In the early 1700s, Europeans discovered in the Pacific Ocean a large, unpopulated island with a temperate climate, rich in all nature’s bounty except coal, oil, and natural gas. Reflecting its lack of civilization, they named this island "Basicland."

The Europeans rapidly repopulated Basicland, creating a new nation. They installed a system of government like that of the early United States. There was much encouragement of trade, and no internal tariff or other impediment to such trade. Property rights were greatly respected and strongly enforced. The banking system was simple. It adapted to a national ethos that sought to provide a sound currency, efficient trade, and ample loans for credit-worthy businesses while strongly discouraging loans to the incompetent or for ordinary daily purchases.

Moreover, almost no debt was used to purchase or carry securities or other investments, including real estate and tangible personal property. The one exception was the widespread presence of secured, high-down-payment, fully amortizing, fixed-rate loans on sound houses, other real estate, vehicles, and appliances, to be used by industrious persons who lived within their means. Speculation in Basicland’s security and commodity markets was always rigorously discouraged and remained small. There was no trading in options on securities or in derivatives other than "plain vanilla" commodity contracts cleared through responsible exchanges under laws that greatly limited use of financial leverage.

Article on what happened to the US in the recent times by Charles T. Munger,  the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

Read the original article from Slate or discuss the article on BasicallyMoney.com:

What investment strategy would you deduce from the latest article from Charles Munger?

It might get Loud. Looks like a great movie. Three world famous guitarist Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and the White Stripes’ Jack White. I need to watch this soon…

• The leather case reused as a stand.
• The stand with the keyboard.
• I like the price. $499 for the smallest model.
• iBook looks kind of nice. I would like to have it on my iMac.

The following I do not like about the iPad:

• There is no GPS, possibly location is done using WPS (Wi-Fi Positioning System ).
• There is no camera built-in.
• You have to pay extra for the 3G.

I am guessing all these and more will come with the next version of the device.

To make this successful, it should be competitively priced. This is Apple’s version of a netbook…   I will give it another try and try to love it, after watching the keynote video!

Steve Ballmer demos the HP Slate on CES.

Steve Jobs is demoing the Apple iPad.

CNBC TRANSCRIPT: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates – Keeping America Great

It is AWESOME.

Can you put a price tag on awesome? No, you can’t
Awesome, is the category of things that you would repurchase without a second of hesitation, if the thing would get lost, got broken or stolen. Kindle is sharing this with my iMac, the xbox and the iPod – any iPod really, but the iPod touch especially…

It is simple, this is one of the main reason I like this little device. No need for configuration. it gets out of your way and it just works. You slide the little power button and you are ready to go, when it sleeps it puts out a random picture of some famous author, very nice!

Kindle Store

The Amazon Kindle Store has all the books you need, well kind of, if you live outside of the US then you have less then everything. You just select what you want and you are set… it is downloaded automatically to your device.
You can also request a sample of the book you want to read, then you will receive the first chapter for free.

Synchronization

This device has its own email address. If you send any documents to yourdevice@kindle.com then the attachment will be converted to kindle format and downloaded to your device wirelessly, however this will cost you some money (99 cents per megabyte).

If you do not like to pay then send the document to yourdevice@free.kindle.com. In this case you will get a reply with your converted document attached and you can download it while connected to your pc.

Kindle PC

This is quite new and I was very happy to try it this morning. Amazon has just release the beta version of their Kindle for PC application. This application allows you to read your books on your computer and synchronize your notes and bookmarks between your devices. This will be super useful, if you would like to read technical books or anything else with color.

What else can I say? It is awesome… ah, yes!

Lookup

If you start moving your 5-way controller while reading, you can quickly look up the meaning of a word in the built in dictionary. This feature is priceless for someone like me, who tries to learn English!

In order to install and use the new plugin please, do the following:

• Shutdown Shuriken
• Extract the content of GoogleCalculator to the plugin directory of Shuriken 
  Hint: use Shuriken >> Reveal to display the Shuriken folder when Shuriken is running.
• Start Shuriken
  Hit . in order to enter text mode and type something that you would like to calculate
  e.g "25 USD in Eur" or "23 inch in meter"
• Tab to the action pane and type calc to get "Calculate with Google" action.
• Hit enter.

[download]

I was using Windows Vista from the early betas until just about 4 months ago. I liked many of its features such as search and aero and the new start menu, but after a while I have just realized that there is something wrong with it and I have given up. Formatted my hard disk and installed Windows XP and did use my computer that way ever since. For me, the experience was a little bit like when someone meets this really nice and nice girl and decides to live with her. First it goes really well, but after a while the realization comes, there is no love in this relationship anymore or maybe never ever has been and then moves out of the apartment.

With Windows 7 it is totally different though. There is chemistry here and it feels like we have known each other for years. It has everything that is important for you and much more… There is hope! There is love!

There are many things I like a lot in Windows 7, but one thing I like the most is its speed and smoothness. It just works. No senseless pauses sprinkled with flashy animation when copying files, no freezes. It does what it needs to do.

Things I like…

The new taskbar is really good. It resembles the dock from OS X, but I think it is a very nice improvement in Windows.

I like the themes in Windows. I was never a big fan of the plus packs in earlier versions, nor the different themes, but I love the ones that come with Windows 7. I even like them better than the themes can be found in OS X.

I also like Aero snap, the full-screen previews on the taskbar,  jump list and finally the desktop gadgets are starting to be useful too. The best is to check What’s coming Windows 7.

Things I didn’t like…

My only complaint is around Apple Bootcamp. I did not have any problems with the drivers, except the speakers are not working for some reason. My headphone jack socket shines out with red light and if I plug-in headphones the audio works through the headphones, if I take it out then the no audio.
Then I tried to install Bootcamp on Windows 7, but the setup told me that it works only with Windows Vista and Windows XP.  It would be nice to see an update from Apple for the drivers, but I guess this should wait until Windows 7 is released.

I think we are looking forward to a really nice next version of Windows. It is an evolutionary step, with smaller changes and little features, but I think if Windows needs to copy anything from OS X then it needs to copy these small steps…