Okay, here’s my big problem with the budget that the Bush administration submitted to Congress yesterday. (No, I didn’t read all of it, but I did check out a few highlights.) It makes a big deal about getting rid of the federal deficit by 2012. But guess what: George Bush will have been out of office for three years by then–and the …
Ed Thorp explains the new hedge fund reality
I had a nice e-mail conversation with Ed Thorp last week. Some of it was reproduced in my Time column, but I thought the world’s legions of Thorp fans might want more.
For those who don’t know the man, he’s a math professor (he spent most of his career at UC Irvine), who figured out in the early 1960s how to beat the house at blackjack …
Are Women “Baby-Making Machines”?
Yes, according to no less an expert than the health minister of Japan. Hakuo Yanagisawa made the comments recently as he addressed Japan’s low birth rate. According to Reuters:
On January 27, Yanagisawa told his supporters in a speech touching on Japan’s low birthrate: “Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed,
…
Corporate Blogging: Proceed With Caution
My blog got me in trouble the other day.
I had just published a posting referring to a company event. It turns out the event is hush-hush. I had no idea. My supervisor came tearing down the hall, and–thanks to the magic of the Internet–I turned back the clock and took the posting down.
Corporate blogging can be tricky. Employers …
Hedge funds on paper
My first Curious Capitalist column, “Hedge Funds Head for Mediocrity,” is in the edition of Time that hits newsstands tomorrow. It’s also online right now, but I must say it looks much prettier on paper (worth every one of those 495 pennies). Here’s how it starts:
In 1962, a government study of mutual funds revealed that they were, on
…
Stop Stapler Abuse!
This week I returned to the office after three months away. My leave was unexpected, so I hadn’t tidied up. I knew I’d return to a bit of a mess: an unwashed tea mug, an unemptied in-box, stale cereal in my snack drawer.
Here’s what I confronted when I opened the door: piles and piles and piles of mail.
Journalists get a lot of mail. …
Brand Building Is About Team Building
It’s brainstorming day at TIME.
The TIME 100 is an annual issue we do profiling the 100 most interesting, influential, newsmaking, world-changing people of the past and coming year. (No, you’re not on the list. You were the person of the year; don’t be greedy.) It’s followed up by a celeb-stocked extravaganza in the swanky Time Warner …
Remembering when Microsoft was scary
As Bill Gates makes the rounds promoting Microsoft’s new operating system and everybody yawns, it’s worth recalling just how scary and important his company seemed a decade ago.
Just to pluck a few examples from the 1990s pages of Fortune: Microsoft was going to extend its dominance from desktops to handhelds. It was going to take over …
Fundamentally okay index funds
I’ve always thought index funds were pretty cool. On average, stock mutual funds do worse than unmanaged indexes like the S&P 500 and Russell 1000. So if you buy a fund that only trails the index by a teeny bit, as most index funds are able to do because of their super-low fees, you’re already doing better than most investors.
But when …
Time Is a Valuable Commodity for Workers
Time. I think a lot about time, and not just because it’s the name of the news organization I work for. Like most working people, I find time–or the lack of it–an eternal frustration, an unwinnable battle, the bane of my harried existence. My every day is a race against the clock that I never, ever seem to win.
This is hardly a …
We Mommies Aren’t Warring or Opting. We’re Too Busy Making Lunch
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of blogs by SAHMs. This is in part for a story I’m working on, but also because I wanted to see how the issues of stay-at-home moms differed from those of us who can escape to an office.
You can’t cover the workplace beat without reporting on women at work, and that road leads inexorably to the subject of …
Charting Detroit’s dependence on low gas prices
Every time bad news breaks for U.S. automakers, journalists and other observers offer one of two main explanations. One is that Detroit doesn’t make very good cars, or at least doesn’t make them efficiently enough. The other is that American automakers are so burdened by the retiree health care and pension commitments that they made when …