See more photos from my visit to Parfrey’s Glen Natural Area in Wisconsin, about an hour outside of Madison. It really was amazingly beautiful - the pictures do not do it justice. The Parfrey’s Glen trail is under a mile but well worth visiting. If you want to hike more try the Ice Age National Scenic Trail or nearby Devil’s Lake State Park. The top photo is of me (John Hunter) at nearby Durwood’s Glen. The yellow flower is from Parfrey’s Glen.

Related: Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve, Ohio - Mesa Trail Boulder, Colorado - Nature Recreation Declining - Mason Neck State Park, Virginia

In response to: Fair Use Rights by David Bradley

Copyright is a taking of a public benefit for a private entity. This was put into law in order to increase the total public benefit. The idea was that taking from the public to provide the creator a limited-term, exclusive, government-granted, right to their work would encourage individuals to invest their time in creating works that would benefit society.

So the debate is properly about how great the taking from the public should be. It seem to me the current situation is completely corrupt. Many of the actions are taking public benefit to provide to the private entity where no possible public benefit exists. Extending copyright periods of long ago created works, where obviously the public is harmed purely for private benefit. No possible argument can be made that their is a payoff to the public for this taking.

If you wanted to take such an action and made it only for new work then their could be an argument that now a creator knows they have 100 years of government provided rights and therefore investing more time and effort in their work creates new and better work. I don’t believe this argument but at least it is possible. The current actions though are mainly about large companies using government to take from the public to provide themselves private benefit with no corresponding public benefit.

Lawrence Lessig is the person who has the best insight in this area, in my opinion: The Value of the Public Domain.

Dr. Deming published his seven deadly diseases of western management a couple decades ago. I would add 2 new diseases: Excessive executive compensation and a broken intellectual property system.

Fair use is the right to reference (and quote limited portions of) works that have been granted government copyright protection. This is integral to the whole idea of creating the greatest public benefit (even while providing some government imposed limits on public rights to the creator). The large companies now are using lawyers to greatly increase the harm to society by expanding the taking of public benefit. They threaten and scare many into paying fees (or completely avoiding works that have been granted limited government granted copyright rights) where none are are rightly due (see Lawrence Lessig for examples). This causes great harm to society for the private benefit of a few. This is an obvious failure of government. Those countries that are successful at adopting more sensible systems are going to have a great advantage over those countries that chose to continue to increasingly bad practices of harming society to benefit a few private interests.

Related: What is Wrong with Copyright Taking Public Good for Private Special Interests - Innovation and Creative Commons - Diplomacy and Science Research - More Government Waste - Crazy Watchmen - General Air Travel Taxes Subsidizing Private Plane Airports - China and the Sugar Industry Tax Consumers

Over the last 2 months the yields on bonds have increased the discount rate has continued to decline.

The spread between corporate bond yields and government bonds has decreased a bit as treasury yields have increased 37 basis points compared to just 4 and 6 basis point increased in corporate bond yields.

Data from the federal reserve - corporate Aaa - corporate Baa - ten year treasury - fed funds

Related: Bond Yields 2005-2008 - 30 Year Fixed Mortgage Rates versus the Fed Funds Rate - Initial Retirement Account Allocations

This year, the average discount rate has fallen every month while the average 30 year mortgage rate has climbed all but 1 month (a 5 basis point drop). In January, 2008 the discount rate averaged 3.94% and 30 year conventional fixed rate mortgages averaged 5.76%. In May, 2008 the discount rate had fallen to 1.98% (for a 196 basis point drop) and 30 year conventional fixed rates had risen to 6.04% (for a 28 basis point increase).

The chart shows the federal funds rate and the 30 year conventional fixed rate mortgage rate from January 2000 through May 2008 (for more details see: historical comparison of 30 year fixed mortgage rates and the federal funds rate).

Related: Affect of Fed Funds Rates Changes on Mortgage Rates - real estate articles - Bond Yields 2005-2008 - Jumbo and Regular Mortgage Rates By Credit Score
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I originally setup the 10 stocks for 10 years portfolio in April of 2005.

At this time the stocks in the sleep well portfolio in order of returns:

At this point I am most positive on Google, Toyota, Templeton Dragon Fund and Tesco. I am wary of Dell - they seem to be moving in the wrong direction, but I am willing to give them longer to improve. I am even more wary of Prizer but again willing to stick with them for the long term. I will be looking for a suitable replacement.

In order to track performance I setup a marketocracy portfolio but had to make some minor adjustments. The current marketocracy calculated annualized rate or return (which excludes Tesco) is 9.8% (the S&P 500 annualized return for the period is 7.9%) - marketocracy subtracts the equivalent of 2% of assets annually to simulate management fees - as though the portfolio were a mutual fund - so without that the return is about 10.8%). View the current marketocracy Sleep Well portfolio page.

Related: 12 Stocks for 10 Years Update (Feb 2008) - Retirement Account Allocations for Someone Under 40 - Lazy Portfolio Results

Here is updated data from the UN on manufacturing output by country. China continues to grow amazingly moving into second place for 2006. UN Data, in billions of current US dollars:

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Economic statistics, like all data, needs to be defined. The way to collect data (economic data or any other type) is to operationally define the terms. Statistics don’t lie. Statistics can be faulty, when those collecting the data fail to use good operational definitions and the data quality is poor (without a definition people make guess…). People can also just make up false number. And people can try to mislead by stating statistics in a way that seem to indicate something that is not the most accurate way to view the whole situation.

The way to cope with such problems is to understand statistics and data. The data can be wrong. So you have to access that possibility. And the data can mean something different than you assume (and often the data is not presented with the operation definitions). When that is the case be careful about your assumptions (with financial and economic data and other data too). But don’t decide to just ignore data because then you condemn yourself to ignorance of the many things which data shed light onto.

In, What ‘Unemployment’ Really Means These Days, the unemployment data is explored. The post does a good job of showing how you can get different measures of the “unemployment rate” depending on how you define what you will measure. I happen to believe the existing measure is best but you need to understand that it doesn’t factor in underemployment and people giving up completely… I believe the best way to deal with those weaknesses is to have supplementary measures that enhance your understanding of the unemployment rate. And too view it as only one measure of economic health. Look also at median wages, health care coverage, hours worked, vacation time…
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