My Tumblr Comments

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal

Know who he is? Well you should. He’s the “Arabian Warren Buffett” (per Time magazine), a member of the Saudi Royal Family, and worth $29.5B. He also happens to be the largest single investor of Citigroup, one of the largest US financial firms.

Foreign investment into US companies was formerly ill received. Here are some examples..

• Remember the Unocal dilemma a couple years back? Unocal was to be acquired by an oil company that was 70% owned by the Chinese government. There was such opposition that the Chinese company withdrew its bid for Unocal because of “the political environment in the United States.”
• In 2006, Dubai Ports World, a government entity owned by the United Arab Emirates took over 7 US ports. There was such opposition that once acquired, the ports were  immediately sold by the Dubai company.

But now no one’s putting up a fight. Namely because we need the foreign investors to give straight cash to Wall Street who recently wrote off billions (because of the subprime mess), and, thus, help our economy back to stability. We’re seeing foreign investments by sovereign wealth funds, which are government owned investment funds, left and right in an attempt to help bail out our major financial firms.

• Abu Dhabi’s government investment fund paid $7.5 billion for 4.9% of Citigroup.
• China’s fund has invested $5 billion for 9.9% of Morgan Stanley.
• Singapore has purchased 9.4% of Merrill Lynch for $4.4 billion.

So what? Why should you care that Prince Alwaleed invests in Citigroup? Well, because the revenues of the banks will fall into the hands of foreign governments, marking a shift in economic and political power from the United States to Asia and the Middle East, and perhaps the fall of the US Empire.

Interesting to note - this happened to the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. But instead of selling off shares of the banks, as we are doing now, the Ottoman government sold off shares of the Suez Canal to European investors in order to help itself out of bankruptcy. Revenue and power was shifted from east to west as the Empire fell. Now after 150 years, we may see movement in the other direction.

— dihard

Reminds me of this story by Warren Buffet.  Welcome to Squanderville!

A thought on the Mac AirBook

I’m going to laugh at all of the fanboys who get pissed in 3 months when they re-release it for $300 cheaper. — livejamie

Maybe they’ll get a $300 Apple Store credit.  ’Cause, you know, that’s the same thing as a refund.

I think the hardest thing about breaking up is accepting that it wasn’t necessarily a “failure.”

— juliaallison

I think it’s only ever a failure if you learned nothing from it.  

There is no such thing as a setback.

help!

For my peace of mind, I need to block access to a certain website. (I think you can guess which one.) I tried Leechblock and have found it to be completely useless. By “useless” I mean it does not seem to work. At all.

Does anyone have better suggestions??

— juliaallison

In Windows XP, edit C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Add the following lines:

  127.0.0.1  example.com

  127.0.0.1  www.example.com 

replacing ”example.com” with the domain you don’t want to let yourself visit.  If that file is read-only, you’ll have to right-click on it, choose Properties, and uncheck the Read-only checkbox at the bottom before you can modify it.

When The Nerds Take Over

Definitely something worth thinking about.  I’ve been thinking about this off and on for a while.  Tom Peters and Hugh MacLeod, among others, no doubt, have written about similar ideas (“Brand You” and “Global Microbrand,” respectively).

——

I was just emailing my friend Rjyan, attempting to express my cloudy feelings about where the world is going, and the phrase “The Individual Revolution” popped into my head. Not surpringly, someone already came up with the idea: Richard Duvall, who died last year:

A champion of the “individual revolution”, Duvall coined the term “freeformer”, a label used to describe a consumer tired of working with institutions and more inclined to go it alone. Some ten per cent of society at the moment are freeformers, according to Duvall, and there is an accelerating trend towards the “consumer entrepreneur”.

Currently, I think there’s a big challenge for anyone who wants to make a living (or get rich!) without the aid of a big corporation. So many people get “sucked up” into a company instead of maintaining their autonomy. How much longer will that go on? Is there a way to stay “single”, so to speak, or does everyone evertually crack?

An interesting aspect of turning yourself into a famous brand (as opposed to creating a company) is that only a crazy person would sell his own identity to another company. Like in Wayne’s World when they sold their show for $5,000, but much, much worse.

A Jakob Lodwick-Jacob Lodwick Mashup

First, he quotes duplo talking to dalas, who says:

“[Tumblr is] similar to other social networking/blogging type sits but by taking away comments and making it so that no one else can view your friends and followers it sort of takes away the elements of those sorts of sites that cater to people’s vanity and desire to be popular. instead it’s just a neat way to share things you think are interesting with other people.”

And then, in explaining a post with a screenshot of his number of followers (from this): 

“I didn’t explain the context properly when I posted that image [ed. note: I added this link]. Some of my friends, such as AA and dalas, have posted their own milestones already, in a gesture that sits somewhere between bragging and opening up (since your # of followers is private). I don’t see anything wrong with this sort of celebration. On social networks, users sometimes accumulate ‘friends’ because they see reciprocal benefit: I get listed in your ‘friends’ area and you get listed in mine. But on Tumblr, followers receieve no such benefit. They are not listed publicly anywhere in relation to me.”

Clearly, Jakob is too smart to let Tumblr get in the way of his vanity and desire to be popular followers’ reciprocal benefit.

Flashforward

Comment boxes aren’t the problem.  “Any old jerk” is the problem.  Yes, most  YouTube and MySpace comments suck.  I had a private blog in the past where only authorized people could see and comment, and it was fine/fun for the years that it lasted.  The comments showing up on the same page only improved the value of the posts and the experience as a whole.

—————— 

I picture myself in the future. My hair is gray even though I’m in my 30s. I’m telling stories to teen-agers about the early days of the web; that strange transitional period where it morphed from a nerd haven into a mainstream platform that all people used.

“Oh yeah, it was wild. Every page had a comments box at the bottom, where any old jerk could write whatever they wanted! It turned each creative person into a public servant, building this communal discussion forum where all men had an equal voice. Yup… some called it ‘community’, others called it ‘democracy’… what’s that? Eh? …. NO! No, no, none of us realized we were a bunch of filthy communists. It didn’t quite click that we had been negating our property rights, by default, on almost every single site, for ten straight years.

“Back then most people were talking about Facebook Apps, MySpace Widgets, and YouTube BingBongs. Ha! Can ya picture life without your precious BingBongs?!”