The SoapBoxers

You might have already noticed it, but there is a new tab in the blue bar at the top of the page – “Advertise”.  In addition the the larger ads that some of you currently see, we are making a small number of spots available to private advertisers.

You can read details here, but the gist is that you have the opportunity to lock in a crazy 2 month rate of $1.25 per month on a 125 X 125 pixel ad (you provide the image).  These ads will be displayed to ALL readers of The Soap Boxers.

This is an introductory offer.  Rates are certain to increase after the introductory period (yeah, we’re trying to get you hooked at the lower price and then reel you in).  Seriously, where are you going to get better exposure for your site for a mere 4 cents per day? 

One of the spots has already been snapped up (by charter sponsor Irrational Family) – act today to get one of the three remaining spots.

Over the course of the past year, the staff of The Soap Boxers has produced a large quantity of articles on a very wide variety of subjects.  We’d also like to think that we’ve produce a high quality of work, but that’s more subjective 🙂

Today, there is no new article.  Please take this time to explore the archives (there’s a link for that up in the blue bar).  Just spend a bit of time looking at older articles and clicking on links – and keep an eye out for links – they are EVERYWHERE on the site – you might be missing some.  You never know – you might stumble across something really cool!

I’ve recently been doing some exploring of my own and found articles that I had completely forgotten.

CLICK CLICK CLICK 🙂

In this edition of The Soap Boxers, I will attempt to identify the greatest inventions in the history of mankind.  I’m going to skip around a bit, and will probably miss a few, but without further ado, let’s jump in!

The Caveman Trio – Fire, Wheel, and Meat.  I’m pretty cold blooded, so I’m glad that someone eventually realized that fire could be harnessed for warmth.  I can imagine how happy those first cave people would have been, basking in the warmth of the very first fire.  The wheel – the foundation of transportation – gets plenty of attention as well.  The last leg of the Caveman Trio – meat – gets the short end of the stick.  We owe a lot to the man who decided that it would be a good idea to kill an animal and eat its flesh, just for kicks.

Indoor plumbing – Can you imagine going outside to an outhouse when the temperature dips below zero?  Not my idea of a fun time, either.  Shower and sinks are pretty cool, too.

Perfumes, deodorants, anti-perspirants, and other stuff that makes people smell less awful.  Admit it – left to our own devices, we kind of reek after a while.  Products that allow us to minimize body odor get an A+ in my book.

The internal combustion engine – Prior to the Model T, people rarely traveled more than 25 miles from home – and when they did travel that far, it was quite the ordeal.  I commute further than this to work every day, one way.  Henry Ford’s Model T could not have been possible with Gottlieb Daimler’s internal combustion engine.

The assembly line – This time, we’ll give full credit to Henry Ford.  Ford’s idea of keeping workers stationary and moving the work to the workers allowed for considerably more efficient production.  Furthermore, it served as a catalyst for analyzing other workflows.

The printing press – Thank you, Herr Gutenberg!  The printing press allowed the sharing of knowledge to the masses.  No longer was the distribution of written works limited to handwritten manuscripts or the older woodblock printing.  I am a certified bibliophile – but without Gutenberg’s press, I wouldn’t have the ability to own hundreds of books.

The telephone – postal mail was great, and telegraphs were a step forward, but the ability to actively converse with another person over a phone line was revolutionary.  Now, if we can just get rid of the anachronistic use of the word “dial”.

Humor – A few simply jokes can serve as a pick-me-up to carry someone through the rest of the day.  Kudos to the person who first pushed their intellectual skills into the field of humor.

Electricity – From the simplest light bulb to complex medical equipment, electricity makes it happen.  Spend a few days without electricity during a blackout and you’ll realize exactly how important it is.

Baseball – You knew that I couldn’t leave this one out, right?  For more than one hundred thirty years, Americans have enjoyed the pleasure of watching professional baseball.

OK – that’s my list.  Is it complete?  Certainly not.  Throw out your list!

I like math, particularly algebra and probability.  This article is the first of what may become a semi-regular segment that takes a deeper look into topics of a mathematical nature.

Russian Roulette

One of the most dangerous games in the world is Russian Roulette.  The player inserts one bullet into a revolver with six chambers.  The player then spins the cylinder and pulls the trigger.

What is the chance that you can spin six times, pull the trigger each time, and hit an empty chamber every time?

The basic math of the situation is that the odds of hitting an empty chamber on any particular spin is 5/6 (5 empty chambers, 1 chamber with a bullet), or .833.

Just as the odds of having a coin come up heads X consecutive times is .5^X, this situation is .833^X.  In our case, this is .833^6, or .335.  You have a 1 in 3 chance of walking away from this game alive.

But I still wouldn’t recommend trying.

Fuel Consumption

Let’s look at these two scenarios:

A: Upgrade a car that gets 10 mpg for a car that gets 20 mpg
B: Upgrade a car that gets 20 mpg for a car that gets 30 mpg

At first glance, it appears that either scenario will result in the same amount of fuel savings, right?  After all, you’re saving 10 mpg in either case.

This isn’t the case, though.  Let’s assume 10,000 miles are driven in a year,  Scenario A results in fuel consumption dropping from 1000 gallons to 500 gallons – a savings of 500 gallons per year.  Scenario B results in consumption dropping from 500 gallons per year to 333 gallons – a savings of a mere 167 gallons.  Huh?  What’s the trick?

The problem is that we’re trying to use the wrong tool.  We want to determine the change in fuel consumption – but the mpg is not the rate of fuel consumption.  It is the mathematical reciprocal of the rate of consumption.

Let’s take a fresh look at the two scenarios, using the actual fuel consumption rates.  We’re using the exact same cars, but simply stating the facts in a different manner.

Scenario A: Upgrade a car that consumes 0.1 gallons/mile for one that consumes 0.05 gallons/mile

Scenario B: Upgrade a car that consumes 0.05 gallons/mile for one that consumes .033 gallons/mile.

The difference becomes clear – scenario A reduces fuel consumption by .05 gallons per mile and scenario B reduces fuel consumption by .0167 gallons/mile.

It almost makes you wonder why the government didn’t use fuel consumption rate in the Cash For Clunkers guidelines instead of mileage.

Why do we, as a whole, use the wrong tool to gauge fuel consumption?  Probably because we prefer to use whole numbers rather than fractions.

Pizza Pi

We’ll finish up with an easy problem.

The last time my friends came over, I ordered an 8 inch pizza.  My friends could only eat half as much pizza as they wanted before the pizza was gone.  This time, I was more prepared and ordered a 16 inch pizza – but there is lots of pizza left over.  What did I do wrong?

A lot of folks in the crowd are going to immediately know the answer to this one.  The area of a circle is Pi times the square of the radius (the radius being half the diameter – or 4 inches for the 8 inch pizza and 8 inches for the 16 inch).  This means that the 16 inch pizza is four times as large as the 8 inch pizza, not merely twice as large.  The 16 inch pizza has ~200 square inches [Pi X (8^2)] whereas the 8 inch pizza has ~ 50 square inches [Pi X (4^2)].

I really hate winter.  Let me count the ways.

1. I hate cold weather.
2. I miss the sun.
3. Driving on ice sucks.
4. I hate shoveling show.
5. The winter sports pale in comparison to the grand sport of summer – baseball.

Thus, each winter, I typically bump into a bit of a case of the winter blahs.  During the last few years, I have found myself better equipped to fight it off.  How?  A couple of ways.

Mitigate the misery

Shoveling snow is a winter task that I hate.  I keep putting off the purchase of a snow blower for a few reasons.  First, I keep telling myself that the last few winters have been atypical, and that it really doesn’t snow in Iowa much.  Second, it seems that many times ice is the main culprit, and snow blowers don’t handle ice very well.  Third, they’re a bit pricey (although possibly cheaper than the chiropractor bills some years).

So, each year, I spend too much time outside in cold weather shoveling snow.  To make the experience a bit better, I grab my wireless headphones, fire up the downstairs DVR, and listen to one or two TV shows while I shovel (depending on the length of the show and the amount of snow).  Left to my own devices, I rarely watch non-sports TV, so this does give me a chance to catch up on the couple of shows that I care enough about to record.  In the last few weeks, I have greatly reduced my backlog of NCIS and The Office.  I grew up listening to baseball on AM radio for much of my entertainment, so I can get significant entertainment value out of a TV program even when the video portion is absent.

If you enjoy reading, winter can also be a good time to catch up.  The weather sucks for outdoor activities, so why not stay indoors a bit more.  If you’re looking for recommendations of some good authors, I have a list.

Set Intermediate Milestones

Years ago, I would sigh deeply when the first snowflakes hit the ground and start counting down the days until spring.  This made for a very long winter.  In the last few years, I have started to look forward to winter milestones.  This helps reduce the wait a bit by breaking it into manageable chunks.

A major milestone for me is the date that spring training begins.  This is mid-February each year – a full month (or more) before spring begins in the midwest.  However, when the first pitchers and catchers report to Florida and Arizona, I know that there will significant baseball news every day until November (my threshold for “significant baseball news” is probably a bit lower than most people’s.)

In 2010, there is another wonderful milestone – the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.  I absolutely love the Olympics.  At some point during the Olympics, I will know person details about athletes from dozens of countries from sports that I pay little attention to outside of the Olympics.  Then, of course, there is luge.  I fully intend to DVR ever possible bit of luge coverage in order to satisfy my desire for the sports for the next four years.

In closing, I would like to point out the fact that there is a big difference between a mere case of the winter blahs and the more serious condition of depression.  If you feel that you are experiencing depression, I urge you to seek proper medical attention, just as you would for any other ailment.

Back on April 15, when the Dow was at 7920.18, I launched a stock market contest between a team of three personal finance bloggers (team Goliath) and a team of folks who, while they were intelligent, did not immerse themselves into finance at quite the same level (team David).

So, who won? Team David, of course. Don’t you people read the bible?

Every participant was at least somewhat bullish, with the lowest guess being 8232. Peter Rabbit of Team David (who would later join the staff of The Soap Boxers) was the closest, but even his guess of 9500 was more than 900 points below the actual December 31 close of 10428.05.

Everyone on Team David had a guess of at least 8492.48, while the highest guess from Team Goliath was 8400 (Team Goliath had a very tight spread in their guesses). Thus, Team David slays Team Goliath … and it wasn’t even close.

For your reading pleasure, I present the original article below, in its entirety.

The rules:
Each player predicts the closing value of the Dow Jones industrial average at the close of day on December 31, 2009. Points are awarded on a 12-10-8-6-4-2-0 basis for being closest to the actual closing value. The score of all players on each team are added together, and the best team score wins.

I will update the contest every month, focusing on the actual rate of Dow rise or fall compared to the guesses. For example, if a player guesses a 850 point increase and the Dow increased 100 points in the first month, they would be on target. This relies on a false assumption that the market will move similarly in each month.

Note: this contest is for entertainment purposes only and is not to be construed as investment advice.

The predictions:

Team Goliath

Team Goliath consists of three people who write blogs related to personal finance.

Trevor of Financial Nut
Why do I choose 8,400? Though I do not necessarily agree with Keynesian economic theory, I do feel that some of this spending is going to create some jobs and allow for money to be injected back into the economy. By this time I would imagine that many of the Obama Administration’s plans to deal with all of these “toxic assets” and to create employment in an increasingly dying economy will be in place. Right now the plans are only being discussed and just barely being implemented.

In addition, recessions in the past haven’t lasted much longer than what we’ve had. This one is, however, very unique and may be longer.

But at the end of the day, who really knows?! 🙂

Lazy Man of Lazy Man and Money
Although some suggest that much of the recent drop is psychological, I think that much can be explained by the large amounts of credit that were extended over the last 10-15 years. More money in the system allows earnings to rise – which results in a lower P/E ratio – making it easier for buyers to justify higher prices.

We’ll see what happens in a bad economy where the earnings drop not just due to the lack of buyers, but the lack of easy credit.

I do, however, think much of the damage is priced in now. Although I am not a currency expert, I think it will be important to watch the impact of the stimulus package on the dollar in the next 8+ months.

Heidi of Bankergirl brings a bit of sugar and spice to a group filled with snails and puppy dog tails.
Based on historical data, we have yet to hit the low for this economic cycle. I think that sometime in the second quarter (or possibly early Q3) of 2009, the dow is going to hit its low. It will recover throughout late Q3 and into Q4, but it will land around the low-to-mid 8000 mark.

Hope I’m wrong – my job is much more secure once we are back up to around 10,000.

Team David

Team David consists of three people who have ordinary jobs and do not write about personal finance.

Peter Rabbit is an IT Auditor.
The last few reports on housing and the purchase of durable goods were very encouraging. These are lagging indicators when we enter a recession as well as when we come out of one. This signals to me that the worst may be behind us. By no means are we in a period of growth but we may have stabilized. Basically, I am betting that we have about 4 more days of 500 point gains sprinkled in the next few months. But otherwise you will see a lot of +100 and -100 point days that just pass time and wash each other out.

Phil Ossifer is a computer systems analyst and has recently launched the (not finance) blog Chunga Goes Wild
Stocks WON’T perform like they did over the last 80 years. Unique circumstances of that period are unrepeatable, e.g., post-Industrial Revolutionary growth, outcome from wars, political/demographic changes, etc.

Monetary policy will float us for a while, but also leads us toward a serious, long-term decline. We now have more debt than any nation; we have a negative savings rate – and yet we look to more spending for the answer. Over-consuming and under-producing is not sustainable!

Finally, analysis based on a few known factors like bad mortagages, trade deficits, and economic cycles are short-sighted. We are now in a complex, unpredictable, global system (think: Chaos theory). Cheers!

Black Hole is where logic goes to die. Fittingly, he works in human resources.
In the past month, the Dow has been on the incline, and I think it will be up and down (in small variances) throughout the year, but I think towards the end of the year it will climb a little more steadily. Banks will become more stable than they are now, and the economy is receiving such a boost monetarily that it will definitely turn around and quicker than other “recessions”.

Free agent
The Soap Boxers will not be a member of a team, but I will be awarded points on the basis of my finish. Thus, a good showing by TCO can serve as a spoiler for one of the teams. Think of me as the guy in the middle of a game of “keep away”.
I personally believe that much of the recent drop in the market is due to psychological factors. A lot of really good stocks are getting beaten up. When the Dow was hovering around 6500, P/E ratios were at five year lows. This is a time to snap up some solid blue chip stocks at good prices. I think that there will be some slight corrections in the near future, but that we have hit bottom and that the market will turn the corner once spring is in full bloom. The positive energy of spring will improve the mindset of potential investors.

Submit your own guess in the comments sections. Invite your friends to compete against you. I will also track the guesses of commenters in the monthly update. Only guesses made before April 30 will be included in the monthly updates (sorry, had to make the cutoff somewhere).

First, I’ll note that these goals are all professional, rather than personal.  As in the past, I will go forward somewhat anonymously.  I’m not completely anonymous, though – my picture is actually me, and if we interact offline, you’ll recognize me.

I resolve to put forth a serious effort into my novel, Casting Stones.  I got off to a roaring start in November, writing more than 7000 words.  December has been much different, with fewer than 500 words.  Furthermore, I have become dissatisfied with what I have so far, and will likely end up rewriting all of it.  This is not entirely a bad thing.  What I have written so far is light on descriptions and really just rushes to move the plot forward.  This has always been a problem with my longer writing.

I resolve to submit a series of short stories to the Iowa Short Fiction Award contest.  This requires a 150 page double spaced manuscript.  If I keep writing stories at my current rate, reaching this length should be no problem at all, and I should actually be able to do some editing and removed some of the inferior stories.

I resolve to someone finish the “long” story for the 4th quarter of 2009.  This has died on the vine a bit, and with a baby due in the coming weeks, it is unlikely that it will be finished soon.  Still, I’m hoping to having this finished by early February.  Alternately, I may choose to write several bonus short stories for volume 3 of The Fiction of Kosmo.

I resolve to have minimal turnover in staff in 2010.  2009 was a pretty crazy year.  I’m sure some of your heads were spinning at times, due to the rapid addition of writers.  I’m happy with the staff we have right now – in both the caliber of the writers and the breadth of the content.  I wouldn’t mind having a bit more content that appeals to women, so if anything is added in 2010, that would be the area I seek to address.  We also have a couple of writers currently on sabbatical, and I’m hoping they return in earlyb 2010.

I don’t thank my writers enough for the work they do.  Their only pay is future profit sharing – which either means they expect us to turn a profit at some point, or that they simply enjoy writing.  I suspect that they enjoy writing, and hope that maybe they earn a few dollars at some point.

I resolve to steer The Soap Boxers out of the red and into the black.  I really haven’t focused much on finances in 2009, instead choosing to focus on the content of the site.  I’ll still focus heavily on the content in 2010, but with the current staffing level, I should have more time to work on actively driving traffic to the site.

I resolve to get on Twitter more often.  Currently, most of my Tweets are just automatically generated announcements of new posts.  In 2010, I’ll try to be more active on Twitter, and allow follower to gain greater insights into my life.  This doesn’t mean I will be tweeing 24/7, because I have a pretty small tweeting windows (a couple of hours every night).

I resolve to publish at least 325 articles in 2010.  That’s 6.5 a week, allowing us to go without an article once per fortnight.  We published 370+ articles in 2009, so I think we can definitely achieve this.

thank you for reading and have a great 2010.

Wal-Mart Ship to Store

Wal-Mart gets a lot of negative publicity, but one thing that they get right is Ship to Store. You buy an item on WalMart.com, choose to have it shipped to a nearby store, and pick it up when it arrives at the store. The shipping is completely free.

I keep waiting for more stores to follow Wal-Mart’s lead, but there hasn’t been a big rush to offer this service. Sure, some stores will offer free shipping on purchases over a certain amount or with special coupons – but I’m unaware of other stores offering free shipping to a local store for absolutely anything purchase through the store’s web site. We recently purchased a forty pound item – I shudder at how much the shipping would have been on this item through another vendor.

I’m really confused about why more stores don’t offer this. This is a golden opportunity to have people walk into your store. When people walk into a store, they usually spend Monday. Wal-Mart also smartly locates the Ship to Store counter way in the back of the store – so that you have to walk though several aisles of merchandise in order to pick up your item.

How does is work? Wal-Mart is nice enough to explain the process on its web site. Your item is first sent from a warehouse to a distribution center. Then, it is loaded on a truck that goes to your local store. Thing about this for a minute. There’s already a truck going from the warehouse to the distribution center. There’s already a truck going from the distribution center to the local store. This means that the marginal shipping cost for Wal-Mart is very low.

Target Pricing

My wife really likes Target, so we end up there quite often. One thing that annoys that crap out of me is unit pricing of some items. The particular item that is the target of much of my ire is Charmin toilet paper. Regardless of which size is on sale in a given week, the 30 pack ALWAYS costs more per roll than at least one of the smaller sizes. I once asked a worker if they were aware of this. Yep, they were aware of it. Nothing they could do, since prices are set by corporate.

I’ve run into the same problem with bottles of ranitidine (generic version of Zantac). Some times the unit price of the larger bottles would be almost twice as much as the smaller bottles. With respect to ranitidine, the issue of “we can’t control what corporate does” reared its ugly head. Target was out of the store brand ranitidine for literally months on end. For those who aren’t aware, this is an extremely common medication. When I asked when they might be getting a shipment, the employee told me that they didn’t know – corporate just sends them a shipment, with no input from the store! So I went to Wal-Mart and grabbed some of their store brand product.

Last week, we had to pick up some Goldfish (the crackers, not the animals). On the end cap, they were prices at $3.49. Within he aisle, the exact same box was priced $3.29. Guess which price rang up on the register? Yep, you guess it, $2.59. With a cart full of items and a two year old that need to needed to get home before bed time, we didn’t point out the discrepancy. We’re not exactly sure if this was some sort of unadvertised sale … or if the correct price was $3.29, or perhaps $3.49.

We’re winding down 2009. When the year began, The Soap Boxers was in its infancy. I was the sole writer, and the schedule that I set for 2009 was 5-6 articles per month. Obviously, we’ve gone far beyond those expectations. We’ve also gone far outside the original topics of customer experiences, news, sports, and book reviews.

How did this happen?

Largely by chance, actually. The expansion of the staff occurred after I asked Johnny Goodman to write about his experience at The Masters. While I am not a golf fan, I understood how cool this experience would be to a golf fan. I liked what Johnny wrote, and offered him a weekly column to write about sports. If you stop to think about it, it’s a bit odd that a sports nut such as me would bring a dedicated sports writer on board. However, I realized that there is value in having different opinions on issues, as well as the fact that Johnny would be able to cover topics (such as golf) that were of minimal interest to me.

During the course of the year, we expanded the staff incrementally. This was done mostly to expand the breadth of subject matter that we cover, while also taking some work off my shoulders. Early in the year, I decided that I wanted The Soap Boxers to deliver fresh content almost every day – something that would have been impossible if not for my wonderful staff. We have had between 33 and 38 articles in each month between March and November (and are well on the way to 30+ again this month).

Early on, I also made the conscious decision to avoid becoming a niche blog, in spite of the fact that this best way to draw a large audience. I have always tried to run the site more like a magazine or newspaper, including content from a wide variety of topics. If it works for USA Today and The New Yorker, why can’t it work for us?

The Soap Boxers has also given me the opportunity to kick start my fiction writing, after enduring a decade where I wrote very little fiction. It felt a bit rusty at first, as if the fiction neurons had experience some atrophy. Soon, however, it was full speed ahead.

In a largely positive year, there have really only been a handful of negatives. The first was a situation involving plagiarism that I felt the need to deal with quickly and decisively. The second was the loss of a loyal reader who was offended by one of my short stories. Neither of these were things that I had a great deal of control over. The plagiarism was dealt with as soon as I figured out what was going on (hint: don’t copy from a national media outlet), and the story that was deemed offensive garnered positive reviews from many others.

The third negative is that fact that growth of readership seems to have stalled a bit. We seem to have reached a long term plateau. If we’re destined to move forward with this group, that’s OK with me. You’re a great group of readers. It would also be great to have a few more folks as readers, though, so if you’d mention The Soap Boxers to a friend or two this holiday season (or share through Stumble or other social networking), we would be grateful.

Beyond the actual writing, I’ve had the experience of interacting with some cool people – other bloggers as well as readers – during the course of the year. I’ve also had the experience of learning a lot about WordPress, as I took a free template and customized the hell out of it, so that the template designer himself probably wouldn’t recognize it.

So, what will 2010 hold for us?

The schedule may fall into a slight bit of disarray early in the year. My wife and I are expecting our second child in January, and this will of course take time away from my writing and coordination of articles. I’m trying to get a bunch of articles written in advance, so that the schedule doesn’t skip a beat. Logic would dictate that there will be some sort of impact, though. We’ll try to keep it minimal.

The Winter Olympics arrive in Vancouver in February. We will attempt to bring some unique insight and quirky biases (such as my fascination with luge) through a series of articles. Baseball will follow on the heels of the Olympics. I promise to overwhelm you with baseball coverage and make an effort to affect your All Star voting.

I’ll continue to chase down interesting stories and angles. I’ll definitely try to dispatch my alter ego, Scoop Chevelle, for a half dozen interviews during the year. January will bring us an interview with a famous blogger.

I’ll also be reviving the “Fake News Network” segment the debuted on Thanksgiving Day. FNN will bring you fictionalized news events. Some will be (very loosely based on real events; others will be made from scratch. You will probably note similarities between FNN and sites like The Onion. Am I ripping off The Onion? No – I’ve been writing these sorts of articles prior to the existence of that wonderful site.

We got our daughter’s picture taken with Santa yesterday.  (It’s actually a pretty good day to do this, because everyone else at the mall is busy pushing and shoving other shoppers).  We asked if “Merry Christmas” could be printed on the border.  The lady told us they couldn’t do that, because of “the law”.

I have friends who practice quite a variety of religions.  If some people want to say “Happy Holidays”, I really won’t take offense.  There is not, however, any law that forbids a private company from printing the phrase “Merry Christmas” (or, for that matter, “Happy Ramadan”) on a product.  If there was, the legal department at Hallmark would be very, very nervous, since they sell a lot of greeting cards that contain this phrase.

And to take the argument to the next level … note that these weren’t some sort of generic holiday photos.  They are photos with Santa Claus.  Santa is tied very firmly to Christmas.