Mark Cuban Warns: This Bubble Is Far Worse Than The Tech Bubble Of 2000 -

Mark Cuban Warns: This Bubble Is Far Worse Than The Tech Bubble Of 2000 - 

Just over a year ago, we warned that while the world of speculative capital is focused intently on the Twitter and Facebook #Ref/0 fundamental valuations in the publicly-traded equity markets, the real dot-com 2.0 bubble is occurring in the private markets. Few paid attention, prefering the head in the sand "well the music is still playing" meme; but one (or two) billionaires noticed, and with all eyes intently focused on Nasdaq 5,000 (as some indicator that we made it back to Nirvana), Mark Cuban unleashes uncontestible exposition why is this bubble far worse than the tech bubble of 2000.

It is different this time... and, as Mark Cuban explains, far worse...

Ah the good old days.  Stocks up $25, $50, $100 more in a single day.  Day trading was all the rage.  Anyone and everyone you talked to had a story about how they had made a ton of money on such and such a stock. In an hour.  Stock trading millionaires were being minted by the week, if not sooner.

You couldn’t go anywhere without people talking about the stock market.  Everyone was in or new someone who was in. There were hundreds of companies that were coming public and could easily be bought and sold.  You just pick a stock and buy it. Then you pray it goes up. Which most days it did.

Then it ended. Slowly by surely the air came out of the bubble and the stock markets declined and declined till the air was completely gone.  The good news was that some people were able to see it coming and get out. The bad is that others were able to get out, but at significant losses.

If we thought it was stupid to invest in public internet websites that had no chance of succeeding back then, it’s worse today.

In a bubble there is always someone with a “great” idea pitching an investor the dream of a billion dollar payout with a comparison to an existing success story.  In the tech bubble it was Broadcast.com, AOL, Netscape, etc.  Today its, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

To the investor, its the hope of a huge payout.  But there is one critical difference.  Back then the companies  the general public was investing in were public companies. They may have been horrible companies, but being public meant that investors had liquidity to sell their stocks.

The bubble today comes from private investors who are investing in apps and small tech companies.

Just like back then there were always people telling you their idea for a new website or about the public website they invested in, today people always have what essentially boils down to an app that they want you to invest in.  But unlike back then when the dream of riches was from a public company, now its from a private company.  And there in lies the rub.

People we used to call individual or small investors, are now called Angels.  Angels. Why do they call them Angels ? Maybe because they grant wishes ?

According to some data I found, there are 225k Angels in the US. Like the crazy days of the internet boom,  I wonder how many realize what they have gotten into ?

But they are not alone.

For those who can’t figure out how to be Angels. You can sign up to be part of the new excitement called Equity Crowd Funding. Equity Crowd Funding allows you to join the masses to chase investments with as little as 5k dollars.  Oh the possibilities !!

I have absolutely not doubt in my mind that most of these individual Angels and crowd funders are currently under water in their investments. Absolutely none. I say most. The percentage could be higher

Why ?

Because there is ZERO liquidity for any of those investments. None. Zero. Zip. 

All those Angel investments in all those apps and startups.  All that crowdfunded equity. All in search of their unicorn because the only real salvation right now is an exit or cash pay out from operations.  The SEC made sure that there is no market for any of these companies to go public and create liquidity for their Angels.  The market for sub 25mm dollar raises is effectively dead. DOA . Gone. Thanks SEC. And with the new Equity CrowdFunding rules yet to be finalized, there is no reason to believe that the SEC will be smart enough to create some form of liquidity for all those widows and orphans who will put their $5k into the dream only to realize they can’t get any cash back when they need money to fix their car

So why is this bubble far worse than the tech bubble of 2000 ?

Because the only thing worse than a market with collapsing valuations is a market with no valuations and no liquidity.

If stock in a company is worth what somebody will pay for it, what is the stock of a company worth when there is no place to sell it ?
*  *  *

Of course, tomorrow's mainstream business media channels will trot out various asset-gatherers and commssion-takers who will denigrate Mr. Cuban's clarifications - just as they did Janet Yellen's Biotech warnings last year - but the question is: who do you believe? The billionaire with no ax to grind or the market maven "TV personality" with vested interests up the wazoo?

If examples are needed, see below...



Read more - 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-04/mark-cuban-warns-bubble-far-worse-tech-bubble-2000

For The First Time Ever, US Consumers Spent More On Food In Restaurants Than In Grocery Stores -

For The First Time Ever, US Consumers Spent More On Food In Restaurants Than In Grocery Stores - 

Over the weekend, we mocked the WSJ for glorifying the US "wage recovery" by focusing on the "scarcity" of waiter and bartender jobs ("there is fierce competition" for restaurant workers the WSJ said), a concept well-explored on these pages: we have shown repeatedly that soaring number of waiters and bartenders have been the "backbone", so to say, of the US job recovery in recent years (alongside energy workers but that ship has now sailed). As it turns out the joke's on us.

As Mark Perry of the AEI shows, for the first time ever, the spending patterns of US consumers are so skewed, that Americans, or at least a small fraction of them, spent more on restaurants and bars, than what Americans, the much larger fraction, spent on grocery stores to prepare food for themselves.

In other words, when it comes to food, either the bulk of Americans have forgotten how to cook and are hemmorghaning money to overpay for restaurant prepared dinners, or a small fraction of society - i.e., the 1% leisure class - now outspends the majority of the nation, those who can't afford to eat out no matter the amount of subsidies or handouts by the government, on food.



What is casuing this historic inversion is unclear, but what is clear is that it is full steam ahead fo the "waiter and bartender recovery" until all those Ivy League grads who can no longer finds a job on Wall Street are serving you a burger at your favorite fast food, and recently IPOed, burger place.

Read more -

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-04/history-made-first-time-ever-us-consumers-spent-more-food-restaurants-grocery-stores

2015 Mighty Ford F-750 Tonka is the Dump Truck of your childhood dreams -

2015 Mighty Ford F-750 Tonka is the Dump Truck of your childhood dreams - 

Do you have a big sandbox behind your house? Like Sahara Desert big? If so, Ford may have just the thing for you.

The automaker has teamed up with Tonka on a custom dump truck to promote its new 2016 F-650/F-750 medium duty lineup.

The Mighty Ford F-750 Tonka that debuted Wednesday at the National Truck Equipment Association Work Truck Show in Indianapolis features a Truck Tech engineers dump truck body and is finished in Tonka’s iconic yellow paint with a black grille and decals touting that the toy brand has been “getting dirty since 1947,” which happens to be one year before the Ford F-Series debuted.

The F-750 it’s based on will be built in house by Ford, has a 33,000 gross vehicle weight rating, and in this configuration can haul up to 17,000 pounds. It’s powered by a version of the 6.7-liter diesel V8 offered in Ford’s super duty pickups, here with up to 330 hp and 725 lb-ft of torque.

And while Ford can’t match Tonka’s lifetime warranty, it comes pretty close. The engine has a five-year, 250,000-mile warranty. Unfortunately for those with young hearts and big backyards, the Mighty Ford F-750 Tonka is a one-off show car, but you can always just buy one in yellow and pretend.

Read more - 

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2015/03/04/mighty-ford-f-750-tonka-is-dump-truck-your-childhood-dreams/?intcmp=trending

Forget Coffins – Organic Burial Pods Will Turn Your Loved Ones Into Trees -

Forget Coffins – Organic Burial Pods Will Turn Your Loved Ones Into Trees - 

The idea of coming full circle and returning whence we came from is one that appeals to many of us, regardless of our faith (or lack thereof), and this is an idea captured perfectly by this beautiful new burial method developed in Italy. The Capsula Mundi project by designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel has developed an organic, biodegradable burial capsule that will turn the deceased’s body into nutrients for a tree that will grow out of their remains.
After being encapsulated in the fetal position, the deceased is buried and either a tree or tree seed is planted above their capsule. The project’s site already has a number of trees to choose from.
The project is currently only a concept because Italian law forbids such burials. If it were allowed to proceed, however, the project’s aim would be to create entire memorial parks full of trees instead of tombstones. And instead of destroying and burying wood for wooden coffins, we would, at the end of our lives, provide sustenance for new trees instead. And indeed, the idea that our loved ones and descendants could visit our tree, care for it and rest in its shade is truly a comforting one.

Read more- 

http://www.boredpanda.com/biodegradable-burial-pod-memory-forest-capsula-mundi/

Bill Clinton’s portrait for the National Portrait Gallery has a Monica Lewinsky reference slipped into the painting -

Bill Clinton’s portrait for the National Portrait Gallery has a Monica Lewinsky reference slipped into the painting - 

The artist who painted Bill Clinton’s portrait for the National Portrait Gallery claims that he slipped in a Monica Lewinsky reference into the painting.
Nelson Shanks told the Philadelphia Daily News that he “subtly” incorporated Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress into the 2006 portrait.
“The reality is he’s probably the most famous liar of all time. He and his administration did some very good things, of course, but I could never get this Monica thing completely out of my mind and it is subtly incorporated in the painting,” Shanks said.
He explained that he put a shadow of the blue dress into the painting.
“If you look at the left-hand side of it there’s a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things,” Shanks told the Daily News. “It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him.”
Shanks claims that that Clintons want the portrait removed from the gallery.
“And so the Clintons hate the portrait. They want it removed from the National Portrait gallery,” he told the Daily News. “They’re putting a lot of pressure on them.”
The National Portrait Gallery denied the claim to the Daily News.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the former president’s wife, Hillary Clinton, will likely enter the presidential race in April.

Read more - 

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/03/02/artist-claims-he-included-lewinskys-blue-dress-in-clinton-portrait/

Prisons Increase Profits by Replacing In-Person Family Visits with Video Screens -

Prisons Increase Profits by Replacing In-Person Family Visits with Video Screens - 

Those in charge of the nation’s jails and prisons have found a way to make some money off the backs of those who can often least afford it—the families of inmates.

Telecommunications companies, last seen making huge profits off phone service for inmates, have had to find a new revenue stream since the Federal Communications Commission capped most jail phone rates. Now they’re installing video visitation systems at jails and prisons across the country, charging huge fees for their use and splitting the profits with the facility.

The new systems are touted as more user-friendly for families and better at restricting the flow of contraband into correctional facilities. But they come at the cost of high charges—up to $1.50 a minute—for remote video visiting.

“Seventy three percent of the people in our jail have not been convicted--that means they are innocent until proven guilty,” Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins told NBC News. “And 100% of their family, their spouses and their children are innocent, who are the people who end up paying for this.”

Prisons often don’t start getting their share of the loot until the chat system has been paid for or until a certain level of calls are made each month.

Prisons have no incentive to make the charges affordable for families and some officials show a complete disregard for the cost. The purchasing manager for St. Clair County, Illinois, Tom Maziarz, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “A dollar a minute strikes me as a fair price. I guess it depends what viewpoint you’re coming from. The way I look at it, we’ve got a captive audience. If they don’t like (the rates), I guess they should not have got in trouble to begin with.”

In some cases, a limited number of video chats are free but must be done at a central facility. One company, Securus, requires that jails and prisons that install its systems curtail in-person visits by all except attorneys and clergy. However, that often disincentivizes the use of such systems. A study by the Prison Policy Initiative reports that when traditional through-the-glass visits are retained, there is an average of 23 minutes of offsite video chats per month. When in-person visits are eliminated, that number falls to 13 minutes per month.

Whether done at a central site or remotely, video and sound quality of the chats are often poor, causing much of a pre-scheduled video conference to be wasted.

The systems also eliminate the personal contact between families and inmates that is credited with reducing behavior problems while incarcerated and recidivism after release. “It just seems so impersonal,” Ashika Coleman-Carter, whose husband was jailed in Travis County, Texas, told NBC News. “The old visits, even though you couldn’t touch behind the glass, at least you could go into an actual visiting room and see someone’s face. Now you can’t get close to the person at all.”

The video chats also provide less privacy for visitors with picture and sound being recorded and often reviewed by jail officials. In-person visits were usually in a separate room, but the video chats often take place in the dayroom of a jail. Sometimes family members watch while fights break out behind their loved one.

Attorneys are also troubled by the lack of privacy. “When I need to discuss with them issues germane to their defense or what a witness said…anything with substance, I’m not going to do it over the computer, because I don’t trust them,” Marci Kratter, a Phoenix defense attorney, told Al Jazeera America. “I’m a bit of a cynic, so I have concerns about whether what’s discussed over the Internet is actually privileged and that there’s not some way that they are recording it.”

She’s right to be concerned. Prisons in several jurisdictions have been sued by defense attorneys, charging their conversations with clients have been illegally monitored.

Read more -

http://www.allgov.com/news/where-is-the-money-going/prisons-increase-profits-by-replacing-in-person-family-visits-with-video-screens-150302?news=855820

Too much Facebook leads to Envy and Depression -

Too much Facebook leads to Envy and Depression - 

Constantly checking Facebook to see what your friends are doing could lead to some serious depression.
A recent study conducted by researchers at Nanyang Technological University, Bradley University and the University of Missouri Columbia found that heavy Facebook (FB, Tech30) users can experience envy -- which can ultimately lead to extreme sadness.

The researchers surveyed 736 college students and found that, basically, if you quietly stalk your friends on Facebook and then realize that your life doesn't measure up to theirs, you feel bad about yourself.
"If Facebook is used to see how well an acquaintance is doing financially or how happy an old friend is in his relationship -- things that cause envy among users -- use of the site can lead to feelings of depression," said Margaret Duffy, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
This isn't just a college phenomenon. I am nearing middle age and I can relate.
Facebook is a huge part of my life. Like most Facebook users, I have the app on my phone. I check it at work. I check it at home. I check it when I am out. If I am in a subway station with Wi-Fi, I check it there too.
I am up to date on all my friends, their kids and whatever they are reading at that moment. Unfortunately, it's an addiction that I can't quit.
Facebook has allowed me a little window into my friends' lives back home. They have babies -- well some of them have teenagers. They have lovely homes. And the dinners -- oh the dinners they serve! There are food presentations that look like something out of a Martha Stewart magazine. I watch all the videos of their kids saying the darndest things. I click on their pictures of vacations in exotic places.
I have come to the conclusion that Facebook is a lifestyle magazine featuring my friends, who are doing it better than me.
I peruse Facebook from computer on my coffee table, because I am not grown up enough to buy a desk for myself. My coffee table is my all-purpose table. I eat there too -- usually hunks of cheese with a knife and no crackers. That's right no crackers, because I am too lazy to run out to the bodega.
My only consolation is sometimes my friends confuse "there," "their" and "they're" in their posts about their lovely vacations and darling children. Then suddenly, I feel a little bit better about myself.

Read more - 

http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/02/technology/facebook-envy/index.html

North Carolina just made it legal for lobbying firms to purchase prostitutes to service politicians -

North Carolina just made it legal for lobbying firms to purchase prostitutes to service politicians - 

North Carolina’s State Ethics Committee has just opened up a major problem for their state — they just made it legal for lobbying firms to purchase prostitutes to service politicians. The Committee’s determination that sex had no value and that sex between a lobbyist and politician was nothing to report or in any way questionable means that a major loophole has opened up for lobbying firms. Now lobbying firms can hire people with the explicit goal to seduce and fornicate with politicians in order to garner favor.

In other terms, lobbying firms can hire people who can offer sexual services for politicians, and they don’t even need to register. now, before it is said that it is being misinterpreted, here is the actual letter from the Ethics Committee, titled “Sexual Favors or Sexual Acts as a Gift or ‘Thing of Value.'” In it, they declared that these relations have no monetary value, so do not need to be reported. In addition, they declared that if the person is not registered as a lobbyist, there was never any point of concern, even if the service was paid for by a third-party. In other words, lobbyists can hire people expressly for a politician to use in a carnal manner, even if the politician asks for or otherwise indicates their desire for such a service.

Even more disturbing are the long-term implications. Let us say a politician does partake, yet the person who paid for the night of temptation was a less than honest broker. A few hidden cameras, some veiled threat that did not cross the line into blackmail territory, a night of infidelity could put a politician into a less honorable group’s pocket without major cost, and all now rendered perfectly legal by the Ethics Committee of North Carolina.

Lobbying is a practice which needs to end for the good of the republic. When our founders agreed that the people have the right to redress grievances and to petition the government, that did not mean corporations or trade groups being granted superior access to the people themselves. Money is not speech, liberty is not anarchy — freedom for all, not just for the elite.

Read more - 

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/02/27/gifts-for-politicians/

NASA's Dawn spacecraft releases images showing another Bright Spot on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres -

NASA's Dawn spacecraft releases images showing another Bright Spot on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres - 

The latest images captured by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft of the dwarf planet Ceres continues to baffle scientists as the photos reveal another significant bright spot on its surface.

The planet, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, has an average diameter of 590 miles and is the largest body in the main asteroid belt and is believed to contain a large amount of ice.

“Ceres’ bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin,” Chris Russell, a principal investigator for the Dawn mission, said in a news release from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“This maybe pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations,” Russell said.

Scientists hope to get a better view of Ceres in the next week as Dawn is scheduled to enter the planet’s orbit March 6. The bright spots that have captivated the world might soon come into sharper focus.

"The brightest spot continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size it is brighter than anything else on Ceres,” Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planch Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, said in the release.

The Dawn spacecraft has already delivered more than 30,000 images of Vesta – the second largest body in the main asteroid belt – during an orbit in 2011 and 2012.

Read more - 

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/02/26/nasa-dawn-spacecraft-releases-images-showing-another-bright-spot-on-ceres/

First full body transplant is two years away, surgeon claims - plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body -

First full body transplant is two years away, surgeon claims - plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body - 

A surgeon says full-body transplants could become a reality in just two years.

Sergio Canavero, a doctor in Turin, Italy, has drawn up plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body and claims the procedures needed to carry out the operation are not far off.

Canavero hopes to assemble a team to explore the radical surgery in a project he is due to launch at a meeting for neurological surgeons in Maryland this June.

He has claimed for years that medical science has advanced to the point that a full body transplant is plausible, but the proposal has caused raised eyebrows, horror and profound disbelief in other surgeons.

The Italian doctor, who recently published a broad outline of how the surgery could be performed, told New Scientist magazine that he wanted to use body transplants to prolong the lives of people affected by terminal diseases.

“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it. But if people don’t want it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else,” he said. “I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”

Putting aside the considerable technical issues involved in removing a living person’s head, grafting it to a dead body, reviving the reconstructed person and retraining their brain to use thousands of unfamiliar spinal cord nerves, the ethics are problematic.

The history of transplantation is full of cases where people hated their new appendages and had them removed. The psychological burden of emerging from anaesthetic with an entirely new body is firmly in uncharted territory. Another hitch is that medical ethics boards would almost certainly not approve experiments in primates to test whether the procedure works.

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But Canavero wants to provoke a debate around these issues. “The real stumbling block is the ethics,” he told New Scientist. “Should this surgery be done at all? There are obviously going to be many people who disagree with it.”

The idea of body transplants – or head transplants, depending on the perspective – has been tried before. In 1970, Robert White led a team at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, US, that tried to transplant the head of one monkey on to the body of another. The surgeons stopped short of a full spinal cord transfer, so the monkey could not move its body.

A lull in attempted body transplants followed White’s experiments, but last year researchers at Harbin Medical University in China made some headway with mice. They hope to perfect a procedure they claim “will become a milestone of medical history and potentially could save millions of people”.

Despite Canavero’s enthusiasm, many surgeons and neuroscientists believe massive technical hurdles push full body transplants into the distant future. The starkest problem is that no one knows how to reconnect spinal nerves and make them work again. Were that possible, people paralysed by spinal injuries could have surgery to make them walk again.

“There is no evidence that the connectivity of cord and brain would lead to useful sentient or motor function following head transplantation,” Richard Borgens, director of the Center for Paralysis Research at Purdue University in Indiana, US, told New Scientist.

According to the procedure Canavero outlined this month, doctors would first cool the patient’s head and the donor’s body so their cells do not die during the operation. The neck is then cut through, the blood vessels linked up with thin tubes, and the spinal cord cut with an exceptionally sharp knife to minimise nerve damage. The recipient’s head is then moved on to the donor’s body.

The next stage is trickier. Canavero believes that the spinal cord nerves that would allow the recipient’s brain to talk to the donor’s body can be fused together using a substance called polyethylene glycol. To stop the patient moving, they must be kept in a coma for weeks. When they come round, Canavero believes they would be able to speak and feel their face, though he predicts they would need a year of physiotherapy before they could move the body.

“This is such an overwhelming project, the possibility of it happening is very unlikely,” Harry Goldsmith, professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, Davis, told the magazine.

Read more - 

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/25/first-full-body-transplant-two-years-away-surgeon-claim