The week goes on

Happy belated 4th of July.

It was wonderful to see the news this morning and find the only thing that happened on the fourth was lots of planned noise, smoke and light. The terrorists would have wanted to have something go off yesterday but failed again.

THANK YOU TO ALL THE POLICE, INTELLIGENCE, MILITARY FOLKS WHO KEPT US SAFE YESTERDAY.

Last Friday and Saturday had my business sim. The sim is a business game used in my Strategy class as a learning tool. We run a manufacturing business making small durable goods that cost about $10 each and sell them to wholesalers. We have to decide how much to produce, how much to advertise (Coca Cola and Black & Decker advertise even though they do not sell directly to the public), how much to spend on R&D for new models and how much to put into worker training to generate savings (getting more output per labor and material input) among others. Each team had 6 people on it and there are 5 teams in my class. We started out making one or two decisions a week which gave us time to evaluate our reports and figure out our strategy (be the BMW or Chevy of widgets) and to start to implement it.

The weekend sim was different in that decisions were required every 40 to 45 minutes, which isn't a lot of time to figure out what we needed to do next. It was a lot of stress and put a lot of pressure on the teams. My team worked well together and we were in first for all of Friday and most of Saturday. In the end, sadly, we made some mistakes on our production numbers so we kept running out of inventory and therefore left a lot of money on the table. This caused us to drop to second place. The mistakes were made primarily due to fatigue on our part and the other teams were able to capitalize on it. It was fun but very draining and am glad its over.

On the 4th, we had a party at my sister in law's place. We were celebrating the birthdays of 2 nieces, one brother in law and the high school graduation of another niece. Fun time by all, but I could only stay for a little while and had to miss the fireworks entirely because had to do paperwork at home and homework for today. Oh well, August 4th is coming, 29 days and counting. Oh, August 4th is my graduation day from grad school and yes, I'm looking forward to it.

Have a few news items to share with you:

Ethanol, the wonder cure to our dependence on imported oil and global warming is now becoming a villain. Before, it would help the poor farmers now it will take food from the mouths of the poor and horror upon horror, raise the price of beer. Hat tip Lucianne.

World War 1 vet is now 106. I do hope someone has taken his oral history about the war and life in the US back then. Very few of these men and women are left. Hat tip Lucianne.

Finally, some summer reading on economics and how it can help you in the stock market. I may just have to buy this book.

Hope you had a wonderful 4th and thanks for stopping by.