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Milk seems to be the next hot thing after gasoline.

Yesterday, at our local SAM’s club, milk was priced at $3.49 a gallon … and gasoline was at $2.55.

Anyways, did you know that milk prices are rising globally because affluent people in emerging economies are drinking more milk? Here is what the NY Times has to say about it:

But the biggest force driving up milk prices is the same one that has driven up prices for conventional commodities like iron ore and copper: a roaring global economy. Rising incomes in emerging economies from China and India to Latin America and the Middle East are lifting millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class.

It turns out that, along with zippy cars and flat-panel TVs, milk is the mark of new money, a significant source of protein that factors into much of any affluent person’s diet.

Great, earlier I thought only olive oil is a mark of economic prosperity.

The article goes on to say that:

… The average person in China now consumes more than six gallons of milk a year, up from more than two gallons in 2000.

[OK, that gives me some kind of a complex - our annual milk consumption, for a family of two, is about 30 gallons! - well, holy cow!]

As an aside on the emerging economies issue, are we getting into an habit of attributing every market phenomenon to how much people consume in emerging economies? Sometimes, it makes sense, but often, it seems as if people are dying to make a connection to China, India, Brazil, Argentina, etc… in order to explain domestic market effects in the US [with no regards to how the consumers in US are using up resources].

By the way, some smart people are already making hay of the milk situation by stealing cows.

Driven by a combination of climate change, trade policies and competition for cattle feed from biofuel producers, global milk prices have doubled over the last two years. In parts of the United States, milk is more expensive than gasoline. There are reports of cows being stolen from Wisconsin dairy farms.

Ironically, just yesterday, we were discussing about how burglars are not smart people. So, stealing a cow might go against the grain - that would mean a burglar with a lot of foresight.

A whole new meaning to the term “cash cow”, eh?

For serious people with an economic inclination, here is a great writeup [pdf file] on how milk is priced in the US.

Just received this email from Zecco Trading which says:

Thank you for opening an account with Zecco Trading.* This is just a friendly reminder that you have not funded your account and we wouldn’t want you to miss the opportunity to take advantage of our extraordinary offer. For the next 2 weeks, we’ve lowered the minimum to open an account from $2,500 to $1,000.

This is something I was looking forward to…but not expecting.

I opened a Zecco account a few months ago but I didn’t want to put in $2500…so never funded it. I think I will grab this new offer.

For those who are unaware about Zecco Trading, it is an investment portal…much like Sharebuilder or Etrade. The main difference being that Zecco offers free trades while other firms charge some kind of a commission or monthly fees. Here is a snapshot of what it has to say about trading fees:

For rookies like me, that sounds pretty good.

News about this student loan settlement was reported yesterday by CBS (click here to read the full article). The report follows a nationwide investigation into an alleged kickback scheme perpetrated by schools and lenders. The investigation was spearheaded by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Below, I will highlight some important excerpts from the report. My comments are in italics.

The chief practice that he (Cuomo) hopes to curtail is when lenders pay back schools a portion of the loans steered their way (typically .25 to .50 percent of the net value), payments that tend to grow when a school designates a bank as a “preferred lender,” because 90 percent of students and their families seek loans from those institutions.

Honestly, I had no idea that such a thing existed. So, all this time, students were carrying the extra burden of kickbacks to their own school? I thought the increasing tuition was enough PITA. That’s not good. Raise the tuition from one side…so that more and more students are forced to avail student loans, and then raise the burden on the student loan side too? Aren’t student loans supposed to *encourage* students to study more?

Other provisions in the code are:

The new code requires schools to disclose why it has chosen some lenders to be “preferred” and bans financial aid officers and other school officials from receiving more than nominal gifts from lenders.

“More than nominal gifts” - isn’t that equivalent to bribing? Why was it allowed till now?

No longer can lenders answering telephone queries identify themselves as school representatives when calls made to school loan hotlines are sometimes forwarded to outsourced call centers.

Wow…that’s like the school name is just a proxy and lenders are running the show!

As a part of the settlement, New York University will refund $1.4 million and The University of Pennsylvania will refund $1.6 million towards reimbursement funds. More schools refunding the kickbacks are mentioned in the report. One lender - Citibank is mentioned to be in agreement with the code of conduct.

Well so much for the good part.

The bad part is that the investigation started with about 100 colleges and half a dozen student loan providers. And, the settlement (as reported by CBS) involves only 1 bank and just a third of the schools. Makes me wonder what happened to the rest of the parties involved. Also, there are like 2500 schools in the US (?) (I need a reference here). It’s rather hard to believe they were all clean and *innocent*.

Yesterday, I was trying to read up something on the origin of social security numbers, and found a lot of interesting facts about them through various sources. I am compiling them below and hopefully it will provide some interesting reading material in this boring tax season. To my learned readers, some of the information might seemed cliched, but I am sure there are a lot of people out there who have never heard about most of these facts. Here is what I found out:

• The original social security card was designed by Fred Happel of Albany, N.Y in 1936. He was paid $60 for his work.
• The first social security record was established for John David Sweeney on December 1, 1936 with a social security number of 055-09-0001. However, this is not to be confused with the *first social security card* issued. No one can point out the first card issued because hundreds of thousands of them were distributed around the same time through 45,000 post offices throughout US. Ironically, Sweeney died at the age of 61 without receiving any social security benefits.
• The lowest SSN was given to Grace D. Owen of Concord, New Hampshire in 1936 and it was 001-01-0001.
• The first recipient of social security benefits was Ernest Ackerman who received a lump-sum payment 17 cents in 1937.
• Social security numbers are not allocated serially; meaning, the first number ever issued was not the lowest and the latest number issued will not be the highest.
• So what’s the meaning of the numbers on the card? Most people probably know this, but I will mention it nevertheless. Below is a schematic of a typical social security card.

  

  The first three digits are called the area number, the next two digits are called the group number, and the last four digits are the serial numbers. The area numbers are assigned on the basis of the zip-code on your SSN application. The group numbers are just for bookkeeping purposes only, they don’t have any specific meaning. In each group number, the serial numbers are allocated consecutively from 0001 to 9999.

• Area numbers increase from east/northeast coast to west coast. People living on the east/northeast coast have the lowest area numbers (for example, people who apply for SSN from New Hampshire have the lowest area numbers) whereas, people living on the west coast and southwest areas have the highest area numbers.
• Apparently, there have been rumors in the past about the group numbers being used for racial profiling. Here is an interesting *clarification* on www.ssa.gov regarding group numbers:
  

  Apparently due to the fact that the middle digits of the SSN are referred to as the “group number,” some people have misconstrued this to mean that the “group number” refers to racial groupings. So a myth goes around from time-to-time that encoded in a person’s SSN is a key to their race. This simply is not true.

• 078-05-1120 is the most misused social security number ever….some 40,000 people have claimed this SSN as their own. Here is the story behind it:
  

  In 1938, wallet manufacturer the E. H. Ferree company in Lockport, New York decided to promote its product by showing how a Social Security card would fit into its wallets. A sample card, used for display purposes, was inserted in each wallet. Company Vice President and Treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be a clever idea to use the actual SSN of his secretary, Mrs. Hilda Schrader Whitcher.The wallet was sold by Woolworth stores and other department stores all over the country. Even though the card was only half the size of a real card, was printed all in red, and had the word “specimen” written across the face, many purchasers of the wallet adopted the SSN as their own. In the peak year of 1943, 5,755 people were using Hilda’s number. SSA acted to eliminate the problem by voiding the number and publicizing that it was incorrect to use it. (Mrs. Whitcher was given a new number.) However, the number continued to be used for many years. In all, over 40,000 people reported this as their SSN. As late as 1977, 12 people were found to still be using the SSN “issued by Woolworth.”

• From the start of the program in 1936 till 2005, an estimated $8.9 trillion have been paid out as social security benefits. In the same period, the program has received $10.7 trillion in income.
• In the present times, invalid social security numbers include numbers with set of zeroes ( as in 000-xx-xxxx, xxx-00-xxxx, xxx-xx-0000), numbers starting with 666, numbers from 987-65-4320 through 987-65-4329 - which are marked for advertising, and numbers with the starting three digits above 770, which are not yet allocated.
• Social security numbers are not reassigned after a people die. Here is what socialsecurity.gov says about it:
  

  We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 420 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.

References:

• Social Security History , government source
• How Social Security Numbers Work, Howstuffworks.com
• Social Security Number, Wikipedia
• Image sources: www.howstuffworks.com and www.ssa.gov

Read this latest BBC report. Seems like YouTube’s revenue sharing model will become a reality in the coming months.

YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.
The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

Speculations about this appeared way before (October 2006) in this article. Here is an excerpt from the article.

YouTube users could be paid for their video clips after the popular website was bought by Google for around $1.6bn (£900m).
Those who upload clips will get a slice of advertising revenue on the pages containing their videos.

This also implies that every Tom, Dick, and Harry will start uploading videos…and that videos you like will be preceeded with some junky advertisements.  But for some, this is a chance to try if their handycam skills can strike some gold.

A warm welcome message for readers who discovered this blog through Robin Raskin’s article on gift cards on Yahoo! TECH.

For others’s, Robin mentioned this post “Don’t Like Your Gift Cards? Trade Them Or Sell Them For Cash” in his article. Thanks Robin. Another related post on Pro Bargain Hunter blog is also mentioned in the article. This is what it says:

Two great blog posts that do a good job of covering the re-gifting certificates territory come from ProBargainHunter and The Tao of Making Money.

While you are here, please feel free to rummage through the categories on the left sidebar and discover other interesting articles.

If you like reading the stuff, consider subscribing to this blog using this link. Enjoy your stay.

A commentator “Salman” brought this to my notice through a comment on my last post. Thanks Salman.

You must have seen the nice images near the Google AdSense ads in my right sidebar. Well, on the 18th of this month, Google made it clear that such images are not acceptable. The details are described under the blog post titled “Ad and image placement: a policy clarification“. Let me quote a few lines from the post which would make this very clear :):

What if I place a space or a line between my images and my ads? Would that work?

No. If the ads and the images appear to be associated, inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads will not make the implementation compliant.

Here is an example of an “unacceptable” ad displayed on the post:

Apparently, the images are not really related except the “fruit” part. There is an image of a banana near the ad “Order Grapefruit”.

That’s bad news for people who are using Wordpress plugins like “AdSense Beautifier”.

That also means that the images on the AdSense widget on my right side bar will go away. In fact I think it’s a good excuse for me to get rid of AdSense totally for some time and see how it goes :).

Here is an excerpt from a news article on msnbc.com:

The sheriff said the robbery victim had waited three days in line to buy two Playstation 3 units for $641 each at a Wal-Mart. He was unloading the units at his campus apartment when one man beat him to the ground while another took the PlayStations, Causey said.

How can someone wait for three days in a line, all eager to spend $1282, for some video game hardware? The longest Black Friday wait that I have heard around my town started from Wednesday night 10:00 pm for a laptop at Best Buy.

Ironically, the not-so-gentleman guy who beat the playstation-madness guy, didn’t have long to enjoy his newly-stolen doodad. This is what happened to him:

Peyton Strickland, 18, was killed Friday at a house he shared with three roommates, New Hanover County Sheriff Sid Causey said……..Roommate Mike Rhoton said Strickland was unarmed, but may have been holding a video game controller when he went to the door as it was bashed in by officers.

This is just out; read about it here.
Apparently it’s just a freak accident and not many people are hurt. But this is very very unfortunate.