Sunday, January 28, 2007

DO NOT nuke your Sponges! (!)

Do Not Nuke (microwave) your sponges to disinfect them. There are better ways.
1. You might burn down your house
2. Your microwave will stink.
I've had direct experience with the smelly microwave repercussion. Do you really want your microwave to smell like eau d' kitchen sponge? I ultimately had to toss an otherwise perfectly good Sharp microwave. Everything I cooked had that sour moldy odor.
Also, fire departments around the world are reporting kitchen fires from people nuking dry sponges. You need some dampness or the damned undamp things will can ignite (and that smells REALLY bad).
So buy new sponges. They're cheap.
OR, I've found that just using some bleach type cleaner (like Ajax)to clean the sink once a week does a perfectly good job of sterilizing the sponge.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Google Must be ... Rationalized!

If I had any guts I'd short Google. They're nothing but a fast growing advertising company. 150 BILLION Market cap. Foo.
Though.... Omnicom Group (OMC) is the world's largest advertising/media company, so far as I can figure, and they only have about $10B in revenues (google is already at 9.3B). And Google has 3x their profit margin and 6x their growth (can't continue!)
But Google only has about 9x the market cap of OMC. In some sense, that makes Google cheap...
But how much can they increase sales?
US internet growth is slow and that's most of Google's revenue. They must be near ad saturation, at least in the US.
They're talking about buying billboards for pete's sake.
Ok. I don't have the guts to short them.
Maybe the Google-price will just keep going up.
That wouldn't be irrationally exhuberant
Though, as one famous economist said "If it is impossible for a trend to continue forever, it won't."
Some numbers:
Total US "Traditional" advertising 2006: $12 Billion
Estimated US Online and new media advertising: $7.6 Billion

Sunday, January 14, 2007

The iPhone really does run OS X (probably)

A research company has reported that the main applications processor in the iPhone is made by Samsung. Samsung produces low-power PowerPC based chips for embedded applications (like the iPhone). Apple could easily run a stripped down version of a Darwin-based OS X on a PowerPC chip like that. It won't run as fast as a quad G5, but fast enough. And Apple is not required by their own license to publish the code if they don't want to (A Cingular rep says they won't). So... there is no reason to suppose the iPhone does not run OS X.
It probably does use some subset.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

iPhone OS X is not really OS X

The iPhone looks to be running on a Samsung provided ARM core processor. That means it's not running on an Intel (or PPC) core. That means it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense (Apple can brand toilet paper as running OS X if they like). Darwin, the BSD based operating system that underlies what Apple has previously called OS X does not run on ARM processors. The Darwin/Apple Public Source licensing agreement says the source would have to be made available if it is modified and sold (paraphrased. read it yourself). A Cingular rep has said the iPhone version of the OS source will not be made available. It will be closed, like the iPod OS and not Darwin. So if it ain't Darwin, it ain't OS X (in any meaningful way).An InfoWorld article on an FBR Research report breaks down iPhone component providers and lists Samsung as the chip maker for the main application/video cpu.
So, that leaves the question... What OS is this phone really running? (not Linux or the source would need to be open)

Thursday, January 04, 2007

The price of Corn

Estimates are that half the corn crop will be used for Ethanol as early as next year.
Companies that use corn for
sweetner
animal feed
food aditives and ingredients
corn flour

Are screwed.

CPO is one company that does that and only that. Their stock is actually close to an all time high.
The theory is that shortages of the high fructose corn syrup (hfcs) sweetner (because of corn shortages because of ethanol production) will raise prices enough to offset the higher corn costs.
That doesn't make much sense to me. If hfcs was that profitable, the corn wouldn't go to ethanol.
Plus I think most hfcs users will go to alternative sweetners. In fact, most of the hfcs business is fake.
Sugar tariffs make sugar artificially high (the US uses more corn syrup than anyone else because of that).
Good article last month in the New Yorker economics column about that.

Citigroup analysis says the sensitivity of CPO earnings to HFCS prices is much greater than sensitivity to the cost of corn so the upside is greater than the downside. But I think they're just not taking into account a real corn shortage.
The real analysis that has to be made is profitability of ethanol production (subsidized as it is and with state mandates to produce a certain amount of ethanol fuel to be mixed with gasonline) versus the profitability of HFCS production (the most profitable current use of corn besides selling ears at the supermarket).
HFCS is buried by ethanol right now. It just seems inevitable to me that there simply won't be enough corn available to make ethanol and HFCS -- so HFCS will disappear except in quantities where its not replaceable.
Other sweetners (including sugar which is actually cheaper if imported and not tariffed) will displace corn syrup.

SHORT CPO!
Maybe.
I've gotta read more...

Angry Money

Watch Mad Money on CNBC! BUY THE BOOK! Or not.
Do you really want your money to be mad (at you?).
The Cramer Mad Money show on CNBC is fun and loud and even has some good information. Unfortunately it's got bad info mixed in there and it isn't always easy to tell the difference. Don't trust every number you hear and, as Cramer always says "do the homework."
The best part of the show are Cramer's insights into particular favorite stocks he usually discusses at the top of the show or towards the end (after the goofy off the cuff lightning round). He's an original thinker and he comes up with great angles on how a stock might grow that isn't necessarily the main thrust of the company. For example, he loves Allergen for the vanity and aging market because they make some wrinkle smoothing stuff. But even the CEO tried to tell Cramer their main business is optical (e.g. contact lens solution). But Cramer shut him down cause that wasn't fun. Yet the contact lens stuff might turn out to be the growth area for them because their big competitor Bausch & Lomb is collapsing.
Cramer gives you a story - backed up by some numbers. Just be wary. They may not be the story -- or even the real numbers...