I found this trolling various blogs on wordpress.com. You know, the way we geezers used to surf the internet before Google indexed everything? Anyway, here is the National Post‘s round-up of The Best Financial Jokes Of 2009 So far. In this case, the nation is Canada and the section is Financial.
Here are some of my favorites from the list:
- Bank of America-Merrill Lynch has adjusted its investment portfolio: 50% cash and 50% canned goods
- The courts allowed the bankruptcy proceedings for Chrysler to go forward. The bankruptcy was approved after the judge told Chrysler to sit in a room for a few minutes while the judge went to talk to his manager.
- How many stockbrokers does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to take out the bulb and drop it, and the other to try and sell it before it crashes (knowing that it’s already burned out).
Read on…
USA Today has this post in their blog: Dealer offers AK-47 with each new truck purchase. Well, they get a voucher for an AK-47. They still need to be legally allowed to get a rifle, and go through the waiting period (no loopholes that I can see), but this is some brilliant marketing. By the way, the civillian AK-47 is only semi-automatic, and not super-accurate.
But first, a rant about silver bullets. CEOs love them. Shareholders love them. Politicians love them. It’s too bad they are hardly ever real. The world has a way of keeping itself in balance by using opposing forces and feedback loops (you know, like our government used to). Sure, we find disruptive advancements in technology, math, and even anthropology, but even these usually have some sort of cost or downside. While you keep trying to make alchemy work, we’ll just keep on finding significant, but incremental, improvements, and we’ll see who wins.
Read on…
Red Hat (RHAT) is to be included in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index next week!!! That’s just so cool. While I switched to Ubuntu a while ago myself, Red Hat is a great company with great products, and they contribute very heavily to the Linux kernel, drivers, and software.
Read on…
From Slashdot: Chicken Feathers May Hold Key To Hydrogen Storage. While what they say is plausible (in the MythBusters sense of the word), the original article is from Oregon Live.com, a source I know nothing about.A practical hydrogen car has been elusive for decades. Before the announcement this week by University of Delaware engineers, a nonstop trip from Portland to Eugene in a hydrogen car would need a tank bigger than 100 gallons to store liquid or gaseous fuel, even under high pressure.
Treated chicken feathers work like a sponge. They soak up large amounts of hydrogen and hold it in a small space so the tank can be a conventional size and the fuel won’t need to held under dangerously high pressures….
“It’s the most energy-rich material we have,” says Roger Ely, an Oregon State University professor who specializes in hydrogen, “It’s three times the energy content of gasoline on a pound-for-pound basis.”