Random thoughts
π Day
Do you know today, March 14, is Pi Day? And 1:59 pm is commonly called Pie Minute?
According to Wikipedia, π, in Euclidean plane geometry, is defined “either as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, or as the ratio of a circle’s area to the area of a square whose side is the [...]
Bloody Day Today
For a day like today, there’s simply no escape.
With Dow off more than 260 points, the deepest drop since 2003, everywhere I look, all I see is red. When I checked my Scottrade account couple of minutes ago, I found my paper assets have shrunk nearly $8,000 already and that’s just stocks. The total loss [...]
One’s Trash is Other’s Gold
Bloomberg.com today has a story about a Chinese woman, Zhang Ying, and her company Nine Dragons Paper Holdings Ltd. The article says
Zhang is the world's richest self-made woman, ahead of U.S. chat show host Oprah Winfrey and EBay Inc. Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman, according to Shanghai-based Hurun Report, which ranks wealthy people in China.
And [...]
Fool Me Once ……
A couple of days ago, I forwarded a story from MSN Money about how Capital One is trying to collect more fees by giving people low-limit credit cards so that they can easily overspent with cards. While Capital One's practice of helping people accumulating more debts should be condemned, the center figures in the story, [...]
Hey USAToday, What’s This Title?
Are We Better off Now? A Look at How Tax Cut Made Rich Richer and Poor Poorer
Yesterday, I read this interesting article on NY Times about how our personal income in 2004 (the year that the latest IRA data is available) compared to what we earned four years earlier in 2000. The title of the article, ’04 Income in U.S. Was Below 2000 Level, already decleared the conclusion of the comparison. [...]
Judge Said Paper Money Unfair to Blind People
For me, they are fine except there is no way to tell the denominations from the size. Yes, I really have to see to tell them apart. But what if I can't see?
Today, according to CNN, Judge James Robertson of the district court for the District of Columbia has ruled "that the U.S. Treasury Department [...]
Do We really Know What We Worry About?
The cover story of this week's Time magazine asks "Why We Worry About The Wrong Things?" The printed magazine won't be available till tomorrow, but I got an electronic version of the story from my subscription service. The main point of the article is that we get scared by low probability events while ignoring common [...]
“Should I Pay for My Boyfriend’s Insurance?”
My boyfriend and I have lived together for 10 years (no kids), and we get along fine. Recently he found out I can add him to the health insurance I get from the company I work for part-time. He wants me to do this to save him money, but I don't want to. He owns [...]
One Credit Card Company, Three Cards, Three Different BT Offers
I have four credit cards from Chase: PerfectCard, Rewards, Sony (from Bank one), and Amazon. Except the Amazon card, all the other three sent me balance transfer offers almost every month and I never hesitated to write myself a convenient check and deposit the money into my bank when the terms were right: 0% APR [...]
