shazam--Google's at it again

Google Finance -- Somehow, this morning, this Google page popped up for me as I was going to check things out at the new American Skandia site. It's actually a very nice, clean, clear presentation, very much like things we now pay for as services. Google's at it again, delivering value at no monetary charge. Enjoy.

a fungible feast

fungible - Definitions from Dictionary.com -- In my email this morning, I got notice that the word for the day is "fungible," which word I heard bandied about by the upper-echelon staff of Cuyahoga County and the county commissioners with regard to the Breuer Tower demolition financing, the MedicalMartConventionCenter, and the 1/4% tax increase for what merely goes without restriction or earmarking to the general fund. Here's the whole entry so you, too, can begin to speak in the hip financial parlance of the people you elected or hired to know what's best for you.

Word of the Day for Saturday, September 8, 2007

fungible \FUHN-juh-buhl\, adjective:

1. (Law) Freely exchangeable
for or replaceable by another of like nature or kind in the satisfaction of an obligation.

2. Interchangeable.

3. Something that is exchangeable or substitutable. Usually used in the plural.

People think this tax is for Social Security. But tax monies are really fungible. They get raided all the time.-- Eugene Ludwig, "Motivated to Work," interview by Kerry A. Dolan", Forbes, March 20, 2000

The setting is Ireland in the 1950's, but, a cynical reader might reflect, this sort of fiction is so common that the characters will be completely fungible.-- Susan Isaacs, "Three Little Girls From School", New York Times, December 30, 1990

Genuine eros makes us desire a particular person; crude desire is satisfiable by fungible bodies.-- Edward Craig (general editor), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Fungible comes from Medieval Latin fungibilis, from Latin fungi (vice),
"to perform (in place of)."

Dictionary.com Entry and
Pronunciation for fungible

Yesterday's Word - Previous Words - Help

the 3-ounce solution

TSA Rules, TSA Security, TSA Regulations, 311 Rules -- I had no idea we now had to limit our travel-bag toiletries to 3 ounces per container, in the interest of national security, compliments of yet another bureaucratic layer called the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). I wonder how much we pay to have this extra layer of employees in place, to confound us and amaze us? I do know that I have the option of paying somewhere between $24.95 and $44.95 to mitigate the impact of this bureaucratic imposition on my mobility.

Take note that solid stick deodorant, that can have a consistency and composition similar to that of C-4 or plastique, can be packed anywhere in your luggage. Don't you just feel safer already, now that we have 311 in place?

I don't think I'll be traveling much by commercial air in the near future; there's too much of a chance I'll come unstuck prior to boarding and wind up in a holding cell, until I calm down and become a good, docile citizen again. Do they put you in the tank if you object to these insane processes, or do you just disappear?

bringing the band together for a global tour

Chrysler Lures Another Top Executive - washingtonpost.com -- There's a fascinating story playing out here of tactical team-building to push what looks like a global initiative. Isn't Cerberus the multi-headed, multitasking dog who guarded the gates of hell, and do you remember, was he keeping them in, or keeping them out? Did you catch the heads up in Portfolio this past month?

Alvin, Heidi, and Mitch help us "get it" about what we've got

Financial Advisor Magazine -- We are now beginning to see the dialogues of the Tofflers--last evidenced in book form in Revolutionary Wealth in 2006--echoed in the holistic planning or life planning field, this time by Mitch Anthony in Financial Advisor Magazine. Here he talks of the concepts of intrinsic value, money, and capital, parsing the differences among them. There's some heavy, pithy stuff here. I haven't seen anybody try to use the word "educed" for years. For instance:

“Money is the great wheel of circulation … the gold and silver which circulates in any country, may very properly be compared to a highway, which while it circulates and carries to market all the grass and corn of the country, produces itself not a single pile of either.” ––Adam Smith

“Capital is now confused with money, which is only one of the many forms [in] which it travels. It is always easier to remember a difficult concept in one of its tangible manifestations than in its essence.”
––Hernando de Soto

There is a transcendent value educed from the measurable resource (material in nature) by the application of the immeasurable resource (invisible to the eye) that is known as thought and vision. It is these immeasurable resources of thought and vision that are the true capital resources in our society and business. . . .

. . . Jean-Baptiste Say, the French economist, once said, “Capital is always immaterial by nature since it is not matter which makes capital but the value of that matter; value has nothing corporeal about it.” This insight tells us that we need to better understand the capital that funds our business, and that capital is immaterial in nature. The real value lies within the thoughts and visions and ideas that live within our clients. . . .

shot out: Rosemary's up and running on Meet the Bloggers

Meet the Bloggers » Rosemary Palmer, Candidate, US Congress, Ohio 10th -- I was afraid she might come off as "Dennis-lite" if she stuck to framing things the way he likes to, the snarky, wise-guy, "gotcha," way. She won't. She's for real. She's authentic. Talking to a normal, but talented, person like Rosemary makes me realize how dysfunctional, but talented, Dennis really is, and how underserved we are and have been for a good number of years, not just in Congress, but in all other government positions he has held, all the way back to embarrassments of the 1970s. If you want to acknowledge a big reason for the malaise around here, look no further than Dennis, and his rabid band of acolytes.

Rosemary needs to tune up her campaign patter a bit and become more pat and conversant on the "litmus test" issues, but there's a load of time for that. The fact of the matter is that she's running for all the right reasons, and that's because she's sick and tired of being sold out and lied to by elected politicians at the national level, who are conversant with the issues but manipulate them and do nothing. She's thrown herself into the breach on behalf of all of us. She wants representation and not buffoonery, and so do we.

bipolar nation, deep cleavage, and the Teletubbies

Hedge Funds Tech Industry - Portfolio.com -- Kevin studies America. Worthwhile read.

grand opening at Steelyard

Cleveland's Steelyard Commons -- Our friends over at CoolCleveland.com have noted the following festive event:

Steelyard Grand Opening Families are invited to enjoy activities, giveaways and parade marking long-anticipated grand opening of Cleveland's largest retail center, Steelyard Commons, on Thu 9/6 from 4 – 8:30PM. Live entertainment, games, raffles and more (a parade of performances featuring local community talent begins at 7PM). Steelyard Commons, 3584 Jennings Rd. (From downtown, take I-71 South to Jennings Freeway, exit at Steelyard Dr.

One thing I find extremely heartening is that the IHOP is open 24 hours. Also, the Chipotle serves fairly healthy food, and there's lots of open space for rallies and other massed-up community events. In retrospect, we should have thought to use it for the PutItOnTheBallot.com campaign, but the convoluted access from the freeways might have been a drawback. Getting into Steelyard Commons seems to be an acquired skill, for many. Perhaps for a few days this month we could call all seniors to register for the Homestead Exemption (a $400 value, give or take) before October 1st. This would give our little Mitchell the exposure he so badly needs for the Steelyard project, perform a needed public service, and test the accessibility quotient of the site, and its centrality in the context of the county.

One thing that makes no sense at all to me is that I hear there is a Starbucks coffee shop buried over there somewhere, but it has no street presence.

eWeek: Financial Fact and Friction

Financial Fact and Friction -- In line with the recent furor over slipshod mortgage-lending practices and the careless administration of what is for most people their largest single financial asset, their personal residence, here is a reminder from Eric Lundquist over at eWeek that nobody is held to a fiduciary standard in the confiscatory lending business, and nobody really knows where the money goes. If you weren't aware already, this will be an eye-opener, and from a technical as opposed to a financial perspective. Here's a sampling from Opinion: Skip the frictionless-economy ideas and stick with the customer:

Financial organizations have always been big computer purchasers. They are usually among the first to install the latest supercomputers and big storage servers to process and track the millions and millions of shares traded each day. In the last couple of years, computing attention has turned to "quants": quantitative analysts who contend they can model the entire financial market and would love to talk to you for hours about stochastic calculus.

Yet, despite all those quants and all that computing horsepower on Wall Street and elsewhere in the financial world, it is increasingly evident that no one really knows where the money goes, how it moves and how much the leveraged buyout firms really have in their wallets at the end of the day. Why is that? Wasn't all this computing purchasing supposed to result in a frictionless economy where the movement of money and other financial instruments slides seamlessly through the world's economy and everyone can sleep well at night knowing how much money is in the bank?

When I add up all those CNN tidbits and wild swings on Wall Street as quant-driven computer trading tries to track the untrackable, I have to conclude that all the computing horsepower has been aimed at making money move faster with little regard for trying to settle accounts at day's end.

A computer is an obedient device that will do exactly what you program. If your goal is to track the flow of money after it gets splintered into the world's financial markets, then that is what the computer will do. If your goal is to accelerate that money movement and not really be concerned about where the funds go after they leave your company, then you will get what we have: a lot of panicked investors and corporate managers unable to say where the money has gone.

Forget about the frictionless economy and let's count on building some friction based on accountability and concern for customers who want to know where the money went.

things I just noticed: Google Web History

Google Web History -- Here's a fascinating Google offering that just drifted into my consciousness. I guess it's been available for about 5 months now.