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‘The standard tool is the online pension calculator, of which countless variants exist. There’s only one problem: they leave out almost everything that matters’

Everyone seems to be talking about whether pensioners are vulnerable and poor or living gilded lifestyles. I decided to take a rather self-centred look at that question; I am an economist, after all. I’m 40. Retirement is more than half my working life away. Leaving aside the fate of today’s pensioners, what about my fate? How much cash will I enjoy in my golden years?

The standard tool for such crystal-gazing is the online pension calculator, of which countless variants exist. Type in the basics (age, income, retirement date, current pension contributions, current pension pot) and the calculator spits out the projected size of the eventual pension pot, along with the monthly income it is forecast to generate. More complex varieties allow for all sorts of tweaks – inflation, investment returns, and smoothly rising income and contributions over the years.

There’s only one problem: these calculators leave out almost everything that matters. It is useful, I suppose, to know what one’s income in retirement would be given a particular salary progression, rate of return on a portfolio, inflation rate, annual charges and the annuity rate available on retirement – although simply to list the variables gives a sense of just how uncertain that “knowledge” really is.

It is worth adding that, over the past 14 years the FTSE 100 index hasn’t risen, even in nominal terms; over the 14 years prior to that, the index roughly quintupled. Stick that in your pension calculator and smoke it. In some ways that’s an extreme case – after all, sensible investors rely on reinvesting dividends and will diversify.

Yet, in other ways, the FTSE’s fate over the past 14 years understates the uncertainty produced by long-term compounding. The relevant time horizon isn’t 14 years but more like 30 – over such a span, a modest 4 per cent rate of return would turn £100,000 into £310,000. A tastier 8 per cent return would compound into £930,000. And an optimistic-but-not-unheard-of 12 per cent return would deliver nearly £2.7m.

Those numbers will surprise some: we underestimate the value of a high rate of compound interest so predictably that behavioural economists even have a name for the condition: exponential growth bias. A reasonable forecast range for a £100,000 investment then, 30 years later, seems to be anything from several million pounds to less than you had when you started.

The uncertainties don’t end there – when we look away from the spreadsheet, at the real world, we realise they are barely beginning. Three big risks simply don’t figure in the tidy world of the calculator: one, that I lose my job and can’t find anything comparable; two, that my wife and I divorce, an expensive business; three, that anything from depression to a slipped disc to cancer renders me too ill to work. Ill health, unemployment and divorce are common and bad for your net worth. (They are also bad for measures of “subjective wellbeing”; more colloquially, they make you sad.)

Then there are the wilder possibilities – I might be defrauded by con artists; I could be sued for libel; my home, which is near a flood plain, may be rendered uninhabitable and unsellable by the weather.

I’m not planning on being sideswiped by any of these misfortunes but, then, who is? A common cause of a penurious old age is not a savings problem as such, but an insurance problem: people who are on track to save enough for a comfortable retirement but are then derailed by “events, dear boy, events”.

My plan for a gilded retirement still involves saving for a pension but I have reinforced it with a number of other tactics: buying disability insurance, keeping fit, being nice to my wife – and hoping that the fates are kind.

Also published at ft.com.

Humanity has always been used to competing over scarce resources.

Over the years we’ve become better at it: more adept at making the most of the resources we have at our disposal and better at seizing the resources we need by force. i.e. cleverer.

And so it is we find ourselves perfectly equipped for a life of competition. Genetically hard-wired for it, if you will.

The problem is we can’t really improve on the way we club each other to death anymore. Muscle reached its peak with the invention of nuclear weapons. The ironic consequence of that was a peace-inducing stalemate. Wars over resources still happen, of course. But very rarely on equal footing. Meaning for the most part the enemy of the highest power doesn’t stand a chance.

Continue reading: The gamification of the economy: creating rivalry where there is none

‘A growing body of research backs the folk wisdom that experiences make us happier than possessions’

It has become a cliché to say that we are made happier by experiences than by material possessions – otherwise the Onion headline, “Executive Quits Fast Track To Spend More Time With Possessions” wouldn’t provoke quite the same chuckle.

But is the cliché true? We are all free to spend our disposable income on what we like. If the experiences we buy tend to make us happier than the possessions we buy, we’re making systematic mistakes. That’s possible – but if so, then why?

Maybe it isn’t a fair comparison. Many material possessions are workaday basics such as saucepans, ironing boards and socks. Many experiences are free, meaning the ones that cost money are treats – no wonder the average possession looks joyless compared with the few special experiences we’ve bought. It doesn’t follow that a windfall should definitely be spent on a spa weekend rather than an iPad.

Another possibility is that causation is backwards. Perhaps happy people buy experiences, rather than experiences buying happiness. A recent study by three psychologists, Ryan T Howell, Paulina Pchelin and Ravi Iyer, gives a sense of how this might be possible: they found that people with a tendency to spend money on experiences were already emotionally appreciative of the world; they also tended to buy more experiences the happier they became.

To complicate matters, the difference between a material possession and an experience is not straightforward. My daughters were given a board game for Christmas. Is the game a possession or an experience? It is certainly no fun if it stays in the box – does that fact count for or against the hypothesis that experiences make us happier?

Then there’s the question of whether only wholesome experiences count. Gambling is an experience anyone can buy, and yet when I read articles extolling the virtues of buying experiences they usually seem to be thinking of a parachute jump. If daytime television and time on the slots don’t count as life experiences, then this comparison is rigged.

All that said, a growing body of research backs the folk wisdom that experiences make us happier. Leaf van Boven of the University of Colorado at Boulder and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University conducted surveys of how people felt about their possessions and experiences, publishing their findings in 2003. They asked their subjects – who were students – to focus either on “life experiences” or “tangible objects” they had purchased with the aim of advancing their “happiness and enjoyment of life”. The students were asked to describe how happy these purchases had made them.

The result: life experiences do indeed make students happier. A wider poll suggested that was true more broadly, although less so for low-income respondents; poorer people seem to enjoy material possessions perfectly well.

Yet if the effect is real, then why don’t we shift our disposable income to buy extra experiences and fewer possessions? Or work fewer hours to free up time to enjoy experiences? Two suggestions. One is that experiences grand enough to count as “life experiences” are often social. We wear our new watch alone but go on holiday with friends. Recent work by Peter Caprariello and Harry Reis suggests that what really underpins the happiness brought by experiences is this social element.

Perhaps, too, our fondness for experiences is a function of the way we remember them. The irritations of the weekend mini-break or the boring bits of the opera trip are quickly forgotten: only the rosy glow remains. In contrast, our possessions do not gracefully withdraw into memory. We experience the once-fashionable cardigan not as nostalgic recollection but as an object that occupies wardrobe space while starting to bobble, shrink and fade.

Also published at ft.com.

Everyone knows you should prepare for bad weather with supplies in your car and an eagle eye on the weather reports. But what should you do if you get caught in your car unexpectedly? Here are ten do's and don'ts to keep you calm and safe.

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10.) Do Let People Know Where You Are

If you're stuck out in the middle of nowhere, let people know where you are. This may be your family, your work, or your local law enforcement. All three might not be a bad idea.

Suggested By: autojim, Photo Credit: AP

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9.) Do Turn Off Your Engine When Stopped

If you're going to be stuck not movie for hours on end, save gas and only turn on the car for the heater when necessary.

Suggested By: KDS, Photo Credit: AP

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8.) Do Check Your Tailpipe

If you're in snow and ice and you're running your engine, check that your tailpipe hasn't gotten blocked. If it is, clear the snow and ice out. Otherwise, carbon monoxide can leak back into the car and kill you. It's a very simple check with very grave consequences.

Suggested By: ninjagin, Photo Credit: Oregon DOT

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7.) Do Leave Room To Turn Around

Don't tailgate on a snow-bound highway. Your highway may be completely impassable, and if you're boxed in, you won't be able to get off.

Suggested By: shift24, Photo Credit: AP

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6.) Do Take Local Roads When Necessary

Going along with that last piece of advice, the highway may not be the best way for you to get places in really awful weather. Minor roads can be dangerous, but they might be better than a highway.

Plan your route ahead, and especially think of things to avoid (like a big hill between you and your house).

Suggested By: MaWeiTao, Photo Credit: AP

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5.) Do Know When To Get Out Of Your Car

If there's just a bit of fishtailing ahead of you, it's not a good time to abandon your vehicle and block the road behind you. And if you're stranded off to the side of a fast-moving, slippery road, standing outside your car can be more dangerous than waiting inside.

But there's a right time to get out. If you get stuck in the snow, get out and check your surroundings. There might be a fast food place or a bus road just out of your line of sight, as this almost tragic story explains.

Suggested By: Alex Murel and themanwithsauce, Photo Credit: AP

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4.) Do Make Friends

Maybe you were caught off guard by weather that moved in sooner than expected, maybe you made the mistake of not packing food, water, and blankets ahead of time. When you're stuck on the road, make friends with the other drivers near you. You can all pool your resources.

As this story tells, you might think your microwave popcorn is inedible, but the 18-wheeler three cars ahead might have a microwave onboard.

Suggested By: klurejr, Photo Credit: AP

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3.) Don't Count On A Speedy Rescue

If it looks like you're in for the long haul, don't panic. Autojim explains this the best.

If it happened to you, it's probably happened to dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of others, and you're in the queue. Just being stuck does not take priority over medical emergencies, fires, etc. Be patient, and be courteous to those who do stop by to help.

Suggested By: autojim, Photo Credit: AP

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2.) Don't Keep Calling Law Enforcement And Emergency Services

Call when you need help and if you get help, call again to say that you don't need more assistance. Don't call again and again, overloading the phone lines of the police, towing services, or whoever else.

Suggested By: autojim, Photo Credit: AP

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1.) Don't Take The Shoulder

Whatever you do, don't try and rush past stopped traffic by taking the shoulder. Leave it open for emergency services. You're doing yourself a favor.

Suggested By: willkinton247, Photo Credit: AP

Welcome back to Answers of the Day - our daily Jalopnik feature where we take the best ten responses from the previous day's Question of the Day and shine it up to show off. It's by you and for you, the Jalopnik readers. Enjoy!

Top Photo Credit: Getty Images

TL;DR: Empathy is the most important skill you can practice. It will lead to greater success personally and professionally and will allow you to become happier the more you practice.

This post originally appeared on Chad Fowler's blog.

I've never considered myself a real programmer. I know at this point it's probably silly to say, but I started my scholastic and professional life as a musician, and I've never quite recovered from the impostor syndrome that comes with making such a shift. One of the faux-self-deprecations I use to describe myself is: "I'm a people person who just happens to express this tendency through programming and technology projects."

This seems a bit ironic, because I'm also a very strong introvert. I recharge when I'm alone or in very small groups of people (no more than two including myself is ideal) and I exhaust myself in crowds or in constant discussion. But, on reflection, this all fits together perfectly. The reason crowds of people exhaust me is that I am constantly trying to read and understand the feelings and motivations of those around me. If I could just go through life talking and not listening, hearing but not processing, alone time and time in groups wouldn't be so different for me. But I can't, and I obviously don't think I should.

Coming back to the impostor-syndrome-induced self-identification as a "people person" rather than a programmer, I guess when I say that I'm probably right. I spend much more time and much more effort learning how to understand the people around me than I do code, systems, architectures, and technologies. I'm not an expert or even remarkable at it, but I work on it consciously and consistently. The it I'm describing here is called "empathy":

the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner—Merriam Webster

As exhausting as it is for me, this is the primary reason for the success and good fortune I've enjoyed in my life.

Why Practice Empathy?

Why should you explicitly work to enhance your ability to empathize with others?

• You will be more likely to treat the people you care about the way they wish you would treat them.
• You will better understand the needs of people around you.
• You will more clearly understand the perception you create in others with your words and actions.
• You will understand the unspoken parts of your communication with others.
• You will better understand the needs of your customers at work.
• You will have less trouble dealing with interpersonal conflict both at home and at work.
• You will be able to more accurately predict the actions and reactions of people you interact with.
• You will learn how to motivate the people around you.
• You will more effectively convince others of your point of view.
• You will experience the world in higher resolution as you perceive through not only your perspective but the perspectives of those around you.
• You will find it easier to deal with the negativity of others if you can better understand their motivations and fears. Lately when I find myself personally struggling with someone, I remind myself to empathize and I immediately calm myself and accept the situation for what it is.

You will be a better leader, a better follower, and most important, a better friend.

How to Practice

Here are a few ideas on how to develop your empathy.

Listen

Listen intently when people speak to you. Conversations, especially regarding heated topics, often form a rhythm of back and forth speaking, with each party starting a point just before the conversation partner has ended his or her point. I'm sure you will recognize this pattern in yourself if you think about it. Before whoever is speaking has finished, you have already formulated your response, and you can't wait to spit it out.

Next time you find yourself in a conversation like this, slow down. Force yourself to listen to the words you're hearing. Consider the speaker's motivation behind saying what he or she is saying. Consider the life and work experience that has led to his or her current world-view.

Respond visually and with sound ("ah", "oh", "ya?") but allow at least a second to pass before responding verbally. Ask followup questions to better understand what the speaker intended or how they feel before you respond with your own opinions. Hopefully you'll need more time before you speak, because you've been too focused on the speaker to start preparing your response.

Watch and Wonder

Put down your cell phone. Instead of checking Twitter or reading articles while you wait for the train or are stuck in a traffic jam, look at the people around you and imagine who they might be, what they might be thinking and feeling, and where they are trying to go right now. Are they frustrated? Happy? Singing? Looking at their phones? Do they live here or are they from out of town? Have they had a nice day? Try to actually wonder and care.

Know Your Enemies

Maybe "enemies" is an exaggeration here, but think about a tense, preferably ongoing dispute you have with someone. Maybe it's a co-worker in a competing faction for how you should do some critical part of your work. Maybe it's a family member you're constantly warring with for some reason. Whoever it is, you're used to them being wrong and you being right. You tend to even jump to disagreeing with them regardless of what they are arguing for, because you are on opposite sides of the war.

Now imagine the entire situation from that person's point of view. The person is probably not evil or an idiot. They might not even be wrong about whatever it is you disagree about. In my own life, the problem is usually more of a fundamental philosophical difference than about the specific conflicts that occur.

How does this person feel about how you respond to them when you disagree? What fears cause the other person to be tense and hard to reason with? How do you exacerbate those fears rather than calm them? What valid arguments could this person make against your views and your handling of the situation? What good intentions does this person hold? What are the positive motivations behind what you perceive as a negative outcome? Do you agree with the motivations? If so, are they more important than the specific conflict?

If you're like me, just going through this exercise (maybe a couple of times with the same subject) can greatly reduce your frustration and anxiety over some of the most stressful inter-personal situations. It may sound obvious, but doing it is very different from understanding how it could work.

Choose the Other Side

While talking with Kelly about practicing empathy, she had a great idea. It's hard to side with your own "enemy" as I suggested above. It requires a forced third person perspective, which takes a lot of discipline when you're thinking about your own stress and emotions.

So to make it easier, try it as an actual third person. We all have friends and loved ones that complain to us about how they have been treated by other people. It's human nature to complain and it's the duty of a loved one to listen sympathetically. The assumption is that the listener is on the side of the complainer. A supportive friend or loved one almost always is, instinctually.

Try practicing (internally) taking the opposing view point. Don't go with your default reaction immediately. Start on the other side and work your way back. This reminds me of a cool technique Dave Thomas blogged about several years (almost 11 years ago, wow!) ago called debating with knives. It's an exercise which forces you onto both sides of a debate to help open your mind to the realities of the topic under discussion.

This is probably all obvious, but I doubt many people really practice empathy. I hope you will give it a try, even for a short while, and I hope it improves your life and the lives of those around you even if just a little.

Your Most Important Skill: Empathy | Chad Fowler

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Chad Fowler is CTO of 6Wunderkinder, makers of Wunderlist. He is the author or co-author of a number of popular software books, including Rails Recipes and The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development.

Image via Vladgrin (Shutterstock).

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Continue reading: “Mr John Upcraft is a Certified Professional Geologist”

Dear Lifehacker,
I keep seeing the word "mindfulness" everywhere, tied to everything from losing weight to being more productive. But what does this vague word actually mean, and how can I apply mindfulness to my life?

Signed,
Maybe Mindful

Dear MM,
Mindfulness is a hot topic these days, just like meditation. As you've noticed, it's getting more attention in the news as more studies come out showing the benefits of mindfulness. While it might sound like a New Age-y term (or maybe even psychobabble to some), there's real evidence that being more mindful can enhance just about every aspect of your life—and it doesn't take hours sitting in lotus position to get there. Here's what you need to know.

What Mindfulness Is

Mindfulness has many synonyms. You could call it awareness, attention, focus, presence, or vigilance. The opposite, then, is not just mindlessness, but also distractedness, inattention, and lack of engagement.

Mindfulness is both a practice and a state of mind (for lack of a better word). For example, when you practice mindfulness meditation, you're sharpening your focus (usually by paying more attention to your breath) and training your brain to be more mindful long after you're done meditating. When you're exhibiting mindfulness, you're fully engrossed in whatever's going on around you. (There are other mindfulness exercises beyond meditating, as you'll see below, and there are many other types of meditation as well, so while the two are closely related, they're not the same.)

You can think of mindfulness as simply being fully in the moment (Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines it in the video above as "paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally—as if your life depended on it). That might be the simple definition, but being engaged 100% doesn't come easy, especially in our world of distractions. It means actively listening and not zoning out (even a little) when your co-worker tells the same story for the third time, and it means using all your senses in even mundane situations like washing the dishes or walking to the bus stop.

Mindfulness has roots in Buddhist philosophy and religion, and is considered very important for the path to enlightenment. Wikipedia says (emphasis mine):

Enlightenment (bodhi) is a state of being in which greed, hatred and delusion (Pali:moha) have been overcome, abandoned and are absent from the mind. Mindfulness, which, among other things, is an attentive awareness of the reality of things (especially of the present moment) is an antidote to delusion and is considered as such a 'power' (Pali:bala). This faculty becomes a power in particular when it is coupled with clear comprehension of whatever is taking place.

But it also takes on new, secular definition when viewed from a Western psychology lens. Dr. Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychology professor, literally wrote the book on a slightly different concept of mindfulness. She defines mindfulness as including these important attributes:

• Continual creation of new categories: Instead of relying rigidly on old categories and labels, mindfulness is paying attention to the situation and context and seeing new distinctions. For example, instead of seeing a brick as simply a building object, you could also consider it a bookend, a weapon, a doorstop, and much more.
• Welcoming new information and seeing more than one point of view: Like category making, mindfulness also implies continually receiving new information and being open to new cues (social and otherwise). You and your partner, for example, might seem to be set in your ways and fight about the same old things, but being open to the other person's point of view would change that dynamic.
• Putting process over outcome: Focusing on each step rather than getting anxious about results. Instead of worrying about acing a test, for example, concentrate on truly learning the subject.

In short, mindfulness is about tuning in and being more aware of every experience. This part of William Blake's poem "Auguries of Innocence" best describes, to me, this kind of attentiveness:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

The Benefits of Mindfulness

So what's the point, you ask? As the definitions above hint, increased mindfulness could help you become more focused, more creative, happier, healthier, more relaxed, and in control. It can also help you more fully appreciate each precious current moment (which is all we have, really). Here are some of the most recent studies related to mindfulness. Mindfulness training may:

• Improve memory and academic performance (PsyBlog). In this study, students who did attention-building exercises had increased focus (or less mind-wandering), better short-term memory, and better performance on exams like the GRE, which as supposed to be uncoachable.
• Help with weight loss and eating healthier foods. Mindful eating means paying attention to each bite and eating slowly while paying attention to all your senses (Harvard Medical School, Womens Health). Participants in mindfulness studies ate fewer calories when they were hungrier than the control groups.
• Lead to better decision-making. A couple of experiments associate mindfulness meditation or just a natural tendency to be more mindfully aware with being less prone to the sunk-cost bias, our tendency to stick with lost causes—such as a bad relationship or deadend job—because of the time and energy already invested (BPS Research).
• Lower stress and help cope with chronic health issues. A meta-analysis of 20 empirical reports found mindfulness increased both mental and physical well-being in patients with chronic pain, cancer, heart disease, and more (Elsevier).
• Improve immunity and create positive brain changes. Researchers measured brain activity before and after volunteers were trained in mindfulness meditation for eight-weeks (Psychosomatic Medicine).
• And offer all the other brain benefits we've seen from mindfulness meditation. Better focus, more creativity, less anxiety and depression, and more compassion to name a few.

How You Can Practice Mindfulness

Unfortunately, mindfulness isn't a switch you can just flip and then all of the sudden you're Mr./Miss Mindful for the rest of your life. But it's something you can cultivate.

Curbing distractions and just saying no to multitasking can help you focus more, but distraction-busting tools might also just be crutches. Mindfulness requires you to be more aware even in the busiest and most stressful situations (and that's when it comes in most useful too).

A simple way to get started is to set up triggers or cues to pull you back into the present when your mind inevitably starts to wander throughout that day. For example, while eating, remember to savor each bite every time you put your fork down. At work, you can set an hourly chime or other reminder to pause in the moment. Pausing before you respond to children—or adults—can also help you become more mindful in your relationships. More (deceptively simple) practices include practicing appreciation and letting go of control.

In the college study mentioned above, the mindfulness training that lead to better memory and learning involved these six steps:

(a) sitting in an upright posture with legs crossed and gaze lowered,

(b) distinguishing between naturally arising thoughts and elaborated thinking,

(c) minimizing the distracting quality of past and future concerns by reframing them as mental projections occurring in the present,

(d) using the breath as an anchor for attention during meditation,

(e) repeatedly counting up to 21 consecutive exhalations

(f ) allowing the mind to rest naturally rather than trying to suppress the occurrence of thoughts.

You might be familiar with this as mindfulness meditation—one of the best ways to cultivate mindfulness. It's exercise for the brain, and you can do it while going about your day. (One strategy might be to pick one part of your everyday routine to use for mindfulness training, such as when you shower or walk the dog.)

One final note: While practicing mindfulness is very beneficial, there are times when it's better to let your mind wander. The New York Times reports that creativity and insight may depend on letting your mind wander and daydream, and one study suggests higher mindfulness might be connected with weaker "implicit learning" (unconsciously kicking up new skills or habits):

After meditation upon such sacrilegious findings, no doubt the Buddha, who taught a middle way between worldly and spiritual concerns, would have agreed that there is a time for using mindfulness to discover inner truths, a time for using it to survive a battle or an exam and a time to let go of mindfulness so that the mind may wander the universe.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to find those balanced times between turning on the awareness and taking a mental break.

Love,
Lifehacker

Ah, technology.

You’ve got to love it. Or hate it.

Especially if you’re an auto dealer or a US refiner at the moment.

Both currently find themselves in a similarly challenging period. Call it the curse of being a middleman in a world moving to direct everything.

Over in the auto world, for example, a stealth revolution is currently being waged on car dealers by manufacturers. Thanks to the internet, there’s simply no reason why car manufacturers can’t deal directly with customers. Orders can be gathered online, and customers — rather than being targeted by pushy salesmen — can take full control of the decisions they make. Prices, extras and specs can be decided upon with the helpful advice of independent experts, fans, enthusiasts, and journalists on auto forums.

Continue reading: US protectionism, or what happens when there’s too much of a good thing

‘Be careful what you resolve to do in 2014 – and how irrevocably you resolve it with commitment strategies’

What do the cold war, expiring gift vouchers, the euro and New Year’s resolutions have in common?

A hunt for the link begins with Thomas Schelling, the only person in history to have run war games for Henry Kissinger, won a Nobel memorial prize in economics and served as a script consultant for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.

The film featured the Soviet doomsday device: “When it is detonated, it will produce enough lethal radioactive fallout so that within 10 months, the surface of the earth will be as dead as the moon!” The point about the doomsday machine is that no sane person would ever trigger it, so it is set up to explode automatically in the event of the war. It is thus the perfect deterrent.

Strategic commitments need not be so cartoonish: a public declaration can serve as well, by making it awkward to retreat. Consider John F. Kennedy’s televised address from the Oval Office in which he declared that West Berlin would be defended, and “an attack upon that city will be regarded as an attack upon us all”. Schelling, whose ideas also informed Kennedy, was widely regarded as the authority in the use of such commitments.

In the 1970s, Schelling turned his attention to what we would now call behavioural economics. He was fascinated by what he described as “the intimate contest for self-command” – our efforts to quit smoking or learn Mandarin in the face of stubborn inertia. And Schelling felt that commitment strategies could help us outwit our lazier selves.

The New Year’s resolution can be supplemented with a commitment strategy: paying in advance for a year’s gym membership or betting with friends that we’ll stop smoking. Announcing on Facebook that we’ll be running a marathon in April isn’t quite JFK, but the declaration serves the same purpose.

Commitment devices can work but Schelling raised two awkward questions. The first is, whose side should we take in the intimate contest for self-command? If part of me wants to quit smoking and part of me doesn’t, most of us hope the quitter will win. People tend to eat too much, exercise too little and not save for retirement. But some people eat too little, exercise too much and hoard when they should be spending. It is possible to worry too much about the future.

A second challenge from Schelling: what if the commitment backfires? Many people pre-pay their gym membership as an attempt at strategic commitment, and then don’t go to the gym. This is the worst of both worlds: we fail to keep our resolutions and, in addition, pay the costs of the failed commitment. Spoiler alert: the doomsday machine in Dr Strangelove does not deliver the hoped-for permanent peace.

Some research by Suzanne Shu and Ayelet Gneezy, professors of marketing, suggests that commitment strategies may work with Christmas gift vouchers: a voucher with an imminent expiry date induces urgency and is more likely to be spent than one that expires later. (Similarly: tourists see sights that the locals never get round to visiting.) And yet in Shu and Gneezy’s study, the majority of vouchers expire unused. This is hardly an unmitigated success.

Commitment strategies are now cool in macroeconomic policy. An independent central bank with an inflation-busting mandate is a commitment strategy. So is a fiscal watchdog such as the Office for Budget Responsibility. Bank of England governor Mark Carney’s “forward guidance” is too. But the most ambitious attempt at macroeconomic commitment was the euro. It was a doomsday machine in more ways than one.

So be careful what you resolve to do in 2014 – and how irrevocably you resolve it.

Also published at ft.com.

The spread of machine gambling offers a portent of other economic developments

What if the future of capitalism is not to be found in Shenzhen, Abu Dhabi or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab – but in the Nevada desert? Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist, has spent 15 years conducting field research in Las Vegas, culminating in a disturbing book, Addiction by Design. We are used to thinking of Vegas as a city of gaudy spectacle and the green baize of poker, blackjack and roulette tables. It is now a city of slot machines, which have grown like weeds because they are fantastically profitable. And the spread of machine gambling offers a worrisome portent of developments elsewhere in the economy.

Three slot-machine innovations stand out: first, confusion by design; second, addictiveness by design; third, the use of play money. All have been made possible by the digital automation of the machine itself, which in Las Vegas as elsewhere eliminates the skilled service jobs of croupiers and replaces them with highly paid jobs in interface design and low-paid work as a security guard or waitress.

Consider, first, confusion by design: Las Vegas casinos are mazes, carefully crafted to draw players to the slot machines and to keep them there. Casino designers warn against the “yellow brick road” effect of having a clear route through the casino. (One side effect: it takes paramedics a long time to find gamblers in cardiac arrest; as Ms Schüll also documents, it can be tough to get the slot-machine players to assist, or even to make room for, the medical team.)

Most mazes in our economy are metaphorical: the confusion of multi-part tariffs for mobile phones, cable television or electricity. My phone company regularly contacts me to assure me that I am on the cheapest possible plan given my patterns of usage. No doubt this claim can be justified on some narrow technicality but it seems calculated to deceive. Every time I have put it to the test it has proved false.

I recently cancelled a contract with a different provider after some gizmo broke. The company first told me the whole thing was my problem, then at the last moment offered me hundreds of pounds to stay. When your phone company starts using the playbook of an emotionally abusive spouse, this is not a market in good working order.

Another example is the way the pension providers charge for their services. Between the pensioner and the financial assets they are acquiring, it is almost impossible to figure out who is being charged for what. Even when annual charges are transparent, few people begin to grasp the vast sums such charges may cost them over the life of the product.

Now consider addiction by design. What is not understood about modern slot machines – certainly not by the UK’s Labour party, which recently tried to spark a moral panic on the subject – is that they do not try to drain your money away quickly. They do so slowly, by maximising “time on device”. The machines are cheap to run: what is the hurry? Machine gamers do not even play to win: they play to play. The aim of the machine is to deliver constant reinforcement – for instance, the “false win”, where a player is treated to fanfares and flashing lights after betting $3 and winning 60 cents.

Here, the natural analogy is with Facebook, Twitter and Google. These companies, ultimately, are selling one thing: our attention. Nothing about Facebook makes sense until you view it as a well-honed system for persuading you to check Facebook one more time.

Finally, consider the arrival of play money. A cutting-edge slot machine will not bother with a slot: the player will be attached umbilically via a casino charge-card on an elastic cord. This is partly a logistical matter: feeding machines with money, summoning a cashier to make change and cashing out jackpot wins all take time and interrupt a player’s flow.

But the substitution of cash for “credits” has a psychological effect too. Behavioural economists have shown that cash seems to have a bracing effect on our ethics and our judgment. Dan Ariely has found that we are willing to cheat for poker chips convertible into cash but less willing to be dishonest for naked cash itself. Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester discovered a much higher willingness to pay for a good of uncertain value if the payment was made by credit card.

I would not wish to be too gloomy about all this. Most people do find a way to navigate through the maze of shopping malls and phone bills and loyalty cards and easy credit – the research of the economist Eugenio Miravete often shows people finding satisfactory deals against what look like insuperable odds. And the free market continues to deliver valuable products.

Nor is the right regulatory intervention always clear. Slot machines could be banned, I suppose – no doubt with unintended consequences – but the Vegas-isation of the everyday economy is not easily curbed with the stroke of a legislator’s pen.

Yet it is hard for a free-market enthusiast like me to look unblinkingly at Las Vegas, at row upon row of machines, designed by an elite and needing little human intervention, drawing in consumers, soothing them, entertaining them and eating their money – and not to feel that the invisible hand has slipped.

Also published at ft.com.

Over the new year the New York Times published a scathing attack on Professor Scott H. Irwin of the University of Illinois and Professor Craig Pirrong, of the University of Houston, in which author David Kocieniewski argued the professors were shills for the industries they covered.

Kocieniewski’s case against Pirrong was that he had defended and still defends speculation in commodity markets whilst working as a consultant for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Trafigura, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and other market players.

His issue with Irwin was his position as a defender of speculation in agricultural markets, whilst consulting for a business that serves hedge funds, investment banks and other commodities speculators.

Continue reading: Academics and Wall Street

Yes, its the grocery business. In Malaysia its kind of fragmented and highly competitive. Its pretty open landscape for locals or foreign invaders. When you think about it, its kind of crazy that this industry is not "regulated to favour Malaysian entities". Which is why it is so interesting to me. In fact, all MBAs locally should do a project strategy report on whys, hows ... who's winning, etc...


We spent quite a bit on groceries for sure, next to toiletries, its probably the most frequented places to shop.

The write up in The Edge makes for provocative business reading, and there is a lot more to it.

Many of us are not aware that when we shop at these outlets, they are foreign owned: Giant, Cold Storage, Mercato ... We are aware of Tesco, AEON and Carrefour of course. For consumers, it is great, they keep margins low and competitive. They are big enough to squeeze the middle men and even manufacturer. So much so, they will do away with both layers and produce their own home-brand of products.

All that makes our smaller manufacturers and distributors to be at their mercy. They either have to have "real value" to their products or be able to have a decent marketing budget to gain shelf space. Failing which, they cannot even fathom exporting because that involves transportation cost which will drive up their product prices in overseas markets. The smaller you are, with no "inherent value or consumer loyalty", you are doomed. 


Even when you have some inherent value and/or customer loyalty, your margins are tiny, tiny ... as you need a final distribution/sales outlet for your products. Say you make instant noodles, and your stuff is pretty good .. you have tons of competitors locally ... and then there are the foreign brands such as Indomie and the plethora of Korean and Japanese producers. Unless you are My Kuali with your superduper hit White Curry, you are going to be struggling.

Can we or should we at least try to save some of our SMEs from extinction due to the prevalence and power of these hypermarts? If not, very soon, we all will be consuming ONLY foreign brands that is the cheapest and value driven. 

What is not widely known is that the business model has evolved for these big boys. Its not just a matter of squeezing margins. Its a matter of scale - which can get you a distribution network in terms of logistics, can allow you to brand your own name on many generic products ... allows you to whack long term rents very low as anchor tenants in malls, for locations not in malls they become leveraged bets on land prices (sits on it for 5-10 years then sell and move or revalue on books) as wherever they build the people will come and land prices move up quicker owing to urbanisation and better facilities and conveniences.

When you are big enough, you can even issue your own credit cards ... thus moving into consumer finance.

Mini Marts / Convenience Stores

The only saving grace is mini marts, that is where we have strong local players. They include Mydin, KK and 99 Speedmart being the tops. The era of self owned or family owned shops are long gone. Even the MyMart or MyMydin concepts are going to be futile.

Two new foreign players will come in next year: Circle K and G Ekspres. The battle will continue.

Here I have to salute the resilience, determination and strategy by KK and 99 Speedmart. I am sure many have tried to buy them out, they have 157 and 503 outlets respectively. When the new guys come in, the easiest is to buyout one of them and rebrand. I would strongly advise them both not to do it.

Why KK and 99 Speedmart do so well? They work hard, prices are very fair and THEY STOCK THINGS WE REALLY NEED to buy. This is a cashflow business. the bigger operators use the MBA textbook rule of putting on products that gives them the best cashflow, not necessarily the things we really need. For example, if product A has a 30 day payment rule and product B has a 90 day payment rule - the latter will win shelf space because my cashflow is not dented. Seemingly silly rule but thats why our 7-11 stores suck big time.

7-11 Malaysia is probably the worst run 7-11 franchise. You only need to visit the 7-11 in HK, Thailand or even Singapore to realise the huge difference. Now 7-11 is supposed to be list soon for the Malaysian franchise. It should be a very good BUY because it is soooo badly run, only have upside. Too bad that its already a franchise, because if it is privately owned like KK or 99 Speedmart, the locations of 7-11 (1,479) will be so juicy to some foreign operators to rebrand.

KK and 99 Speedmart should use their internal profits to expand gradually. Its a logistics game. The only thing 7-11 has is 24 hour. If its feasible to do 24 hour, you will wipe out 7-11 in no time.


Of course the worst problem for mini marts is robbery and 24 hour a day is making you a pretty strong target. Need to strategise to overcome that obstacle.

KK and 99 Speedmart can easily have 2,000 outlets in 3-5 years, then you list or sell as the growth will be more muted then.

Still, a fascinating competitive landscape.

‘Your family won’t get you a job or pay your bills … By contrast, distant contacts are sometimes surprisingly useful’

This may be a statement of the obvious at Christmas, but our families can sometimes let us down. Evidence comes from a little-noticed survey published by the US Census Bureau in September. The findings are conveyed in a sad and simple graph. It reports a survey of “households experiencing hardship” in 2011 – and who helped them when times were tough. What counted as tough times? Having a phone disconnected, missing utility bill payments, falling into rent or mortgage arrears, or not seeing a doctor or dentist when needed.

More than half of such households expected help from family members, as did almost half from friends. Rather fewer – about a fifth – hoped for help from a social agency, charity or church.

The overwhelming majority were disappointed. It was rare for family members to provide help with rent arrears – about one time in six – and it was rarer still to receive financial help from other sources or for other purposes.

In short, hard-up Americans were confident of help in need from those close to them – and that confidence was misplaced. (If you’re looking for an explanation of the popularity of payday loans, this finding isn’t a bad start.)

An optimistic reading of this research is that there are plenty of people whose families or friends did help them and thus never featured in the sample. Perhaps. But as the economist Timothy Taylor comments, enough people experience disappointment to leave “lasting shadows”.

This dispiriting stuff reminded me of Mark Granovetter’s work on “the strength of weak ties”, published in 1973. Granovetter, a sociologist, brought together two disparate strands of work: a survey of how people with professional or managerial jobs had found those jobs; and a theoretical analysis of the structure of social networks.

Start with the theoretical observation first: the most irreplaceable social connections, paradoxically, are often rather weak or distant ones. A family group or clique of close friends all tend to know each other and know similar things at similar times. Their social ties are strong but also redundant, in the sense that there are many different paths through which information could pass from one member of that group to another.

By contrast, “weak ties” between one social cluster and another are valuable precisely because the social contact is unusual. Information passed along a weak tie will often be totally new – and if it doesn’t arrive through the weak tie, it is unlikely to arrive at all.

Granovetter then supplemented this theoretical idea with his survey, showing that it was very common for people to find jobs – especially managerial jobs and jobs with which they were satisfied – through personal contacts. The old saw is true: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Or as Granovetter put it in his book Finding a Job, what matters most is “one’s position in a social network”.

But this is not because of crude nepotism: the key contacts who helped jobseekers find jobs were typically distant rather than close friends – old college contacts, perhaps, or former colleagues. Granovetter’s analysis made this finding make sense: it’s the more peripheral contacts who tell you things you don’t already know.

More recent research – for instance, a “big data” analysis of millions of mobile phone records conducted by Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Albert-László Barabási and others – has backed up Granovetter’s argument that the weaker ties are the vital ones.

It’s a disappointing message to deliver at Christmas: your family won’t get you a job or pay your bills – count yourself lucky if they serve you a slice of turkey. By contrast, distant contacts are sometimes surprisingly useful: no wonder we send Christmas cards to people we barely remember.

Also published at ft.com.

Inheritance is a demeaning way for a 50-year-old finally to establish a pension, writes Tim Harford

‘Securing a juicy inheritance may prove the best bet for the generation that came of age under Margaret Thatcher, with their prospects for decent retirement incomes looking increasingly bleak.’ – Financial Times, December 17

Is that news? I thought we knew that our pensions were worth nothing.

Some pensions are worth plenty – including those for many people now on the brink of retirement. This story was based on a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, examining the broader question of how today’s 40-year-olds are doing compared with 40-year-olds 10, 20 and 30 years ago.

In other words, are we richer than our parents?

To be precise, are we richer than our parents were when they were our age, judging by income, savings, debt, pensions and housing.

And the baby boomers took all the money?

The boomer generation did roll like a gigantic steamroller through the past 60 years and did pretty well. Take real equivalised household income.

Take what?

A measure of income corrected to take account both of inflation and different family sizes. What the IFS finds is that the generation born in the 1940s – currently about 70 – was richer at the age of 60 than the 1950s generation is today, now aged about 60. And the 1950s generation was richer at the age of 50 than the 1960s generation is today, just as the 1960s generation was richer at the age of 40 than the 1970s generation is today.

So we’re all getting poorer. But the economy hasn’t been shrinking for 40 years, has it?

No. It shrank a lot five years ago and has hardly recovered. That is largely why each generation now is doing badly relative to the previous cohort 10 years ago. But there’s more to the story than the recession. What we see is that the 1970s generation had more money when they were young than their parents did. But they spent it.

They really only have themselves to blame, then.

Well – perhaps, perhaps not. Nobody knew quite how generous – or expensive – today’s pensions were going to be. Even if the younger generation were far-sighted it’s not clear they would want to pay for quite such gold-plated retirements. But anyway, they were short-sighted, as we all are, and will pay the price. Their parents may have been equally myopic but typically had automatic pensions and didn’t have the same freedom to mess up.

So today’s thirty and fortysomethings have been screwed on pensions.

Well, yes, they have. But they’ve also hurt themselves. At the age of 30, the 1970s generation was spending almost twice as much as the 1940s generation and, unlike all previous cohorts, they were net borrowers rather than net savers.

What about house prices?

That’s another part of the story, in which everything seems to be conspiring to favour the boomer generation. House prices are near record levels, which of course helps homeowners – who tend to be older. Younger people have struggled not only to buy a home, but also to upgrade the homes they have. According to estimates cited by the IFS, the average age of first-time buyers has risen by five years since the 1960s – but the average age of second-time buyers has risen by an astonishing 15 years. Even people who can get on the housing ladder have only grabbed the bottom rung and are digging their fingernails into the wood.

No wonder the IFS sees salvation in inheritance . . .

But inheritance is unevenly distributed, as well as a slightly demeaning way for a 50-year-old finally to establish a pension pot. This is a social mobility issue: young people can’t get ahead without receiving money from mum and dad.

So what is to be done?

A spot of strong economic growth would do no harm: although this issue has long been brewing, it has been worsened by the recession. Building more houses would help young people to find jobs and buy homes – as well as deflating house prices and thus shrinking those inheritances. A property tax might nudge a few empty-nesters into downsizing their homes. And it is absurd that as austerity is hitting schools, university, services and working-age benefits, the state pension is sacrosanct for current pensioners. The problem is becoming too acute not to be addressed – too late for today’s thirtysomethings, but not too late, perhaps, for their offspring. If they can ever scrape together the cash to afford children.

Also published at ft.com.

‘The idea that hard work needs to be rewarded is a farmer’s view. The claim that “we’re all in this together” is hunter-thinking’

In the early 1980s, the anthropologist Hilly Kaplan visited Paraguay to study a hunter-gatherer tribe called the Aché. He found a moral code that, by western standards, seemed too good to be true: Aché hunters shared with open hands, giving away 90 per cent of their meat and 80 per cent of the grubs and fruit they gathered. The Aché believed that a hunter who ate his own kill would be cursed.

As the years passed, Kaplan saw this sharing culture disappear. The rainforest was being hacked back, so the Aché found that foraging would no longer sustain them. They put down roots – literally – and began to farm. And as they started farming, they stopped sharing.

This sad story makes perfect sense. Hunters have enormously volatile incomes: one day they may catch more than they can possibly eat; the next day, nothing. Kaplan discovered that Aché hunters came home empty-handed slightly more often than not. At such a strike rate a hunter would expect to do without food for an entire week about once every year.

Even a skilled hunter is largely at the mercy of good or bad luck – but others in the tribe may have better luck on the same day. It’s easy to see why a strong tradition of sharing might have arisen.

Farmers, by contrast, are less exposed to individual luck. Bad weather will probably affect neighbouring farms too, so there’s less to be gained from pooling risks. And there’s much to be lost: insurers invented the term “moral hazard” to describe cases where people are lazy or careless because they know they’re insured. Sharing encourages scroungers.

So maybe views of fairness are shaped by the environment in which we find ourselves. Hunters value sharing; farmers value self-sufficiency through hard work. Both are admirable virtues and both are appropriate to the situation.

Kaplan teamed up with other researchers, including Vernon L Smith, a winner of the Nobel memorial prize for economics, to test this idea. They concluded that sharing accompanies “unsynchronized variance in resource availability” – researcher-speak for “You never know who’ll be next to bag a monkey.”

Megan McArdle, in her fascinating forthcoming book The Up Side of Down, observes that modern societies can’t make up their minds whether to adopt the morality of farmers or of hunters. The idea that hard work needs to be rewarded is a farmer’s view of fairness. The claim that “we’re all in this together” is hunter-thinking.

Mostly, we seem to think like farmers. The government does tax and redistribute but spending on roads, police or the army isn’t redistribution. The National Health Service is probably the most prominent, beloved and well-funded expression of hunter morality we have – after all, anyone can fall sick without warning. But an Aché-style tax rate of 80 or 90 per cent for all seems unimaginable.

Economic success in the modern world requires tenacity and talent. It also requires luck. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that our moral intuitions straddle the fence between farmer and hunter.

But there’s something different about 21st-century luck – it tends to last far longer than a day. Accidents of parentage are important. So is timing: people who graduate during a recession experience years of depressed earnings after missing the perfect window to step on to the career ladder. Experimenters have sent thousands of CVs to prospective employers and shown that “farmer virtues” – a high-quality degree or relevant business experience – seem less important than your skin colour or the length of time you’ve been unemployed.

The importance of luck in the modern economy might push us towards the fair-shares-for-all morality of the hunter. But if the lucky know they can stay lucky for a lifetime, why share at all?

Also published at ft.com.

There is a saying that "we win some, we lose some". There is also a third category, the ones that you missed out. In this quiet time, you have to kick yourself for missing out on the big fish and nothing comes bigger than Dsonic and, to some extent, Inari.

What I am going write now is how we missed out on a stock, even though we had been following it for a while. Sometimes, there are valid reasons to be cautious with certain stocks but other times, you just couldn't get yourself to pull the trigger (or call a BUY). Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, you would ask yourself, why didn't I just take a small position. Why, in deed?! This type of thinking would be up there with clients' instruction to get me the best price!! When impossible instruction like that came from a newbie, you can just laugh it off. When it came from seasoned players, it makes you wonder whether they knew what they were doing. I'm digressing. Now, let's go to the story.

1) Inari

Inari is the leading Electronic Manufacturing Services provider in the semiconductors industry for Radio Frequency, Opto-electronics and Fiber-optics technologies. We have production facilities across three countries, namely Malaysia, Philippines and China.

The Group has a customer which is also a substantial shareholder of the Company that contributed approximately RM164.5 million or 94.8% to the Group’s total revenue for the nine months ended 31 March 2013. From the outset, I was very concerned with this over-dependent on a single customer.

However, Inari is a very profitable company. See Table 1 & Chart 1 below.


Table 1: Inari's last 11 quarterly results


Chart 1: Inari's last 11 quarterly results

In April 2013, it broke above its horizontal resistance at RM0.35. That should have been a good level to get in for a trading BUY.


Chart 2: Inari's daily chart as at October 4, 2013_11.00am (Source: Quickcharts)

In addition, it was trading at a PE of 5 times in April (based on 4 quarters' EPS to QE31/12/2012 of 8 sen). At that PE multiple, Inari was reasonably priced.

In the end, I gave it a miss because of the single customer concern.

2) Dsonic

This company is involved in the provision of ICT solutions including the smart card personalisation (such as secure ID or chip-based credit / debit / bank cards), customisation of software and hardware solutions, project management, consultancy, R&D and technical consultancy services.

It was listed in September 2012. Its financial performance was very good and it was growing rapidly. See Table 2 & Chart 3 below.


Table 2: Dsonic's last 5 quarterly results



Chart 3: Dsonic's last 5 quarterly results

In early May 2013, it broke above the horizontal resistance at RM1.33 (Prior to the Bonus Issue of 1-for-2, the unadjusted breakout level would be RM2.00).


Chart 2: Dsonic's daily chart as at October 4, 2013_11.00am (Source: Quickcharts)

Its PE at the point of breakout was about 3 times (based on last 4 quarters' EPS to 31/3/2013 of 42 sen).

With every box checked - it's profitable, it's attractively valued & it has a bullish breakout- I should have called a BUY but, I didn't. Why?! I am not sure. It could be because I felt it was "too easy". On hindsight, it is a very poor excuse.

                            *********************************************

As I sit in front of the terminal scanning the stocks- with nothing exciting to write about- I regretted not calling a BUY on these 2 stocks. However, I have to check myself constantly to avoid simply calling a BUY on a stock because there is expectation. I am channeling my 'energy' into writing about stocks that we should be careful about or simply avoid. Until I have something worthwhile, I will be here, silently twiddling my fingers

NOTE: THIS IS NOT A CALL TO BUY EITHER INARI OR DSONIC. SINCE BOTH STOCKS HAVE RISEN SUBSTANTIALLY, I BELIEVE THAT THE RISK TO REWARD PROPOSITION IS NO LONGER IN YOUR FAVOR.

Note:
In addition to the disclaimer in the preamble to my blog, I hereby confirm that I do not have any relevant interest in, or any interest in the acquisition or disposal of, Inari & Dsonic.

Miliband has promised to pull the plug on a very bad thing

‘Ed Miliband defended his proposal to freeze energy prices … His vow to stand up to “powerful vested interests that hold our economy back” was accompanied by a promise to freeze bills for 20 months if he wins the next election.’ FT.com, September 25

Gosh. Mr Miliband has declared war on the free market!

That’s an excitable way to put it. Prices have been capped before, and not so long ago. Energy companies used to be monopolies or near-monopolies, so regulators imposed price caps. Those caps no longer apply to retail energy, the theory being that the market is now competitive enough.

But this market still isn’t competitive.

It’s much more competitive than it was, and neither the level nor the trend in prices is that unusual compared with other EU countries. No doubt competition could be given a prod, but it’s hard to see how a freeze for a few months can be anything but a stunt.

It will keep prices down, though.

It may. Energy prices do bounce around a lot – and, while they have been rising on average for the past decade or so, they have at times fallen. A freeze might actually keep them high rather than low. But in a way that misses the point. Nobody denies that Mr Miliband, given all the tools of state power to play with, can make retail prices go up, down or any way he wants. The question is whether this would be worth the unpleasant side effects.

He is bringing a sledgehammer to crack a nut, you think.

I think he is bringing a sledgehammer to a nightclub: he’s decided he doesn’t like the atmosphere and he’s determined to change it. And he will – but not necessarily in a subtle or constructive fashion.

What exactly do you think is wrong with a freeze?

Let’s start by acknowledging that this is economically a sideshow. If he is lucky, Mr Miliband’s 20-month cap (why 20 months?) will delay a price rise of 10 per cent or so. Energy spending comprises 5 per cent of the basket of goods used to calculate the consumer price index. So Mr Miliband will, on an optimistic view, postpone (not prevent) a 0.5 per cent rise in CPI. That will help some people but is trivial compared with what he might do with the tax or benefit system.

But it’s still something – so what’s the downside?

The first downside is that it makes UK energy policy look capricious, confrontational and juvenile. That matters because this country urgently needs new electricity generating capacity. If suppliers don’t expect to get the revenue they need to cover their costs, they won’t invest. It’s alarmist to suggest that Mr Miliband will simply scare them away and the lights will go out, but it’s reasonable to expect that they will need more convincing in the wake of his little pep talk at the Labour party conference, which can be summarised simply as: “Your customers vote and you don’t, and I’ll never forget that.” He has achieved the remarkable feat of damaging the country before becoming prime minister; most party leaders wait until they win an election before they start screwing it up.

Mr Miliband isn’t really very scary. Is that the only problem?

He is also ignoring climate change. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions means conserving energy, and generating it using nuclear power and renewables, both of which are probably more uncertain and more expensive propositions than oil, gas and coal. Because of this, prices are rising as a matter of policy – policy that began under the last Labour government, in which Mr Miliband was, I seem to recall, the energy secretary.

High energy prices still cause hardship.

They do, to some people, and they can be helped through taxes and benefits. But we live in a world where climate change is a looming disaster and security of energy supply a serious concern, and where our use of energy remains wasteful. In this context, out of all the things that Mr Miliband could demand should be cheaper, why on earth choose energy?

You’re unimpressed.

Mr Miliband’s message is: “Energy price rises are bad. I will make the bad thing stop.” This shows all the political maturity of a 10-year-old – which does, admittedly, place him firmly in the mainstream of British politics. It’s almost as though he looked enviously at chancellor George Osborne’s Help to Buy policy and wondered if he could possibly find something as crude, populist and ill-advised as that. He has succeeded.

Also published at ft.com.

Finally, someone who can provide clarity to the foreign funds moving in and out Asia. It does not mean we should not be wary but need to put things in its proper perspective. I have added my take on the market capitalisation growth of the world's top ten markets as another viewpoint that should further lend credence to the long term trend. Need to distinguish short term noise from long term concerto.

 Economics – Markets – Strategy” for Asia and the G3.    
Three steps forward…

 Capital flows have always been a two-way affair.  When sentiment is strong, inflows push you up the mountain.  When it’s weak, they drag you out to sea.  The fact that Western central banks put interest rates on the floor five years ago and kept them there has only amplified the action – first inward, as Asia’s V-shaped recovery took off in 2009 and 2010 and then outward, as the EU debt crisis erupted in 2011 and, more recently, as fears over Fed tapering have grown.  

We estimate that in the two quarters ending June, some US$138bn flowed out of the Asia-8.  Is that a lot?  Surprisingly, no.  Two years ago, $152bn flowed out when the European debt crisis erupted.  When Lehman collapsed five years ago, $350bn left the region, 2.5x more than the current ‘exodus’.  QE and its tapering make a sexy story but the fact is today’s outflows rank only third in the standings, and that’s just in the past five years.  

 If all of this money is flowing out of the region, when does Asia run dry?  It doesn’t.  Today’s outflows underscore the fact that there have always been two types of inflow: short-run ‘hot’ money flows arbitraging differential rates and returns, and longer-term inflows seeking to profit from Asia’s strong growth.  The hot money is now going home – or at least this week it is.  The long-term money is staying put.  And the long-term money is the bigger force.  

 Since the dotcom / hi-tech downturn ended in 2001, some $2.4 trillion of capital has flowed into the Asia-10.  About $500bn flowed out temporarily in 2008/09 and another $300bn has flowed out since September 2011.  Net, net, that’s $1.6trn of long-term capital that has stayed in Asia, riding out the various global crises of the past 12 years.  Three steps forward, one step back – for every dollar that comes in, 66 cents stay for the long haul.  As capital flows go, that’s a pretty good signal-to-noise ratio.  

 Why is so much money coming to Asia?  That’s easy.  Asia is where the world’s growth is being generated.  And businesses want to be where the growth is. Think about it: Asia and the US are now about the same size – GDP in both regions is roughly $16 trn.  If the US grows at a 2.5% rate, it generates $400bn of new demand each year.  But Asia grows at a 6.25% pace, maybe a bit faster.  It generates $1000bn of new demand every year.  If you’re a businessman, do you want to invest where demand is growing by 4 cents per year or where it’s growing by 10 cents per year?  

 Extend the thought to Europe.  Many are encouraged by the fact that Germany returned to positive growth in the second quarter.  That’s good news and a good reason to invest there.  But put it in perspective.  If Germany grew at a 1.5% rate for the next 47 years – a feat few think it will accomplish – it would double in size.  It would ‘add’ a new Germany to Europe’s economic map by 2060.  Asia, by contrast, ‘adds’ a new Germany every 4 years, right here in Asia.  Five years hence, it will take only 3.5 years for Asia to add a Germany.  By 2060, Asia will have put about 25 Germanys on the economic map.  Pretty staggering.

This is why long-term capital will continue to flow to Asia.  Businesses and investors want to be where the growth is.  Inflows will continue to flip-flop in the short-run and yes, Asia will make plenty of mistakes – the West has no monopoly on that.  But the shift in economic gravity is the biggest structural change underway in the global economy today.  Structural inflows will remain, and grow, long after today’s hot and sexy but ultimately short-term outflows have become a footnote to the bigger picture.  

David Carbon, for
DBS Group Research
September 12, 2013

10 biggest stock markets in the World by domestic market capitalization in 2005 (USD bn)

1 NYSE Group 13,632.3
2 Tokyo Stock Exchange 4,572.9
3 Nasdaq Stock Market 3,604
4 London Stock Exchange 3,058.2
5 Euronext 2,706.8
6 Canadian TSX Group 1,482.2
7 Deutsche Börse 1,221.1
8 Hong Kong Exchanges 1,055
9 BME Spanish Exchanges 959.9
10 SWX Swiss Exchange 935.4


As of June 2013

1.  NYSE - Remember that it merged with American Stock Exchange and more critically Euronext after 2005. Hence their 2005 base should be 13,632.3 + 2,706.8 =  16,339.1. As of June 2013, its 14,000 which is 85.6%, a loss of 14.4%, largely due to European stocks devastating performance in recent years. (-14.4%)

2.  Nasdaq - June 2013 figure was 4,500 compared to 2005 figure of 3,604 ... more reflective of the resilience of the US markets despite the 2008 sub prime debacle. (+24.8%)

3.  Tokyo Stock Exchange - Current 3,300 compared to 2005 figure of 4,572.9. Despite the massive surge over the last 12 months, it is still not enough to wipe out the debilitating balance sheet recession from the excesses in the 80s and early 90s. Abe still has to be more aggressive to reverse the course for Japanese stocks. (-28%)

4. London Stock Exchange - Current 3,396 compared to 2005 figure of 3,058.2. Safe to say, Thatcher's insistence not to join the Eurozone has helped in a large way to allow them to rebuild faster than their neighbours. The government over the last 10 years have done sufficiently enough to propel London as a major and viable exchange for the world's biggest companies, thus drawing a large number of international companies to their shores, hence the real figure for UK may be inflated but still significant to compare. (+11%)

5. HK Stock Exchange - Current figure 2,831 compared to 2005 figure of 1,055. Naturally HKSE also continued to benefit from continued listings of red chips from China, still a significant development and trend. (+168%)

6. Shanghai SE - It was not even in the top ten back in 2005 with just 295 bn. Now its at 2,547 bn. Seen in this light, it makes the HKSE figure even more credible. (+763%)

7. Toronto SE - Again, another that was nowhere back in 2005 with 1,144. Its current figure is just over 2,058 bn. Largely they have stayed strong thanks to almost none of their banks participating in the subprime mess. (+80%)

8. Deutsche Bourse - 2005 figure 1,221 and the current figure is 1,486 bn. Germany is already the most resilient among the EU countries so you can imagine how bad it was for the rest. More significantly, even Toronto has overtaken the German bourse in market cap. (+21.7%)

9. Australia SE - Current figure 1,386 bn while the 2005 was around 720. Benefited from huge China investments in commodities and mines, and they were shielded from the subprime mess. (+92%)

10. Bombay SE - 2005 figure was 380 bn and the current is 1,263 bn. Despite the massive correction for India over the last 6 months, it is still in pretty good shape overall. (+232%)

Now the REALLY INTERESTING PART, we should compare apples to apples .... since 2005 how has Bursa Malaysia fared compared to our neighbours, bring out the tissues.

2005 Market Cap                        2013 June Market Cap

Malaysia  184 bn       490 bn  (+166%)
Singapore  227 bn                  752 bn  (+231%)
Indonesia 77.6 bn     477 bn  (+514%)
Taiwan  433 bn                      754 bn  (+74%)
Shenzhen  125bn                    1,190 bn  (+852%)
Philippines  32.4bn    230 bn  (+609%)
Korea  459 bn                       3,051  (+564%)
Thailand  122 bn       408 bn  (+234%)

The way its going ... the 3 highlighted countries lagged Bursa substantially in 2005. Indonesia looks likely to surge past Malaysia by end 2014 despite the recent massive correction there. Thailand has come up by leaps and bounds despite numerous vicious street protests, disquiet down south of Thailand and changes in government. Thailand looks set to over take Malaysia by sometime end 2015. Now the Philippines ... soon Malaysia will be sending maids to the Philippines ... fuckers!!! Maybe not now but look at the trend, I predict by 2018 the Philippines will bypass Malaysia if nothing changes.

Indonesia has really surged, you cannot just argue that it was from a low base because we are not really using figures from 20 years back. its only 8 years back. We have to look at why we lagged behind, has our growth stunted, have we maxed out? I mean, not just Indonesia, look at Thailand beating us by a comfortable 68%. Singapore is Singapore, fair enough. But just watch the Philippines.

We also cannot use the argument that we are maxed out, or that the best days are behind us, look at fucking Korea, they continued to post enormous productivity gains. I mean just Samsung stock alone, its market cap is 190 bn or 38% of Bursa Malaysia all stocks.

Something went very wrong over the last 10 years. We had no subprime crisis to speak of, and now we are talking of maybe even being part of the emerging markets sell down? We OBVIOUSLY did not invest well, we OBVIOUSLY had too much leakages.

You can either pooh-pooh these statistics as another angry commentator going ballistic or take the reality and DO SOMETHING CONCRETE about it because if we stay roughly the same, we will have the same end result over the next 8 years. Fuck the sloganeering ... the problems are so much more deep seated.

p/s  some of our problems:












Ratio of public servants to total country's population

A frustrating and intriguing study of how shortages change the way we think

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Allen Lane, RRP£20 / Times Books, RRP$28, 304 pages

Here is a flawed but intriguing book with a compelling thesis: being short of time is fundamentally similar to being short of money, or friends, or food, or indeed being short of space when packing for a trip. In each case, the feeling of scarcity comes to the front of the mind. It makes us focus on the immediate problem, which can make us remarkably effective – but also over-anxious, short-termist or blinkered.

We learn on the very first page of Scarcity that Sendhil Mullainathan – professor of economics at Harvard and one of my favourite economic thinkers – is extremely busy: “the past-due pile of life was growing dangerously close to toppling.” In the 300-odd pages that follow, he and his co-author Eldar Shafir, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, explain that people in that sort of situation make hasty, distracted and ill-advised decisions, which may explain certain curiosities about the book itself.

Let’s get the criticism out of the way first: the book is full of chatty attempts to coin new buzzwords. We discover that people who suffer from lack of “slack” have to pay the “bandwidth tax”. As a consequence, they may start “tunneling”, and if they “tunnel” repeatedly then the “tunneling” will turn into “juggling”.

Scarcity is also poorly balanced. More than half the book outlines the psychological effects of scarcity, and what at first is a fun jaunt through some intriguing experiments soon feels lengthy, repetitive and confusing. The concluding chapters, with suggestions for policy, management and self-help, are interesting but brief and often half-baked. We measure gross national product, write the authors, so “Why not also measure Gross National Bandwidth?” To ask that question is to answer it.

Yet while Scarcity frustrates, it also fascinates. The idea that there’s a basic similarity to all forms of scarcity, and that similarity manifests itself in the way we think, has a touch of Gladwellian genius about it: somehow it manages to be obvious yet original at the same time.

In one experiment, the authors asked Princeton undergraduates to play a TV gameshow under controlled conditions. Some were made “rich”, with three times the time allocation to answer questions. The “poor” used their resources more effectively, scoring more points per second than the rich.

Then the experimenters introduced a wrinkle: both rich and poor were given access to the equivalent of payday loans, borrowing time from future rounds to use immediately, at punitive rates. The “rich” hardly bothered; the “poor” made extensive use of this loan-sharkery and earned far less as a result.

This is the kind of result – Scarcity is full of them – that should make us think differently about poverty. The “poor” relied on the payday loans not because of fecklessness or stupidity (they were Princeton undergrads, exactly the same as the “rich”) but because of the context in which they found themselves. And they managed to be penny-wise and pound-foolish because of the way scarcity forced them to focus too closely on the problem at hand.

Mullainathan and Shafir point out that the scarcity perspective explains the effectiveness of fashionable “nudge” approaches, which minimise the cognitive demands on people whose attention is elsewhere. It also explains the failings of over-broad policies such as a lifetime limit on welfare claims, introduced in the US: the cap simply seems irrelevant to most claimants, until suddenly it looms and it’s too late. The policy “penalizes but fails to motivate”.

The authors offer some alternatives. For instance, they suggest a payday loan and savings account rolled into one: the high fees from the payday loan would be split between the lender and a savings account in the name of the borrower. Each hasty grasp for short-term cash builds long-term financial resources. Clever – but would it work? Mullainathan has run rigorous trials of such policy interventions before; it’s not clear why he hasn’t tried this one. Did he run out of time?

The case of the St John’s Regional Health Center, an acute care hospital in Missouri, is particularly memorable: always short of operating-theatre space, always rearranging scheduled operations when emergency cases came in, the hospital’s fortunes were transformed when it switched to a policy of always leaving one theatre empty in case of emergencies. Suddenly, the interruptions to scheduled operations stopped, and with it the endless cycle of rearranging and catching up.

While the example is striking, it also somewhat undermines the book’s thesis: that scarcity makes its presence felt through the way we think. That hospital’s experience suggests that the issue may not be psychological at all, but a topic in operations research.

As the authors admit, this whole scarcity business is new and somewhat speculative. But one cannot help feeling that they are on to something. Scarcity made me think differently about money, food, and how I manage my own time. And for all its flaws, a book that changes the way you see the world is valuable – and scarce.

Also published at ft.com.

There's no better source of wisdom than people who have lived a long time. If you want to avoid regret at the end of your life, this one lesson about work is the one people over 70 were most adamant about—more than on lessons about relationships, children, and happiness:

Read more...

We share a lot of life advice here at Lifehacker, but this comic pretty much sums up everything you need to know, courtesy of Zen Pencils and Bill Watterson's famous 1990 Kenyon graduation speech. It's the best thing you'll read all day.

It isn't exactly a life hack in the most traditional sense, but after reading this on Gawker, I couldn't help but feel it deserved a spot on our front page. Read the full comic below, weep, and then go home and post it on your wall.

When the world’s richest countries were booming, few people worried overmuch that the top 1 per cent were enjoying an ever-growing share of that prosperity. In the wake of a depression in the US, a fiscal chasm in the UK and an existential crisis in the eurozone – and the shaming of the world’s bankers – worrying about inequality is no longer the preserve of the far left.

There should be no doubt about the facts: the income share of the top 1 per cent has roughly doubled in the US since the early 1970s, and is now about 20 per cent. Much the same trend can be seen in Australia, Canada and the UK – although in each case the income share of the top 1 per cent is smaller. In France, Germany and Japan there seems to be no such trend. (The source is the World Top Incomes Database, summarised in the opening paper of a superb symposium in this summer’s Journal of Economic Perspectives.)

But should we care? There are two reasons we might: process and outcome. We might worry that the gains of the rich are ill-gotten: the result of the old-boy network, or fraud, or exploiting the largesse of the taxpayer. Or we might worry that the results are noxious: misery and envy, or ill-health, or dysfunctional democracy, or slow growth as the rich sit on their cash, or excessive debt and thus financial instability.

Following the crisis, it might be unfashionable to suggest that the rich actually earned their money. But knee-jerk banker-bashers should take a look at research by Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, again in the JEP symposium. They simply compare the fate of the top earners across different lines of business. Worried that chief executives are filling their boots thanks to the weak governance of publicly listed companies? So am I, but partners in law firms are also doing very nicely, as are the bosses of privately owned companies, as are the managers of hedge funds, as are top sports stars. Governance arrangements in each case are different.

Perhaps, then, some broad social norm has shifted, allowing higher pay across the board? If so, we would expect publicly scrutinised salaries to be catching up with those who have more privacy – for instance, managers of privately held corporations. The reverse is the case.

The uncomfortable truth is that market forces – that is, the result of freely agreed contracts – are probably behind much of the rise in inequality. Globalisation and technological change favour the highly skilled. In the middle of the income distribution, a strong pair of arms, a willingness to work hard and a bit of common sense used to provide a comfortable income. No longer. Meanwhile at the very top, winner-take-all markets are emerging, where the best or luckiest entrepreneurs, fund managers, authors or athletes hoover up most of the gains. The idea that the fat cats simply stole everyone else’s cream is emotionally powerful; it is not entirely convincing.

In a well-functioning market, people only earn high incomes if they create enough economic value to justify those incomes. But even if we could be convinced that this was true, we do not have to let the matter drop.

This is partly because the sums involved are immense. Between 1993 and 2011, in the US, average incomes grew a modest 13.1 per cent in total. But the average income of the poorest 99 per cent – that is everyone up to families making about $370,000 a year – grew just 5.8 per cent. That gap is a measure of just how much the top 1 per cent are making. The stakes are high.

I set out two reasons why we might care about inequality: an unfair process or a harmful outcome. But what really should concern us is that the two reasons are not actually distinct after all. The harmful outcome and the unfair process feed each other. The more unequal a society becomes, the greater the incentive for the rich to pull up the ladder behind them.

At the very top of the scale, plutocrats can shape the conversation by buying up newspapers and television channels or funding political campaigns. The merely prosperous scramble desperately to get their children into the right neighbourhood, nursery, school, university and internship – we know how big the gap has grown between winners and also-rans.

Miles Corak, another contributor to the JEP debate, is an expert on intergenerational income mobility, the question of whether rich parents have rich children. The painful truth is that in the most unequal developed nations – the UK and the US – the intergenerational transmission of income is stronger. In more equal societies such as Denmark, the tendency of privilege to breed privilege is much lower.

This is what sticks in the throat about the rise in inequality: the knowledge that the more unequal our societies become, the more we all become prisoners of that inequality. The well-off feel that they must strain to prevent their children from slipping down the income ladder. The poor see the best schools, colleges, even art clubs and ballet classes, disappearing behind a wall of fees or unaffordable housing.

The idea of a free, market-based society is that everyone can reach his or her potential. Somewhere, we lost our way.

‘The Undercover Economist Strikes Back’ by Tim Harford is published this month in the UK and in January in the US.

First published in the Financial Times, 16 August 2012.

I am all for constructive analysis and commentary. An open progressive society should always have that. However, is our society somehow more like the cartoon below ... always finding something negative to say, ... never considering the backdrop or context. It is easy to just criticise and complain, somehow by shading something darker, it makes our pitiful life bearable. In much the same way, we run the danger of branding ourselves by what we do not like, we have no problem telling others what we don't like. How do people describe you? Is it "oh, she doesn't like lamb dishes, she cannot stand Sungai Wang complex, she hates Justin Beiber,  ...." or is it "she loves dogs, she goes gaga for Baskin Robbins, she loves to climb hills ..."

Microsoft Office is already a robust, feature-filled office suite. If you want to make it even easier and boost your productivity, here are seven awesome, free add-ins and apps for your downloading pleasure.

What Are Office Add-ins and Apps?

First, a brief overview of these utilities, if you’re not already familiar: Office add-ins are exactly what they sound like. They're plugins that add extra features or custom commands to Office programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. They’re easy to install and manage from the program’s main menu, and there are hundreds of free and paid options to help you accomplish whatever you need to in Office (not unlike the extensions in your browser). And, like browser extensions, they do have one downside: add-ins increase the startup time for Office programs, so you’ll need to be judicious in which ones you install.

With Office 2013, add-ins are now called Office “Apps.” Apps are more connected to the web while add-ins for 2010 and older versions tend to rely on VBA, macros, and other legacy Office conventions. Older add-ins will still work with Office 2013, but the newer Apps only work with the latest Office suite.

Here are some of the most useful free ones available.

Add-ins for Microsoft Office 2013 and Earlier

Office Tabs

Office Tabs (note: updated link) adds a tabbed view to Office 2010 and earlier Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents (as well as Publisher, Access, Project, and Visio in the paid enterprise version). So if you’re working on a dozen Word documents at the same time, you can more easily switch between them, save and close all the docs in one click, and also add documents to groups. We’ve mentioned Office Tabs before. If you're using Office 2013, you'll need to spring for the updated, though paid version from Extend Office; the latest version adds the ability to display the tabs in a left- or right-hand navigation bar, which is great if you’re short on vertical screen real estate.

Search Commands

Search Commands, from Microsoft’s Office Labs, helps you find commands you need in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (32/64-bit versions, Office 2007 or 2010 but should also work with 2013). If you’ve ever wondered “How do I do that in Microsoft Office?” this is a handy add-in to have installed. Type in what you’re looking to do in the search field to find commands and be taken instantly to the related menus (Mac users should already be familiar with this feature, since it's in every app on OS X). It’s a whole lot faster, at least, that trudging through help files.

Excel Utilities

Excel Utilities from Apps Pro offers 30 shortcuts and selection tools that spreadsheet pros probably use on a daily basis. These include one-click access buttons and keyboard shortcuts for things like conditional formatting, data validation, unhiding or rehiding worksheets, and more. If you’re using Excel 2007 or higher, the new ribbon tab for Excel Utilities puts these shortcuts within easy reach.

Apps Pro, founded by Microsoft MVP Rob Bovey, also offers a free XY Chart Labeler add-in, which lets you add labels to XY chart data points.

ASAP Utilities

Another suite of utilities for Excel, the popular ASAP Utilities, includes over 300 features and shortcuts. These include exporting worksheets as separate files, sorting sheet tabs by name or color, auto-naming multiple worksheets, and selecting cells based on formatting, content, and more. The add-in is free for home and student users, and works in 32-bit versions of Excel 2010 and 2013 as well as earlier Excel versions going back to Excel 2000.

VisualBee

VisualBee turns bare or ugly PowerPoint presentations into something more stylish and presentable in just a couple of clicks. It works with PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 and comes with a large collection of free templates and images. Animations and transitions are also built-in, but you can turn those off and modify any of the templates after they’re applied to your slides.

Apps for Office 2013

There aren’t quite as many of the newer apps for Office 2013 in the new Office Store, because it’s relatively new. However, these apps hold a lot of promise because they can pull in updates and data in real-time. I haven’t tested the two below, since I’m still using Office 2010, but they seem to be universally useful ones to try out if you're using the latest Office suite.

Search the Web

Search the Web adds a Google (no, not Bing) search panel within Word, Excel, Project, and PowerPoint 2013. Thanks to the add-in, you don’t have to leave your document and switch to your browser to Google the info you need—including images from Google’s image search.

Bing Dictionary (English)

Bing Dictionary for Word and Excel 2013 is a more intelligent or at least web-connected dictionary from Microsoft. The company describes it as such:

Special features include: fresh linguistic content, web-scale collocations, and powerful search capabilities that let users enter words as they sound. Additionally, users can explore English with functionality like wild cards that can suggest letters, words or phrases, optionally specified by part-of-speech. Behind these features are an ever-expanding and massive dataset derived through mining the web. By continuously discovering and distilling high quality language knowledge on the Internet, Bing Dictionary can present a continuous English lexicon.

More Specific Add-ins and Apps

The seven above just scratch the surface, as there are companies dedicated to solely to developing plugins for Microsoft Office. You can find add-ins for science and math, random number generators, and just about every category of Outlook and Exchange plugins you can think of. You’ll also find a ton of paid plugins as well, including NetCentrics GTDOA for Outlook ($75), which GTD creator David Allen helped design. In short, if there’s something you need to do in Microsoft Office that doesn’t seem easy or built-in, chances are there’s a third-party solution that can help.

Read for free: Is Asia heading for a 1990s-style financial crisis? 
http://on.ft.com/14iXok3

Credit growth since 2008 has been rapid, leading to a run-up in house prices, high growth rates and corporate mega-deals. 
But as the tide of cheap money from overseas rolls back from emerging economies across the region, analysts warn that Asia could be at the start of a series of currency and credit crises.

Here’s a rather incurious column by Andrew Ross Sorkin in Dealbook. One which jumps from JPMorgan feeling the heat over Chinese princelings and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (serious stuff) to Wall Street executives hiring the progeny of other Wall Street executives.

Sorkin’s for it — rather fatalistically.

But, in truth, it is the way of the world. It is a hard to fault a business for hiring someone who has better contacts than someone else.

Continue reading: Actually Sorkin, yeah, it’s a scandal

The long holidays just passed, for most of us in big cities, we cherish the traffic free situation as the bulk of people has gone back home. Why arent't you back? Work is work, it will always be there. 

If you have young kids, what do you wish for the most when they are older and you are much older? Too often, we think of our parents only in deep gratitude when we are much older, that is fine and fair. What do you wish for when you are much older and retired?

How often we call our parents? If you happen to be living with them, that is great. For most of us in big cities, I think the majority in big cities have our parents in our home towns. How often you call your parents?

Yes, they can be grumpy and nagging ... but think further, nagging is just their way of showing that they care cause they know not of anything better to show their concern. 

Our parents come from a different era, they may not be as "friends" with us as many of you try to be "friends" with your kids. That is not their fault, thats just the way it is. There was never a guide book on how to become parents.  They did the best they could in the culture and upbringing that they had,

If you have kids, and you possibly couldn't think of anything you could love more, thats how your parents felt about you. They may have flaws and much like all of us. In the twilight years, when all the hard labour, sacrifice are done... when the hours seem longer than 60 minutes, what do they wish for .... very much the same things you wish for when you are 60 or 70.

I don't know how many parents you have ... I have two, one has passed on. Make that call, make that trip. 

Textbooks are incredibly expensive (not to mention cumbersome and heavy in dead tree format). Smart students can pick up free digital textbooks from severalsources, including one we haven't mentioned before: Rice University's OpenStax College.

Read more...

Tracking is one of the things that Internet users are exposed to no matter where they go. Websites use analytics software to track them, advertising companies use tracking to make more money because of targeted ads, and social media sites too may know where you have been almost at all times because of buttons and scripts that are installed on the majority of websites.

There are less obvious ways to track users though, and one of them comes in the form of a browser's fingerprint. When you connect to a website information about your system and browser are available to the server you are connecting to. These information are used to fingerprint the browser which works really well considering that the remote server has access to information such as the browser's user agent, headers, time zone, screen size and color depth, plugins, fonts and a number of other data points.

The idea behind Panopticlick was to provide Internet users with the means to look up how unique their browser really is. To find out, simply load the website and run the test on it. You end up with a score in the end that tells you if your browser is unique among the browsers that have been tested so far, or if it shares the same fingerprint with others.

Unique is a bad thing in this test, as it means that no other tested browser shared all characteristics with yours. With that fingerprint created, it is theoretically possible to identify you on websites that you visit, provided that your browser got a unique score.

Note: While the score is displayed as unique by the test, it does not necessarily mean that it is indeed unique, considering that the majority of Internet users have not tested their browser on the site.

Tweaking your browser

If you do not like the idea of your browser having a unique score, you may be interested in tweaking it to reduce the identifying bits of information that it reveals when it connects to websites.

This may sound easy at first, but is not really because of the following. Some information cannot be disabled, as they are always transferred no matter what you do. Disabling certain features, like plugins, can also be used for the fingerprinting. If you run your browser without plugins, then this is a clue that websites can use as well for the fingerprinting.

So how do you get your browser from having a unique fingerprint to one that shares its fingerprint with other browsers?

The idea here is to modify settings such as the user agent or screen size and depth so that they match the largest percentage of browsers. Instead of using a Firefox Nightly user agent for example, you may use a user agent that is more commonly used.

One option that Firefox users have for that is the Firegloves extension. It has not been updated in a year but it is still working fine. It changes settings to common values so that your browser's fingerprint turns out to be less unique than it actually would be without.

Probably the most interesting option that it provides you with is its random mode. Fingerprint tracking can only work if the browser's fingerprint does not change. If yours is random, because of changing information, then it is not really possible to identify all those random fingerprints as belonging to a single browser, unless other tracking technologies are used in addition to that.

Note: The user agent used by the extension is an old Firefox user agent. The reason why it works that well in the test is likely that other users who have installed the extension in Firefox have taken the test on the Panopticlick website in the past.

Closing Words

If you are not using Firefox, your options to reduce your browser's fingerprint may be limited. You can try and install a user agent modifier and switch to a common one, disable plugins such as Java or Flash to avoid them providing websites with a list of fonts your system supports, but that is about it.

Have another tip on how to cope with browser fingerprinting? Let me know in the comments.

The post How to modify your browser’s fingerprint so that it is no longer unique appeared first on gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials.