Chyden Finance: profit from hypocrisy

Pres. Obama looks set to become this generation’s Jimmy Carter, flailing through crisis after crisis, clinging to empty symbolism, and accomplishing precious little that is useful.
With Iran’s rulers publicly questioning Israel’s right to exist, testing long-range missiles, and building nuclear capability; North Korea’s rulers testing nuclear weapons and firing rockets over Japan; the US military [...]

Are the flacks in Microsoft’s marketing department intentionally trying to make Windows look like The Choice of Luz3rz™, or is this a brilliant piece of viral marketing? The video is so painful to watch that one feels compelled to groan about it publicly.

Then again, what a wonderful metaphor for our globalized and bureaucratized future.
As [...]

A regular reader has alerted Chyden Finance to an article in the Carribean Net News, which reports, “[Venezuelan President, Hugo] Chavez, who delivered a speech Thursday [24 September 2009] at the UN General Assembly, assured that his government would not cut off oil supplies to the United States. ‘I would never do it now, [...]

Yesterday, I indicated that the desire on the parts of the managers of multinational corporations to establish a one-world intellectual property regime could work against them.
This goes beyond Linux, Apache, Python, PHP, MySQL, OpenOffice, R, and other open-source usual suspects.
There is a very active open-source hardware movement that aims to keep technological innovation free. [...]

Continuing our theme of global convergence, C|Net News reported recently, “A senior lawyer at Microsoft is calling for the creation of a global patent system to make it easier and faster for corporations to enforce their intellectual property rights around the world.”
Given the existence of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the fact that [...]

Steve Foerster writes, concerning the high cost of textbooks, “So how about it publishers? If you’re getting your thirty pieces of silver, can’t you cut us some kind of a break?”
At USD 16 per ounce of silver, Steve’s estimate is not entirely inaccurate.
In a competitive market, price approaches marginal cost. In other words, [...]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
There’s this high-profile member of the political class who says one thing and does the exact opposite…
Granted, this time the issue is relatively trivial, but it does have far-reaching implications.
Here’s the set-up:
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is one of those rare politicians, who claims to care about real [...]

A decade ago, one troy ounce of gold cost about USD 250. Today, a troy once of gold is going for about USD 1,000.
r = (FV/PV)^t, where:

r:
rate of return

FV:
future value (here, 1,000)

PV:
previous value (here, 250)

t:
time (here, 10)

And the calculator says…
r=14.87% per year, on average. Over the past decade, gold has returned approximately 15% per year, [...]

USA Today reports, “[S]ome investors are trying to expose their portfolios to the swine flu.”
The article has a list of firms whose shares should benefit from mass death and hysteria caused by the outbreak of a virulent strain of H1N1.
Not exactly a happy thought, but more or less in keeping with what we are all [...]

Politicians come and go.
Bureaucrats, on the other hand, are on the job, year in… year out… behind the scenes… making sure that the machine grinds on and on and on.
Let us take a moment to thank the unnamed US government signatory of the recent No Violation Letter to Mozilla, in response to Mozilla developers’ finding [...]