A History for Memorial Day

Monday morning I started Memorial Day at my grandma's house eating breakfast. First some backstory, my grandpa, who died in 1990 was a Navy veteran during World War Two. He was, as I am informed, a welder on the airplanes on the second Yorktown, CV-10 I believe. He was also one of the deck gunners. He had a number of friends die during the war and from what I understand was not particularly fond of the Japanese the remainder of his life. We never discussed it because I was four when he died.

Anyway, my grandma remarried her high school sweet heart, whose wife had died of cancer, several years later. During the course of his career he worked with a Japanese-American architect, who happened to visit this past weekend while my sister and I were there. During the very brief time that I spent with the Architect and his wife it was very enlightening. The architect's wife was born in Japan, her mother died when she was an infant and she was sent to the US to live with her grandparents in California. Then the war broke out and she had to live in an internment camp in Arkansas. This combines with the one Holocaust survivor that I met in the same town last summer to remind me of what has happened even recently in history. I am not sure if the architect lived in an internment camp as well, but the message that I received just knowing one person conveyed the message I was interested to hear.

We do not need to learn history to innovate or produce goods and services, but we must learn history so that we do not repeat the mistakes of our past. There is significant value in knowing the past mistakes. That is why experienced people get paid more. These lessons are so valuable! We must remember! More importantly than simply remembering we must also learn from our previous ordeals and do the right thing in the present and in the future. Hopefully the sacrifice of a few can be the lesson for the many.

I Live in Iowa: Week 58

A busy week it was! I spent much of the week in Davenport, one of the Quad Cities, at a welding connections design seminar. It was very educational. For the last year I had been of the conclusion that the increased stress concentration factor combined with the heat affected zone surrounding a weld which decreases the material properties were the two factors which combined to fail structures at welds. Well, that is often the case, but not always. Welds can crack during manufacturing when the weld material is high in carbon or silicon. Welds can also  crack if the angle between the two plates is very small, because the sides of the weld on the steel will cool too quickly and the weld material will cool away from the middle. That kind of crack you might not even be able to see from the surface. There were a number of other things that we learned from weld sizing to bridge design and distortion accommodation.

In total it was another 53 hour week at work. Overtime is bittersweet. I get paid more and I get a lot done, but I spend a whole lot of time sitting in front of a light bulb. It's funny, in college I would be impressed with myself when I put in a four hour study or homework session at a desk. Then I would do something else for an hour or so. Now, I put in more than twice that every week day.

There was no coaching this week, except some schedule planning. My own running went well, 60 miles. I was aiming for 70-75, but I was a little more tired than I anticipated on Friday and Saturday. I was planning for a 50-75-100 mile three week mileage build up. Now it will probably be 50-60-100.

Ending the week my sister came down from Milwaukee and we drove up to our relatives in Minnesota. It was a nice weekend seeing the family. I didn't get to sleep until midnight Friday, despite pulling into town around 9:30. Everyone likes to talk, myself certainly included. Saturday I tried to go help out in the Greenhouse after breakfast, but after about two hours of that I was done. Saturday afternoon was a daze of war movies in my grandma's dimly lit basement. I rarely have five uninterrupted hours of laziness, it was glorious, and strangely agonizing as I felt useless. The night ended with steak and an action movie. Good stuff.

Thank You for Reading

I have been more busy than usual interacting with people, working and running the last week or so. I have more fuel for the blog but it could be a few days before I get it written. Thanks for reading!

Quarterly Financial Results

Hewlett-Packard is laying off 27,000 people. They are doing this because their revenue and profits are down. This is coming up now because their most recent quarterly results were released recently. One requirement for publicly traded companies is that they have to report their results four times per year. Every time they report results the owners (stock holders) will hope that the company makes a little bit more money than they did at the same time last year. If the company is not doing well the investors will request action. If a lack of performance continues the investors will demand action. In part this happens by the share price dropping as people sell their shares, in other words, a measure of the value of a company decreases.

While this strikes me as somewhat successful system of establishing value, it also strikes me as an incomplete picture of the health of a company. Employees work on projects from the daily duties to the multiyear projects with value not actually generated through sales until years later. As I am one of those who typically works on projects years before value is typically realized it troubles me to hear about a company responding to poor quarterly results through massive layoffs. It is yet another reminder how fragile our personal "stability" really is.

I Have My Health

There have been a number of articles recently on NPR and in the Wall Street Journal about health problems. However you look at it, health problems are a hassle. Sometime I forget how fortunate I am to have such incredible health. Millions of people are suffering or burdened under huge medical bills yet I have a health budget surplus. It seems there are more health problems and more afflicted people than there were twenty years ago. I tend to get bogged down in the problems in my life instead of focusing on the positive attributes. Thus, I have my health!

I Live in Iowa: Week 57

Sometimes I ask myself, 'am I living "the life"'? After going down a hill earlier today on my bicycle at least 43.6 mph with my hands off the handle bars screaming, I do feel that I am living "the life". While that is simply one little three second burst of excitement in my life, it is indicative of everything else. For the record, from a conservation of momentum physics perspective bicycles and motorcycles become more stable theoretically at high speeds. The only problems are small perturbations which may cause excitement of a natural frequency, an imperfection in the road surface, cars, pedestrians, wind, animals, and loss of personal balance. So... it felt right at the time...

Anyway, I worked 53 hours this week. We have quite a lot of work to do and overtime is offered so I took it and worked extra hours. I finished more projects than I normally do, but let me tell you, sitting in front of a computer over 50 hours a week is not entirely fun. On the other hand, my time and a half rate does feel ridiculous.

Coaching was an anticlimactic end to the season. We had one very motivated person who was going to close out the season with a 10,000 on the track, but due to family commitments did not run the race. So that's it. The season is over. Our team has two people going to nationals, one in the 100 and 200 and another in the 400. I am excited for both of them because they are both multiple time school record holders and our only two seniors this year. What a great way to end  your college career.

My own training, went well, really well. I ran 50 miles taking a day off. I rode with the Wednesday night Free Flight group and we hammered on each other for 35-40 miles at an average of 19.6 mph. It's going to be a good summer. I registered for the Gary Bjorklund Half Marathon up in Duluth, Minnesota and the Grandview Gallop here in Dubuque. Of note, I was not fast enough to get into the USATF Half Marathon National Championships, so I am in the actual Gary Bjorklund Half. Plus they have no prize purse for the half this year because it is going to the national championship race. This all means, I am probably one of the fastest people in the half. Which means, I could win the thing. Me? Win the Gary Bjorklund Half Marathon? For those that do not know, it's one of the biggest half marathons in the country.

What else? Does there need to be more? Isn't that enough? There is one more thing, I bought the DVDs "From the Earth to the Moon". It's pretty amazing, we went to the Moon!

Also, the company I invested in back in February, DHT Holdings, has had their stock price drop to the floor. I don't get it. They have more in cash than their market capitalization. Their book value is about five times their market cap. Their most recent quarter had earning per share of $.10 (meaning they are profitable) with a $.02 dividend. That's a Price to Earnings of less than two! That's a dividend of 13%. So I invested even more money in it. Of course there is probably something I am missing and I will lose weeks of pay. The only reason I can figure out people are selling at these record low prices is that they are afraid it will lose more value. In other words, when everyone else is selling, it must be a good time to sell. That's ridiculous. It is bewildering. As time progresses I am sure that I will learn some valuable lesson. Hopefully it is not some key variable I am missing now.

The Facebook IPO is Today

Facebook is going public. That means that you can own part of Facebook. Pretty cool huh? Well, it's not all good. In any start up company venture capital and angel investors (both are groups of rich people) only invest when they feel that the company will go up greatly in value and have an exit strategy. Going public through an IPO means the largest investors in the company are typically selling some of their shares in the company to get more money. In other words, the most informed investors about a particular company are selling their stock.

That is not strictly true for Facebook. When a company has over 500 shareholders they have to release their financials because the SEC mandates it. Facebook passed that threshold and since they will have to publish their financials anyway, they might as well make $18 billion off of it through an IPO.

Finally, as a value investor one of the metrics I look at is Price to Earning Ratio. That is the price that you pay compared to the profits of the company on a yearly basis. P/E below 5 is typically a great value. P/E below 10 is still a bargain. A P/E of about 12 is the 300 year average valuation of the largest companies. Facebook's P/E will be over 100 today. It could go up to 150 or even 200 today. That's not ridiculous, if you feel that Facebook will make ten or twenty times as much money in the coming years than it does now. However, Facebook is already not what it used to be. It is trying to be a one stop entertainment (and recently, shopping) stop. It was cool because it connected people. At the beginning it was even more cool because you had to have a .edu email address. Now anyone can get in, they reduce their privacy policy every eight months or so, they are trying to sell stuff, and they are getting into the games arena. It's just not what it used to be.

That being said, I'm still thinking about buying some. I do hope that Twitter doesn't follow in Facebook's steps. Twitter is cool because it is simple. It is actually my prefered social media at the moment.