Life is pretty simple

Tuesday, November 27, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments


Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.


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Nutrition

Tuesday, November 27, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

71 kg, 9% fat

Yeasterday i ate 

lentils & a green salad for breakfast (it's weird but you feel strong but not full. Bread and milk is not a good breakfast for me anymore)
Put some Iswari Hemp seeds and some Flaxseeds on top of the lentils

At lunch after a class of Pilates i ate 1 veggie soup and 1 big Salad with Greens, some Beans, tomato and cucumber

at 5 pm i ate some Almonds and some more Hemp seeds

For dinner i ate Beans & ratatouille with some more seeds and lemos juice

Rooibos tea for desert

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China stock's hit 3 year low!

Tuesday, November 27, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments


By Bloomberg News
     Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) -- China’s stocks fell, with the benchmark index closing below 2,000 for the first time since 2009, as the value of shares traded slumped to the lowest in four years. Material and health-care companies led losses.
     The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 1.3 percent to 1,991.17 at the 3 p.m. local-time close, its lowest level since 
Jan. 23, 2009. Shares worth 33.1 billion yuan ($5.3 billion)
 
 
PS If you are a commodity you don't make money. You can sell but you are always racing to lower prices. With lower prices it's difficult to make money. Solutions:
1.Kill de competition/Monopoly. Be nº1 in something (Visa, Master card, etc...) 
2.hire a good marketing guy that builds a good brand. The marketing guy is the top person in a company (Nestele, Daimmler, etc...)
3.Build a product that no one has. I don't believe in this you can build a solid product (this is not a durable solution and it's difficult to do)
4.Keep cutting costs to survive, race to the bottom. Most people are doing this in order to survive.
5.Be small, organic, local, of service, in short with a top service.
 
Leaving for Rio & São paulo, still 71 kg & 9% fat. Hope to be able to get to Rebook Gym in São paulo if it's not too expensive!!

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If only......

Monday, November 26, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments


If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

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It's true

Thursday, November 22, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

It's useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk or running for office


Shirley MacLaine

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Better to be Bang & Olufsen than Sony

Thursday, November 22, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments


     Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Sony Corp. and Panasonic Corp., the
Japanese electronics makers reeling from record losses, had
their long-term credit ratings downgraded to junk by Fitch
Ratings, citing a weak recovery in the television market.


Things Investors should hate: Innovation

Innovation has two very nasty effects on investors. 

The first one is that it gets everyone excited, often over-excited. It’s possible to trace most of the great booms in stockmarket history to the over-enthusiasm of investors for some new technical trend……

This is the second way in which innovation is a bane to the investor: it destroys existing, often long-established, business models.  This process of creative-destructionism usually, eventually, leads to simpler, better ways of organising corporations and lives.  But in the meantime all of those careful investment plans, built on careful historical analysis of sales and earnings can go hang.

So, yes, I love innovation personally.  But as an investor I’d rather find something which is more likely to stand the test of time.  Powerful brands and physical goods are harder to displace. 


Better to have design than to have innovation & product. Is Apple a B&O or a Sony? I don't know

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Nutrition

Wednesday, November 21, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

71,6 kg, 11% fat and 20,6 BMI
yesterday was an ok diet day
I eat Lentils with a big Salad for breakfast with green tea
Eat some almonds at 11 am
Lunched in a Buffet
Eat some white beans with mushrooms cooked in a delirious sauce
the second time i went to the buffet i ate rucola salad and more mushrooms
1 glass of wine
1 muesli bar at 5 pm
No time to go to the gym
1 hour of Spinning in my Cyclops 3.0 at home, easy, easy
for dinner i ate Lentils with a big green salad with Lemonade (Green Salad with Mushrooms, Spinach, peppers, carrots, lettuce, red cabbage, mini tomatoes and Endives)
1 Rooibos tea before bed

not a lot of carbs, only the beans and lentils. The breakfast is strange because i eat real food.  Today i am going to eat a bit of brown rice and fruit.



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Nutrition for sports

Wednesday, November 21, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

Today i am with 72,2 kg, 8,9% fat and 21 BMI
It's good to be back at 72 after 1 week travelling and eating outside.
I spent last week in NY. I tried to eat has much Veggan opitions as possible.
I ate at Chop's and Whole Foods. The other days i went to my favorite restaurants, Moustache Pizza, Café Mogador, etc... eating normal food always with red wine. Mostly salads and some pasta.

yesterday i ate
1 Salad with Lentils for breakfast with Green tea
Grilled fish with greens for lunch with red wine
1 cereal bar before going to gym
90 minutes spinning class where i burned 1200 calories
1 big vegetable soup with a bit of Chlorela from Iswari
1 Big salad with Hemp seed and Flaxseeds, dressing only lemon
Roibos tea after dinner




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just do it

Tuesday, November 20, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

Don't prepare. Begin. Our enemy is not lack of preparation. The enemy is resistance, our chattering brain producing excuses. Start before you are ready

Steven Pressfield

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No more small booms and bust's!

Tuesday, November 20, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments


And yet our economic policy makers have often aimed for maximum stability, even for eradicating the business cycle. “No more boom and bust,” as voiced by the U.K. Labor leader Gordon Brown, was the policy pursued by Alan Greenspan in order to “smooth” things out, thus micromanaging us into the current chaos. Mr. Greenspan kept trying to iron out economic fluctuations by injecting cheap money into the system, which eventually led to monstrous hidden leverage and real-estate bubbles. On this front there is now at least a glimmer of hope, in the U.K. rather than the U.S., alas: Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has advocated the idea that central banks should intervene only when an economy is truly sick and should otherwise defer action.
Promoting antifragility doesn’t mean that government institutions should avoid intervention altogether. In fact, a key problem with overzealous intervention is that, by depleting resources, it often results in a failure to intervene in more urgent situations, like natural disasters. So in complex systems, we should limit government (and other) interventions to important matters: The state should be there for emergency-room surgery, not nanny-style maintenance and overmedication of the patient—and it should get better at the former.

From WSJ Learning to Love Volatility

http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324735104578120953311383448.html?mg=reno64-wsj


PS The idea to regulate, to suppress volatility, to combat the business cycle and to bailout the losers is turning the world into a fragile system prone to a big fall. If we don’t allow for small failures one day we will get a big one. All of this is done in order to win the next election......I think democracy is not serving the people anymore.

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Stay the course

Tuesday, November 20, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments


Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance
- Dr. Samuel Johnson

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Online teaching is the future

Sunday, November 18, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

The best way to increase the quality of teaching is to increase the number of students taught by the best teachers. Online education leverages the power of the best teachers, allowing them to teach many more students.......

 Not every university can afford world-class lecturers in development economics, the history of Croatia, or pop art, but more universities will be able to offer such courses by supplementing their own lecturers with online offerings.

Alex Tabarrok

Last year, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, an online course from Stanford taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted 160,000 potential students, of whom 23,000 completed it, a scale that dwarfs anything possible on a physical campus. As Thrun put it, “Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined.” Seeing this, he quit and founded Udacity, an educational institution designed to offer MOOCs.

Clay Shirky

I believe online teaching is the future because:

1.Cost
2.You can repeat over an over
3.Quality, you can leverage the best teachers
4.You can still have practical classes, campus, homework, Sports but providing the best lectures available.
5.Thare are no sick days and bad lectures (the teacher is not feeling well)






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How to solve all the problems! ( not all but...)

Sunday, November 18, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments


As of 2000, for instance, a worker in Mexico earned a wage 40% that of a Mexican-born worker of similar education and experience working in America.
Most of this wage gap is down to productivity differences, stemming from disparities in the quality of infrastructure, institutions and skills. An individual worker, however talented, cannot hope to replicate the fertile environment of a rich economy all on his own. But transplanting a worker into rich soil can supercharge his productivity. A Mexican worker earns more in the United States than in Mexico because he can produce more, thanks to the quality of US technology and institutions........

In a recent report Sharun Mukand of the University of Warwick calculates the effect of movement by half of the developing world’s workforce to the rich world. Such a vast migration could never happen in practice, of course, but as a thought exercise it is instructive. If migration closes a quarter of the migrants’ productivity gap with the rich world, their average income would rise by $7,000. That would be enough to raise global output by 30%, or about $21 trillion. Other studies find even bigger effects. A 2007 paper by Paul Klein, now at Simon Fraser University, and Gustavo Ventura, now at Arizona State University, reckons that full labour mobility could raise global output by up to 122%. Such gains swamp the benefits of eliminating remaining barriers to trade, which amount to just 1.8-2.8% of GDP, reckons Mr Mukand.





PS This is so true, the temptation to try to stop immigrants from entering Europe is killing Europe. We need people to work and pay taxes and since there are no babies what we should do is open the doors to all that want to work and live here.











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Never Outshine the master!

Sunday, November 18, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments


From Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power:
Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.
Outshining the master is the worst mistake of all…
Everyone has insecurities. When you show yourself in the world and display your talents, you naturally stir up all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity…With those above you, however, you must take a different approach: When it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all.

 http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2012/11/never-outshine-the-master/


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Diet day 71

Wednesday, November 07, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

72 kg no change, 7% fat
yesterday ate a smoothie at breakfast
1 banana
some spinach
some Hemp seeds from iswari and some sesame seeds
1 green tea during morning
big green salad with beans at lunch
1 glass red wine
Another green tea mid afternoon with some Almonds
Black beans
1 grilled salmon 
some Aspargus for dinner
yesterday i did no sport went to bed early
it's good to stay in the same weight, to stabilize

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To do what is right

Wednesday, November 07, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments


"A president's hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right."
- Lyndon B. Johnson

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Diet day 70

Tuesday, November 06, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

72,3 kg, 5,8% fat and 20,9 BMI
I am not doing a hard core diet anymore, my target is to stay around 72 kg during the winter and try to go down to 70 kg before the race season starts in April. I think i figured out how to lose some weight without a big pain.
yesterday i ate

1 banana 100
some greens 50
Some Iswari Açai from Brasil
Some chia seeds
Some lemon juice 50 and put all in the mixer for breakfast
Some Almonds before lunch 200
1 grilled fish 200
Big portion of greens 200
2 slices of cheese 100
2 glasses of red wine 100
1 big Green tea after lunch
1 muesli bar before 6 pm
1h30 Spinning class burned 1200 calories
at dinner i ate
A bit of Black Beans 200
A bit of Ratatouille 200
a bit of Hemp seeds 100

Total calories in 1,500 calories in

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Tuesday, November 06, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

The phrase, as it is normally quoted in Latin, comes from the Satires of Juvenal, the 1st/2nd century Roman satirist. Although in its modern usage the phrase has universal, timeless applications to concepts such as tyrannical governments and uncontrollably oppressive dictatorships, in context within Juvenal's poem it refers to the impossibility of enforcing moral behaviour on women when the enforcers (custodes) are corruptible (Satire 6.346–348):

Well i think the idea of regulating the world might be dumb for 4 reasons

1.Regulators are human and they don't know
2.If they make the economic actors they regulate to act all in the same way if one has a problem we are faced with a systemic problem
3.They distort the price signals in the market and investors make non economic decisions. (Buy sovereign paper because it is favored by regulators at zero yields)
4.People stop thinking because after all they are doing all according to the regulators

I guess there is nothing to do about this because people still think that a Employment Initiative by the government creates job's and a growth policy creates growth. 

After 10 years of this policies in Portugal we are in deep trouble but people still believe that a Development Bank is going to bring development and a market regulator is going to regulate?


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What my kids should study?

Tuesday, November 06, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

Well i guess they will study whatever they like but for the sake of making a decent living after they should consider this (the underlying is mine):


The fact that employment in routine occupations has been disappearing is well documented by recent job polarization literature (Acemoglu 1999, Autor et al. 2006, Goos and Manning 2007, Goos et al. 2009, Autor and Dorn 2012). This literature finds that occupations focused on routine tasks tend to be middle-waged. Thus, the disappearance of routine occupations in the past 30 years represents a ‘polarization’ of employment because the middle of the wage distribution has been hollowed out.
As recently as the mid-1980s, about one in three Americans over the age of 16 was employed in a routine occupation. Currently, that figure stands at one in four. The fact that polarization is occurring should not surprise anyone who understands the influence of robotics and automation on machinists and machine operators in manufacturing. Indeed, the influence of robotics is increasingly being felt on routine occupations in transportation and warehousing. Of equal importance is the disappearance of routine employment in ‘white-collar’ occupations - think bank tellers being replaced by ATMs, or secretarial work being replaced by personal computers and Siri, Apple’s iPhone-integrated ‘intelligent personal assistant’. Thus, all of the per capita employment growth of the past 30 years has either been in ‘non-routine’ occupations located at the high-end of the wage distribution, such as software engineers and economists, or in low-paying jobs, such as service occupations like restaurant waiters and janitors. For this last set of occupations, this has been especially true in the past decade.

I think this trend is not going to change soon, Machines are much better than man and they never get tired. So you need the guys who control the machines and some manual  & creative jobs and of course sales people (always).
All the rest is going to slowly disappear.




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How to move forward

Tuesday, November 06, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

Do one thing everyday that scares you

Eleanor Roosevelt

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Marketing will be like sex

Tuesday, November 06, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

In the future, marketing will be like sex: Only the losers pay for it

Fast Company magazine, December 2010

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We are still in a Bear Market

Sunday, November 04, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments



http://allstarcharts.com/the-little-book-of-stock-market-cycles/

PS I am happy that we are in a 12 year Bear market. It must come to an end sooner or later . If i keep my powder dry i might have a easier life going forward making real money from the markets again.

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Buying up rivals softens competition and enables firms to charge more.

Sunday, November 04, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments



http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21565609-economies-scale-run-out-certain-point-largest-firms-america-may-be


PS One of the best business books i ever read is How to be a Billionaire by Martin S. Fridson. In this book from 2001 Martin goes through the top people on the rich list. From Bill gates and Sam Walton until John D. Rockefeller and try to capture what they did to be there. One of the themes is , kill the competition. He claims if you are in a very competitive market is very difficult to make serious money. 

To be number one is a very good position to be.  Consolidation works. The idea of Jack Welch that GE  will only compete in markets where they are nº1 or nº2 makes sense.

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Love is rational after all

Sunday, November 04, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

Since our parents inevitably made errors in their courtships, we are unlikely to be ideally balanced ourselves. We have typically come out too tall or too short, too masculine or too feminine; our noses are large, our chins small. If such imbalances were allowed to persist, or were aggravated, the human race would, within a short time, founder in oddity.The will-to-life must therefore push us towards people who can, on account of their imperfections, cancel out our own (a large nose combined with a button nose promises a perfect nose). Schopenhauer liked predicting pathways of attraction. Short women will fall in love with tall men, but rarely will you see tall men go for tall women (they unconsciously fear the production of giants). Feminine men will often be drawn to boyish women with short hair.

Alan de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

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Diet day 63

Thursday, November 01, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

71,8 kg, 9,7% and 20,8 BMI
yesterday was a Holliday in Portugal and i did a 5 hour bike ride in the early morning
so i had to eat a lot before and during the race
I drank for breakfast
1 banana 100
some greens 50
Some Iswari Açai from Brasil
Some chia seeds
Some lemon juice 100
During the race i ate 3 home made bars 300 
Drank Green tea with IswariAçai and Agave 100
Eat 4 dates 250 and 4 Dry Figs 200
Burned 3000 calories
Al lunch i ate a big portion of Lentils 200
Big Green salad 200
Veggie Soup 200
Ate some Brazilian 2 hour after lunch 100
Dinner
Soup 200
Green Salad with Mushrooms, Ginger, Rúcula, Tomato, spinach and lettuce 200
Some Black Beans 200


Total in 2400


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