Buy the cheapest cables

Popular Science in an article titled Gadgetry's Golden Rule calls the fancy high priced cables for stereo, speakers, DVD players, TV sets and such, a scam. They recommend buying the cheapest cable you can find.
PopSci has this exactly right. The fancy gold plated connectors, the thick black rubber insulation, the color coding, all look cool, but don't conduct electricity any better than standard plastic, tin plated ones do. And once your system is plugged together, on the shelf or in the entertainment center, who looks at the cables?
I am an electrical engineer, done a lot of work on video, a radio amateur, and an audio video buff to boot. I have formal education and forty years of experience.
Start with speaker wire. Your speakers have an impedance of 8 ohms. As long as the speaker wire resistance is less than ten percent of that ( 0.8 ohms) the wire is doing all it can do to make the sound right. My handbook of chemistry and Physics give 0.4016 ohms per 100 feet for #16 American Wire Gauge (AWG) copper wire, the wire in ordinary lamp cord (zip cord). Put the speaker 100 feet from the amplificer, and you have 0.4016 ohms going out, and another 0.4016 ohms coming back, for a total resistance of 0.8032 ohms,. Round it off to 0.8 ohms. How many of us have a house that is 100 feet from end to end?
In fact, many of us have the speakers withing 10 feet of the amplifier. In that case, the cheap thin Radio Shack wire (#24) will be 0.2567 ohms over a 10 foot run.
The only thing you can do with speaker wire to improve the sound is to "phase" the left and right speakers. Make sure the plus terminals of the amplifier are connected to the plus terminals of the speakers. This way both speakers push and pull together, which improves the bass. If you have one speaker wired in reverse, one speaker cone is pushing while the other cone is pulling, which causes the two speakers to cancel each other out. The cancelation is never purfect, but it will weaken the bass a bit. If buying zip cord at Home Depot or somewhere, a brand of wire with a mark of some sort distinguishing the left from the right wire is nice to have. Type of metal, solid vs stranded, rubber vs plastic, the electrons don't care. Shielding does nothing for speaker wires, the signal in the speaker wires is very high (watts), the signals floating thru the air are microwatts, and nobody can hear interference that is a million times weaker than the music.
The other cables in the system, the ones with that funny RCA jack on each end, are no more critical than speaker wire. Since the signal level is very low, and the impedance are much higher than 8 ohms, the wire resistance just doesn't matter. The wire from your CD/DVD player is driving the amplifier, which is a 1000 ohms. Ten percent of that is 100 ohms. Any kind of wire is going to be way way less than 100 ohms.
Go with the cheapest cables and save money.

Of marks and mortgages

"The underwriting of risk in the past few years has of course, not been too good". Ethan Penner writing in yesterdays Wall St Journal op-ed page. "Yet the outcry for systemic fixes from various constituencies has been dangerously off the mark. " "Another is to move away from securitization and and return to a portfolio lending model-- where for example the bank originating the mortgage keeps it (in its own portfolio of assets) rather than selling it to a third party (as in securitization). "
" The argument in favor of portfolio lending is based upon the notion that, unlike securitization, portfolio lending incorporates the discipline of 'skin in the game.' Since in the portfolio lending model, the loan's risk is not being transfered from the originator/lender, the underwriters will therefore be more careful."
Mr. Penner goes on to argue in favor of securitization of mortgages, which is what killed a lot of Wall St players in the last few months. At the end of the Op-ed piece, the Journal's editor notes
"Mr. Penner helped pioneer the application of securitization technology to real-estate finance as CEO of Nomura Capital".
In short, Mr. Penner made a lot of money creating mortgage backed securities, which have caused the credit crunch and may push the US economy into recession. Is such a man believable?
The trouble with mortgage backed securities is that no one (except perhaps the originator) as any idea of the risk involved. No bond rating agency can predict the probablity of the home owner failing to make his mortgage payments on time.

Classical Values has a really scary story about FBI agents with too much time on their hands.
Agents put up a website with links labeled as kiddie porn. Woe to the rube who clicks on one, he gets raided by the FBI. Now I don't really hold with child molesters, but getting raided, your computer[s] and papers confiscated, and your reputation ruined for just clicking on link is police state stuff.
Doesn't the FBI have better things to do with their time? Like catching Osama Bin Laden?

Moving assets off balance sheet?

Yesterday's Wall St Journal, talking about the future worth of financial stocks (which is doubtful) said "The big profit gains reported by many financial companies in receent years were magnified by borrowing and moving assets off their balance sheets...."
Does this make sense? Balance sheets contain assets and liabilities. Assets are good, cash in the til, money owed to you, things you can sell. Liabilities are bad, debts, money you owe to others, taxes, stuff like that.
Why move assets "off balance sheet"? I can see moving liabilities off balance sheet, like the money borrowed to buy sub prime mortgages, but why assets?
Or is this another accounting scam, like the $36 billion of imaginary assets that GM removed from it's books last fall? I suppose it was a good thing that GM 'fessed up and showed a $39 billion dollar loss last year, but just as aggravating is to find that GM had been padding it's books by putting imaginary assets on them all these years.

What's a mortgage broker good for?

Today's Wall Street Journal had a editorial piece speaking out against treasury secretary Harry Paulson's suggestion that mortgage brokers need more regulation and licensing.
Regulation and licensing? How about boiling in oil and drawing and quartering? Brokers are unnecessary middlemen who skim a percentage of the deal, for doing little to nothing.
As a borrower, I don't what a middleman, offering self serving advice, and misrepresenting me to the lender. As a lender, I need to learn two things, am I lending more than the property is worth, and does the borrower make enough money to make the payments. If I get either answer wrong, I am going to loose money on the loan.
Only a fool would believe anything a broker would tell him. A wise lender will learn the answers him self, so he is sure the answers are correct.
So who needs a broker. And if you don't need a broker, why bother the license and regulate them?

Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back

Lehrer's news hour had a piece about press coverage of the Iraq war. Several newsie pundits appeared, and pontificated about the goodness and badness of the Iraq war coverage. Turns out, they were really talking about coverage of pro and anti war politics back here in the good old safe US of A. The coverage none of them did, or even wanted to do concerns American soldiers in the combat zone. The professional newsies find that too dangerous, too uncomfortable, and too pro American to cover.
I had a relative serving in Iraq last year. The newsies didn't do squat to keep me informed of how he and his unit were faring. The only decent info I got for the entire year my brother was serving, was from his emails. The newsies didn't tell me where our men were, what they are doing, how they are coping, what units are engaged, what battles they have fought, victories or defeats achieved, heroic actions performed, decorations awarded, nothing. It was like our soldiers stepped into a black hole from which nothing comes out.
To hear newsies discussing how great their coverage was, when there wasn't any coverage at all makes me angry with the whole tribe of them.

Databases leak

Seems like the US State department's passport data base is leaky, at least Barack Obama's, Hillary Clinton's and John McCain's passport files have been looked at by unauthorized personnel. Is nothing air tight? Stores have repeatedly let customer records slip out of their data bases into the hands of identity thieves.
Does anyone want their medical records revealed to insurance companies, employers, or political enemies? Vote in universal health care and all our medical records will go into a federal data base. And from there, by accident, by hook, or by crook, they will be made public.