On the republican side, there is Sam Blakeslee. In the special election he got just short of 50%, which forced this regular election to be held. Since he found himself so far ahead, he has decided to make absolutely sure that he never answers a question from a reporter, and never appears in a public debate with his democratic opponent. As a former employee of Exxon who has supported offshore oil drilling in california, you couldn’t ask for a more obnoxious candidate.

The Democrat is a guy whose platform seems to be “we need to break the 2/3 rule and we need to raise taxes”. Great thinking you fuckwit – have you ever thought of why the California budget is always broken?

No wonder California is broken if this is what we end up with.

But I saved my biggest criticism for last. These candidates have met in a debate once, but somehow nobody thought to videotape it and upload it to youtube. There were a grand total of 200 people present at the debate, but none of the news outlets thought to do this, and neither party thought of doing it, and the organizers of the event never thought of it. Democracy FAIL.

In olden days people used to say that “The stock market has higher risk but higher expected return than bonds”. I have come to believe that since the financial services industry has fundamentally been unable to quantify risk any more, this is no longer a meaningful statement. I fully expect that the next crisis will occur in the bond market, since the bond rating agencies have constructed their own house of cards.

Ultimately investing depends on your estimate of the potential upside or downside for an asset that you intend to exchange for something else in the future. There is a surplus of advice on how to assess risk, and a shortage of trustworthy advice.

1. If you are logged into Facebook but then surf around the web, you will be transmitting personal details from your facebook presence to the other web sites
2. When other people surf the web, they will be transmitting data about their relationship to you. This seems like the worst example.
3. Trying to improve your privacy settings requires negotiation of a dozen pages with 170 different privacy settings.

There is now an organized protest to avoid logging in to facebook on 6/6/2010. That’s an easy one. I think it’s time to dial back and see what it feels like to not use facebook. Unfortunately I’m logged in on so many places that it will require a witchhunt to log out everywhere. Anyway, this blog post will still eventually show up there, but I won’t.

One of the recent events that annoyed me is that people have been giving one of my email addresses to facebook in trying to add me as a friend. This was apparently caused by someone uploading their email contact list, but in doing this they gave private information between the two of us to a third party, namely facebook. I am always appalled by how freely people will give away private information belonging to someone else, and think nothing of it. Facebook is openly preying on this ignorance. Shame on both of you.

In reality, unless a company pays dividends to stockholders, the owner of a share of stock holds essentially nothing. It’s universally true that an asset is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. Some assets possess some intrinsic value (e.g., glittery stuff like diamonds or stuff that keeps you warm like oil or real estate that you can live on). By contrast, stock has no intrinsic value whatsoever. It’s like any other currency, and the people who create the currency have the power to devalue it at their own discretion.

All of my life I have heard the mantra that long term investments in the stock market will outperform other types of more conservative investments, but like many individual investors, I have recently come to regard such claims as untrustworthy and self-serving. By staying on the sidelines for the next ten years I may forego gains that flow to others who participate in the game, but I think I’m pretty much done with gambling. I have now seen two major collapses of stock markets in the last ten years, and I don’t care to participate in any more.

It’s not clear what all this mess and smell is supposed to accomplish other than to be a full employment act for tax professionals, accountants, and IRS employees. Whenever I hear calls for a “flat tax” I am baffled by why people think this will improve the situation, because it simply replaces one piecewise linear function with a second piecewise linear function. The problem is in figuring out what counts as income, and it seems like it should be a lot simpler than this.

1. Motorola Droid on Verizon
2. HTC Nexus One on T-Mobile

I’ve been thinking about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two phones, and it’s a close call.

The Droid has a few advantages. The physical keyboard is very welcome, but I find myself using the virtual keyboards more and more, and I also find myself using voice input more often. Voice input used to be pretty miserable, but lately I have noticed a dramatic improvement in the precision. The resolution is slightly higher on the Droid screen, but it’s not a huge difference (480×854 vs 480×800). Both screens are stunningly good, particularly compared to the iPhone, which has a pretty mediocre screen. The speaker on the Droid is dramatically better, though some people might find it weird that I sometimes listen to podcasts through the speaker instead of using headphones. Sometimes I put it on speakerphone and set it on the table – the sound is very good through the speaker on the Droid.

The Nexus One has a few advantages as well. It’s thinner and lighter than the droid. It has rounded corners that make it pleasant to hold. The processor seems slightly faster, though this may be the software release that they are running. It lacks the physical keyboard, but I don’t seem to miss it as much as I thought I would. It is supposed to eventually get a car dock and a home dock, but I haven’t seen them yet. The home dock is apparently $45, which I concluded was too expensive. The trackball is very nice, and I use it all the time – in fact the droid sometimes feels clumsy to use because of the lack of a trackball.

The big difference for me has been the networks. I have been finding the T-Mobile network to be pretty marginal, but I’m not sure if it is a physical problem of the Nexus or a software problem in Android or simply that the network is lacking. Note that I haven’t made any attempt to measure network coverage over a large area, and you should be very careful of people saying one network is better or worse than the other. People tend to use their phones in a very few areas and draw conclusions about coverage over the entire USA, which is clearly misguided. All of the mobile networks have strong areas and weak areas. The verizon network won’t work at all in most parts of the world. I find that 95% of my phone usage is at home, a work, and in a hotel. In all of these places I usually have Wifi, so the mobile network is largely irrelevant there. With all these disclaimers, I am uncomfortable saying that the Verizon network is better than the T-Mobile network. When I travel to Europe, the Verizon Droid will be incapable of making or receiving phone calls, so it will stay home.

So which one would I recommend? The Droid, by a slight margin. On the other hand, my employer is paying for the data plan, and the answer might change if I was paying for the data plan, because frankly I doubt that I would buy a data plan – I’d buy an unlocked Nexus and use APNDroid to turn off cellular data access.

Would I recommend them instead of the iPhone? The iPhone is clearly a good phone, but I haven’t had a chance to use one at great length. I sincerely despise iTunes, which is one reason why I could never tolerate an iPhone. I find a lot of the value from a smart phone in the applications, and I find nothing lacking in the Android applications. People talk about having 100,000 applications on the iPhone but only 20,000 on Android, but that seems like a completely ridiculous comparison. It only matters if the 20 applications that you really want are available on the phone you want. If you are already an iPhone user, then you have already had your head bent to the Apple way of doing things, so it’s unlikely that you will be happy on an Android phone. I’ve observed a discussion among iPhone users who complain about differences, but almost all of the complaints are that things are done differently, rather than things can’t be done. The two phones offer very similar feature sets, but you should never expect things to be exactly identical.

I wonder what phones will look like two years from now!

Whatever happened to Windows apps?