Hashemian Blog Web Tools, Financial Markets, Technology Saturday, November 25, 2006 Dollar's Doomsday  When I wrote this blog entry about the dollar over three years ago, the dollar and the euro were at parity levels, give or take a few cents, and the euro was climbing robustly. Soros had taken a strong position against the dollar and was beating the drum on how grim the outlook for the dollar was. The dollar did lose ground but it finally stabilized and everyone thought the bad news was over. Not so fast. Here we are again. The euro is near $1.31 and the British pound is nearing $2. What gives? It's the irresponsible spending. It's the careless borrowing. It's the head-in-the-sand mentality that the world loves the dollar and it won't let it sink. At some point we have to wake up to the reality that this is business, not charity. People will not punish the dollar because they disagree with the US policies, but they will bail when their interests are in jeopardy. And jeopardy is what we have now. We are funding an endless and hopeless war without a timetable to disengage, while the rest of country goes about its business as usual. The stock market is up but now it seems that it might be on a shaky ground. And the one possible bright spot in the economy, the housing market, has run its course and it's on a descent path. Personal debt levels are at all time highs, and yet we continue to believe that all is well. Ever get a feeling that our economy today is built on a house of cards? It is. Without the foreigners, like the Chinese, that have vast reserves of dollar denominated securities, the underpinnings of our economy will come apart in a hurry and the economy will collapse. We have no one to blame but ourselves. For years, we have been the junkies and the foreigners happily supplied the drugs. They always knew what they were getting in return for their products had dubious value, but didn’t have the courage, or the will, to put a stop to it. They were just as addicted to our IOUs as we were to their products. By some accounts we are already in the middle of a long crash. The dollar is not even at a third of the value it had 30 years ago. But at some point the slow fall might turn into a fast plummet and that won't be pretty. All will suffer from a dollar crash but none more so than the US. The wealthy Americans will be fine. Their Asian accounts, European real estate holdings, and Gold and global funds will be their tickets out. As usual, it's the middle class that will take the brunt, and it'll be a painful one. dollar,euro,economy,british pound,exchange rate,china,Europe Labels: business-finance <Dollar's Doomsday> // posted by rh 0 comments Sunday, November 19, 2006 PS3 and the culture of impatience  Judging by video games today, we have certainly come a long way. I remember my first video game. I must have been about 13 or 14 when we bought it at a tag sale. It was one of those consoles that you hooked up to the TV and it pretty much offered a crude black and white ping pong game that you could play against the console or an opponent sitting next to you. Plain joysticks slid two sticks up and down on the screen and a square ball bounced back and forth over a thick line bisecting the screen. I played that game countless times against a wall or on occasion, my sister. I think that console is still somewhere in the bowels of the house where my parents still live. My fascination with that game, or any video games for that matter, is no longer there but I can understand the excitement a kid (or an adult) might have for video games today, but only to a point. What amazes me the extent some people go to obtain a video game, a book, sports or concert tickets, or whatever these days. Are these items that important or that time-sensitive that require so much sacrifice? Perhaps I don't see the urgency the same way some people do. Take the PS3 as an example. Do people really need the console so bad that they are willing to camp out for days to be one of the first to have it? We all know what will happen to these video games in a not too distant future. The novelty will wear off and eventually they will end up in the attic or some storage room, just like my old video game. Then most likely they will find their way to a landfill. I was browsing eBay the other day and noticed a final bid of $15,000 for a PS3. Probably a bogus bid, but I think $3,000 was in line with how much a PS3 could fetch on eBay. To me, even the $600 retail price tag seemed outrageous. But then again, I guess I just don’t comprehend the exaggerated passion and zeal some people have for something as commonplace as a video game. I hope I never comprehend it. video games,ps3,playstation 3,sony,ebay Labels: ebay, social <PS3 and the culture of impatience> // posted by rh 0 comments Sunday, November 12, 2006 Mars Blue Sunset  Of all the images sent from various orbiters, telescopes, and satellites gathering information on mars, this one has captured my imagination the most. I think It was captured by the Opportunity rover and it shows the Sun setting on Mars. It's a surreal image, inviting the viewer to look at every detail of the terrain on our sister planet. The Sun almost looks like a distant moon. Hard to believe that even at that distance, mars is still a slave to the Sun's gravitational forces. Notice how much smaller the disk of the Sun is compared to what we see on Earth. How could a star so far away from this planet still exert its forces on it? How could Mars still experience day time and night time from an object so distant? Wouldn't it be something to actually be there and experience this image first hand? As much progress as we have made in space exploration, I suppose landing humans on Mars is still a distant reality, possibly way beyond my life time. Still, looking at this image tells me that we have no choice but to continue our efforts to learn more about the universe that we are a part of. Clearing the haze of scientific and mathematical complexities that are part of exploring the space, there is the essence of old-fashioned human curiosity that keeps driving us out into the unknown. It's as old as humanity itself, and it's a quest driven by a never-quenching and inexplicable thirst to explore, discover, and experience – a simple desire to know more. mars,sun,space,sunset Labels: science, space <Mars Blue Sunset> // posted by rh 0 comments Thursday, November 09, 2006 Digg Vs. Centenarians  I noticed an interesting fact about Digg's registration page today. It's a nice, clean page and, unlike some other sites that ask for everything private but the length of your nose, easy to fill out. The CAPTCHA is a challenge sometimes, but what is a site to do faced with an army of miscreants? Anyways, the only private question there is the birthday. The day, month, and year fields are all pre-populated drop-downs. That's when I noticed that the year field runs between 1906 and 2006. So let me get this straight, a one month old infant can sign up for Digg, but a 101 year-old senior can't, unless he/she lies about their age. According to the census data there are about 55,000 people in the US with the age 100 or older. There's little doubt that the population of centenarians will continue to rise in the years ahead. I guess the world really does belong to the young. Alright, I'm not faulting Digg here. I just notice stuff sometimes. We're all guilty of the same sin - writing off the seniors in the society. To borrow a song line from The Who, hope I die before I get old. But most likely their attitude isn’t quite the same anymore. More like, hope I die before I get really really old… well, actually, hope I never die. digg,centenarians,senior citizens,the who Labels: health <Digg Vs. Centenarians> // posted by rh 0 comments Friday, November 03, 2006 Politics of SQL Left Join and Right Join  The other day I was helping a colleague with an SQL statement and I noticed he had a left join in his query. For those of you unfamiliar with SQL, it is a query language programmers use to access and manipulate data inside databases. Joins are used to cross-reference data between various database tables. With the mid-term elections around the corner there is quite a bit of usage of words like right, left, liberal, and conservative around the nation, so seeing the left join in the query invoked thoughts of politics in my head. My colleague is a conservative, and I am firmly to the left of the center, but not quite off the cliff. We sometimes engage in political debates, and as all debates go have never convinced each other of the other person's persuasions. Anyways, I scolded him for betraying his party by using a left join in his SQL statement. And then I thought to myself what a perfect way to resist the right-wing agenda. So, no matter what your platform (as in your database platform), Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, Sybase, or even Access, on November 7th boycott right joins and only use left joins. Then vote Democrat. You can do it. Right joins are useless anyways while left joins are so much more intuitive. They just make more sense. Yeah, let's write a petition to ANSI and all database vendors and demand an end to the right join absurdity. Together we can send right join to the ash heap of query history. Obsolescence and deprecation is the right join's destiny. democrat,republican,sql,joins,left join,right join,oracle,mysql,politics,conservative,liberal,vote <Politics of SQL Left Join and Right Join> // posted by rh 1 comments

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