investor!
Since some are reading this stuff, I'll tell you a funny story.
Lewis at his Ph.D. oral preliminary examination had a tough time.
There is only one question he really did well at.
Lewis was asked to explain, in detail, quick sorting.
He did great on that question.
Reason is, of course, that bill told Lewis to know all about quick sorting before the exam!
Purdue mathmetician Edward Silverman taught bill this ploy to get students through oral exams.
When bill went out of the exam room to tell Lewis he passed.
No Lewis.
Bill had to drive to Lewis's appartment to tell him he passed.
Lewis was so convinced he failed he simply went home!
More on students.
John Sobolewski is also one of bill's Ph.D. students.
Before Sobolewski's preliminary Ph.D. exam, bill suggested to Sobolewski that he study a/d converter methods.
Sobolewski did great on a/d converter methods and also well on other questions too.
Patty and bill went to the Sobolewski's for dinner this thanksgiving.
Sobolewski's live about 2 miles from us.
Isn't a thesis advisor's duty to help and guide his
students?
Debt monster
To be sure, the threat of a Sears bankruptcy is by no means imminent. Even today Sears remains a huge business, with $40 billion in annual sales, a payroll of 310,000 employees, and balance sheet equity of more than $6.2 billion.
Let's watch ARM, MIPS, ARC, Tensillica, and other microcontroller companies this year.
While we perfect products for 80C32 SOCS, of course!
Sampling of 40 biggest losers is only tip of insider iceberg ...
To make the cut, a company's stock had to lose at least 99.5 percent of its value between March 2000 and September 2002.
Overall, there were 319 publicly traded companies in the valley during that period.
Had the cutoff been set at a stock decline of 90 percent, the number of companies would leap to 146. In fact, half the publicly traded companies in the valley have lost at least 87 percent of their stock value since the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000.
The Mercury News examined the stock sales record of insiders at 40 companies in Silicon Valley that have lost virtually all their value since the stock market peaked in March 2000. The executives, board members and venture capitalists at these companies walked off with $3.41 billion, while their companies' total market value plunged 99.8 percent to a mere $229.5 million at the end of September.
``This is not a victimless crime,'' said Charlie Cray, director of Citizen Works' Campaign for Corporate Reform. ``The argument is that they're taking risks. But they're taking risks with other people's money.
Portal's stock peaked at $83.94 on Feb. 24, 2000. The stock then began a steady slide to $6.75 on Nov. 22, 2000, when Portal reported disappointing quarterly results. A Goldman analyst downgraded Portal for the first time that day from his recommended list to ``market outperform'' -- still the equivalent of a buy rating.
But while Goldman continued to tell investors to buy, insiders at Portal were selling. By the time of the downgrade, Portal had been public only 18 months and insiders had already sold more than $695 million in stock.
Since then, Portal's revenues have plummeted, from a high of $81 million in the final quarter of 2000 to $30.2 million in the most recent quarter. The company has restructured three times and fired 870 employees on its way to reducing its workforce to 600 by the end of this year.
And five lawsuits have been filed against the company alleging securities fraud for the way its IPO was conducted.
Portal is in danger of being delisted from Nasdaq because its stock price has been at around $1 a share for so long. Once worth more than $1 billion, the more than 35.1 million shares of Portal currently owned by CEO Little are now worth $38.6 million.
A lot of us are going to try to make it though 2003, without bankruptcy, to emerge in 2004 with products. But we can't incur too much debit.
Sunday December 8, 2002 19:53
Senior citizen trouble!?
TO BE PRECISE: in 2000, there were 61 million Americans 45 to 64; by 2010, there will be 79 million, estimates the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The increase is 30 percent, even though the entire over-16 population is projected to grow just 11 percent. Roughly one in three working-age Americans will soon be “mature.” We baby boomers are advancing toward old age.
The trouble is that society doesn’t quite know what to do with us. For years, the trend has been toward ever earlier retirement. People wanted (it was said) rest and recreation. Companies needed to make room for the young and ambitious (that was us). Retirement emerged as everyone’s entitlement—life’s earned vacation. In 1960, 78 percent of men from 60 to 64 were in the labor force, as were 31 percent of those 65 and over. By 2000, those figures were 55 and 18 percent, respectively.
Early retirement’s lure remains. It’s dangerous to generalize about any group as massive as everyone 45 to 65. But some things can be safely said: most of us have fewer illusions than at, say, 25; we have usually substituted attainable ambitions for unrealistic fantasies. For many, early retirement is still the thing. Plenty of us have huge enthusiasm for work. But others have had enough. They want out.
Some are also being pushed out. Older workers span the spectrum of human potential—from deadwood to spark plugs. But many are expensive workers. They’ve received years of cost-of-living and merit wage increases. Their health expenses are rising. When companies want to cut costs—as they do now—the temptation to substitute younger (and cheaper) workers for older (and more expensive) workers is powerful. “Early retirement” programs multiply. Experience is expendable.
Equivalent to doing the wrong thing in business
EYEWITNESS TO CUSTER'S LAST STAND
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and 225 of his men died in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Custer's final battle made him a legend and stirred up considerable controversy.
Sure is going to be an interesting 2003.
But, of course, csd is thinking simple this year. About settlement.
And 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, too.
The sale deserves attention for a couple of reasons. First, it comes amid one of the weakest IPO markets on memory. Technology IPOs have only raised $265 million all year -- a fraction of the $10 billion generated in 2001 or the $30 billion from 2000. ...
In the year ended in June, Seagate had net income of $153 million on $6.1 billion of revenue, according to its prospectus. That compares with $214 million of net income on revenue of $6.2 billion during the comparable 2000 period that came largely before the buyout.
However, last year's bottom line was a dramatic improvement from the more than $500 million that Seagate lost in the year ended July 2001.
The disk-drive space is still fiercely competitive, and the company is directly linked to a still-weak computer industry, analysts said.
Want to gamble some of your remaining 401k money?
In late 1873, the first Great Economic Depression in US history began. The entire banking system of the nation collapsed, having overextended loans.
People could not get what little savings they had in their bank accounts, and many banks closed forever. ...
The pension fund 401k money did not evaporate. It was stolen using high tech.
Executives at Silicon Valley companies that lost most of their value during the dot-com bust made billions of dollars when they sold their stock, according to an analysis by the San Jose Mercury News.
The newspaper examined records of stock sales by executives, board members and venture capitalists at 40 companies that have become almost worthless since March 2000. It found that the insiders walked away with $3.41 billion from the sales while, by Sept. 30, their companies' total market value fell 99.8 percent to $229.5 million. "This money was taken from investors who didn't have the same information as these insiders and lost their money," said Charles Elson, director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.
Most of the companies are software, hardware and telecommunications firms. The newspaper only included companies whose stock price dropped at least 99.5 percent. Most had major restructurings that included layoffs and 15 declared bankruptcy. ...
Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, which studies corporations, is a critic of allowing insiders to sell stock.
"They sell the stock and then they restate the earnings," Minow said. "That brings it one step closer to being a Ponzi scheme."
Belec is telling us, of course, that NASDAQ stocks are not going to return to their bubble highs. Or even maintain their current highs.
But where is the bottom? And how do we guess when to starting buying again. PE = 4? Or 10?
It's a nice book for investors who are serious about scouring the market for good stocks, because it spells out the exact criteria by which the Warren Buffetts, Martin Zweigs and Peter Lynches of the world came by their fortunes. It's as if each star investor wrote a chapter opening his own magic box of strategies. And every detail is summarized in a grand final chapter called "the famous ratios" which lists and explains the numbers that can point the way to good stocks.
For example, there's not one of the famous investors who doesn't look at some measure of a company's intrinsic value. Most looked at the ratio of a company's share price to its earnings, either as a stand-alone statistic or in relation to other figures. For example, Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, liked companies with PE ratios under 15. Peter Lynch only looked at the PE of those firms with sales exceeding $1 billion, and he wanted them to have PEs under 40.
That gives you a much longer list of companies, but not the whole universe.
Even William O'Neil, the publisher of Investor's Business Daily who is famous for loving fast growing companies and stocks that are moving up quickly, likes to look at PE and compare it to how fast a company's earnings are growing. In his estimation, a high price/earnings ratio is okay if it is exceeded by the company's annual earnings growth rate.
That ratio is called PEG.
What about Warren Buffett, probably the most lauded investor still trading today? He doesn't look at PE, or O'Neil's PEG, or price-to-sales or yield, other measures you'd expect a traditional value investor to use. Instead, Buffett really scours a company's debts, and buys shares only in firms that can pay off their long-term debt with two years of net earnings... last year's earnings. His ratio? Long-term debt must be less than twice last year's earnings.
In fact, all but one of the famous investors steered clear of companies with high debt loads, though each had his own way of measuring that.
Then there is the debt problem which we wish to avoid by not buying the expensive and antiquated Keil cross non-operating system 80C32 software development system.
"This economy is really laboring under a tremendous debt load," said Paul Kasriel, director of economic research at Northern Trust in Chicago. "The corporate sector has made great strides in slowing down its borrowing, but the private sector hasn't even started."
Sure enough, debt as a percentage of assets among households has reached new highs, consumer borrowing was very strong in the third quarter and equity extraction from homes has been enormous. ...
As a result, Mr. Hatzius and Mr. Kasriel both expect the economy to sputter along next year. Mr. Hatzius projects gross domestic product growth of around 2 percent for 2003, while Mr. Kasriel forecasts around 3 percent.
So where does that leave the stock market? Stable, perhaps, but not strapping.
"Sluggish gross domestic product growth usually means corporate profits aren't much better than flat," Mr. Hatzius said. And if corporate profits stagnate, stock indexes may, too. What has gone on in the past two years may well continue: individual stocks do well but the indexes disappoint.
"This economy is in hock," Mr. Kasriel said. "It has come off 20 years of extreme leveraging. It's going to take time to work through these things. And it won't be pleasant."
If everybody believes something, it's probably wrong. We call that Conventional Wisdom.
In America, conventional wisdom that has mass acceptance is usually contrived: somebody paid for it.
We have another Example
C is a better microcontroller software technology than either BASIC or Forth.
The Asian Financial Crisis in Perspective
by J. Orlin GrabbeConclusion
It may be, as they say, that Asia is the 21st Century. Certainly you can see it coming. Guests at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo can now receive their own private e- mail address, as well as Internet and newsgroup access, for the duration of their stay. I'm sure Frank Lloyd Wright would have approved. It's a little piece of the future available to antediluvian nomads of the 20th Century.
But getting the rest of the country--far removed from the Imperial Palace--up to speed will not come easily. It may not come at all. It takes years to recover from an asset bubble. And what can be said of Tokyo is equally true of Hong Kong, Bangkok, Jakarta, Seoul, and Beijing. The financial crisis isn't over. The economic crisis isn't over. On Nov. 3, James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, said "the worst is over". He's wrong. The worst has only just begun. And this is the way Asia will enter the 21st Century.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
In sum the spinmeisters continue to spin, but the economy still looks weak and the market remains highly overvalued. The rally is losing steam and appears ready to roll over.
"Every extra dollar borrowed by a consumer now puts us all a dollar further from recovery, the debtor a dollar closer to default, and his bank a dollar closer to a bigger loan loss provision than it would have had to face by foreclosing while there was still something to be salvaged."
My mind refuses to stop thinking about Ben Bernanke's pledge to work the offices of the Fed to actually take positive, calculated steps to achieve a simmering, permanent inflation in the USA by buying debt, and cranking up the printing presses to pay for it all. There is probably no policy statement that any Fed Governor could utter that could possibly cause my eyeballs to spin around in my head - blip blip blip - like that one does.
The theoretical underpinnings of such a bizarre statement is that this will allow the Fed to, theoretically, always have room to cut rates, so that, theoretically, preposterously-overvalued assets can always become even MORE preposterously overvalued, since some clueless knothead of the future will always, theoretically, borrow money to buy your entire inventory of ludicrously-overpriced assets from you, and thus, theoretically, insure that you make an effortless profit and thus prevent, theoretically, the deflation from ever affecting asset prices in a, theoretical, downside fashion. Theoretically. In short, the Fed is issuing a policy of guaranteed profitability from merely borrowing and buying assets!
This is fabulous! All my life all I've ever heard from anybody is that they want me, probably the most clueless dolt on the planet, to give them that one hot investment tip, that inside-track idea, that has zero risk and maximum, eye-popping returns. And guess what? Now I have one! I say, with the booming, haughty authority in my voice born of confidence, "Anything that is so abundant, so widely held, so broadly distributed that it would cause the government and the Federal Reserve to get verrrryyyy nervous if its price ever went down!"
"The economy is in great shape," says Milton Friedman. And don't worry about deflation, says the Nobel Prize winner. "Deflation is a consequence of bad policy, not a cause of bad results." The Great Depression of the '30s could have been avoided, he says, if the Fed had merely increased the supply of money fast enough.
Isn't it wonderful, dear reader? We mean, that the economy is in such great shape....and that central bankers can avoid any really bad results simply by changing their policies! But hey, why didn't they change their policies before $10 trillion got exterminated in the world's stock markets? And before nearly 2 million Americans lost their jobs since the slump began in March of 2000? And who's to say they won't wait until another $10 trillion goes to money heaven before getting their policies right ...
To be sure, deflation remains the talk of the town and the widespread expectation of most investors. But resurgent inflation seems increasingly likely. On Wednesday, during my appearance as a co-host on CNNfn's morning show, I announced, "Inflation is a buy. If it were a stock, it would be selling for eight times earnings and less than book value." - Admittedly, the mighty forces of deflation and inflation are still battling each other in a fight to the death. But inflation seems to be prevailing, or at least that's the implied verdict from several financial markets. Both the CRB Index of commodity prices and the gold price have been trending higher for more than a year. More recently, since early October, bonds have tanked, copper has surged and the dollar has failed to rally despite a powerful stock market rally.
Debt! Not if we use BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, of course!
Debt. During the boom times--and anticipating a glorious new era of deregulation--power companies borrowed a stunning $600 billion. They used that money in part to bulk up their speculative trading operations. But mostly they used it to buy entire power companies or construct natural-gas-fired power plants.
That bill is coming due. Starting next year and continuing through 2006, a whopping $90 billion of debt has to be either repaid or renegotiated, according to Standard & Poor's. Few of the companies appear able to repay it; the collapse of energy trading has put them in a severe cash crunch, and several are close to bankruptcy. Speculative trading is no longer profitable, of course, but far worse is the fact that power plants aren't generating much cash flow either. The overbuilding has helped lower the cost of energy--and the economic downturn has meant that the country simply isn't using as much power. Power prices are severely depressed.
Welcome to the next great debt disaster. "The debt bubble in this industry is massive," says Karl Miller, a former energy executive who is now a senior partner at Miller McConville & Co., a private firm that is buying distressed assets. Starting next year many energy firms teetering on the edge of Chapter 11 are going to fall into it. Once again the brunt of the losses could land on some of the nation's largest banks. For instance, J.P. Morgan Chase, which has acknowledged lots of bad telecom and cable loans, says it has another $2.2 billion in exposure to merchant energy companies. "People have been focused on the bankruptcies of Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom," says Miller, "but this sector is the sleeping giant."
Guns are blazing on the anti-deflation front. Policy makers in Japan and the United States have elevated deflation to their number one concern. Even European authorities have finally joined the game, as evidenced by an aggressive 50 bp ECB easing, with the euro-zone inflation rate still above the so-called price-stability threshold. The full force of the global policy arsenal now seems aimed at arresting deflation. And that’s very good news.
The bad news is that there’s no guarantee the medicine will work. Policy traction is most difficult to achieve at low levels of inflation and nominal interest rates. Just ask Japan. In the case of the US economy, stabilization policies typically work their charm on three sectors – consumer durables, homebuilding, and business capital spending. With all three sectors having gone to excess in recent years, any response to policy stimulus could be surprisingly muted. In Europe, monetary stimulus is being offset by the combined headwinds of fiscal consolidation and lingering structural rigidities, especially in the labor market. History tells us that deflationary remedies must be administered early and aggressively. Only time will tell if it already isn’t too late.
80C32 USB SOCs
hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth minimizes costs and
increases profits! The system software exists and is essentially free!
Both the operating systems and an apps built upon BASIC-52 and 80C32 Forth work better than with obscure expensive and reinvented operating systems.
The Morales and Payne legal project is going well. We've got them in writing and there is a possiblity that judges Dee Vance Benson and Antonin Scalia are, in fact, honest!
Thursday December 5, 2002
08:13
Senior
citizens have a lot to worry about these days. Pension funds disappearing -
being stolen by high tech. Possible government induced inflation if deflation
is, in fact, real.
The pension funds for Wisconsin and Milwaukee public employees filed a lawsuit against WorldCom Inc.'s investment bankers Tuesday, accusing them of using false financial information to help sell the telecommunication company's bonds to investors.
The State of Wisconsin Investment Board and City of Milwaukee Employes' Retirement System filed the lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court in Madison. Pension funds in at least six other states have filed similar suits.
The lawsuit says the state pension fund lost almost $38 million and the city pension fund lost about $9.5 million on WorldCom bonds. The lawsuit seeks recovery of those losses. ...
The lawsuit alleges WorldCom and its investment banks raised billions of dollars through public offerings of investment-grade bonds that were sold with prospectuses and registration statements containing false information. The lawsuit says money raised from selling bonds to the public was used to pay off short-term debt and release the investment banks from billions of dollars of lending commitments they had issued to back up WorldCom's short-term debt.
Goldrick P/E correction
Goldrick reponded that in the old days anything above 10 [TEN!] was considered a total crap shoot.
There will be new winners too.
Software maker Phoenix Technologies Ltd. (NasdaqNM:PTEC - News) on Thursday said it will cut 11 percent of its work force, or 60 jobs, close certain U.S. plants and move some operations to Asia.
Phoenix said it will close its facilities in Irvine, California, and Louisville, Colorado. The moves will reduce the company's North American employee base by 24 percent.
Phoenix said it will add customer service engineers to its offices in Taiwan and Japan.
The San Jose, California-based company said the restructuring will result in a one-time charge of $5.5 million in the first quarter of 2003. It said it expects to save $8 million annually from the changes.
Shares of Phoenix closed at $6.36 in Wednesday trading on the Nasdaq stock market.
Threaded code is slow!
Lacovara tried to get Sun witness Dennis Carlton, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, to admit that factors such as Java's performance issues may have held back the acceptance of Java and hindered its ability to compete with Microsoft's .Net platform for developing Web services. ...
"The more applications that are specific to an operating system, the more demand for that operating system," Carlton said.
But, again, 90% of the work is usually done in 10% of the code. So recode the 10% in assembler.
Speed of code is not the only consideration. Forth, Basic, and Java are about the most memory efficient technologies.
Memory efficiency is very important in an 80C32 with its limited memory.
Where is the bottom? P/E 4-15?
The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. (Not only were a recorded 12,894,650 shares sold on 24 October; precisely the same number were bought.) The bargains then suffered a ruiness fall. Even the man who waited out all of October and all of November, who saw the volumne of trading return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next twenty-four months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenonmemon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable."
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santyana, 1905
Wild senior citizens are tracking senior citizen stories
NEW YORK -- International Business Machines Corp. (IBM, news) has chosen to fund its pension plan now, instead of doing it gradually over a three-year period, because IBM's cash flow and balance sheet are strong enough to allow it, especially now that the pension deficit has shrunk by a third to $3 billion thanks to rising stocks.
Google has done a technology jump on other internet news services! google news.
Way we gather information and hopefully distribute information like 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth is going to change in a positive way to.
Delfation from google news
`Big D' is back, and this time deflation is no longer solely in the domain of asset prices," Rubin wrote in a commentary released today.
"For the first time in nearly 50 years, private-sector prices are falling in the U.S. economy.
"Prices for everything from Christmas sweaters to DVD players are tumbling in the face of a soft global economy and stiff competition from producers, which is helping U.S. shoppers stretch their spending power.
Although the abundance of bargains is benefiting consumers and may keep them in the malls at a crucial time for the economy, the falling prices have been a bane for businesses whose profits have been crimped.
So far, most analysts and Fed officials view deflation -- a cycle of falling prices, profits and wages -- as a remote risk for the U.S. economy but one that bears watching, especially in light of the Japan example.
Csd speculates that new technology, debt, pension shortfalls, and maybe deflation may have a bad effect on the 2003 economy.
And hopefully has a solution which it knows something about. And is fun too! 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth.
Ross, below, is referring the Java's ease of port between microcontrollers.
Forth, the predecessor of Java, is equally easy to port to other microcontrollers.
Sandia labs ported Forth from the 8085 microprocessor to the 8051 microcontroller, both of which it built as rad hard parts.
"Would the world as you see it have reached fruition if one platform was speaking to PCs and the other to devices?" Motz asked Ross. Motz was referring to the notion that Java is more prevalent on devices and Microsoft, with its .Net platform, is dominant on the desktop, as both sides established in court.
Added Motz: "The whole vision was that these platforms were going to be compatible for everything. If Microsoft continues to dominate the PC market, and assuming they develop the technology to interact with handheld devices, assuming it was dominant in the PC market, would that over time affect its ability to win the whole field?"
To this Ross replied, "Yes. Even though the software will run on a cell phone, the development will take place on a desktop machine." He added that developers building on a desktop with Microsoft tools are likely to write to a Microsoft-based platform, such as Microsoft's .Net Compact Framework.
In Forth software development bill occasionally got confused whether he was running the code on the 8051 or the PC!
Csd sees a serious business technology problem with what the Javans are doing.
USB 2.0 coupled with gigahertz PCs and Microsoft Visual Basic, C++ 6.0, and Office means that more and more computation are going to be done at the PC side as opposed to the peripheral side.
This going to hurt both the peripheral side microcontroller business and, as a result, the Java business.
And this is hurting Sun's core business since PC are now outperforming Sun workstations. And selling at a fraction of the cost of a Sun workstation.
As a result Sun's stock price SUNW is tanking. And it looks as if Sun is getting defensive.
Talk about technology innovation!
The above quote came from google news.
Google news opposed to other news sites such as CNN, google news is about completely automated with the google search engine searching the web for the most popular articles!
Posted P/E ratio information!
Goldrick reponded that in the old days anything above 10 [TEN!] was considered a total crap shoot.
and
2003 may prove to be a very interesting year.
Clearly hardware and software are facing deflation.
This is, in some ways, simply great. Gigahertz PC with infinite amount of memory and disk drive space for several hundred dollars.
However, if you are trying to make a living in high tech is is not so neat. Especially, if you borrowed lots of bucks and are possibly going to try to pay them off with decreased earnings.
Possibly since bankruptcy is usually the way out.
Chapter 7 for software companies since they usually have only tons of undocumented code which is a liability, not an asset.
Chapter 7 is getting harder to get.
Chapter 13 is becoming more popular with bankruptcy courts. And is not nearly as much fun as Chapter 7 since you don't totally get off the hook for debts.
The feds are finally starting to realize they may have a deflation problem.
Dig this!
Like Japan, the United States appears to be suffering a hangover after an equity bubble, and worries have grown that the Fed, which has already pushed short-term interest rates to a four-decade low of 1.25 percent, could be just one economic shock away from finding itself with too little ammunition.
You can read their possible solutions above.
"The Great Crash: 1929" by John Kenneth Galbraith is simply fantastic.
No one knew what to do to get out of the depression.
Galbraith enumerates a stunning sequence of missed predictions by economists.
We are clearly going to have an interesting 2003. Especially microcontroller hardware and software!
80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth continue to look more and more attractive! And really fun interfaced to Windows, of course!
In addition, a Goldman Sachs survey reported that US companies are set to underspend their IT budgets this year and into next year. They found that it would take a second half 2003 recovery for spending to even increase by a paltry 2-to-3 percent for the full year. This is completely out of line with Street estimates of 7 percent revenue growth, and is likely to lead to further widespread earnings disappointments. In our view, those who think that the market can continue to rise on its own momentum are in for a rude surprise.
However, Merrill Lynch's chief U.S. strategist, Richard Bernstein, who has been among Wall Street's most bearish gurus the past few years, does not subscribe to that upbeat assessment. He views the markets' heady run-up — especially the Nasdaq composite's gaudy 30.1% rise — since hitting multiyear lows Oct. 9 as a dangerous signal that speculation is alive and well. As a result, he reduced his recommended exposure to stocks and increased his bond holdings.
Lights go out at Stanford after tech bubble burst
The doors will be closed and the lights turned off at Stanford University this holiday season as the elite private US school takes unusual steps to save money.The economic recession that has pummelled the technology sector is being felt in the intellectual capital of Silicon Valley, the string of communities between San Francisco and San Jose that is home to the world's largest concentration of technology companies.
About P/Es.
Bill and Patty's son pointed out yesterday that to bring P/Es into historical ratios either the earning have to go up or the price has to come down. Logical.
Bill asked 75 year old Purdue grad then Sandia labs engineer Bill Goldrick yesterday what he considered reasonable P/E.
Goldrick reponded that in the old days anything above 10 [TEN!] was considered a total crap shoot.
Debt, deflation, and pension shortfalls might do bad things in 2003.
Microsoft has been trying to sink Java. So here's an interesting twist.
BALTIMORE (Reuters) - A federal judge hearing Sun Microsystems Inc.'s (NasdaqNM:SUNW - News) antitrust suit against Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - News), said on Tuesday that forcing Microsoft to carry Sun's Java software in the Windows operating system could be an "attractive" remedy. ...
Microsoft dropped Java, a computer language designed to run on various operating systems, when it introduced Windows XP last year. It later reversed itself and said it would start including Java in a Windows XP update, but only until 2004.
Csd was told that Microsoft was not doing quality control checking on Java!
Spending lots of money with Keil for an antiquated non-operating system cross development environment is not a good idea. Especially if we are in a deflating economy.
Breaking down the components of September’s consumer price index, Rosenberg has noted that if it were not for a handful of items that comprise a mere 7 per cent of the CPI – auto insurance premiums (+9.5% y-o-y), tobacco (+9.2% y-o-y), hospital services (+9.0% y-o-y), and tuition (+6.5% y-o-y), the US inflation rate would already be running below the one per cent level. By contrast – personal computers (-21% y-o-y), software (-8%), long-distance telephone charges (-4.5%), toys (-9%), utilities/fuels (-2.3%), automobiles (new cars -1.1%, used cars -3.2%), television sets (-11.1%), VCRs (-6.0%), audio equipment (-6.0%), tools/hardware (-2.0%), airfares (-5.2%), sporting goods (-2.1%), etc, - a whole range of day to day products are already recording significant price deflation. ...
Equally important however is that by denying the reality of the economy’s current plight - in order to avoid spooking investors, corporate managers, and consumers in the short run perhaps - the Fed is damaging its deflation fighting credibility. ...
Stocks rise, as Buffett put it, first for the right reasons, and then for the wrong ones. Stocks were cheap in '82...the Dow rose 550% over the next 14 years. Then, by the time Greenspan warned of "irrational exuberance", stocks were no longer cheap. But by then, no one cared. Benjamin Graham's giant "voting machine" of Wall Street cast its ballots for slick stocks with go-go technology and can-do management. Stocks rose further; and people became more and more sure that they would continue to rise. ...
"What happened in the 1990s," says Robert Shiller, author of the book "Irrational Exuberance," is that people really believed that we were going into a new era and were willing to take risks rational people would not take...people did not feel they had to save. They spent heavily because they thought the future was riskless."
But risk - like value - has a way of mounting up, even while it seems to disappear. The more infallible Alan Greenspan appeared...the more "unduly escalated" asset values became. Having warned of a modest "irrational exuberance," the maestro created a greater one.
Senior citizen concerns.
Like the unseen menace that stalked Elm Street, the pension monster has been hidden in the shadows. Now it's stepping out into the light. And is it ever one mammoth ugly creature: Big corporate pension plans in America owe some $1.2 trillion to their current and future retirees, and for the first time in years companies don't have enough money stashed away to pay for those benefits. The size of the current shortfall? $240 billion. To put that in perspective, that's more than half of what they're expected to earn this year.
It's the day of reckoning in corporate America. You've probably read that companies are restating their pension assumptions and will take a hit to earnings as a result. You've no doubt seen how the stocks of some huge, widely held companies like General Motors, Ford, Delta, and American Airlines' parent, AMR, have been pummeled, in no small part because of concerns about their underfunded pension plans. But what you may not realize is the extent of the havoc this monster can wreak. The debit is not just an accounting mirage; companies will have to start pumping cash--some $29 billion next year alone--into pension funds. That's real money. Money that won't be going to dividends or research or new plants. In other words, the monster is going to suck the blood out of those corporations.
But it looks like we have time to do two!
This means tough times will continue for computer and software companies for at least another six months until IT spending picks up. And when it does, long-term growth in IT budgets will likely be in the 6 to 7 per cent range compared with the 10 to 13 per cent growth during the years prior to the dotcom "bubble" years.
Monday December 2, 2002 19:41
12/01/2002 - Updated 09:39 PM ET
Cable may see hostility on rates
Given a choice between angering Wall Street or consumers, whom do you think cable operators pick?
That didn't take you long, did it?
You may have had some help, though, if you're one of the millions of subscribers who are starting to receive the familiar annual letters telling you how much rates are about to jump.
Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox and Cablevision Systems are among the operators that either have raised, or plan to raise, prices in the 4%-to-8% range, well ahead of inflation, which is virtually flat. The average basic cable bill, now at about $34.52 a month, is up 45% since cable was deregulated six years ago.
The real world of high tech is a bit different
than what the high tech merchants expect you to believe
David Lieberman figures the cable companies will have a tough time meeting Wall Street’s expectation, especially if the companies plan to rely on price increases to boost cash flow. He notes that Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox and Cablevision Systems are among the operators that either have raised, or plan to raise, prices in the 4%-to-8% range. That’s well ahead of inflation. The basic cable bill is now around $34.52 a month, up a whopping 45% since cable was deregulated six years ago. Good thing the programming is better.
We've got news, or bad news, for all of us.
Cable is only currently charging about 1/4 of what it costs them to operate.
And they may have technically obsolete media.
Fiber optics in sewers.
Study how Comcast got Excite software for about free! 1 2 3 4
So, cognoscenti, the cable companies all expect us to get hooked [needle in the arm] on their services so we must submit to their increases.
But there may be a problem for cable.
Satellite Internet connection.
We're in to high tech solutions!
And fun too!
Cheers
The professors' approach is complex, but it depends on a simple indicator: the ratio of the number of middle-aged people to the number of young adults in the population. When this ratio rises, the overall market's price/earnings ratio will rise, too, the professors predict. When the age ratio declines, as it is expected to do until about 2018, the P/E will also decline. . Demographics are the most critical factor in determining long-term market trends, they say, because investment behavior largely depends on age-related patterns. Younger adults, from 20 to 39, are generally consumers. Middle-aged people, 40 to 59, tend to invest in stocks.
Demography and the Long-run Predictability of the Stock Market
Calculations from the annual population tables of the Bureau of the Census shows that this ratio will decline from its current value to around 0.9 in 2018 (see Figure 3). Using Table 2 , which has a high cohort ratio close to 0.9, with á = 2 or á = 4, our model predicts a decline in the PE ratio from around 30 to a ratio between 5 and 16 in the next twenty years.
Here's another
future PE guess.
These pieces of information will make investing in about 80% of corporations look unattractive.
As the bear market has ravaged the stock market, the assets of U.S. pension funds were annihilated. State and local pension funds - whose figures are a matter of public record - have fallen in value from $80 billion in 2000 to $25 billion today...a 70% decline. Although I don't have complete figures for U.S. corporate pension funds, those numbers won't look much different from the state and local government accounts (which often use the same pension fund managers). ...
Only one in five corporate pension plans will have enough funds to fully cover liabilities next year if weak economic conditions persist, according to an analysis released by a consulting firm this week.
Pension Crisis Will Worsen in 2003
With retirement plan funding headed for a crisis, FASB contemplates possibility of accounting rule changes. Also: CPAs prod SEC to broaden rules on misleading auditors.
So much for the two-month stock market rally.
The corporate pension crisis is expected to get much worse over the next year or so as the nearly three-year bear market has forced many companies to make contributions to their defined benefit plans to cover shortfalls and comply with federal laws that protect workers’ pensions.
Retirees are more likely to sell stocks than buy them.
These days, no company wants to risk having investors dump its shares because of a perceived pension-plan problem.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YEARS, lots of companies have to actually do something about their pension funds, most of which got fat and happy during the great bull-market ’80s and ’90s. Pension funds have lost money for three straight years because stock prices have fallen so sharply. Now the bill is coming due. Trevor Harris, chief accounting analyst at Morgan Stanley, estimates that the 360 of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies that still have “defined benefit” pension plans will have aggregate pension deficits of $240 billion at the end of this year. That’s compared with a slight surplus at the end of last year, and a $263 billion surplus at the end of 2000. Think of it: a half-trillion-dollar swing in just two years. Even by federal government budget standards, that’s serious money.
Then there is all of the debt.
The lingering excesses of America’s post-bubble business cycle – especially a massive current-account deficit and record private sector debt loads – makes it hard for me to believe that there will be a vigorous response of the US economy to the latest dosage of policy stimulus.
"The length and severity of depressions depend partly on the magnitude of the 'real' maladjustments, which developed during the preceding boom and partly on the aggravating monetary and credit conditions." - Gotfried Haberler, Prosperity and Depression, 1937
Then there is Internet to get software/hardware truth to readers.
, of course, is good information.
So time to get the PC side of Embedded Controller Forth for the 8051 family workin under on both Windows 2000 and 98SE.
At the peak of the bubble in 2000, some 450 corporations had launched VC units, according to a recent study released by a trio of professors at the London Business School. More than 100 of those units are no longer active, according to the study--including those at British Airways, Compaq Computer, Marconi, and the Vodafone Group. Of the remainder, you can bet another 100 or so would love to wash their hands clean of the whole experience. ...
Though CSFB won't talk on the record, industry watchers say the firm is representing Hewlett-Packard as it attempts to off-load its venture holdings. Insiders say HP plowed roughly $250 million into its portfolio, which at its peak had a valuation north of $1 billion. In a galling lesson for HP, sources say the entire portfolio is expected to fetch no more than $10 million.
Keyboard work! Which now needs to be done after the thinking phase of the project is over.
Japanese it is reported, spend roughly 80% of the time planning a project and 20% of the time executing the project.
It has been said that the reverse is true in the U.S.
In 1995, Japanese experts watched in disbelief as the nation slid into deflation. Economists insist conditions are different in the U.S. But the similarities -- low interest rates, high debt levels and falling prices -- suggest the threat is real.
But we're going to try to beat this with improved software productivity tools. And have fun which doing this too!
But this week, when AOL Time Warner holds a much-anticipated press conference, there won’t be any backslapping. In fact, there won’t be any Jerry Levin, who abruptly retired months ago. Case, the man who helped send his partner packing, will be there, though there likely will be a harsh spotlight on him. The man now running the show, Richard Parsons, will unveil a new AOL Time Warner strategy: to create a kind of “must-have AOL,” in which consumers would pay extra for exclusive online offerings from Time Warner siblings. In effect, it turns the company’s original model on its head, with Old Media re-energizing the New Economy division. The mantra from Parsons these days is to under promise and over deliver. After all, no one is in the mood to hear spin from a company that was never able to live up to its own hype. The combined company’s stock, which peaked at $56.60 in May 2001, hit bottom in July 2002 at $8.70, and is now trading at about $16. That collapse has wiped out a stunning $280 billion in value for one of the market’s most widely held stocks since the deal was announced. And its capitalization may take a further hit—the company faces its second investigation by the SEC and the Justice Department over its accounting.
The company’s stock is so beaten down that, NEWSWEEK has learned, several Wall Street buyout firms have explored making a bid for the company’s assets, particularly its online operations.
Bill's ms and phd student Lewis wrote AOL, Time Warner, and the Crash of 2000.
Speaking of mistakes.
On most measures, we are in the sixth-worst bear market ever experienced. A few weeks ago, when the market was about 10% lower, it equalled the previous record set in 1937, and qualified as the second-worst bear market.
The report examines correlations between the magnitudes of declines in previous bear markets and subsequent recovery times. It finds some sobering relationships. By using regression analysis, it estimates the recovery time we could expect in this bear market.
The conclusion is that, for a total market decline of about 45%, the historical relationships suggest the recovery period should last about 96 months. Even if the current decline of about 38% does represent the bottom - which the firm does not believe - six years would still be required.
The pattern of previous recoveries is also revealing. In the past 27 bear markets and their subsequent recoveries, the average price move in the recovery phases was 59%, double the average decline of 29%.
However, the recoveries from bear markets take far longer than the declines; the average recovery phase lasts 57 months, three times longer than the relatively quick decline of 17 months.
Earnings and valuations will influence the timing and pace of a recovery but the report is wary on valuations. It says the market's current p:e of about 35 is "very high" relative to the long-term historical mean of 15.
The pension liability problem may bring lots of companies under! Or their pensioners put on the street!
What will 2003 economy be like? We'll see!
Think BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth ... and interactive fun!
Not all trends are bad, of course. But many still go unnoticed. Take the bull market of the 1990s, for example. The Netscape IPO that launched the mania occurred in the spring of 1995...five years before the market's peak. Few people understood what was likely to happen. In his 1994 book, The Road Ahead, about the future of computer technologies, Bill Gates, doesn't even mention the word "Internet."
The biggest trend we see in place right now can easily be captured in one word: debt. Since 1992, there's been an ominous shift in debt from the public to the private sector. Federal borrowing rates have declined, while private borrowing has grown at a rate never seen before in America.
The vast majority of the debts we added in the 1990s were used to fuel massive financial speculation in corporations and home mortgages. As these financial assets begin to deflate, the debt remains, causing the debt to loom higher and higher as a percentage of assets. Total debt, as a percentage of GDP, has grown from around 150% in 1982 to nearly 300% today. ...
As the bear market has ravaged the stock market, the assets of U.S. pension funds were annihilated. State and local pension funds - whose figures are a matter of public record - have fallen in value from $80 billion in 2000 to $25 billion today...a 70% decline. Although I don't have complete figures for U.S. corporate pension funds, those numbers won't look much different from the state and local government accounts (which often use the same pension fund managers). ...
Meanwhile, news of enormous future charges to earnings based on the mandatory contributions to their sagging pension funds are filling the pages of the financial media. For example, SBC announced this week it would take a $2 billion charge against earnings next year to begin repairing its pension plan. Raytheon says it must pay $500 million towards its pension fund over the next two years. Right now, Wall Street estimates that 10% of the S&P 500's earnings next year will go towards underfunded pensions. ...
Capacity utilization in electronics, for example, has declined from 90% in 1999 to under 65% today. ...
This rapid decline in capacity utilization is one of the symptoms of a credit bubble bursting. ...
And if the US is going into a deflation there could be some real trouble here.
The Lucent high tech story is absolutely scary.
While the crash of the technology sector has triggered a surge of bankruptcies, few of the failed dot-coms or other New Economy companies have had traditional pensions. Lucent is something different, a maker of high-tech gear for the communications industry with roots deep in the Old Economy and with many more retirees than current workers.
Lucent is contractually bound to pay each of the 275,000 people covered by its pension plan, and its work force of 35,000 must generate the cash to keep the pension trust funded. These circumstances parallel those of the steel sector, where stripped-down remnants of once-huge work forces now struggle to sell enough steel to pay the last generation's retirement benefits.
Especially in a possibly deflating economy.
Senior citizens have to be careful. And keep somewhat busy and entertained too!
Here's an article which may be trying to make you feel okay about being ripped off.
Yet many workers who stay on the job past age 70 are smacking into a series of laws and regulations that may boost their taxes, deplete their retirement savings and erode the value of their Social Security benefits. Some say the federal government seems determined to penalize them for continuing to work.
Bill designed lots of pc boards at Sandia labs.
We contracted production to a number of pcb vendors. Then we used contract assembly to build the boards.
Most are no longer in business.
Csd believes that with 80C32 SOCs the pcb are going to be much simpler, ie fewer parts on layers.
The complexity will have to transferred inside the chip.
| PCB industry still in the doldrums
Weak demand sparks flurry of fab closures in North
America Hopes for a recovery in the printed-circuit-board market next year have faded. Weak demand, stiff overseas competition, unrelenting price erosion, and shortened lead times are forcing many PCB manufacturers with soft balance sheets to significantly scale back their operations in North America. Teradyne Connection Systems (TCS) knows the story. With plans to close its PCB fab in San Diego next month, the company will have only one PCB plant in North America, at its Nashua, N.H., headquarters. "The San Diego site could manufacture 44- layer boards," said Tom Pursch, vice president of Teradyne's Components Business unit and manager of TCS, a division of Boston-based Teradyne Inc. "As we rationalized our demand and looked at where the world was headed, we realized we did not need two North American board shops," Pursch said.
Last week, Honeywell Advanced Circuits (HAC) auctioned off two PCB fabs it had closed earlier this year in two Minnesota cities, Buffalo and Roseville. The auction included the sale of some manufacturing equipment from its lone PCB fab in Chippewa Falls, Wis. HAC is a subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., Morristown, N.J. Domestic demand is so poor that North American PCB makers are using less than 50% of overall capacity, resulting in steep operating losses for many. Worldwide PCB revenue in 2001 fell 24%, to $32.5 billion, and will increase only slightly, to $33 billion, this year, mostly because of Taiwan board suppliers that are expanding into China, said Andrew Rassweiler, an analyst at iSuppli Corp., El Segundo, Calif At the same time, OEMs have been aggressive about their desire to have PCBs made in lower-cost Asia. And Asian PCB manufacturers that make their living producing low-layer- count boards complied by adding more capacity to make higher-layer- count boards, according to analysts. "Asian board makers can competently service more than two-thirds of North American production today," said Chris Whitmore, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., San Francisco, in a report. "They are adding capacity and gaining technical know-how at an alarming pace. PCB fab fundamentals will continue to deteriorate until we see a rebound in end- market demand and a substantial decrease in worldwide capacity." TCS is mulling plans to form a partnership with an Asian company, while at the same time focusing on revamping its remaining North American fab, Pursch said. "We'll focus our North American capabilities on niche products-high-end, high-capability, high-mix, low-volume, some military applications, and quick- turn boards for new-product introduction," he said. "Over time, we'll continue to subcontract out lower-end products where the capability exists in low-cost regions." Changing times Indeed, North American PCB manufacturers will have a different look in the future, according to Jim Savage, an analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners LLC, New York. "High-volume, medium technology and low-layer-count board production will never come back to North America. That business is shifting to China," Savage said. 'Anyone whose business is based on that will not be successful. "The business that stays in North America will be quickturn and high technology with big, complex backplanes, advanced and high- frequency materials, and high-density, high-layercount boards," he said. Vertically integrated EMS providers with PCB plants in North America, such as Flextronics International Pte. Ltd. and Sanmina-SCI Corp., have indicated further consolidation is on the horizon. Michael Marks, Flextronics' chairman and chief executive, told analysts that he expects to make further reductions in the Singapore EMS company's global PCB fab business in light of soft sales. Analysts believe Flextronics will target underperforming plants in North America and Europe. This year, Flextronics' PCB division, Multek, saw its North American sales drop to $130 million from $270 mil lion in 2000, said Harvey Miller, a partner with Kirk-Miller Associates, a Palo Alto, Calif., consulting firm that has created Fabfile Systems, a database of PCB fab companies. In July, IBM Corp. sold its Endicott, N.Y., PCB fabrication operation to a newly formed company named Endicott Interconnect Technologies Inc. The move was part of the Armonk, N.Y., computer manufacturer's ongoing effort to cut $5 billion from its supply chain. The former IBM site is expected to generate sales this year in North America of $210 million, a 34% drop from sales of $320 million in 2000, according to Fabfile. Returning to the core Industry observers said IBM's sale followed the lead of other OEMs with underperforming PCB fabs that decided to eliminate their exposure to the market and turn attention to core business fundamentals. "OEMs are under such competitive pressure that it goes down the supply chain to suppliers," Miller said. "There's no loyalty at all, especially when times get hard. Suppliers are trying to beat variable costs. They can't buy new equipment or do much research and development in this situation. It's a matter of surviving." And some North American PCB fabrication makers with operations in China consider themselves survivors. "We have different cans to play," said John Hastings, director of investor relations at Viasystems Group Inc., St. Louis. "We have facilities in China, Europe, and North America. We're not like some companies that are just focused on North America." But Viasystems, which closed a large Richmond, Va., PCB plant last year, saw its board sales drop to $180 million this year from $440 million in 2000, according to the Fabfile database. "This by far is the longest downcycle we've experienced as an industry," TCS' Pursch said. "We came off such a high in 2000 that the peak to the trough is a lot farther than it's ever been." <> EBN november 25, 2002 |
We have to contain 80C32 SOC operating system costs ... and have a better product.
In Electronic News' annual ranking of top semiconductor companies, many of the players moved up or down the charts. All companies saw their revenue figures plummet over the course of the year. As a group, the top 25's semiconductor sales dropped from more than $167 billion to just less than $112 billion this year.
| BUSINESS
PICTURE A BIT BETTER FOR NEXT YEAR IT industry growth slows sharply in 2002
The information technology industry suffered its largest decline ever in 2002, with a growth rate of -2.3%, according to market research firm IDC. However, IDC, Framingham, Mass., expects the $875 billion dollar market to recover in 2003, growing at a rate of more than 5%. Overall, the IT industry has contracted by roughly 3% over the past two years, compared with an average annual growth rate of 12% the past 20 years, IDC said. Major contributors to this year's decline include a 9.3% reduction in worldwide sales of IT systems, comprising PCs, servers, and workstations. Meanwhile, the global storage market shrank by 10.6% in 2002 and isn't expected to recover to its 2001 level until after 2006. The worldwide network equipment market experienced a 7.6% decline as sales to telecom service providers dropped sharply And the services market, which today represents more than one- third of total global IT revenue, also underwent a dramatic decline as the average contract value fell to a three-year low, IDC said. Although IDG projects IT spending to resume growth in 2003, it cautioned against unrealistic expectations. Software spending will remain weak while price competition will inhibit revenue growth in the hardware sector. Services growth will be similarly restricted by smaller projects. Beyond 2003, IDC expects growth rates to improve for several years, followed by slower growth later in the decade. The research firm also emphasized that significant changes in the economic or geopolitical environment, such as a prolonged war in Iraq or another plunge in the stock market, could result in lower growth rates for IT spending. Because of the possibility that these more negative external conditions might be realized, IDC produced for the first time an alternate "down-side" forecast. Under these more negative conditions, IDC believes worldwide lT spending growth next year will be closer to 2%, with spending in future years approximating real GDP growth. <> EBN november 25, 2002 |
Csd doesn't like the page size to be over 500k bytes. This page is.
The only truly serious deflation the United States experienced in the past century was at the beginning of the Great Depression, when prices fell about 10 percent a year from 1930 through 1933. In a new book, "A History of the Federal Reserve, 1914-1951," economist Allen Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon University says the deflation and the Depression were primarily the result of a mistaken Fed policy that allowed the money supply to decline sharply. That policy was reversed when President Franklin D. Roosevelt devalued the dollar against gold and the resulting inflow of gold led to a renewed expansion of the money supply.
Last week Meltzer told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute that he was confident the Fed, using different tools, could deal with any deflationary threat.
Many financial analysts agree with that assessment, but they caution that times could still be tough despite Fed action to flood the economy with money. In a deflationary situation, however it came about, American consumers and businesses might have become so worried and uncertain about the future that they hold back on spending, even with interest rates at rock bottom and plenty of cash available.
Government statistics show that average prices for products have declined in the past year, including those of cars, clothing, computers, furniture, gasoline and heating oil. So, too, have the prices for services such as telephones, hotel rooms and airplane tickets, even as costs for other services such as health care, housing, education and cable television continued to rise. ...
Deflation, like cholesterol, comes in good and bad varieties. ...
By contrast, the bad kind of deflation occurs because there are too few customers chasing too many goods and services, resulting in repeated rounds of competitive price cutting that leads to layoffs, falling wages, and a decline in business investment and consumer spending.
That attendance at last week's Comdex was a far cry from two years ago, when the show attracted more than 200,000 visitors. In 2000, more than 2,300 vendors displayed their wares at the show; this year, just 1,100 showed up
Who stole the
pension fund money?
Some cashed in at the top of the bubble. Those who likely caused the bubble, of course.
And you think these things happen by accident?
There are some highly intelligent people whose total goal is to gain financial wealth. And they are planning their next move. The bond market? The real estate market?
Only one in five corporate pension plans will have enough funds to fully cover liabilities next year if weak economic conditions persist, according to an analysis released by a consulting firm this week.
The firm, Watson Wyatt & Co. (NYSE:WW - News), also said Monday if the weak stock market continues, the percentage of companies that will need to contribute to their pension plans next year could more than double to 65 percent. U.S. companies will have to pump billions of dollars into pension plans weakened by the current bear market. Federal law requires companies to protect the solvency of pension plans, which guarantee benefits to retired workers.
Possibility that we are going into a deflation is real.
But nothing prevented the subsequent launching of the late-1990s hi-tech boom, arguably the most astonishing burst of irrational exuberance in history.
The damage done during the financial mania has left many structural imbalances that only time and a continuing bear market can correct. ...
The record debt accompanied by tremendous worldwide overcapacity and an overvalued stock market will take time to correct. ...
In a deflation case spending lots of money on system software is not a good idea. Spend some of your time learning something new and have some fun too.
The sale price of app software might not be high enough to pay for expensive development software.
While we read a lot of hype about the economy some probably put there by some to intentionally make the market go up so that some can sell as soon as this happens, state economic data may be a more reliable indication of what's really happening to the economy.
The outlook for state budgets across the US was described as "bleak" and "dire" on Monday in a grim report that contained an unusually blunt plea from governors for billions of dollars in new federal support.
The National Governors Association warned that state budgets were now in the "worst shape since World War II", highlighting the economy's weakness and the reversal of budget fortunes across the US over the past two years. ...
All states currently enjoy high, investment-grade credit ratings, but S&P warned last month of possible rating downgrades for debt issued by Arizona, California, Connecticut, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington.
Financial conservatism is likely a good idea in these times. Keep the debts down. Or plan on bankruptcy, of course! But it's getting harder to do Chapter 7.
Courts are forcing more Chapter 13s.
Thing likely will get get better and we want to be there with some neat 80C32 and PC side software when they do ... without spending tons of money, of course!
If you happened to log on to this site, then please look at Nolo press on this site.
What Nolo press is trying to do with legal matters, we are trying to do with 80C32 software.
Good turkey day and good internet reading too!
This is the time to get ready for the next up cycle.
Our CREF retirment income has taken a big hit in this bear market. Where is the bottom?
We must continue to be conservative and get the software working we need to do the job at reasonable cost.
Keil is not the solution!
USB and 80C32 SOCs look to be winner ... running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, of course!
Happy turkey day!
Deflation?
Sun margins to narrow
Mr McGowan said competitive pricing would cause Sun's gross margin to narrow "slightly" from its gross margin of 41.2 per cent in the first quarter. He declined to provide more detail on the quarter, noting that Sun was only eight weeks into a 13-week period.
Sun, which last month said it would cut about 4,400 jobs, said most of the US layoffs had been completed and the majority of the job cuts outside of the US would be completed by the end of the third quarter. Shares in Sun nosed up 1 per cent to $3.80 in after hours trading.
HELSINKI, Nov 27 (Reuters) - Contract electronics maker Sanmina-SCI Corp (nasdaq: SANM - news - people) said on Wednesday it would cut almost 30 percent of its staff in Finland due to persistently weak demand.
Csd's 19 inch Relsys monitor failed Sunday
night.
Monitor Masters said they would fix it for $79. But this about the price of a new 17 inch.
Monitor Masters offered a reconditioned 21 inch Hitachi for $95 with 60 day warranty.
Csd took this offer.
Then Csd delivered the failing Relsys to a dealer for proper recycling.
Monitor Masters reported that Albuquerque is getting increasingly concerned about ewaste. They reported that individuals may still be able to get away throwing a monitor in the trash. But companies can't do this.
Embedded Processors by the Numbers
by Jim Turley
About zero percent of the world's microprocessors are used in computers. Yup. Every PC, Macintosh, engineering workstation, Cray supercomputer, and all the other general-purpose computers put together account for less than 1% of all the microprocessors sold every year. If you round off the fractions, embedded systems consume 100% of the worldwide production of microprocessors.
What Turley is also saying is that about 0 percent of microprocessors are properly recycled.
Microprocessors have some very toxic components known to cause birth defects.
The semiconductor industry is facing serious problems.
Bill Gates (pictured), Microsoft's chairman, said the world's largest company will make fewer acquisitions and investments than in the past, following big losses on equity holdings in cable and broadband companies, particularly in the UK. He acknowledged that the software company would have done better to invest its money in US treasury bonds during the late 1990s rather than take stakes in these groups.
"We are chastened. There are some investments that you will see us do, but probably less altogether and with a lot more care and in connection with strategic relationships," said Mr Gates in an interview with the Financial Times. ...
"We want to keep our R&D spending strong even during industry cycles. A strong balance sheet - it doesn't necessarily have to be quite as strong as ours - a strong balance sheet is a very important element in that," said Mr Gates. The company is investing $5.2bn a year on research and development.
After an important legal filing yesterday afternoon, Csd is resuming the project to convert the PC side Forth software to Visual Basic 6.0, C dll, and C++ wdm driver.
Microsoft software tools reduce the cost of software. But does this lead to deflation?
Global: Fighting Deflation
Stephen Roach (New York)
Policymakers at America’s Federal Reserve have finally joined the battle against deflation. And I commend them for that. I have been critical of the US central bank over the past few years for its unwise exuberance in nurturing asset bubbles -- first in equities and, more recently, in property. But I am entirely supportive of the Fed’s recent efforts to atone for its sins and now address what I see as the major risk of our time -- deflation. Key questions remain as to whether the actions will work and what impact they will have on the broader global arena. But this is important progress.
Software will get less expensive.
Improved technology, like BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, of course, will make peripheral end software less expensive.
Fewer programmers will be needed!
The days of signing bonuses and foosball lounges for IT employees are fading fast.
The latest evidence: IT payroll costs are set to go down—yes, down—next year.
According to the Robert Half Technology 2003 Salary Guide, starting salaries for information technology professionals are projected to decrease an average of 1.3 percent in 2003. "Economic uncertainty combined with an extended high-tech downturn continues to impact IT hiring activity," said Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology. "For the most part, starting salaries have stabilized, with increases in base compensation reserved for the most sought-after specialties, such as network architecture, disaster recovery, and systems security administration."
Debt burden increases by 61%
Monday, November 25, 2002People with financial problems increased their debts by 61 percent last year and have more than $52,000 in credit card debt on average, according to a new study by the national financial counseling center Myvesta. The debts of the organization's average client skyrocketed from $162,847 last year to $262,825 this year, including mortgages, car loans, credit card bills and other debts. Myvesta's typical client pays $1,039 a month in credit card bills, $1,440 on a mortgage and $719 on a car loan.
We have to keep software costs down. Many need the money for other things!
Let's look at some debt load web sites.
America's Total Debt Report
Circular Flow and Distribution of U.S. Money Supply Income Loads
This is all scary. Super scary!
Guys, we have to limit what we are paying for peripheral side 80C32 SOC software to get our jobs done.
Paying thousands of bucks to Keil for an obsolete technology is not the way.
The six identified changes in high tech hardware/software technology coupled with a monumental debt load in a possibly deflating economy may cause some of us to question
So we need to hold down 80C32 software development costs while building more reliable apps on top of existing known-technology interactive real-time operating systems. BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, of course!
NIH is bad.
And these are very important project for all citizens.
Our civil rights are in danger, having been stolen by crooked, in writing of course, lawyers.
The lawyer infestation and current economic problems are not unrelated.
Keep in mind that lawyers contribute nothing to the GNP!
Hopefully the law projects will conclude soon so that more time can be devoted to port, not reinvent, 80C32 Forth to SOCs connected to gigaHertz PCs through USB.
Because of the law business bill was forced to learn C/C++, dll, vxd, and wdm driver technology. And even Visual Basic 6.0 app programming to prove that error bits from a wdm driver were, in fact, properly being transferred to ring 3.
"Economists say America is unlikely to follow into Japanese-style deflation," said a recent Wall Street Journal article, "because U.S. leaders reacted to their slowing economy much more quickly than Japanese leaders did..."
Oh?
The question bores most people. But it haunts us like an unsolved crime. Spectators, we sit on the edge of our chairs to see what will happen next.
"Every extra dollar borrowed by a consumer now puts us all a dollar further from recovery, the debtor a dollar closer to default, and his bank a dollar closer to a bigger loan loss provision than it would have had to face by foreclosing while there was still something to be salvaged."
When a software company goes belly-up, there are not many tangible assets.
A cd-rom with the software source. Documentation? Probably not.
Chapter 7, not 11, is what software vendors do.
Csd has some very interesting software chapter 7 and lawyer stories.
Lawsuits by frustrated software customers. Really interesting to see. Not participate in.
Before the Nasdaq, a small company that wanted to raise capital had to borrow from a bank or float a bond issue, which meant it had to pay interest.A better way was to sell stock to the public and essentially collect interest-free money. If the company was big enough, it might qualify for a listing on the NYSE or the American Stock Exchange. If not, it could take its chances on the over-the-counter market, a kind of Wild West of financial markets where information moved slowly and share prices often swung crazily. ...
To many investors, it wasn't a specious comparison. No stock market in history climbed as fast as the Nasdaq did from 1997 to early 2000, and almost none took away the winnings as quickly.
Just wait until the Chinese get into software.
India Indians are already into software.
Deflation like we've never seen it!
Most Indians and Chinese couldn't afford computers until they became so inexpensive.
In the Malaysian industrial center of Penang last year, some 16,000 jobs disappeared from the high-paying electronics industry, including those of managers and engineers. "Their companies ask them to go to China to help set up factories," Kenneth Stephen Perkins, a union leader, said of such skilled employees. "When they come back to Penang, they are informed they no longer have jobs."
The semiconductor industry is the deflation leader.
And also many semiconductor companies are in deep debt. And may have to service this debt with less revenue from their products.
May is used since some or many will simply chapter 7 or 11. This may have been the plan in the first place.
Again using Dr. Bernanke’s own words (but from our antithetical analytical framework): “In other words, the best way to get out of trouble is not to get into it in the first place.” Precisely! And that is what Dr. Richebacher has been preaching for years. Paraphrasing the good doctor, “There is no cure for a Bubble other than not letting it begin in the first place.” If the Wall Street darling Benjamin Strong would have acted responsibly to safeguard sound money and financial stability – thus thwarting financial and economic excess in the mid-twenties as things began running completely out of control - it is likely that financial collapse and depression could have been avoided. And applying Dr. Henry Kaufman’s quote regarding the Greenspan era: “The Fed missed its timing.” Well, Benjamin Strong bet the farm and lost. Greenspan has lost the ranch, although the “house” apprehensively consents to his gambling on his neighbors’ homesteads. Blaming the Great Depression on those that were rightly fearful of escalating dangerous financial and economic imbalances – those dreadful “Bubble Poppers” – is such a gross distortion of the facts and an injustice to sound economic analysis. Long live the Bubble Poppers!
Since we are all trying to avoid financial disaster, you might be interested in
Just like the wondrous meteor storm I dragged myself out of bed to marvel at early Tuesday morning, real interest rates are plunging from the heavens. They are negative already, but history shows they can plummet much, much lower before we emerge safely from the clutches of this horrific supercycle Great Bear bust.
The Morales and Payne legal projects are progressing well.
Computers, of course, are leading deflation.
A leader in the price-slashing is eMachines, which is promoting a system with a powerful 1.7-gigahertz processor and a 40-gigabyte hard drive for $399. Manufacturers are cutting prices to move machines by year's end and make up for sales projections that were too optimistic, analysts say.
Those 80C32 vendors who implement USB 2.0 runnng a BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating system, of course, should do just fine.
Infineon, the German semiconductor manufacturer, is bracing itself for deep operating losses in contrast to analyst forecasts for an operating profit in the current fiscal year through September 2003.
The group, however, is challenging analysts' low sales expectations and forecasting optimistic revenue targets for the period. In an internal paper drawn up by Infineon's supervisory board, seen by FT Deutschland, the world's third-biggest producer of chips for personal computers expects operating losses before tax and interest to exceed €200m ($200m).
Ulrich Schumacher, chief executive of Infineon, had previously declined to give a forecast for the current fiscal year. "The market situation is far too unpredictable", he said at an annual press conference two weeks ago. ...
The company recently reported a record net loss of €1.02bn for its fiscal year to September, compared with a loss of €591m a year earlier, on sales of €5.21bn, down 8 per cent year-on-year.
and
Meanwhile, I think the Fed finally gets it. The "it" in this case is deflation. A remarkable speech by Fed Governor Ben Bernanke says it all (see his November 21 address "Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here" posted on the Fed’s Web site). This speech, on the heels of the larger-than-expected 50 bp monetary easing of November 6, leaves little doubt in my mind that the Fed has gone into a full-blown anti-deflation drill.
and
Washington, Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. is unlikely to experience deflation because of the country's strong financial system, efficient capital markets, and a central bank which has the right policy tools to prevent a general fall in prices, Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke said.
Csd hopes all of you are following articles at the prudentbear and Zeal for they may save some of your remaining investments.
High tech is likely in some of the most serious trouble in history.
Deflating economy is now mirrored.
Adam Hamilton's November 15, 2002 has a very interesting article on where the NASDAQ may end up and choices for investment.
Senior citizens, of course, are and should be concerned that their pensions funds are being stolen! Some by high tech companies whose products are going no where in the marketplace.
While updating the Keil link, bill got a phone call from Lewis.
Gee, Bill's ms and phd student Lewis wrote AOL, Time Warner, and the Crash of 2000.
Lewis pointed out that his prediction turned out to be even worse than he expected.
But we also discussed what will be future winners. And this may involve random numbers. And Internet too, of course!
SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition)?
Hmm, we're working so that anyone connected over Internet to an intelligent 80C32 SOC sensor can log on to that 80C32 SOC over Internet.
Maybe we need a absolutely brilliant crypto security system too?
Bill would have never gotten into Internet if it were not for John Young.
But now here, this is simply a BLAST!
Have a good weekend.
Hey, we hope, Allah willing of course, to be able to run BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth on this machine with only the USB connector connected.
The Cypress board is sitting on top of a printout
of an email from Russia and a complete description of the
CAVE algorithm.
Investments.
The debt chart article moved.
Csd, a senior citizen operated business, is hearing more and more stories of retirees being financially ruined by the stock market crash. They are being forced back to work.
Since the rate of return is smoothed over a number of years, the significant drop in equities since early 2000 is only now starting to impact corporate earnings. A recent study by UBS Warburg says that S&P 500 companies are running their first pension deficits since 1993. The report estimates that a combined pension surplus of $252 billion in 1999 has turned into a deficit of $126 billion. The impact on income statements is significant. Last year S&P 500 companies showed pension income of $8.2 billion, but this has now swung around to an expense of $5.4 billion. Pension fund investment income in 2001 was 16.3% of the total profits for the entire index.
The stock market decline may not be over if price/earning ratios are a valid criterion.
And high tech old workers usually can't go back to their jobs. Many didn't keep up with new technology.
Economics professsor Bob Wallace recommend bill read "The Great Crash: 1929" by John Kenneth Galbraith.
Galbraith made clear that no one knew the bottom of the stock crash even long after it bottomed.
Friday November 15, 2002 16:46
Companies must contain software costs in a possibly defalating economy.
At an Estate Planning Workshop bill attended on Tuesday, Alan Read of CLA, reported that 80% of the wealth in the US was owned by citizens 65 or older.
So it's natural crooks flock to where the money is. The pension funds. And senior citizens too.
Some of them use high tech venture ploys to bilk bankers and investiment firms of senior citizens money.
Think Visual Basic 6.0, 80C32 BASIC-52 and even Forth.
We have an idea about whose dollars may disappear. The senior citizens. They might be forced to live only on social security ... as long as that lasts.
Who is going to get stiffed on all the borrowed dollars?
What has happened to stock prices during the past decade reflects the state of Japan's economy during this same period, one typified by stagnation and deflation.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Though most economists doubt the scary monster called deflation will wade across the Pacific and level the United States the way it polished off Japan, many U.S. businesses still have a real problem raising prices, and that could affect some stock prices as well.
Please note the change below.
Look what's happened to the VCs, especially those who invested in non-80C32 SOCS. ARM, ARC, Tensillica, .... the fools or possibly crooks.
Here's an example of the problem: Honeywell.
Absolute brilliance = productivity
High tech appears to be having terrible times, especially in silicon valley.
Here's the underlying problem.
The problem will be even more serious if we enter a deflating economy.
Fewer bucks to pay off expensive borrowed bucks. In the real world, of course, this means who in his right mind is going to try to do this.
Chapter 7 or 11 is the only way. Screw the investor.
But csd doesn't agree with this strategy. But this is likely to happen.
Where are the debtors going to get the dollars to pay back the loans?
In an inflating economy lots of buck pay off few borrowed bucks. This is doable.
Csd, of course, is conservative, but you can tell this from the web.
And we are having fun!
Look what's happened to the VCs, especially those who invested in non-80C32 SOCS. ARM, ARC, Tensillica, .... the fools or possibly crooks.
Too Much Ventured Nothing Gained VCs are a hurting bunch.
New companies feel their pain.
FORTUNE
Monday, November 25, 2002 By Russ Mitchell
Deflation might happen this next year.
[I]n the case of the Internet, one need look no further than the 75 percent decline in the Nasdaq to understand that very little of the economic benefit of this new technology has flowed to any but the earliest investors. In the end, a key segment of society did profit from the bubble. According to J. Bradford DeLong, an economic historian at the University of California at Berkeley, consumers are the big winners. They enjoy the low prices that flow from ruinous competition and reap the benefit of improved products and services that result when companies use new technology to operate more efficiently.
How the Bubble Economy burst
Steven Pearlstein
The Washington Post
"The problem is that the Fed is still pursuing a restrictive policy," said David Hunter, chief market strategist at Kelly & Christensen, who argued the Fed's policy moves have continuously proven to be too little and too late. "It is not the fact that inflation is the lowest in decades that causes me to forecast deflation in 2003, it is the Fed's lack of understanding of the immediacy and magnitude of the deflation risk."
So great is the risk -- and the Fed's blindness to it -- that Hunter expects 2003 will be the "worst economic year this country has experienced" since the 1930s. Rather than preventing deflation's onset, the myriad structural differences between the U.S. and Japan will result in a "much swifter and steeper" descent into deflation here vs. the gradual creep there, he suggested.
thestreet.comBUBBLE : The Influence of Venture Capitalists 'Johnny Appleseed' for a Risky Field Doerr's Ambition Paid Off -- at First
Here another fascinating link to the current economic problems.
Here's more on the debt problem.
The economic condition of the US is pretty horrifying when one studies the Prudent Bear's graph.
Sunday November 10, 2002 19:52
Silicon Valley got blindsided with Windows 2000. And maybe getting blindsided again with USB 2.0 while pushing 32 and 64-bit peripheral microcontrollers.
And maybe suffering unemployment consequences for these mistakes.
Also many corporations and individuals are burdened with debt which rose with the bubble economy.
So many, not some, companies may try to pay off debts in possibly a deflating economy. And will likely go broke like Enron, Global Crossing or Excite with a chapter 11 or 7.
Got to watch Cypress about this with its apparent astronomical debt in this apparent deflationary economic cycle.
The moral of this commentary for the intelligent [as opposed to the other type. ... Retirement checks are simply great for freedom of expression!] 80C32 SOC vendors is to get Forth and BASIC-52 running quickly on their chips interfaced to Windows through USB and a wdm driver!
Tuesday October 29, 2002 16:12
Shred's article has message similar to Manner's article
The tech stocks that led the market in the 1990s may not lead in the 2000s. The Oracles, Sun Microsystems and Ciscos may not be the next technology leaders, and their early struggles could be an indication of shifting market leadership. Buying Xerox in the early 1970s would have cost you severely since then, but buying Intel would have made you wealthy. The challenge for tech investors is to spot those emerging leaders. Watch for breakouts and accelerating fundamentals, and ignore laggards.
We will, of course, see what happens!
Wednesday October 23, 2002 14:30
Predictions are made that 1 in 3 high tech companies will fail.
Richard McClendon has some ominous economic predictions.
Friday October 18, 2002 12:25
Gee, Bill's ms and phd student Lewis wrote AOL, Time Warner, and the Crash of 2000.
Monday October 7, 2002 18:20
ARM stock has declined
from about 6 to 2 in the past week.
The October 2002 issue of Embedded Systems is only 48 pages long. The magazine looks like it is having financial problems. Few advertisers.
One reason Forth isn't as popular as it should be is that magazine, like esp, don't push it since other language and operating system vendors are spending money for magazine advertising. Welcome to the real world.
The editor in chief of esp appears a bit depressed. So we'll post his editorial.
Michael Barr
Get Rich Slow
By a show of hands, how many of you jumped ship from a stable engineering company to a startup in the late ‘90s? I bet if you didn’t, you at least thought about it or had a few offers. I never jumped ship myself, but straddled two boats at once, trying to make a quick million on a tight budget of night and weekend hours.
I guess I always knew the air would come out of the bubble at some point. And I sure as heck knew it wouldn’t be good to be on top if that happened. So my partners and I kept our day jobs and focused on long-term issues in our business planning. How would we profit from our ideas in ways other than a quick sale of the company or an IPO? We figured we’d identified a product and a market for it, so needed only to develop the code and keep expenses lower than revenues while we increased sales.
Still, we crossed our fingers and hoped as much as the next guy that we would time our business just right and make a bundle somehow. We certainly weren’t going to turn down a multimillion dollar purchase offer—and were so confident our company was worth it that we turned down a bona fide small, private funding source and free help from an experienced CEO because it would’ve valued the company far less initially.
In the end, unfortunately, the bursting of the bubble took not only the really bad ideas but also many good ones (including ours) down with it. By the time we had filed our patent application, developed our prototype, and written our business plan, all of the funding sources for search engine enhancements had dried up. I suspect several of the venture capital firms and search engine companies we talked to would’ve jumped at the chance to be involved with our idea just a few months earlier. But the game was up. And two years later— long after we wrote off our personal investments in the company—the capital we needed to quit our jobs and work toward profitability still isn’t available. So I have a new plan.My new plan is to get rich slow. To play the part of the tortoise rather than the hare. Engineering is a good, stable profession, and one that generally pays well—especially if you have a specialty as in demand as real-time embedded systems design. It’s really not a bad life, if you can get it.
So rather than try to outwit or outplay, I’ll just try to outlast—and I’ll save everything I can along the way. Besides, it’s a lot easier to stick to your core values and make the world a better place little by little when you’re not busy making an end run. To see how extremely disjointed the two paths can become, witness any of the recent corporate scandals.
Honesty, integrity, and responsibility should be the core values of all practicing engineers. And we should practice them outside of work as well. There’s more to life than engineering and money, as fun as both are. So I’m stopping to smell the roses now more, too. It sure is nice to have my nights and weekends back! And that’s worth a lot to me.
mbarr@cmp.com