A study (supposedly co-authored by Fed Chair Alan Greenspan) estimated that "Americans withdrew $600 billion in equity from their homes in 2004, or 7% of their disposable income." Greenie's study estimated "consumers spend about 51% of the cash they extract." Goldman's estimates were that consumers spend ~68% of the cash they extract through home-equity loans and refinancing (most of the rest is used to pay down credit-card debt or invest).

The Big Picture: Read it here first: Real-Estate Boom Soon May Sputter As an Engine of Retail Sales

Sxip Identity's sxore (pronounced "score") is an identity and reputation system for blog authors, readers and commenters. To enrich the dialog between blog authors and commenters, sxore provides a framework for identity and reputation, ensuring that blogging's participatory, user-generated content model isn't hijacked by spurious or malicious commenters.

sxore

Why should the ditsy girls have all the fun? Smart is sexy in the Geek Gorgeous 2006 Wall Calendar. The calendar showcases young ladies who are not only beautiful and stylish, but can also fix your computer, normalize your databases, discuss the advantages of polymorphism, and beat you at Doom.

The Geek Gorgeous Calendar featuring Women in Technology

In yet another sign that the housing boom is fizzling, existing home sales declined last month, pushing up inventories to a 19-year high, a new report found.

Sales slipped a greater-than-expected 2.7 percent in October from September's pace, according to the National Association of Realtors, a Washington D.C.-based industry group. The drop would have been 3.2 percent but for the people forced to relocate after the hurricanes.

Noticed more houses on the market? I have. It will be a pity that rising rates will only put more housing on the market, at cheaper prices.

Newsday.com: Unsold house inventory highest since April 1986

"Outside the Box" is a newsletter by John Maudlin that provides reprints from various financial sources that give particularly useful insight or non-obvious thinking. This week's is a particularly good example from GaveKal's Brave New World investment book.

There is little doubt that indexation is the cheapest way of capturing the attractive long-term returns offered by the capitalistic system. From there, it would be easy to deduce that one should have part, if not all, of one's portfolio indexed. But this conclusion would be wrong, as indexation works on three basic premises, legitimate at the micro-economic level, but chaos inducing on a macro scale....

Indeed, the system can work only as long as active money managers attempt to do the job for which they are paid i.e. allocating capital according to what they perceive to be the future ROIC in the different investments which they consider at any given point in time. Most of them will fail, but the process of screening for future ROIC is vital for the well being of the capitalistic system. Winners emerge, losers collapse. In this creative destruction (or is it destructive creation?), capital is allocated efficiently through a constant system of trial and error.

To put it in another way: the active money managers (and their clients) support most of the costs; the indexers get most of the rewards. Without a doubt, this is what happened in the 1980's and 1990's. So why did it stop working? Easy. The active money managers, chastised by years of underperformance, were forced to become 'closet indexers'. In January 2000, some of our clients in the City got fired from their fund management job for refusing to own France Telecom or Nokia.

And this behavior brought the entire system down. The business of money management had become so big after a decade long bull market that it had been taken over by 'professional people', advised by consultants. Often, these management teams wanted to conserve, and not create. They were accountants, not entrepreneurs. The management of the firms (not money managers themselves anymore) attempted to reduce the unpredictability of the results of their money management teams by preventing them from taking risks. And risk was defined as a deviation from the index against which the money managers were measured (hence the introduction of 'risk controls', 'tracking errors' etc.).

...To put it succinctly, indexation became a victim of its own success for two reasons.

The first consequence of the move towards closet indexing was that money management evolved from being an exciting and intellectually stimulating business to a boring and mind-numbing number-crunching game...

The second, most harmful consequence is that capital started to be allocated according to size, rather than future returns on invested capital. Indeed, relevant indices are all, for the most part marke... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

InvestorsInsight : Thoughts From The Frontline: Print View

The BLACKHOLE storage engine acts as a “black hole” that accepts data but throws it away and does not store it. Retrievals always return the empty set:

mysql> CREATE TABLE test(i INT, c CHAR(10)) ENGINE = BLACKHOLE;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)

mysql> INSERT INTO test VALUES(1,'record one'),(2,'record two');
Query OK, 2 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 2 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> SELECT * FROM test;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

When you create a BLACKHOLE table, the server creates a table definition file in the database directory. The file begins with the table name and has an .frm extension. There are no other files associated with the table.

The BLACKHOLE storage engine supports all kinds of indexing.

This is not a joke.

MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual :: 14.10 The BLACKHOLE Storage Engine

For example, most people probably didn't realize that a typical American eats 13.7 pounds of turkey and 4.7 pounds of sweet potatoes each year. Or that 256 million turkeys are being raised in America this year. Or that U.S. exports of cranberries and sweet potatoes help reduce the nation's trade deficit.

For Robert Bernstein, those are the nuggets that feed his imagination. Bernstein is a public affairs specialist at the Census Bureau, and for eight years he has been collecting and disseminating trivia related to holidays and other observances.

Census Counts Thanksgiving Consumption - Yahoo! News

Personal Weather Stations Google Map

Personal Weather Stations Google Map : Weather Underground

What we need instead is a means of letting you tag and structure your data so it can be found reliably by any search engine no matter where it is on the internet. That would stay true to the distributed internet Google has so masterfully exploited.

I wish I were hearing more noise from the microformats guys to act as competitors — or at least as pressure on Google for openness and standards.

I'd love to tag this article...

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Google Base v. microformats

- you are ordering subscription to Eggalert that will be billed every 3 months for $5.95. It will automatically renew every 3 months unless cancelled. You can cancel at any time and not receive any future charges, and will only be charged for the 3 month time period that you've ordered.

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