I swear, sometimes it seems like Apple is all design, no engineering. It would be nice if, in addition to the mock turtleneck-wearing crowd that runs the company, they would hire a mechanical engineer or two.

From what I’ve seen online, if you have this problem, Apple might replace your phone if it’s in otherwise pristine condition (i.e. there is no evidence you have dropped the phone).

The upshot of all of this, if I’m right (which is a big if), is that we may never see the kind of extended rally that occured during the bear market that started in 1929. Maybe they’ll just last a few days, or maybe a few weeks. A corrolary of this is that volatility will be much higher than in the aftermath of the 1929 crash. This may be one explanation for why we’ve seen historic levels on the CBOE volatility index (VIX). Usually the VIX peaks around 40 or 50, but these days we’re seeing sustained levels around 70.

So, while I’m going out on a limb, if you’re sitting on cash and tempted to try to time the market and ride the rally we’re currently in, you might want to rethink it. In this day of electronic data and trading, I think the aftermath of the financial crisis will be an extended period of volatility that will eclipse anything the market has seen in its entire history. This crisis may have put the final nail in the coffin in the foolish academic theory of “efficient markets,” but that doesn’t mean the markets can’t be inscrutible and chaotic for an extended period.

Gatorade was created by legitimate sports scientists, and while it’s formula is simple–sucrose, dextrose, salt and potassium–it really does have a actual benefit. The sucrose and dextrose are sugars with relatively low glycemic indexes, and the salt and potassium provide electrolytes. All things that are rather important to the functioning of your muscles, and thus it reasons to replace them. Professional sports teams provide Gatorade partly because I’m sure they get money for it, but also because it has been shown to be truly effective.

Not surprisingly, the company has always marketed the product to consumers, who recken if pro sports teams provide it to their players, it must be worth buying. However, at some point, they changed the formula sold to consumers in order to save money. If you look at a current bottle of good old lemon-lime Gatorade, you’ll see that it doesn’t contain salt (though there is potassium) and the sucrose and dextrose have been replaced by the cheaper (thanks to our moronic farm subsidies) but far less healthy high fructose corn syrup. (America truly runs on high fructose corn syrup.) Corn syrup is a great way to get a sugar crash, the last thing an athlete wants to consume. I guess they figured the salt didn’t help the taste and was kind of pointless in the sham they now pawn off on consumers.

What makes this truly cynical marketing is not that the company makes two products of vastly different quality, but that they call them the same thing. Imagine if Honda made special version of their cars with better handling and safety to give to celebrities, trying to make it look like famous people drove Civics.

How much does Gatorade save? Whatever it is, I’m certain truly informed consumers would rather pay the extra few cents to get the healthier old formula. And does any of this really even help them in the long run? Some short sighted middle manager probably ordered the switch to give the company a one quarter boost in growth. I suspect this kind of business “improvement” is behind a lot of American corporate growth, and eventually it is self-defeating. In the long run you don’t grow an economy by shrinking quality. And you don’t maintain customers by fooling them: eventually some insufferable pedant is going to blog about it, no matter how mundane it is.

But being merely amateurish wouldn’t be enough to warrant a blog post. I’m warning people off of this piece because it’s so buggy as to be almost unusable. I’ve had problems with bugs in their semaphore class not actually protecting resources from all threads. (Apparently they really have a problem with this thread thing.) Most problematically, however, the IDE itself is highly unstable. Sometimes, under Linux, it gets confused and when you hit “delete” in an editor window, it actually think you want to delete the whole method, not just the current character. That’s obviously a problem, especially if you don’t catch what it just did, and accidentally hit save. Restarting fixes this. Right now, whenever I set a breakpoint, it crashes with a segfault upon reaching the breakpoint. Running without the breakpoint works fine. Clearly, they need more work.

Maybe in another ten years they’ll be ready, but for now I suggest anybody considering REALbasic learn a real language instead. BASIC can potentially be a great language, but in the hands of these guys, it’s open mike night.

If this stupid blog does one thing useful, it will be to save just one person from using the complete waste of space that is OpenOffice. I can’t tell you how much I’d be willing to pay for Microsoft Office if I could go back in time and use it instead of OO, but I can tell you it’s a lot more than Microsoft charges for Office. What’s really embarrassing is that using a “community developed” version of office software is exactly the kind of stupid, false economy for which I railed against desktop linux.

CU freshman Emily Benson, 19, of Kansas City, said she thinks the decriminalization of marijuana will become a hot topic in the upcoming political season and said she felt part of something bigger than just a smoke-out on Sunday.

“We’re at the starting point of a movement,” she said. “This is a big part of the reason I applied here — for the weed atmosphere.”

Although CU junior Max Lichtenstein, 21, isn’t into marijuana or smoking, he also felt Sunday’s event was a chance to do something “bigger” than himself. He passed out 126 Rice Krispies treats with messages attached asking that they act out against the injustices in Darfur…

“I just like being generous and doing nice things,” he said. “I’m like a good Samaritan.”

I should have known public image would be a problem when I found out that the school slogan was “Minds to Match our Mountains.” Publicly comparing their students’ brains to a mass of granite really makes one wonder if the administration knows what they’re doing. So does the fact that the last three major publicity events I’ve read about the school have been this story, hookers for the football team, and campus riots over beer policy. Thanks, CU, for continuing to ensure my degree continues to be so valuable in the market. Maybe your slogan should be “Minds to match the font size you’ll want to use to mention our school in your resume.” After this article, I’m down to 7 pt Helvetica, placed with an asterisk down at the bottom of the page in the same style used for “Do not try this at home” on television commercials.

But Mr. Obama has also said he’s open to raising – indeed, nearly doubling to 28% – the current top capital gains tax rate of 15%, which would in fact be a tax hike on some 100 million Americans who own stock, including millions of people who fit Mr. Obama’s definition of middle class.

Mr. Gibson dared to point out this inconsistency, which regularly goes unmentioned in Mr. Obama’s fawning press coverage. But Mr. Gibson also probed a little deeper, asking the candidate why he wants to increase the capital gains tax when history shows that a higher rate brings in less revenue.

“Bill Clinton in 1997 signed legislation that dropped the capital gains tax to 20%,” said Mr. Gibson. “And George Bush has taken it down to 15%. And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28%, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?”

Mr. Obama answered by citing rich hedge fund managers. Raising the capital gains tax is necessary, he said, “to make sure . . . that our tax system is fair and that we are able to finance health care for Americans who currently don’t have it and that we’re able to invest in our infrastructure and invest in our schools. And you can’t do that for free.”

But Mr. Gibson had noted that higher rates yield less revenue. So the news anchor tried again: “But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up?” Mr. Obama responded that this “might happen or it might not. It depends on what’s happening on Wall Street and how business is going.” And then he went on a riff about John McCain and the housing market.

To be fair, I think the WSJ was a bit simplistic and unbalanced in their criticism, because while capital gain revenue may have gone up when rates went down, that doesn’t mean total tax revenue didn’t decrease. It’s possible that people simply moved money from fixed-income assets into those producing capital gains, and that the reallocation from highly taxed income to capital gains resulted in a net decrease in total tax revenue, the increase in capital gains taxes notwithstanding. I don’t know if that’s the case, but you’d think a competent newspaper reporter might have bothered to find out.

Regardless, the important thing is that Obama didn’t make this case, or any case, for that matter. His first answer was diversionary, and his second was just plain dumb. He essentially said “Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but I’m going to do it anyway.” Great. For what it’s worth, he had a much more reasoned response to these kinds of questions during a recent interview with Maria Bartiromo, so maybe he just had a bad night.

So, I thought I’d put up this quick post in case other people have been having the same problems with their laptops running Vista. Check to see if your laptop uses the Intel 945 graphics chip. If so, your problems might be solved by upgrading to the latest driver. For your convenience, here is a link to the drivers from Dell’s FTP server:

Intel 945 Vista 32 bit drivers

Sorry this wasn’t a very fun post, but sometimes you gotta pay the bills.

handset_usb_driver_32_v340

Drop a comment if there are any problems with the archive.

If you make a lot of trades, and use a brokerage that doesn’t provide cost basis information, your best bet is to just download a TXF file from your brokerage website and import that into the desktop version of TurboTax. (For some reason, the online version doesn’t accept this kind of file.) You can still import the 1099-DIV and 1099-INT data from E*TRADE or Ameritrade, but just make sure to disable the importing of brokerage sale (1099-B) data. Otherwise, you’re better off just entering each trade manually from your online history.

And in case you’re looking for an alternative brokerage, I can heartily recommend Fidelity. Apparently, they are fairly unique in managing to achieve the highly elusive technological feat of exporting correct cost basis information online.

Let our dental technology catch up with our medical technology. We can make materials that can protect a 4 million pound space shuttle hitting the atmosphere at over 17,000 MPH, but we’re still stuck with teeth that get bested on a daily basis by microscopic bacteria? You pay a few thousand dollars to have all your teeth replaced once you’re an adult, and then you never have to worry about them again. Think of the money and time we’d save! If we all had bionic teeth, it would be worth a half percent of GDP growth, easy. And goodbye bad breath, which could be just the thing to reverse the declining birth rate in America. There’s another percent right there.

You might ask, “Why doesn’t everybody do this? Why don’t dentists recommend this to people if this is such a good idea, genius?” The answer to that is self-preservation. The dentists know they have the technology to make themselves obsolete, and they’ve been hoping nobody would point this out. Don’t be surprised if I’m found floating dead in the Charles one morning, with a #7 dental pick in my back.