elkit in wonderland

Worth your Weight in Gold

The other day I opined that someone was worth her weight in gold. And then I started wondering - how much IS that, exactly?

So here it is: Today's closing price for 1 ounce of gold is US$ 1,318.90.

16 ounces in a pound, therefore one pound of gold comes in at US$ 21,102.40.

 

If you weighed 100 pounds, and you were worth your weight in gold, you would be worth 2.1 million bucks.

Price Check on Aisle 4

The price of the insulin for Willow has almost doubled in less than two years, sigh.

• Mar 1, 2012: $169.00
• July 16, 2012: $185.67
• Nov 13, 2012: $196.44
• April 11, 2013: $215.25
• Sep 3, 2013: $265.62
• Dec 20, 2013: $306.25

Bloomberg has more, from August '13:

“There isn’t a focus on cost-benefit in the U.S.,” Mark Purcell, an analyst at Barclays Plc, said in an interview. “You’ve only got, effectively, two players in the market so it’s a classic supply-and-demand cycle; and the demand is huge.”

I Can Upload You, You Can Download Me

Wait, are you serious?

My bank, a local credit union, just "upgraded" their online banking system, and yes, I do have to set "upgrade" in quotation marks. They were good about announcing it ahead of time on the site. They noted the expected downtime for access. They said that on your first login after the upgrade, you'd have to enter your password with all uppercase where there used to be lower-case letters. (Don't you think that's weird? If they're already sort of using my password, why don't they just leave it the way it is?)

But okay, I waited until they were done with their upgrade - excuse me, "upgrade", and tried to log in again. They gave me a pop-up window reminding me of the new password rules. Okay, that's nice, extra points for that.

Only I couldn't log in. I am certain that I did not forget my password, and that I entered it exactly as they had specified, but it gave me a "user validation error", and finally locked me out. I waited until the weekend to call customer service because I figured this would take a while. Sure enough, the disembodied voice noted they had a higher call volume due to the upgrade. I waited on hold for about 10 minutes (not too bad), spoke to a friendly customer support guy who asked me security questions to verify it was really me, reset my password, and remained on the line with me while I logged in. (Another extra point for that.)

I log in, and look at the new account screen. Wait, is that really my account balance? No, that's dated a week ago. Oh, they have the transactions listed in ascending order, with the most recent items at the bottom of the page. Well, that's not really helpful. Let me re-sort that, so that the most recent transaction, and my current balance, is AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE WHERE I CAN SEE IT.

So I re-sort, and ... now it's a 2-digit figure instead of 4 digits!!!! What the ...?!??!! Where did my money go? Instead of having a panic attack, I click on the online help, and find out that this is the desired behavior, "to avoid confusion": It hides the account balance, and just shows me the transaction amount. Oh. Kaaaaaaay ...

Alright, fine. Whatever. Let me pay my bills now. With a check and an envelope and a stamp. How do I add a transaction? "Pay my bills"? No, that's online payments, that's not what I want.

Hmm. Hrmpf. There does not seem to be a way for me to add my own transactions, forcing me to break out a PAPER REGISTER for the first time in, oh, six years.

I think this may be the final nail in my bank's coffin (their last "upgrade", where they reset everybody's passwords TO BE THEIR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS, almost caused me a heart attack).

Can anybody recommend a good bank for me?

P.S. on August 23rd: I did finally figure out ... no, wait, I didn't. I sent an email to their support team, asking if adding and editing transactions was really gone. Turned out it can be found is hidden under "FinanceWorks". FinanceWorks is run by Quicken, and does have a pretty nice interface, and a bunch of nice reporting tools. Plus, I'm back at Apple, and the ATM on campus is Keypoint (my above-mentioned local credit union) ... so maybe I'll stick with them after all. [Le sigh]

Money, Money, Money, Must Be Funny ...

I know this sounds pretty out there, but you know what? It makes sense to me.

Stiglitz is saying something slightly more radical than what I've been saying for some time. You don't need the current banks. If they won't lend, let them go under. If the Fed can lend to banks, why can't it lend directly to banks and consumers.

Give It Away, Give It Away Now

My blogger friend Beth Kanter had the best birthday ever last week, and I am proud to say I was part of it. We've been online friends since we met at BlogHer or WoolfCamp or SXSW, I forget which, and we are connected on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and any channel that we find each other on. I follow her loosely (we're not close friends by any stretch of the imagination), but when she asked for a very special birthday gift a couple of weeks ago, I was happy to chip in.

A week later, on her actual birthday, she thanked us all:

Today is my birthday and this year, as I have done for the past 8 years, I asked friends and family to donate to the Sharing Foundation in my honor. (If you want to know more about why my family and I care about the children of Cambodia and this charity, take a minute to watch this video my son, Harry made.) Last year, I got 51 people to donate $10 for my 51st birthday using my blog, Twitter, and other social media outposts. This year, I experimented with Facebook Causes birthday application.

We raised $6,255 from 162 donors! That's enough to cover the cost of school uniforms for 615 Cambodian youngsters. Many children in Cambodia do not go to school because their families lack the $10 for a uniform, required for school attendance. Last year, the Sharing Foundation's sewing school, a vocational training program, made over 1250 uniform sets and donated them to needy children in Roteang Village, to the Street Children's Assistance NGO, and to a poor government orphanage. The sewing girls, who are employed by the Sharing Foundation's vocational training program, earn from the first day of their training, so this is a win-win situation.

See her blog entry, "Thank you for the best birthday ever! We raised $6,255 for the Sharing Foundation to send 625 Cambodian youngsters to school!" for all the details and linkage.

I'm going to appropriate her idea for my own birthday this summer. And maybe you like it too?

If Dirt Were Dollars

How big is California's budget hole? Try these numbers on for size - San Jose Mercury News.

California's [$40 billion budget] shortfall is larger than the entire yearly budget of every other state except New York. It exceeds the gross domestic product of more than 100 countries, including Syria, Costa Rica and Kenya.

Money - It's a Gas!

From Political Punch, via Andrew Sullivan:

President-elect Obama campaign raised roughly $745 million for his 2008 presidential campaign.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., raised roughly $320 million, including the $84 million from entering into the public financing system.

This does NOT include money from the DNC and RNC. When those numbers are taken into account, we expect the Democrats to have raised closer to one billion dollars, compared to roughly $630 million for the Republicans.

Which means the President-elect had, roughly, a $400 million advantage.

ABC News' Tahman Bradley points out that Mr. Obama's total exceeds that of all 2004 candidates combined. They raised $673 million.

The comments on this entry are interesting too - there are several people explaining that they donated to Obama's campaign because they were fed up with the Republicans' policies, that they gave smaller amounts repeatedly, and that Obama's web site made it so easy. (I did too. I was especially glad that I could "vote with my wallet" even though, as an alien, I could not vote with a ballot.)

Putting Out Fire With Gasoline

SiliconValley.com has a chat with CIA chief-turned-venture capitalist R. James Woolsey, who says:

We borrow about $2 billion a day to import oil, about $700 billion a year. It dwarves the defense budget. It certainly dwarves the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It dwarves our trade deficit with China.

$700 billion a year for oil. $700 billion. Where have I heard that number before? Hmmm, maybe we could bail out of importing oil for a year ...

Money, Money Changes Everything

The New York Times has Questions for Margaret Atwood (thanks for the pointer, Ayse!):

As one of Canada ’s most esteemed novelists and poets, you are about to deliver a series of public lectures on a seemingly nonliterary subject, “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth,” which is also the title of your latest book. Your timing is perfect. Well, I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s not my fault. I didn’t make those banks collapse.

So what led you to take up the subject of debt? Long ago, I was a graduate student in Victorian literature. When you think of the 19th-century novel, you think romance — you think Heathcliff, Cathy, Madame Bovary, etc. But the underpinning structure of those novels is money, and Madame Bovary could have cheerfully gone on committing adultery for a long time if she hadn’t overspent.

So very true. The young ladies in Jane Austen's novels are forever discussing how many pounds a year this handsome bachelor or that eligible young lady has (and everybody seems to know everybody's money business). And in my favorite Anthony Trollope novel, The Eustace Diamonds, a young widow refuses to give up a diamond necklace that she says her late husband wanted her to have, while her in-laws claim it's a family heirloom, and she shouldn't get to keep it, and all the bickering and the entire plot is about who gets to have what. (I hope that didn't sound dry and boring, because it's anything but).

And Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, at the very end of the Victorian era, is all about Lily Bart's failure to find a suitably prosperous husband.

Gimme Some Money

Hunter doesn't really care for the bailout plan. He has a different idea:

I propose instead that Henry Paulson give that 700 billion dollars to me. In return, I'll stimulate the economy myself. I'll stimulate the hell out of it -- whatever you want. I'll spend it like it was water, and I was some sort of... water-spending guy.

The first thing I'd do? Build new solar and wind infrastructure, and make untold billions of dollars providing power to the nation. The walls of my corporate headquarters would be covered with solid gold, and the business park would be laid out so that from space, it would look like Calvin peeing on barrels of oil.

I'd create jobs like there was no tomorrow. My car is broken, so I'd hire 20,000 people to carry it mosh-pit-style into town whenever I needed to go shopping. I'd finance the arts, creating thousand-person choral groups to Rickroll my enemies in front of their own houses. Rush Limbaugh would be serenaded wherever he went from a fleet of low-flying zeppelins.

More great suggestions that had me spitting up my coffee, in his blog post, "Oh, And A Pony, Too. With A Jet Pack".