And to think I wanted to work for these jokers at one time
It has been clear for more than a year that the dot-com boom is over, and yet privately held Idealab continued to pour millions of dollars into new start-ups that have little hope of success, Miller said. If Gross and his cohorts really had the best interests of the investors at heart, they would wind down the incubator and return the remaining cash, he said.
* * * * *
Here’s more unintelligible US foreign policy at work: at the end of a good Slate article on the ’93 Mogadishu debacle, and to me it’s nothing but a horror of mistake after mistake, there’s this…
American soldiers may soon be back in Somalia, if they’re not there already, in pursuit of al Qaida. Couldn’t this have legitimately been used to promote the film? Sure. The only trouble is that our most likely ally in the anti-terror fight will be Hussein Aideed, leader of the Habr Gidr clan and son of the “Hitler-like” villain in Black Hawk Down. No wonder the film’s promoters chose not to play up the post-9/11 “return to Somalia” angle.

NYTimes: Japan Slows Down, but Not Its Road Builders
Highway construction here once enjoyed wide popular support as a way to spread Tokyo’s wealth and to reduce rural isolation and poverty in this California-sized nation. But in recent years, road construction projects have taken on the air of government make-work programs, intended to disguise Japan’s growing unemployment.
In fact, Japan has spent trillions of dollars in the 1990′s in an effort to build its way back to economic growth. But instead it finds itself today deep in recession and saddled with daunting construction bills Û the world’s largest government debt and an annual deficit that increased fivefold in the last decade.
* * *
Still, critics say, Japan is littered with public works projects built with little concern about profitability. From heroes of development, construction company presidents have became villains of economic stagnation, and are accused today of building bridges and bullet trains to nowhere.
“We are starting to look like medieval Spain, wasting our money on useless things,” grumbled Hideaki Mizuno, an investment banker in Tokyo. “We need to use market mechanisms to allocate money.”

Stuff like this story of a 17 YO internet fraudster who bilked $1M out of thousands of investers continue to amaze me. Who is naiive enough to send money to random companies/people on the web? How many suckers are born every minute?
Newsbytes: Stephen Cutler, director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, said the case “demonstrates that just about anyone – even a 17-year-old high school student – can mastermind a securities fraud over the Internet.”
NYTimes: Cole Bartiromo, a California teenager who raised more than $1 million from investors late last fall by guaranteeing returns of up to 2,500 percent? In less than two months, Mr. Bartiromo, 17, persuaded more than 1,000 people to send him money by promising to make risk-free bets on sporting events, according to a complaint yesterday from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Then he transferred much of the money to an account he held at a casino in Costa Rica.

I went to my second i-Club event on Saturday, the Queens Meet #8. It was cold out but I bundled up with long underwear and kept pretty warm.
More Queens Meet 8 pics here and here.
My car is the silver wagon on the right in the first photo (that’s my leg sticking out of the driver’s side door.) Another guy with a silver wagon bought a very nice set of used OZ 17″ wheels from Garrick (blue wagon in the “blubarus” photo) and I was jealous You can see the wheels in question in the fourth photo from the top.
One cool thing was that another guy, Ray, and I traded armrests. He’s shorter than me but had the extended armrest (which got in the way of his shifting) and I had wanted the extended one but didn’t want to pay the outrageous $150 or whatever Subaru wanted for a bunch of plastic. So we swapped out our armrests.
It was very cool to see so many Imprezas in one place, especially so many WRXs. This is the kind of thing where I really see the value of a digital camera.
* * * * *
Dave Barry on Windows XP
I’ve been a loyal Windows man since the first version, which required you to write on the screen with crayons. Every year or so, Microsoft comes out with a new version, which Microsoft always swears is better and more reliable, and I always buy it. I bought Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1415926, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows RSVP, The Best of Windows, Windows Strikes Back, Windows Does Dallas, and Windows Let’s All Buy Bill Gates a House the Size of Vermont.
My computers keep having seizures, but I keep buying Windows versions, hoping I’ll get lucky. I’m like the loser in the nightclub who keeps hitting on the hot babe. His shoes are squishing from the piña colada she poured on him, but he’s thinking: “She’s warming up to me!”
I bring this all up because now Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the “most reliable Windows ever.” To me, this is like saying that asparagus is “the most articulate vegetable ever.”

Happy New Year! I had a quiet Xmas in Connecticut with family and friends and a phenomenal New Year’s down in Miami.
oh no…4000 DPI scanner from Nikon
Steve’s Digicam review
Imaging-Resource review
uh oh…5 megapixel Nikon digital camera…
imaging-resource review
Steve’s Digicam review
* * * * *
NYTimes: Yes, There Are Still Optimists in Japan
“Don’t hold your breath for quick reform in Japan Û particularly of bank bad debts Û or you will both underperform and die before it,” David Roche of Independent Strategy, an investment firm based in London, said in a recent report.
But there is a silver lining: because of their woes, banks, contractors and real estate companies make up only 11 percent of the Topix, about half of their weighting in 1998. So even if the government mismanages the bank cleanup, the effect on the broader market is more limited than it was during the previous recession.
More important, plenty of big Japanese companies are still partly insulated from the domestic economy, and many of their stocks are more affordable than at any time in the last 15 years. Matsushita Electric Industrial, Toshiba (news/quote) and Fujitsu are trading at well below their peaks, yet have little debt, strong brands and well-trained work forces. All of them have announced job cuts, factory closures and plans to spin off or trim unprofitable divisions.
* * * * *
Salon: Martha Stewart Invades Japan
…in Japan, democracy is largely nominal, a diplomatic cover for some rigidly hierarchical systems and assumptions. Little surprise that to some local fashion arbiters, European models seem better attuned to contemporary Japanese tastes. One editor at a mass-market Japanese women’s magazine sours on Martha Stewart Omnimedia’s chances for success in her native land. Citing the recent failure of a Japanese version of Good Housekeeping, she finds Stewart’s über-Americana ill-timed. “Today’s Japanese are more interested in Italian styles in furniture and design,” she says. “There’s an Italian boom, partly because the aesthetic sense and the use of space are similar. American homes are unrecognizable in Japan; Japanese women simply don’t have the room to entertain guests.”