Archive for March, 2012

The Model Business Model

Notwithstanding its conservative investment portfolio, the central bank remains highly profitable because of its unique business model. Rather than paying for funding, it simply creates the money that it needs at no cost. The return on its investments, as a result, almost all flows directly to the bottom line.
NY Times

So simple and so beautiful. What kind of genius entrepreneur would invent such a perfect business model? “Economist” John Law of the 17th and 18th centuries. Not only did he invent the perfect business model, but he also made significant advances in the business of Bubbles. How did his business model innovation turn out? Like most incredibly brilliant men who come up with bold ideas too early, John Law “ultimately fled the country disguised as a woman for his own safety.” 10 years later, Law “contracted pneumonia and died a poor man.” This is all according to Wikipedia, which, according to Wikipedia, is the source for the unvarnished and unbiased truth.

In the twenty-teens, our central bankers are much more advanced, more ethical, and more American. Importantly, they also look way less good in drag and wouldn’t “pass”. There should be no way this ends as badly as all the other times this has been done. What is that expression? How does it go? Shit’s way different at this point in history, dude.

Recommendation: Long the best business model, short all inferior business models, as the former will compete away the latter.

HT to the Paleofish


Solutions to Problems: Healthcare

Healthcare continues to get ever more expensive. Healthcare is crucial to quality of life in America. How best to reconcile the former with the latter is an issue that has divided, and will continue to divide, people along many lines: have & have-not, 1% & 99%, Republican & Democratican. Healthcare is an issue, I agree. But it is an issue that, despite whinging by just about everyone (especially meek cries your ears can pick out from hospital beds in the distance), is eminently solvable. Simply, kill the sick.

Most people are small-minded and only consider what is lost, which, in this case, is sick people. But think of all the savings! It’s a difficult pill to swallow that things get expensive when there isn’t enough of them, so it’s difficult to swallow that there isn’t enough healthcare for the amount of sick people. Historically, society has dealt with expensive healthcare by increasing the amount of it; classic 20th century thinking and demonstrably too expensive. The right way to cure this ill, to make healthcare cheaper, is to decrease demand by ridding ourselves of the (almost) dead weight that the sick represent. The absence of the needy sick will make hospitals, doctors, pill-makers, breast implanters, and the whole healthcare system compete for customers, healthy customers who have practically no ailments whatsoever. Prices will plummet, affordability will skyrocket.

It’s time to live in the future, the future that is now, the now in which a modern healthy consumer can no longer afford the continued living of the unhealthy consumer. How else can a healthy modern consumer afford $15k per year to tutor each kid on top of the $50k he spends to send each to private nursery schools starting in pre-pre-pre-K? How else can he belong to three golf clubs (each with $1500 minimum monthly spends at the snack bar or clubhouse, mind you), have season tickets to the Knicks, and have a reasonable summer home in a 2nd tier vacation spot like Martha’s Vineyard? How else can he always pay a homeless person $50 in cough syrup to wait in line to get him the new iPad (which is actually called the new iPad) on the first day it comes out? The modern healthy consumer shouldn’t be asked to forgo the bare necessities of life to subsidize the sick. We can dick around with these please everyone solutions or we can get serious about healthcare and simply kill the sick.

Machem Raiser heads a consultancy shop, MLR Associates, which is “renowned” for providing “bold, clear-thinking” white papers to industry leading businesses. His ideas have had “a devil of a time” getting traction, but, per MLR Associates, “not one person has disputed that [MLR’s] solutions make sense.” The firm’s motto is: “The world can be better. Let’s make it so. Simply.” LoS has negotiated a pretty sweet deal for all MLR research, research which we are providing to our clients gratis, which means “free” in some old language, probably Babylonian or whatever they spoke in Ur (was it Babylonian?).


A Rebuke, Literally in Public

From Georgetown’s own, “Elizabeth,” in the comment thread for Pomegranate Capital Thinks Women Can Run Money Better, Is Wrong:

This is quite literally the most ridiculous article and comment thread I have ever read. Are you men really so afraid of a little competition that you have to kill it before it becomes a serious threat? I suggest that you spend less time bashing women and more time getting an education and getting out of your tiny elitist and anti-female bubbles. I am so embarrassed for your gender reading these comments…

My reply:

You are LITERALLY the most ridiculous poster in that entire thread, Eliza. Literally! As successful men, we are always “killing it.” So your implied suggestion — let’s call it what it is, Beth, a rebuke — that we NOT “kill it” is offensive. Literally offensive. But the embarrassment you, Lizzie, feel for our gender (I usually fill out all Government forms that ask for my “Sex” as “Yes,” just to make it harder for the Government to know what my gender is. But I digress, I LITERALLY digress) is nothing compared to the embarrassment that we feel for not only your gender, but for your Common App safety school, and for your parents, and for that time you read A Modest Proposal and thought “Gee this Dr. Swift guy is practically the antichrist, how does he think can solve poverty and the ills of the underclass by eating their babies, I am so embarrassed for his gender, profession, language, countrymen, yadda yadda, et alia and cetera.”

LITERALLY,
Mr. Juggles

PS Chin up, the world needs coffee-makers, too. Human ones. With skirts.

PPS But it wouldn’t hurt to learn to type.