Author Archive for a Guest

Why Social Investing May Not Be Such A Good Idea

Published by a Guest on January 7, 2009 in Social Networks. View Comments

It’s once again a great pleasure to offer a guest post from our good friend Marriott, who works in the financial industry in Washington, D.C. Marriott last wrote about climate-ready crops in May.

In December 2008, kaChing received the blessing of the SEC to become a Registered Investment Advisor. kaChing is a social networking and investing website that allows individuals to create sample and fictitious portfolios. They can then share these portfolios with other individuals on the network and compare their successes and failures.

Now, in principal, this is a great feature of education that is much needed for the modern investor. Individuals can learn as they invest the money they wish they had, or they can follow other individual’s portfolios to see how they succeeded and failed. The idea of using play money to learn about investments is not original to kaChing. Over the years there have been several ways for individuals to test their investment ideas, methods and strategies before putting their life savings into play. That’s a great system.

kaChing’s recent move ruined what they had, in my humble opinion. By becoming a Registered Investment Advisor with the SEC, they have gone into the business of selling advice on investments. It works basically like this (my own spin is applied): if you are an 18 year old hotshot with some investment ideas and your allowance doesn’t provide you with the capital to make investments with real money, you can open a trading account through kaChing. If your ideas, no matter how crazy, actually start to do well and other social investors take notice, then you can charge a fee for the ability to track your portfolio. Of course, kaChing will take a small part of this fee for providing the connection services. Once people pay the fee to track your portfolio they can link their own grown up money accounts to your fictitious one and try to replicate your stellar returns.

Despite my beliefs in the free market, the survival of the fittest, and stupid is as stupid does, I have a few major problems with kaChing’s new business model.

Continue reading ‘Why Social Investing May Not Be Such A Good Idea’

The Future of Power

Published by a Guest on August 31, 2008 in Energy and Environment. View Comments

A guest post by James Q.

First off, I want to thank Jarred for inviting me to guest post on Tropophilia. I’ve been following the blog since its inception and have been nothing but impressed. I hope I can meet the standards of this site.

Jarred linked me to an article about using solar power in conjunction with a small water powered fuel cell. While photovoltaics power a home during the day, surplus power splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, and the two are combined again at night in a fuel cell to produce power. Sounds good enough, but I cannot in good faith agree with the concept.

I’m not an engineer or scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but I do believe that simplicity works. My first thought when reading the article was, “why not just store the excess power in a battery instead of using it to power another process?” To me, adding extra steps, equipment, and parameters only complicates things. Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t efficiency fall every time an energy source passes through a different medium?
Continue reading ‘The Future of Power’

Distracted by Shoes

Published by a Guest on July 24, 2008 in Advertising, Consumer Behavior, Culture and Lifestyle. View Comments

The following is a guest post from Daniel H. Welcome back, Dan!

In a recent NY Times column, David Brooks describes a deterioration in American culture over the past century, noting that “America once had a culture of thrift…but over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded,” and now we exist in a “culture of debt.”

He partially blames the effects of a rapidly growing economy, noting how some luxury items which were once unaffordable for the middle class suddenly came within financial reach (especially within the reach of creditors if not within the reach of one’s own cash). He also blames the deterioration of the norm of personal responsibility, and claims that those who fell victim to marketing schemes were also furthering the deterioration of a norm of thriftiness, in themselves and in those around them.

I thought it was a good opinion piece, really. But the whole time I was reading the article, I kept getting distracted by shoes.

Lots of shoes.

The whole top and side of the internet page on the New York Times website was full of shoe advertisements, which of course, exist because the Times wants to collect on extra revenue whenever possible and because advertisers are willing to pay prime dollar for space on a site viewed by perhaps millions of people per day. And so as I was challenged by Brooks’ thoughts on how we, as Americans, should seek to be wiser consumers, I also felt that this change cannot and will not happen if I do not seek to monitor the ways in which I take in information, most especially on the web, but anywhere for that matter. If Americans truly desire to become wiser spenders, we must question our acceptance of the commercial advertising industry and its self-imposition into our day-to-day lives.

While I don’t think internet advertising is wrong at all, it might be helpful, as technology and the internet becomes more and more central to our means of gathering information, to ask several questions: First, what space is sacred? What space or information should not be corrupted with advertisements? At what point, if any, is the value of information corrupted or degraded by advertisements? Would we put corporate sponsors on our holy scriptures or governmental documents? What about on websites that contain this kind of information? What about good literature? The unspoken reality here is that corporate sponsors help keep quite a bit of the internet free and available to all, which I tend to find is a good thing. I only wonder where we go from here?

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user bcjordan.

Competition Needed Among “Climate Ready” Crops [Guest Post]

Published by a Guest on May 13, 2008 in Agriculture, Business, Environment and Science. View Comments

It’s a pleasure for us to publish this thoughtful guest post written by “Marriott” — good friend, good neighbor, and good ol’ fashioned lover of Freedom.

What if I said that you could plant corn any time of year, in any climate condition, and still harvest the same succulent vegetable that many of us grew up eating every summer? What if you could do this for any vegetable? During my morning commute I read an article in the Washington Post that discussed how this may be a possibility for the future of farming. (I urge you to read the Post article)

Although there are many issues to discuss with this idea, my focus will deal with the corporate side of things and the future of this potentially lucrative industry. Feel free to debate the usage of these seeds, their methods, or anything else that hits a nerve with this issue.

Geneticists and scientists working for major bio-tech and agricultural development firms have been working on developing “Climate Ready” crops. The basic idea is that through genetically altered seeds, these scientists can create crops that are drought, heat, flooding resistant. They are basically “Global-Warming Proofing” our crops. And with the recent sticker shock at grocery stores throughout the country, this appears as a welcome opportunity to help the impending food crisis.

The problem with this recent technology is patent monopolization. From the article:

Three companies – BASF of Germany, Syngenta of Switzerland and Monsanto of St. Louis – have filed applications to control nearly two-thirds of the climate-related gene families submitted to patent offices worldwide.

The nature of these patents is even more troubling as corporations are able to eliminate competition. In one such case a corporation is applying for a patent to use one gene, and in the language of the patent the corporation effectively bans other corporations from using the same gene in any other “Climate Ready” seed.

Continue reading ‘Competition Needed Among “Climate Ready” Crops [Guest Post]‘