The best investment advice you'll never get

Solli took one look at my unkempt collection of mut­ual funds and said, “You’re being robbed here.” He pointed to funds I had purchased from or through Putnam, Merrill Lynch, Dreyfus, and—yes—Charles Schwab (which referred me to Aperio) and asked, “Do you know that you’re paying these guys to do essentially nothing?” He carefully explained the many ingenious ways fund managers, brokers, and advisers had found to chip away at investors’ returns. Turns out that I, like more than 90 million other suckers who have put close to $9 trillion into mutual funds, was paying annual fees, commissions, and transaction costs well in excess of 2 percent a year on most of my mutual funds (see “What Are the Fees?” page 75). “Do you know what that adds up to?” Solli asked. “At the end of every 36 years, you will only have made half of what you could have, through no fault of your own. And these are fees you needn’t pay, and won’t, if you switch to index funds.”

If Solli is an industry gadfly, Geddes, a modest, unassuming son of a United Church of Christ minister, is its chainsaw massacrer. “We work in the most overcompensated industry in the country,” Geddes admitted before the water was served, “and indexing threatens the revenue flow from managed funds to brokerage houses. That’s why you’ve been kept in the dark about it. This truly is the great secret shame of our business.

Most people who study the poor ...

'Most people who study the poor are only interested in watching them make mistakes'

How did you go around winning the confidence of the people there?

Most reporters and academics spend a few weeks or, if they are lucky, a few months, getting information and data. I spent over a decade. Many people who write about these communities are armchair critics full of false assumptions. They are not ready to get out of the hallowed halls of Ivy League institutions.

Some of them assumed that people in these depressed areas had no family values, no respect for law, and no higher aspirations. But I would soon come to question those assumptions. And because I went directly into the neglected communities with an open mind, I was able to discover many things.

My visits not only enabled people to gain confidence in me, but it also helped me to see many sides of my informants. I was able to see them grow over time. That I stayed around to watch them make mistakes and pick themselves up engendered their confidence in me -- most people who study the poor are only interested in watching them make mistakes.

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

Street Fight

Street Fight chronicles the bare-knuckles race for Mayor of Newark, N.J. between Cory Booker, a 32-year-old Rhodes Scholar/Yale Law School grad, and Sharpe James, the four-term incumbent and undisputed champion of New Jersey politics.

Fought in Newark's neighborhoods and housing projects, the battle pits Booker against an old style political machine that uses any means necessary to crush its opponents: city workers who do not support the mayor are demoted; "disloyal" businesses are targeted by code enforcement; a campaigner is detained and accused of terrorism; and disks of voter data are burglarized in the night.

Even the filmmaker is dragged into the slugfest, and by election day, the climate becomes so heated that the Federal government is forced to send in observers to watch for cheating and violence.

The battle sheds light on important American questions about democracy, power and -- in a surprising twist -- race. Both Booker and James are African-American Democrats, but when the mayor accuses the Ivy League educated Booker of not being "really black" it forces voters to examine both how we define race in this country. "We tell our children to get educated," one Newarker says, "and when they do, we call them white. What kind of a message does that send?"

From CoryBooker.com

Newark is a city of limitless strength and unbounded potential. It is a city of hope and promise. Newark is a city of accomplishment and a city of struggle. Newark's people, like the bricks from our Brick City nickname, are strong, resilient, enduring, and when we come together there is nothing we cannot create or achieve.

We are a people committed to strong, safe neighborhoods, to thriving schools and abundant economic opportunity. We are a city that rejoices and luxuriates in the arts and culture and have a history of setting the very rhythm for an entire nation. We are a city that boasts of great universities, houses of worship that span back decades and centuries, parks designed by America's greatest urban landscape designers and a transportation system that literally connects the globe.

Newark is a great American city. It is representative of America's success and her continuing efforts to make real the promise of this nation to everyone. Within Newark's borders lie many of America's greatest stories, some of her most courageous activists and some of her most sobering challenges. The future of our country will be defined here --by the children in our schools, the young men and women entering the workforce and by how our community meets the challenges before us. The future is now.

Street Fight tells a gripping story of the underbelly of democracy where elections are not about spin-doctors, media consultants, or photo ops. In Newark, we discover, elections are won and lost in the streets.

How spicy foods can kill cancers

Something that I've always known intuitively.. Thanks to Sridhar for pointing this.

Scientists have discovered the key to the ability of spicy foods to kill cancer cells.

They found capsaicin, an ingredient of jalapeno peppers, triggers cancer cell death by attacking mitochondria - the cells' energy-generating boiler rooms.

The research raises the possibility that other cancer drugs could be developed to target mitochondria.

The Nottingham University study features in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.

The study showed that the family of molecules to which capsaicin belongs, the vanilloids, bind to proteins in the cancer cell mitochondria to trigger apoptosis, or cell death, without harming surrounding healthy cells.

I think it is also anti-genotoxic.

Vegetarian diet

Assuming humans can survive on a vegetarian diet, the best argument for doing so isn't what is ethical or what we were designed for. Every time you move up a link in the food chain, only 10% of the energy of the prey is absorbed by the predator (the rest is lost as heat). So, a cow gets 10% of the grass' energy, and by eating the cow we get only 1% of the grass' energy. Eating a bird who eats bugs who eat plants, we're only getting .1% of the plant energy. Vegetarianism would be an easy way to create an abundance of food for the entire population.

I would appreciate it if you mentioned this, because this argument is rarely brought up (and I know no one else will read this comment). Thanks for the entertaining blog.

No study will ever prove or disprove the meat contention. The random, unaccountable differences between individual humans make strict science and human nutrition mutually exclusive fields.

In order for a study to say anything conclusive, the scientists would have to do something like grow 100 genetically identical clones, and then make sure each one got exactly equal amounts and types of water, sleep, stress, excercise, exposure to illness etc etc etc. Feeding half of this group a carefully controlled omnivorous diet and the other half a carefully controlled vegetarian diet with identical levels of macro and micronutrients for 12 months and then measuring their resultant "health" would be somewhere APPROACHING scientific.

Present nutritional studies typically do not have this level of rigour. Now my declatation of bias: I really like meat. Therefore I eat it.

For all the discussion on teeth, I saw a lecture on skull bones once.

From it, I learned that human teeth are:
-Not like dogs - some of their teeth are for gripping, some for chopping up bones to get at the marrow, and some for ripping flesh
-Not like cats, large or small - their teeth are mostly for ripping and slicing flesh
-Not exactly like baboons - males have huge canines for fighting other males
-Not like horses - front teeth for tearing and back teeth for grinding with a gap in between
-Not like rodents - front teeth for gnawing, always growing

-A lot like bears and pigs - people have mistaken their skulls for the skulls archaic skeletons because of the similarities between the teeth

Bears and pigs eat a lot of the same things that humans like to eat, basically everything. In fact, a certain grizzly bear in Yellowstone really liked an entire case of beer he found in a camp and was nicely drunk at the camp when they found him. But then again, when I think of bears eating meat, I think of them clawing at salmon...

3. High-protein (meat) diets equate very closely (i.e., a one-to-one correlation) with aggression, conquest, etc., not to mention getting more of your agrarian neighbors' babes than your typical agrarians get of your babes

As I have stated, if there is a conclusive study that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that vegetarianism is a superior diet, with enough nutritional benefits to justify the switch, then I will switch without skepticism. But no such study has been produced, and what is available currently seems to be rather primitive.

Desi sites - ICICI Bank Woes

Most Indian websites are designed by retards of the highest order. In fact, each AND every site is designed by retards. The GUI is the most user-unfriendly, most things just don't work, too many ads, pop-ups. In fact, one can go on and on ...

In this series, I will attempt to cover some of them that I encounter.

Lets take for example, ICICIBank.

1. Those idiots don't let us choose our own username. They send it via mail, a week or so after we visit a bank and open an account.

2. Bank to bank transfer fails for most everyone. I just tried to transfer, resulting in several errors for reasons unknown to me. Finally, I tried to request a reissue of Transaction Password, as the transaction password expires after x number of unsuccessful attempts. Which resulted in another error..

Request for reissue of Transaction Password.


Error

Currently, we are unable to process your request.

Suggestion

Please try after some time.

What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses

For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system.

Harry Campbell

You might think this is because doctors make mistakes (we do make mistakes). But you can’t be a victim of medical error if you are not in the system. The larger threat posed by American medicine is that more and more of us are being drawn into the system not because of an epidemic of disease, but because of an epidemic of diagnoses.

Americans live longer than ever, yet more of us are told we are sick.

How can this be? One reason is that we devote more resources to medical care than any other country. Some of this investment is productive, curing disease and alleviating suffering. But it also leads to more diagnoses, a trend that has become an epidemic.

This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction.

Perhaps most worrisome is the medicalization of childhood. If children cough after exercising, they have asthma; if they have trouble reading, they are dyslexic; if they are unhappy, they are depressed; and if they alternate between unhappiness and liveliness, they have bipolar disorder. While these diagnoses may benefit the few with severe symptoms, one has to wonder about the effect on the many whose symptoms are mild, intermittent or transient.

The other source is the drive to find disease early. While diagnoses used to be reserved for serious illness, we now diagnose illness in people who have no symptoms at all, those with so-called predisease or those “at risk.”

Two developments accelerate this process. First, advanced technology allows doctors to look really hard for things to be wrong. We can detect trace molecules in the blood. We can direct fiber-optic devices into every orifice. And CT scans, ultrasounds, M.R.I. and PET scans let doctors define subtle structural defects deep inside the body. These technologies make it possible to give a diagnosis to just about everybody: arthritis in people without joint pain, stomach damage in people without heartburn and prostate cancer in over a million people who, but for testing, would have lived as long without being a cancer patient.

Second, the rules are changing. Expert panels constantly expand what constitutes disease: thresholds for diagnosing diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis and obesity have all fallen in the last few years. The criterion for normal cholesterol has dropped multiple times. With these changes, disease can now be diagnosed in more than half the population.

Most of us assume that all this additional diagnosis can only be beneficial. And some of it is. But at the extreme, the logic of early detection is absurd. If more than half of us are sick, what does it mean to be normal? Many more of us harbor “pre-disease” than will ever get disease, and all of us are “at risk.” The medicalization of everyday life is no less problematic. Exactly what are we doing to our children when 40 percent of summer campers are on one or more chronic prescription medications?

No one should take the process of making people into patients lightly. There are real drawbacks. Simply labeling people as diseased can make them feel anxious and vulnerable — a particular concern in children.

But the real problem with the epidemic of diagnoses is that it leads to an epidemic of treatments. Not all treatments have important benefits, but almost all can have harms. Sometimes the harms are known, but often the harms of new therapies take years to emerge — after many have been exposed. For the severely ill, these harms generally pale relative to the potential benefits. But for those experiencing mild symptoms, the harms become much more relevant. And for the many labeled as having predisease or as being “at risk” but destined to remain healthy, treatment can only cause harm.

The epidemic of diagnoses has many causes. More diagnoses mean more money for drug manufacturers, hospitals, physicians and disease advocacy groups. Researchers, and even the disease-based organization of the National Institutes of Health, secure their stature (and financing) by promoting the detection of “their” disease. Medico-legal concerns also drive the epidemic. While failing to make a diagnosis can result in lawsuits, there are no corresponding penalties for overdiagnosis. Thus, the path of least resistance for clinicians is to diagnose liberally — even when we wonder if doing so really helps our patients.

As more of us are being told we are sick, fewer of us are being told we are well. People need to think hard about the benefits and risks of increased diagnosis: the fundamental question they face is whether or not to become a patient. And doctors need to remember the value of reassuring people that they are not sick. Perhaps someone should start monitoring a new health metric: the proportion of the population not requiring medical care. And the National Institutes of Health could propose a new goal for medical researchers: reduce the need for medical services, not increase it.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/health/02essa.html?em&ex=1167886800&en=fac975c80a093e35&ei=5087%0A

Should I Be Tested for Cancer?: Maybe Not

A review..

H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH, has written an unusually understandable revelation of the folly of testing for cancer in people with no symptoms. He explains how only a few people will benefit from common tests such as PSA, fecal blood, mammograms and others. He is enough of an insider to be able to explain the flaws in clinical trials being used by "authorities" to recommend extensive testing, and the lack of trials in some cases. The unneccessary biopsies, surgeries, radiations, chemotherapies for slow-growing cancers or even non-malignant ones are presented bravely. The uncertainty of testing is exposed where a positive for cancer may be wrong 1/3 of the time. And it is up to the patient to get second opinions.

The financial and legal pressures on MDs to test excessively are brought out. There is advice on talking or writing to your MD to indicate your unwillingness to undergo too many tests, and not to hold your MD liable if a cancer was "missed" - that is the big thing.

The deaths caused by cancer treatment are aired. This is something very few people, even MDs, know. Even when a treatment can cut the deaths from a particular cancer in half, most current treatments create non-cancer deaths, many of which will be improperly reported.

Welch is a special expert on the misleading nature of 5-year survival rates how they can rise because of early detection, yet with no change in the cancer plus cancer treatment mortality rate.

There are good explanations of how 5-year survival rates are calculated, how age-adjustments are made, how randomization for trials is done, and other things not even taught in medical school, but reserved for medical researchers. And quite easy to comprehend with clear figures and tables.

No errors that I can find; a really excellent book.

Death By Government

A Review..

Professor Rummel's work, Death By Government, is a product of eight years of research into the roots and causes of Democide - defined as the intentional killing by governments through genocide, politicide, and arbitrary mass murder of its people. The cornerstones of current U.S foreign policy - centered around fostering democratic freedom - are based upon Professor Rummel's correct observation, that liberal democracies promote the greater peace and they are essential to eliminating Democide and ending wars between nations. Through empirical research the evident truths become exposed and the reader is left with the overall understanding that absolute power corrupts and leads to the murder of a governments' people and that only through restricting and checking power can these horrors be restrained. Democracies virtually never make war on each other and the more democratic two governments, the less the likelihood of violence between them. So not only is democracy a solution to domestic democide, but globalizing democracy is also a solution to war. The existence and spread of liberal democracies (not just electoral democracies, but liberal democracies in terms of civil and political rights and liberties) provides the long run hope for the elimination of democide and war. Professor Rummel astutely notes that power's relationship to democide is on a continuum - the more absolute the power, the more democide. The problem is Power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.

That America actively supports dictatorships is well-known. I wonder if this book includes genocide of Native Indians.

Aid to Dependent Dictators

Capitalism is the most powerful economic force ever developed. The exponential economic growth made possible by private property rights and free trade is the basis for the existence of the modern world. This is no secret; even the Communist Party of China includes "businessmen," i.e. capitalists, as one of the four pillars of the Party.

So why are so few nations even nominally capitalist? Largely because of America's biggest welfare program: Aid to Dependent Dictators. Since World War II, US foreign aid has systematically subsidized parasitic governing "elites," from the nomenclatura of the Warsaw Pact to the kleptocrats of Africa; even the rulers of the "Axis of Evil."

The Roman Empire extracted tribute from its subject provinces, leaving Roman citizens with a lighter tax burden (at first, anyway). The US Empire instead taxes its own citizens to pay tribute to foreign ruling classes. This may be counterintuitive, but it is a highly effective Imperial stratagem. By subsidizing socialist regimes, Rome-On-The-Potomac prevents the development of competing capitalist centers elsewhere. A tiny expenditure each year to prop up a dictator can prevent the emergence of a multitrillion-dollar economy. What if every poor nation in the world had taken the route of 20th century Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan… or for that matter, the 19th century United States? How much power would State Department proconsuls have if every nation on Earth were rich?

Manifest Technology

This Manifest Technology Web site is designed to help you make sense of computer and consumer electronics technology. It's for people who are interested in actually using some of this cool new stuff, but would like help figuring it out.

Instead of providing product reviews or exhaustive feature comparisons of specific versions, the focus here is on providing the overall context and information you need to help make sense of what's available, and to understand whether it might be of use to you. Read the articles, check out the links, and enjoy!

This site contains over 200 articles, presentations, and references, all freely available for personal use.

Holocaust denial

Let me clarify my position: I'm in no way a Holocaust denier. I'm part Jewish, and my family was crippled by the Holocaust.

However, I also know quite a number of survivors. And their accounts amounted to about the same thing - yes, the conditions in the camps were horrifying. Yes, people were dying like flies. Yes, there were crematoriums (what else can you do with dead bodies?) Yes, there were frequent mass executions, and daily individual ones. However, the majority still died of natural causes (hunger and disease). The camps simply did not have the logistics to keep these numbers of people alive, especially towards the end of the war, when the German population itself was hungry.

Religious support for slavery

If you were really a Rabi, you would know that God, Himself, told the Jews it was OK to own slaves as long as the slaves were not the children of Israel. Heathens and foreigners may be kept as slaves and their children bought and sold as property. God also allows you to beat your slaves as long as they don't die from the injuries. The book of Exodus commands slaves to submit to their masters regardless of their treatment.

You can read it for yourself in any Torah or Bible. It's in the book of Leviticus--the same book where God sets the Kosher laws, denounces homosexuality, severely limits who is worthy of entering His temple, and demands you sacrifice sheep to atone for your sins. Our Founding Fathers used those passages to justify writing slavery into the Constitution.

VMWare AMD Dual-Core issues

VMWare complains...

"Your host's BIOS does not have valid NUMA information. Please update the host's BIOS or associate the virtual machine with the processors in a single NUMA code (CEC). Please read VMWare Knowledge Base articles 928 and 1236."

Motherboard is ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe.

Installed AMD Dual-Core Optimizer and AMD Athlon™ 64/FX Processor Driver for Windows XP. Will disable Cool n Quiet in BIOS now as suggested by xilog.

The Dilbert Principle

The Dilbert Principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management, in order to limit the amount of damage that they're capable of doing.

MySQL Backup strategies

Mini Rant: I never gave much thought to backing up my database, and I suspect you haven’t given much thought to it, either. You think it won’t happen to you, but believe me, when something does happen it can do more than ruin your day. If you don’t have a backup, you can lose days, months, or even years of hard work. You can’t trust your host, no matter how good they are. And you can’t ignore the possibility of “pilot error.” Just yesterday, I was making some corrections and in my haste clicked the wrong button, erasing two days of work since my last manual backup and losing several new entries. Now that I’ve figured out how to automate my backups, all I can say is: Have a backup plan!

How to Find a Web Host That Doesn’t Suck

Google I’d start by searching Google for comments about your potential host. Also, try “[your potential host] sucks” (don’t forget the quotes). Consider these results for example:

Upstart Blogger is currently hosted by AN Hosting, so let’s start with them. Google search for “AN Hosting Sucks”: No results.

Since AN Hosting is owned by Midphase , let’s do a search for Midphase. Google search for “Midphase Sucks”: About 38 results.

Before AN Hosting, I was with Hosting ZOOM. Google search for “Hosting Zoom Sucks”: Two results, both because of me.

Before Hosting Zoom, I was with DreamHost. Google search for “DreamHost Sucks”: About 24,200 results (I contributed a few).

Now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as Carl Sagan said. The lack of Google results for your potential host may not be an indication of anything. But a multitude of “[your host] sucks” results should be a red flag.

Upstartblogger.com

Picture of the year

Thanks to Venkat.

Lal Bihari - considerable posthumous activities

Lal Bihari (or Lal Bihari Mritak) (born 1961) is a farmer from Uttar Pradesh, India who was officially dead from 1976 to 1994. He founded Mritak Sangh or the Association of the Dead in Uttar Pradesh, India. He fought Indian government bureaucracy for 18 years to prove that he is alive.

When Lal Bihari tried to apply for a bank loan in 1976, he found out that he was officially dead. His uncle had bribed a government official to register him as dead so he would get the ownership of Bihari's land.

Bihari discovered at least 100 other people in a similar situation, being officially dead. He formed Mritak Sangh in the Azamgarh district. He and many other members were in danger of being killed by those who had appropriated their property. Nowadays the association has over 20,000 members all over India. By 2004 they had managed to declare four of their members alive.

Over the years Bihari tried to attract attention to his situation by various means. He organized his own funeral and demanded widow's compensation for his wife. In 1980 he added the word "mritak" ("dead") to his name and signed his letters "late Lal Bihari". He stood for election against Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 and lost, to prove that he is alive. In 1994 he managed to have his official death annulled after a long legal struggle.

In 2004 he ran for a seat in the parliament of Lal Ganj.

Bihari continues to support other people in similar situations. In 2004 he sponsored fellow Mritak Sangh member Shivdutt Yadav when he contested election against Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Film-maker Satish Kaushik will be making a movie about his life, death, and life. Bihari was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Award in 2003 for his considerable "posthumous" activities.

The Conquest of the United States by Spain

There is not a civilized nation which does not talk about its civilizing mission just as grandly as we do. The English, who really have more to boast of in this respect than anybody else, talk least about it, but the Phariseeism with which they correct and instruct other people has made them hated all over the globe. The French believe themselves the guardians of the highest and purest culture, and that the eyes of all mankind are fixed on Paris, whence they expect oracles of thought and taste. The Germans regard themselves as charged with a mission, especially to us Americans, to save us from egoism and materialism. The Russians, in their books and newspapers, talk about the civilizing mission of Russia in language that might be translated from some of the finest paragraphs in our imperialistic newspapers. The first principle of Mohammedanism is that we Christians are dogs and infidels, fit only to be enslaved or butchered by Moslems. It is a corollary that wherever Mohammedanism extends it carries, in the belief of its votaries, the highest blessings, and that the whole human race would be enormously elevated if Mohammedanism should supplant Christianity everywhere. To come, last, to Spain, the Spaniards have, for centuries, considered themselves the most zealous and self-sacrificing Christians, especially charged by the Almighty, on this account, to spread true religion and civilization over the globe. They think themselves free and noble, leaders in refinement and the sentiments of personal honor, and they despise us as sordid money-grabbers and heretics. I could bring you passages from peninsular authors of the first rank about the grand rule of Spain and Portugal in spreading freedom and truth.

We assume that what we like and practice, and what we think better, must come as a welcome blessing to Spanish-Americans and Filipinos. This is grossly and obviously untrue. They hate our ways. They are hostile to our ideas. Our religion, language, institutions, and manners offend them. They like their own ways, and if we appear amongst them as rulers, there will be social discord in all the great departments of social interest. The most important thing which we shall inherit from the Spaniards will be the task of suppressing rebellions. If the United States takes out of the hands of Spain her mission, on the ground that Spain is not executing it well, and if this nation in its turn attempts to be school-mistress to others, it will shrivel up into the same vanity and self-conceit of which Spain now presents an example.

From: http://www.mises.org/story/2398