Dvorak News Blog

A Week of Obama and the Stock Market — Dvorak Horowitz Unplugged

By John C Dvorak Tuesday March 24, 2009

Here is the 20th conversation I had with money manager Andrew Horowitz…. new insights for anyone who invests in anything. What to do? This chat is presented as-is for anyone who wants to listen in. We discuss the market conditions with some unique insights.

More importantly we look at the current opportunities at the bottom. We also discuss our in-depth coverage of specific stocks with the new Drill Down series to be released shortly.

click ► to listen:

Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.

This week’s episode brought to you by:

U.S. move to cheap Chinese condoms threatens American jobs

By McCullough Tuesday March 24, 2009

19 Comments

At a time when the federal government is spending billions of stimulus dollars to stem the tide of U.S. layoffs, should that same government put even more Americans out of work by buying cheaper foreign products? In this case, Chinese condoms. That’s the dilemma for the folks at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has distributed an estimated 10 billion U.S.-made AIDS-preventing condoms in poor countries around the world.

But not anymore.

In a move expected to cost 300 American jobs, the government is switching to cheaper off-shore condoms, including some made in China. The switch comes despite implied assurances over the years that the agency would continue to buy American whenever possible. “Of course, we considered how many U.S. jobs would be affected by this move,” said a USAID official who spoke on the condition that he would not be named. But he said the reasons for the change included lower prices (2 cents versus more than 5 cents for U.S.-made condoms) and the fact that Congress dropped “buy American language” in a recent appropriations bill. Besides, he said, the sole U.S. supplier — an Alabama company called Alatech — had previous delivery problems under the program.

It’s clear that Alatech’s problems over the years, which apparently have been resolved, may have driven U.S. officials to seek much less expensive foreign-made condoms in the first place. But that’s cold comfort to Fannie Thomas, who has been making AIDS-preventing condoms in southeastern Alabama for nearly 40 years in the small town of Eufaula.

“We pay taxes down here, too, and with all this stimulus money going to save jobs, it seems to me like they (the U.S. government) should share this contract so they can save jobs here in America,” Thomas said.

I can think of at least two problems with this. One is obvious.

Sperm Bank Clearance Sale!

By Joe C Tuesday March 24, 2009

11 Comments

Test Tube Baby

One of the oldest banks of its kind in the United States, Xytex International, on Tuesday rolled out a stimulus package for customers who are hurting in these tough economic times. Xytex is a sperm bank, and it’s offering up to 200 dollars off a vial of sperm to clients wishing to start or add to their family, but need a little help.

“We’re all feeling the effects of the economy and, especially for families seeking reproductive options, every dollar counts,” Xytex spokeswoman Danielle Moores told AFP.

So, Xytex is offering deals on vials from “select” donors, who come a bit cheaper than the usual “standard” donor.

“Select donors are a new level of donor which we introduced to try to help our clients who are interested in third-party reproduction but, with the tough economy, are having a little bit of trouble purchasing a regular donor,” Moores told AFP.

Select donors, explained Moores, are men from whom Xytex has “many, many vials because they’re very successful donors or able to stop in several times a week or — for whatever reason, we have a huge inventory,” and it is being made available in a sort of clearance sale.

Safe to say the “select donors” are not your average Nobel Laurete or Mensa member. Hopefully, a full psychological profile is included with each vial.

Dell Says it Will Kill the iPhone!

By John C Dvorak Tuesday March 24, 2009

18 Comments

Google changing strategy and adopting the semantic search model. Dell says it will release an iPhone killer. Oh really? iPhone sued over being used as a book reader.
Suse Linux 11 hopes to take over data centers.
IBM and Wyse getting together to re-introduce thin client computing.
Win7 being changed as expected.
Red Hat to be bought by Oracle?
More 3D theaters coming soon.
Steve Pearlman introduces OnLive. I call it Cloud Gaming.

click ► to listen:

Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.

Caption This Photo

By Uncle Dave Tuesday March 24, 2009

82 Comments

Click pic to embiggen, if you dare

Judge in ‘Plan B’ case condemns political interference of Bush’s FDA

By Eideard Tuesday March 24, 2009

60 Comments

The politics of birth control can produce unusual allies. Take Monday’s ruling in federal district court in New York, overturning the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on selling the morning after Plan B contraceptive over the counter to women younger than 18.

The judge in that case, Edward Korman, scathingly criticized several Health and Human Services and FDA officials for bowing to “pressure” from President George W. Bush’s White House and its “constituents,” and for using “political considerations, delays, and implausible justifications” to hold up nonprescription sales of the birth control drug for years.

In a 52-page ruling, Korman sounded like a speechwriter for President Barack Obama, accusing the FDA and the Bush administration of tossing science under the bus to “appease” conservative supporters of Bush in Congress and the Republican Party.

But Judge Korman is no leftover liberal from Bill Clinton’s era—he’s an appointee of Ronald Reagan, and long before that, was in the Justice Department under President Richard Nixon…

Meantime, if the Obama White House does not appeal the ruling, it will mark the fourth significant departure from the Bush administration’s positions on controversial health-care issues since Obama’s inauguration. The other three decisions allow federal funds for embryonic stem-cell research and for international aid groups that offer abortion counseling, and a move to lift the rule that would let medical personnel shun abortion-related services on the basis of their conscience.

Only controversial to nutballs who think we should live under a theocracy.

What Question Would You Ask At Obama’s News Conference Tonight?

By Uncle Dave Tuesday March 24, 2009

44 Comments

Like athletes limbering up for the big game, White House reporters have been going through elaborate preparatory rituals as they bone up for tonight’s prime-time news conference with President Obama, the second formal “presser” of his presidency.

The Bush White House liked to spring its news conferences with as little as a few hours’ notice, on the theory that reporters would have less time to dream up stumpers and zingers. But Obama aides confidently announced tonight’s 8 ET session six days in advance.

There are 160 chairs, and somewhere between 12 and 20 correspondents are likely to get questions.

The unspoken contest playing out under the East Room lights: The president wants to deliver a message – in this case, reassurance on the economy and a plug for his budget – and not get tripped up by issues he considers extraneous, or that might overshadow what he wants to say.

Reporters have the opposite incentive: They want to “make news” by getting the president to say something he hasn’t said before, or wasn’t prepared to say – which, by definition, is not his message.

Democracy run amok!

By Eideard Tuesday March 24, 2009

52 Comments

NASA’s online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. Comedian Stephen Colbert won.

The name “Colbert” beat out NASA’s four suggested options in the space agency’s effort to have the public help name the addition. The new room will be launched later this year.

NASA’s mistake was allowing write-ins. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report,” to write in his name. And they complied, with 230,539 votes. That clobbered Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes.

NASA still reserves the right to choose an, uh, appropriate name.

PA town’s firefighter of the year arrested for arson

By John C Dvorak Tuesday March 24, 2009

15 Comments

Pa. town’s firefighter of the year arrested for arson – USATODAY.com — Haven’t we seen one TV script after another about this?

A former assistant fire chief in Coatesville, Pa., who was named Officer of the Year in 2004 has been arrested for arson, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Robert F. Tracey Jr., 37, was arrested at his fire station in Coatesville, a town of 11,000 people west of Philadelphia, where he now works as a captain, WPVI-TV says. He was featured in one of its reports as recently as January about arson plaguing the city.

Another Darwin Award Contender — 3 Persons Killed In Blast While Trying To Saw Through Bomb

By Gasparrini Tuesday March 24, 2009

22 Comments

Three killed after sawing through old bomb – Metro.co.uk: This is surely a contender for the Darwin Awards. Three men have been blown up and killed after trying to saw through a shell left over from the Vietnam war.
They were attempting to break open the 105mm artillery shell to salvage metal and explosives, police revealed.
They were all killed when the shell exploded in southern Tay Ninh province.

More than 38,000 Vietnamese nationals are thought to have been killed and 100,000 injured by explosives left over from the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975.

Discarded embryos to generate O-negative blood for transfusions

By Eideard Tuesday March 24, 2009

24 Comments

Researchers in the UK plan to make what’s being hailed as an unlimited supply of blood for transfusions using discarded stem cells found in human embryos. They’ll test embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments to find those with embryonic stem cells that will make O-negative blood, which is the one type that can be transfused into anyone without being rejected…

Supplies of blood available for life-saving transfusions are limited. Local and regional pleas for blood by the Red Cross, owing to critically low levels, have become routine in the past decade. There’s more to it all than just giving blood. There are a host of tests that must be run on donor blood to make sure it is free of infection. And blood has a limited shelf life. Blood stored for 29 days or more (nearly 2 weeks less than the current standard for blood storage) is more likely to cause infection in transfusion patients, a study last year found.

Embryonic stem cells have the ability to become all the cells of the body. The idea is that harnessing their power would allow infinite production of what’d being termed “synthetic” blood that would be free of any infections that sometime plague blood supplies.

“In principle, we could provide an unlimited supply of blood in this way,” said team member Marc Turner, director of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service.

Any guess on how soon the True Believers go bonkers over this one?

China Wants To Create A Global Currency

By Uncle Dave Tuesday March 24, 2009

65 Comments

Wasn’t Adam Curry ranting something about a lunatic idea to establish a global currency coming up at G20? So, what other predictions have you got, Adam?

China called for the creation of a new currency to eventually replace the dollar as the world’s standard, proposing a sweeping overhaul of global finance that reflects developing nations’ growing unhappiness with the U.S. role in the world economy.

The unusual proposal, made by central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan in an essay released Monday in Beijing, is part of China’s increasingly assertive approach to shaping the global response to the financial crisis.

Mr. Zhou’s proposal comes amid preparations for a summit of the world’s industrial and developing nations, the Group of 20, in London next week. At past such meetings, developed nations have criticized China’s economic and currency policies.

This time, China is on the offensive, backed by other emerging economies such as Russia in making clear they want a global economic order less dominated by the U.S. and other wealthy nations.
[…]
In his paper, published in Chinese and English on the central bank’s Web site, Mr. Zhou argued for reducing the dominance of a few individual currencies, such as the dollar, euro and yen, in international trade and finance. Most nations concentrate their assets in those reserve currencies, which exaggerates the size of flows and makes financial systems overall more volatile, Mr. Zhou said.

Moving to a reserve currency that belongs to no individual nation would make it easier for all nations to manage their economies better, he argued, because it would give the reserve-currency nations more freedom to shift monetary policy and exchange rates. It could also be the basis for a more equitable way of financing the IMF, Mr. Zhou added. China is among several nations under pressure to pony up extra cash to help the IMF.

Well, this is frightening. Scientists say 2012 could be the year the sun attacks the Earth.

By Uncle Dave Tuesday March 24, 2009

53 Comments

This is quite an article. Read the whole thing to understand how this all works and how utterly unprepared we are for it.

Wired has some articles about our power grid: here, here, here and here.

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. […] Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.
[…]
The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see “When hell comes to Earth“). If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Flaming assholes in California turn to setting toilets on fire. Clorox to the Rescue!

By Eideard Tuesday March 24, 2009

11 Comments

A US firm is offering $5,000 for clues leading to the arrest of an arsonist who has been setting portable toilets on fire across San Francisco.

The Clorox Company is also offering a year’s supply of toilet cleaning products in exchange for such tips.

More than two dozen toilets on San Francisco construction sites have been set on fire in the city in recent months, the Associated Press reports.

The cost of the damage has been estimated at $50,000.

The free cleaning products is a nice touch.

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Unrelated Link: What is it? (pictured above)

Thanks, K B

Remembering the Microphone Hogs of 1985

By John C Dvorak Monday March 23, 2009

6 Comments

The following article is for the real old-timers. This column, about chatterboxes in the industry of old, ran in Computer Currents, a local Bay Area Magazine, in 1985.

The Kings of Never-Ending Babble
by John C. Dvorak

There was a good-time to be had at the recent 3rd Personal Computer Faire at Brooks Auditorium. If you missed it there’ll be another one next year. The 3rd Personal Computer Faire isn’t like the popular West Coast Computer Faire or like the trade shows at Moscone. It’s rather tame and sedate by comparison. But it was worth attending if for no other reason than to attend some of the talks.

The show had the usual panel discussions, seminars and speeches. Most of them seemed to include the ubiquitous Philipe Kahn, prexy of Borland International. Kahn has three or four hit software products on the market, including Turbo-Pascal and Sidekick. At one session he told some sort of allegory about the planet of Swine and software companies like SwinePro, who ran the planet. The founder of MicroPro International, Seymour Rubenstein, was on the same panel when this story was told. As Rubenstein was checking for the phone number of his attorney Kahn told the tale of how Borland saved the people from high-priced software and the planet dwellers lived happily ever after.

Kahn then ragged on just about