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Hans Jørgen
Lysglimt www.lysglimt.com |
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Welcome! I am Hans Jørgen Lysglimt, Norwegian writer, life planning coach, free market promoter and entrepreneur devoted to defending individual liberty and working for human happiness. This is my blog where I share my thoughts. ######################################################## January 19. 2005 It has been extremely busy lately. But great fun. I am working hard and writing intensely. I flew to Los Angeles and went down to San Diego for three days during the Christmas holidays, too far to fly for too few days. But wow, its great to be down there. I sat in the Jacuzzi at the hotel on December 27 in bright sunshine and had a fantastic time. "What Do You Want To Do With Your Life?". That has been and still is "The Question". On email: The amount of spam keeps increasing. The team at runbox and other email providers are getting better at tackling the avalanche, but there is no telling where this will end and how the problem will be solved. November 27. 2004 San Francisco, California. Right on Van Ness. The Cal Bears beat the living daylights out of Stanford at the Big Game winning by a strong 41 to 6. The Cal Bears are on a roll. Great fun at the game. The liberal movement I have met many liberals here in San Francisco. What surprises me about some of them is that they believe everyone that votes Republican is either stupid or rich. This is not "so to speak" I am amazed to find that some smart well educated people ACTUALLY LITERALLY believe that you can not be well reflected and still vote Republican. They believe that if you think, you have to be liberal. This is an interesting discovery as I believe it provides a clue to understanding the liberal mind. The thing with the liberals is that many of them are really really smart. In fact, the weight of the liberal votes are perhaps better educated and more traveled than the corresponding conservatives. This is why the liberals provide better system critic than the conservatives. It is the observant and intelligent system critic that I like about the liberal movement and that I find attractive about San Francisco. But being smart, does not mean being right. Like Ayn Rand said - forty million French CAN actually ALL be wrong". The liberal movement is hypnotized with the postmodern thought that anything goes, everything is a matter of opinion and can be discussed. Everything is up for grabs. It was exactly this kind of attitude that the Founding Fathers feared and the reason why they made the constitution as hard as it is. The constitution is a relic from an intellectual era that was way more rational than the one we are in now. It contains ideas from a time when everything was not up for grabs. Individual liberty was (and is) sacred. It is this relic that still keeps America vibrant. The conservatives are more inclined to preserve this relic while the liberals want to change it. The problem with the liberal movement is that it seems unable to reflect upon how it arrived at the postmodern ideas, it seems unable to criticize its own postmodern way of thinking. If the liberals could somehow be persuaded to turn their intellect on themselves, that could bring about change. The Bay Area It is great to spend some time in the Bay. This really still is the frontier. This is where technology is being dreamed up and the future is being created. In our lifetime we will see wave after wave of ideas and technology spring from this area, ideas and technology that will change everything over and over again. November 17. 2004 Bush won the election. Bush is far from perfect, so I am not super happy, but he is better than the alternative Kerry who will now pass on to obscurity - enjoy the ketchup! What have we learned? People are afraid of change. There is tremendous power in that insight. The Dow is up about 6-7% so it has been a profitable time after the election. This however is a one off thing, there is no certainty that the Dow will continue upwards. Interestingly the prices of US stocks do not look as overvalued anymore when measured in Euro. The dollar will continue down and US valuation might come down to reasonable levels measured in Euro before long. Also expect foreigners to start buying more assets in the US as the dollar continues down. runbox is going to launch virtual domains soon. We have an aggressive strategy for this and I expect a lot from this new product. I continue to say that email will demand more and more attention and that businesses will move their email service from in-house and standard ISP solutions to specialized email companies like runbox. I am off to San Francisco this week. Will be at the Big Game between U.C. Berkeley and Stanford on November 20th in Berkeley. Will be great. Go Bears! Go Bears! Go Bears! I attended the Big Game in 1996 when an historic 8 quarters where played on overtime. Will do some business and meet some companies and investors in San Francisco the week of November 22-25. Contact me about this if you are in the area. Will be in the U.S. over Thanksgiving, might be in S.F. in Los Angeles or in Utah. Might also spend a few days in New York on my way back to Oslo. October 10. 2004 US presidential election. The truth is that neither Bush nor Kerry are great candidates for the US presidency. Bush is religious and bases his beliefs on a higher order other than man itself. Kerry is a Kantian who has lost his belief in man and believes in collectivist solutions. What has made America great are the classical values it was founded on individual liberty being the most important. Unfortunately America is heading in the wrong direction at accelerating speed. Government is now consuming 30%+ of BNP, anything above 10% is outrageous! We have a huge public sector involved in all issues of life. There is growing demand for the public sector to grow. The classical American values are strongest in the heartland. Along the coasts there is an ever growing influence of ideas imported from Europe. These are Kantian ideas. The liberal Democrats are people who do not believe in the individual, like in Europe they believe in collectivist solutions. This is why they favor "international cooperation" and the UN instead of America standing up for itself. They do not see that if you are good, you can only loose by bargaining with evil. To analyze witch of the two candidates now available to vote on you will want to vote for the one that is best able to preserve and revitalize the classical American values that are still present in the backbone of the population. The liberal Democrats talk about the founding values of America like as if it was a fairytale, something gullible to smile at "ohhh those where the times, but now is different...". Within the Republican Party there is still genuine belief in the classical American values, there is still genuine belief in individual freedom, right and wrong, good and evil. This is why you want to vote Republican - this is why you want to vote for Bush this time around. The stock market With the close race there will be turbulence on the stock market in the time up to the election. After the election there will be more certainty, one way or the other. This is a buying opportunity when prices are low. Blogging fatigue. I have noticed that there is less writing being done on many blogs. I also find myself reading less blogs. The format it maturing, will be interesting to see where it ends up. October 4. 2004 The Presidential Debate "I am optimistic and realistic at the same time." George W. Bush in today's debate. I love this quote, it sums up his attitude and the attitude of millions of Americans. So many Democrats and Europeans have become cynical, it is a Kantian based error of philosophy that you have to be "critical" and critical is often not distinguished from "negative". We must make people realize the enormous difference between "critical mind" and "negativism". Kerry got off on clearly the best start but this was mainly because he was lucky to get the first word. Kerry also clearly was better prepared and better polished, as the opposition he has more time to prepare for this, while Bush has a job to do every day. The balance is still fair, Kerry has more time to prepare but Bush gets more exposure due to the office he holds. Bush got emotional at times and gained much from that. Spooky search engine. I used the ixquick.com search engine today, and it is spooky. It senses that I am doing my searches from Norway and it filters the results of the search based on my location. This reminds me of US magazines making special "European" or "International" issues targeted at foreign audiences. Without exception these magazines are not as good as the US original, making cut down special issues of magazines is either ignorance or an insult to foreigners. I want to see the results Americans do and I want to read the magazines Americans do. The next strike of terror. Sooner or later someone is going to release a dirty nuclear bomb in a container in the US. It is a matter of time. A few tens of thousands of people, or perhaps a few hounded thousand people will die. The US will be able to handle that and to rise from it. I am therefore not that afraid of this, the world will overcome. What I am worried about is the release of a new virus that will kill tens of millions of people. Later I will elaborate more on the consequences of such an event. Right now are the best times in history. When Edward Gibbon published the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776 he said that the early Roman Empire was the best times ever in history to live, and it was. Today we have surpassed this. Any study of history will tell you that it can not last. Our times are the best in history, and we are very fortunate to live in it. Live your life now, travel, smile and enjoy it. Twenty years from now we could be in the third world war, we could have closed borders we could have vide spread virus infections and general depression. I hope we will not see this, but a study of history is rather depressing. So enjoy your life now. Travel I am heading off for London for the weekend. September 17. 2004 3G mobile networks is gaining ground in Europe. I am trying to find a provider that can provide seamless roaming through most of Southern Europe at a decent price. It might be that Vodaphone can not it, but I am not convinced yet. Swedish Frihetsfronten (FreedomFront) has got their new homepage up and running. Congratulations. www.frihetsfronten.se Some recent development have made my connections to the Western USA and California stronger and I expect to do more business there. Some email providers are now having problems in that they get blacklisted by blacklists and unable to send mail to other providers. This gives strength to my argument that email is a professional service that demands a professional full time dedicated staff. Customers will be increasingly frustrated and seek out premium email providers like runbox. On a different note I also see that the entire email landscape could change overnight with new technology. The internet is still in its infancy and email will look very different ten years from now. September 6. 2004 Boy, its been busy summer and I have a lot to catch up on. Gmail They are having some difficulties as I have suspected they will. Have no doubt they will get their email service going, but it will not be as easy as some people have thought. Also, they will have to cater to the masses so there will be plenty of room for niche players like runbox to serve high end email services. The United States of America. It is still the greatest place on earth. During the last year I have spent 8 weeks in the US and made a few reflections. # 1 I have driven a lot and listened to the radio. Not once, NOT ONCE have I heard Elvis Presley played on the radio in the US. I believe this is symptomatic of a loss of romanticism in the US lately. The music and the lyrics they do play I find is very aggressive. I believe the US will have to come to terms with a new world reality before it again can become romantic. # 2 American ideals are alive and well. The US has always been influenced by ideas from Europe. It is extremely interesting to see that Arnold Schwarzenegger is now perhaps the most influential promoter of classical American ideals of freedom, while the people in the north of his home state are turning more and more away from the principles that have made America great. # 3 I have spent a lot of time in Utah. It is so totally refreshing to find that there are places where classical American ideas are so much alive as there. Places in the Rocky Mountains like Salt Lake City, Park City and the like really are Galts Gulch. People are voting Republican. It is so refreshing to spend time there as opposed to the liberal coast. # 4 America is a service minded economy. There is a service mindset. In Norway we do not have this service mindset, in Norway business most often is more about locking in some position (say having a contract with the public sector) and charging a rent for people to access this position by overpricing. More on this later. Books read lately. SAD Winter Blues - Norman E. Rosentahl The effects of light on human beings is profound. After reading this book it is self evident that men need to seek out the sun. Today's lifestyle and buildings where people are hidden away from the sun is not healthy. Light therapy works, but even better is going to the actual sun. This book has convinced me that the effects of lack of sunshine is a physical one, not a physiological one. Did you know that your entire mass of blood passes through the eyes and is exposed to light every two hours? I believe the Californian sense of life could not be there without the sun to sparkle people every day. Many other things can be explained by this as well. Purple Cow - Seth Godin You have to be extraordinary to compete, period. Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing - George Silverman Word of mouth is a system that can be understood. The internet So little has been done and tested on the internet. I miss so many services that I know will come. - I want a text version of all my conversations in my life that I can search. - I want to be notified whenever there is someone I know nearby. - I want to read news about my friends. - I want to know what events my friends are going to so I can go. - I want to have instant quotes on services. - I want to be able to rate my lawyer, my accountant, my auditor and see other peoples ratings. - I want a really good indexed portal like what Yahoo should have been, search for "hotel London" on Google and the answers are meaningless. - I want liquidity in the OTC markets, cant someone make an online market for shares in internet startups? The markets I have been wrong being positive to the market so far this year. My favorite stocks have tumbled. What to expect going forward? I believe it is irrational of investors not to be confident now. Things are looking good. I believe many shares are on sale. The market is depressed and people are unsure, they are selling out. A lot of uncertainty will be settled within the next two months. Bush will win the election, this will spark the economy. US job creation is bigger than expected, somehow this will come out in the media. Oil prices will go down when Bush takes office for the second term. I believe we could very well see a rally in November / December because of this. Buy shares with a high beta that will perform better than the market. July 13. 2004 Sunshine I have long suspected it and its now confirmed that sunshine actually do give a mood boost by releasing endorphins. This Forbes article confirms this suspicion. The recent murder of Forbes magazines Russian editor Paul Klebnikov is tragic. His murder falls into a line of other journalist that have been killed in Russia in recent years. Its sad but it is true, when westerners are doing business in developing countries it is a piece of good advice to stay out of public life and stay out of politics. When I lived in the Philippines for a bit more than a year I wanted to get involved in the progress of the country but was strongly advised to stay out for my own safety. This made it impossible for me to stay there for very long. Se my previous entries about doing business in the developing world about this. We should be very very happy to live and be doing business in the developed world, freedom should not be taken for granted it is a precious privilege. Speaking of the Philippines the Manila government now seems to be giving in to Iraqi terrorists demands that the Philippines pull their troops out of Iraq. The Philippines always was a very sentimental people, and the politics of this country is about sentimentality and empathy with the unfortunate and poor. Now don't get me wrong, I love the Philippinos and their beautiful country. By giving in to these demands Manila is doing itself and the world a great disservice, still it might get the government reelected. This only shows that philosophy of the people is the key to progress. The Philippines feels sorry for itself for being poor, it has always done so. I used to say that it is ok to feel sorry for oneself for being poor for a while, but not for more than 100 years like they have done since they lost the US Spanish war in 1898. In 100 years you can actually do something about it! Have no worries, the Philippines will be complaining their poverty 100 years from now as well. Blog log: Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4 Free newsletter. Receive free notifications whenever longer entries are posted on this site, plus exclusive content. I will give Newsletter subscribers early warning when I find great stock deals.
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