The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics has an article positing mandatory participation in clinical vaccine trials. Volunteers for these trials have declined substantially over the years. The article states low compensation as a primary reason, leaving students and the unemployed as the primary guinea pigs. So what is they answer to increase participation in vaccines and medicines that may or may not work, or have severe side effects? Mandatory volunteers! The authors have the gall to compare compulsory participation in medical experiments to jury duty. Look, I’m 100% against compulsory jury duty and I do whatever I can to avoid it, but comparing sitting in a jury box for a week or two to getting a shot or taking a pill and not know what the hell will happen to you is absurd. Yet, this article is published in a prestigious medical journal.

Look for this to creep in as an amendment to ObamaCare, lobbied heavily by Big Pharma and the neo-Nazi, nanny, busybody health bureaucrats.

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Fascinating article about high-frequency program trading and how it manipulates markets. It has effectively put an end to buy-and-hold (not that it was a good strategy to begin with) and fundamental investing.

This quote nearly floored me:

“..(T)he average holding time period for stocks has shrunk dramatically from just under two years to 22 seconds…”

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I’m all for standing during meetings and throughout the day; I stand almost always during calls. However, I think we would all be more productive if we had less meetings. Cut meetings and conference calls in half. Most do not amount to nothing but wasted time and tangental conversations.

If you do have a meeting keep it short and end at the stated time. Do not go over. Start on time, even if people are late. And when the stragglers phone or stroll in, do not recap anything that was said prior. Nothing pisses me off more than having to hear a recap because someone was late.

Ok, got that off my chest!

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Gold is still a winner, as is silver.

Ben Bernanke’s testimony today keeps my faith in gold and silver. He will crank the presses as long as it takes, savers be damned!

QE3 is around the corner. It will happen sooner than you think. This is an election year and Obama wants to keep his cushy job for another four years. What better way to buy votes than with a bit of good ol’ stimulus? Of course it won’t work, it never does. But that won’t stop Obama from selling it to win the election.

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A trillion here, a trillion there. Pretty soon it adds up to real money!

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Of course, keggers are still perfectly acceptable.

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The biggest takeaway from this: you must be your biggest competitor. Don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t get comfortable.

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I’ve been saying this for years. Home ownership is a scam.

Back in 2009, James Altucher wrote an article for the New York Post about this very issue. He lists the additional costs of home ownership that many people fail to consider when purchasing a home, thinking it’s an “investment”:

* Your insurance premium.
* Property taxes (which are usually higher than any tax deduction you get from your mortgage interest).
* Maintenance (pipes break, electricity problems, etc.).
* Utilities (utilities and maintenance for renters is often reflected in the rental price, but it’s not reflected in a mortgage when you own).
* Yard work, pest control, remodeling, etc. (again, rents usually have this built into the price, but mortgages don’t).

And let’s not forget those initial costs that always seem to add up to more than you expect:

* A down payment of at least 15 percent, which is $90,000 on a $600,000 home.

* Closing costs, usually 5 percent of loan amount, or another $25,000.

* Initial remodeling costs.

Yes, home prices are down considerably since the crash, despite desperate attempts by the Federal Reserve and the government to prop them up. Still, you must ask yourself if going into this much debt, and paying for all the additional expenses is really worth the effort? My answer is no and that’s why I’ve never owned a home, nor do I ever plan on owning one.

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It took a while, but finally.

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Shirky writes that this upcoming SOPA and PIPA bills would create a consumption-only internet, leaving the large, politically-protected media firms as the sole providers of content, just like the the good old days when publishing nearly any form of content was prohibitively expensive.

The internet made everyone a publisher; everyone a content creator. The cat’s been out of the bag for 15 years. It just gets easier every year with better and cheaper tools. Look at the recently released iBooks Author app from Apple. This free app lets anyone easily create a book and sell it on iTunes. Amazon and Barnes and Noble make it relatively easy and cheap–read free–to publish eBooks on the Kindle and Nook. I know because I’ve done it many times. You can even publish your own softcover book through CreateSpace for a nominal fee (the cost of shipping a proof of your book is the only charge.) Anyone with a Mac, Garageband, a mic and an instrument can make music that would have cost tens of thousands in equipment and studio time not too long ago. Movies are still expensive but the price has come down considerably over the years. Just think, the iPhone 4s can shoot video in 1080p resolution! You could make a movie with that and a Mac running iMovie for editing. It’s been done countless times.

The point is, the media companies are desperate to protect their aging, declining business models. They say it’s about piracy, but it’s not. They are using political means to protect their business. Media companies are zombies, being kept alive by their friends in Congress.

We still go to the movies, we still buy books and movies, and we still watch TV shows. We have far more choices now beyond the large media companies, and we want to consume our content on any device we own. The days of sitting in front of the tube at 8pm to watch sitcoms is long gone. We create, we consume and there’s nothing the media companies or Congress can do about it. They can censor what we do on the web, but we’ll find another way. There’s always another way.

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