Failbook
Last Thursday, a family member had access to Facebook shares at $43 per share (IPO price: $38). I asked him if he could get me in. He looked into it and said he couldn't. I just shrugged, since I knew virtually nothing about the offering, whether the $38 price was decent, etc. I just figured it was a risky bet, and since I now keep my assets divided 40/40/20 (currency, metal stocks, equities with an eye toward aggression/speculation), it fit into the "20" area quite well.
I'm glad it didn't work out, since the opening day price of the stock didn't move off the offering price ($38), even though people thought it could zoom past $100 on the opening day of trading. It still could, of course, but this writer doesn't think it likely. Excerpt:
The sad truth is that people are just not clicking the ads; Facebook ads receive far fewer clicks than competitors such as Google's AdSense.
If Facebook was floating with a book value of $5-10 billion (or around $2-4 per share) we would be talking about a serious business proposition, albeit one which is already rather saturated (given that there are 2.3 billion internet users, and Facebook already has its claws into 900 million of them). But at these levels? What are people paying for?
The writer also notes, however, that Facebook is a very creative organization, and it is now sitting on a ton of cash. Those two elements--inventiveness and cash--could prove dynamite, but make no doubt about it: it's just a gamble at this point. I would also note that the people who generate the ideas are now fat and happy. Are those the kind of people that work hard to innovate?
Kill the Children
Environmentalists make me nervous for one simple reason: they hate large families. With seven children, I gotta believe they loathe me (with the exception of one local environmentalist who thinks it's great I have a lot of kids).
How extreme can the environmentalists get? Pretty extreme, it would appear. Despite Malthus' complete face plant in the annals of historical outcome versus predictions, many environmentalists still latch onto his fallacy that people are ecologically bad. The essay linked above looks at the Malthusian legacy, the nut who wants to start killing people now, and why they're both wrong. It's the last part--why people are good for the environment--that interests me the most. Excerpt:
The real problem with centrally-planned Malthusian population reduction programs is that they greatly underestimate the value of human beings.
More people means more potential output – both in economic terms, as well as in terms of ideas. Simply, the more people on the planet, the more hours and brainpower we have to create technical solutions to these challenges. After all, the expansion of human capacity through technical development was precisely how humanity overcame the short-sighted and foolish apocalypticism of Thomas Malthus who wrongly predicted an imminent population crash in the 19th century.
My suggestion for all such thinkers is that if they want to reduce the global population they should measure up to their words and go first.
