I saw this quote come by my inbox today at work:

Simple Math for Safe Doubles [Fool.com: Commentary] January 26, 2006

Mr. Market has the memory of a goldfish and the foresight of a mole. When he sees a company growing at 30% per year, he gets very excited.

Indeed!

Click the link - it’s actually a pretty good read.

Inside look at a billionaire’s budget / Larry Ellison’s spending worries his accountant

So how could someone with $17 billion cause his accountant to worry about running low on cash? Ellison, who identifies strongly with the company he founded in 1977, has been famously unwilling to sell Oracle shares over the years.

Instead of selling them, he has financed his lavish lifestyle — the 23-acre Japanese-style estate in Woodside, the yachts, the airplanes, the Armani suits — by borrowing against his stock.

“I know this e-mail may/will depress you,” Simon wrote in a 2002 note about diversification. “However, I believe it’s my job to address issues you’d prefer not to confront. You told me years ago that it’s OK to raise the ‘diversification issue’ with you quarterly. … Well, I’m doing so. View this as a call to arms.”

This wasn’t the first time Simon had sounded the alarm. In 2001, Ellison’s spending was on an upswing, and his debt level was increasing rapidly, Simon said in a 2004 deposition.

Simon tried to explain to Ellison the seriousness of his debt, saying, “We have a freight train going down a track, hitting a debt wall,” he said in the deposition.

Wow… 23 acres. As someone who was born in Brooklyn, lived in Queens, the border of Long Island, Baltimore, then the Bay Area - I really can’t imagine what 23 acres would look like.

That said - I can see how Larry would run into money problems - it’s expensive here!

Spin

Addressing Employee Complaints
In this segment, Dr. E.L. Kersten provides executives and managers with a shockingly effective strategy for responding to the complaints of their subordinates.

Hahaha… another gut busting video from Despair.com on how to manage employees. Check it out.

MercuryNews.com | 01/30/2006 | New ramps opening at 101-85 should clear up merging messes

Me, and I have good news for you. This is a work in progress and new ramps could open in time for Tuesday’s commute, easing one of the worst merging messes in Silicon Valley. Enjoy:

• The off-ramp from northbound Highway 85 to Shoreline will open, eliminating the need for those drivers to merge with cars trying to reach 101 from north 85.

• A second bridge — the freeway connector from north 85 to north 101 — will be ready. No longer will these drivers have to weave through cars trying to exit at Shoreline or Old Middlefield Way.

• Northbound 101 traffic heading to Shoreline will also have a new off-ramp to themselves without battling traffic merging onto the freeway.

• Work on the carpool-to-carpool lanes between 85 and 101 should finish in May.

Hurray!

Amazon.com: The Logic of Failure: Books

D?rner identifies four habits of mind and characteristics of thought that account for the frequency of our failures:
1. The slowness of our thinking-We streamline the process of problem solving to save time and energy.
2. Our wish to feel confident and competent in our problem solving abilities-We try to repeat past successes.
3. Our inability to absorb quickly and retain large amounts of information-We prefer unmoving mental models, which cannot capture a dynamic, ever-changing process.
4. Our tendency to focus on immediately pressing problems-We ignore the problems our solutions will create.

Successful problem solving is so complex that there are no hard-and-fast rules that work all the time. The best take-away from the book (and this is my favorite quote): “An individual’s reality model can be right or wrong, complete or incomplete. As a rule it will be both incomplete and wrong, and one would do well to keep that probability in mind.” The book is 199 easy-to-read pages, and D?rner gives lots of interesting examples from lab tests illustrating people’s actual behavior in problem-solving situations.

This sounds pretty interesting. The human mind seems to have a lot of bugs! I hope to be able to find time to read this some day. Have you read it?

What, You Got a Problem Paying $102.13 for 2 Tomatoes? - New York Times

Three times in the last three months, Mr. Hinde says, he was overcharged at the grocery. In the first instance, it was an extra $1 on an $8.95 bottle of olive oil. In the second, a “buy one, get one free” discount for caramel dip did not show up. And, in the third, he was charged $102.13 for two tomatoes, bringing the bill to $180, well over what he would typically spend on groceries.

“I said to the cashier, Can this be right?” Mr. Hinde recalled, noting that at that point he knew only the total. “She assured us it was.”

Mr. Hinde and his wife, Lorraine, isolated the mistake on the way to the car (the tomatoes should have been $2.13), returned to the store and got their money back. But, Mr. Hinde said, it illustrates the need for consumers to check their receipts.

Surveys indicate that consumers lose $1 billion to $2.5 billion each year because of scanner pricing errors.

Wow - that’s pretty surprising!

I’m at the Dr Martin Luther King Jr Library in Downtown San Jose right now. I’m connected via ethernet. Check out the bandwidth:

Whoa!

The Associated Press

A pastor who threatened a national boycott against Microsoft and other major corporations for endorsing a gay rights bill urged supporters Tuesday to buy up the companies’ stock and dump it to drive prices down.

Rev. Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, said the stock-dumping plan had been part of his strategy all along.

“You got to find out how you affect a company,” Hutcherson said, conceding that it would be hard to get people to shun products from companies that dominate the marketplace as Microsoft and Boeing do.

He wants supporters to buy one or two shares over the next few months, then sell them May 1.

Hm, according to Moneycentral the average daily volume is 62.54 million and has a 56.1% institutional ownership. Something tells me that this plan might not work out too well… On the other hand, I’ll keep my eye out for May 1st - might be a good day to buy MSFT at a bargain price!