Indeed. What Ellison is doing is taking a bet that his stock's return will exceed the interest rate on his loan. Kind of a dicey gamble, especially on a volatile investment like stock. Considering the volatility of stock, I wonder what interest rate he is even getting. I would be really surprised if its anything near the prime rate. I am actually currently doing a similar thing- my mortgage interest rate is 3.25%, and effectively its lower due to the tax breaks. It makes me uncomfortable as I hate debt, but I am not paying my mortgage off earlier because I can easily exceed a 3% return with only moderate risk even in this market (I made a portfolio of high yielding boring dividend stocks w/ companies like ConEdison, PSEG, AT&T, Verizon, Altria, etc). If the economy ever gets out of the mud, I should be able to find even better returns for the same risk, or my more likely course, the same returns for less risk. You could look at this as a tax deferment strategy as well I guess, as I maximize my mortgage deduction.

I don't really see where the tax dodge comes from at all. There may be some short term vs long term capital gains rates involved, but that doesn't seem likely as I am sure Ellison has a hoard of stock he has had for a very long time around. I guess one could also view it as delaying paying income taxes, similar to a Roth 401k, and letting the stock grow in value tax-deferred. Again it assumes that there will be an increase in value, and those types of schemes always seem like more trouble than they are worth.

Progressive already has a similar system, though I am not sure if it is GPS based. How they work it though, is that you drive around with the device for a period of time- I forget the exact amount of time, but I believe it was in the 3-6 month range. Then you send the device back to them. Progressive states that they don't look at aggressiveness in your driving, just the type of driving you do, when you do it, and how far you drive. So no data streaming is necessarily required.

I could... but that's a lot of work and hassle. I prefer my technology to serve me, not for me to serve it. It would be tolerable if I swapped them out once or twice a year though, just so I don't lose everything in case of theft or fire.

I get that- this is a sobering view of what Americans are up against in the global economy. What I found to be really shocking and eye opening, is that China isn't just about being cheap anymore. China is now BETTER. And they now have the benefit of an entire manufacturing ecosystem around them, kind of like we used to in American cities. At one time in my neighborhood there were all kinds of factories- coffee, sugar refining, boxes, chemicals, packaging, you name it, it was there. They are all condos now. If you wanted to start a factory, you would have to search all over the US or even world to get parts. In China, they can mostly look down the street.

Did you read this article in the nytimes last week: It was really eye opening. The summary is that chinese manufacturers or electronics are no longer just cheaper, they are way more flexible: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

I am surprised that NAS's haven't caught on very well. I have had one since 2007, and have been living in "the cloud" ever since. I can access all of my data over the internet, and it also serves as a nice little low power web server that can run gallery and various other apps. It can stream media, and I can even kick off a bit torrent movie download at work, and then watch it when I get home. All the other functions are really just gravy, as I originally bought this set up to replace a large old power hungry pc that was acting as a file server to supplement my roommate and I's meager laptop drives. I am protected both by RAID 1 and an external USB hard drive that I do a full backup to on a weekly basis. The only thing I am really missing is having a backup kept off-site, which I could do if I was willing to swap out disks, or pay for a service that would allow me to do an online backup.

Its a little pricey (about $400 for disks + the NAS itself) and requires some knowledge to set up properly, but I have no real space limitations, upload/download limits, and I can add or disable features as I see fit. Oh and of course, mine runs linux on top of a low power arm CPU.

I would mod you up if I had the points. Current rates on a 15 year mortgage are around 3.25%. Its cake to beat that by investing in blue chip dividend stocks, especially when you take the tax benefits into account. For instance, ATT has a 5.8% dividend yield right now: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=T

I hate debt with a passion, and it actually annoys me that my mortgage rate is so low it doesn't make sense to pay it off.

I understand where you are coming from. In certain industries and job roles, you are either irreplaceable or you are replaced.

Personally, one of the things I love love love that came out of the financial crisis (really more the scandals), is that we are now required to take one contiguous week off a year. In theory, no blackberries, no logging in from home. Someone else has to entirely cover for you. The thinking behind it is that if you are sitting on top of some fraud, having someone completely take over your responsibilities for a week should be enough for that to be uncovered.

Its just rather unfortunate that it took a mandate from the SEC to actually be able to take an entire week off.

One thing I wished the movie did was sing some of those songs or recite some of those poems. Most of those songs and poems, besides being entirely irrelevant to the story, really had no flow to them. Most of the time I sat there scratching my head and thinking of ways to sing them that wasn't awkward. I failed almost every time.

I wouldn't even mind the crackers welding hotrods, if they did any of the following:
Explained what welding is and how it works, and about different types of welds.
Explained why they were welding what they were welding, and what that part does.
Actually showed some welding technique.
Didn't try to create some fake drama about the project having to be finished on time, and some fake race the clock sequences.

Those shows could be decent, but its all about the "drama" of the junior hotheads avoiding the wrath of the big honcho hothead, and no technical content at all.

Not to mention bad software. When I upgraded to win2000 I realized that really many of those crashes were not the OS at all, but the software. GPF's in particular were an application problem, not an OS issue.

Bats is a full fledged exchange now, as is direct edge. Liquidnet is still an ECN, where large institutional traders try to trade in large blocks. I meant CBOE and their CBSX, not CME, my mistake- they are still an options/futures venue. I am not sure what you mean by a retail market? When you put in a buy order with e-trade, they hit these same markets- they have to hit all the "protected markets" as defined by reg nms (any market that officially registers as an exchange).

The SEC is fairly quick with the paperwork actually, and it did not cost that much, at least not to be an ECN. The direct filing fees were somewhere in the 4 figures, how much exactly, I am not sure- I was on the technology side. Total costs were much higher, as we had to provide paperwork and evidence that we met their requirements.

Market making as a profession, where there is a guy that stands in a pit and makes markets, is pretty much dead. Its all electronic, and the electronic "paper trail" pretty much ensures that you won't get front run. Your buddy today wouldn't just send an order for $32k to the floor, he would send it to one of my algo engines, where we would spray it out and take the top of book at every trading venue we connect to until he had it filled, or sent it to a different type of algo engine that would spread the order out over a time period he controlled and sliced and diced it in the market until he got his fill- the whole point of which is to reduce market impact. HFT guys might be sniping 100 shares here and there to make a fraction of a cent on a strategy that has nothing to do with yours- they might have actually moved the market in your favor.

During market panics, the good old fashioned kind driven by fear- the difference between microseconds and 2 hours is gigantic don't you think? Imagine it being 2007, and saying what difference does it make if my house sells in 2 days or 2 years? Good old fashioned market panics are somewhat tempered by HFT btw- most of these strategies are based on mean reversion, so if prices get too out of whack with what is typical, the algos buy and sell to bring everything back in line. Of course those algos bring on new types of craziness, but no one was looking to outlaw people from trading before computers came on the scene.

You could not be more wrong. Do you realize that in the last 10 years, the number of trading venues has exploded from 3 big exchanges and a few tiny regionals (the NYSE, Nasdaq and Amex) to about 40 today? This change in market structure actually created my current job- smart order routing- which ensures that your order to buy 10 shares of IBM gets executed at the best price (as required by the SEC). BATS, Direct Edge, CME, Liquidnet, and many others (I worked at a brand new exchange/broker-dealer startup in 2008. I assure you can get a competing market up and running in 6 months to a year. Are you being deliberately ignorant, or do you just not know, how much you don't know?

As for HFT, you can thank those guys for being able to buy or sell within a penny of the last trade on liquid stocks. Did you prefer giving up 10 cents when both buying and selling to a market maker who really would front run you? Its much more difficult to front run in today's electronic market. Electronic trading is here to stay, and programs have bugs- whether they react in 10 microseconds, or 50 milliseconds, if some firm wants to bankrupt themselves by distorting the price momentarily of a particular stock, humans aren't going to be able to prevent them.

Here is the thing- those people have built very successful businesses and oversaw the growth of billion dollar businesses. Maybe it was a bit of luck, and being in the right place at the right time, but the bottom line is that they did it, and made apple billions of dollars. $60 million is a lot. But this is in some sense a bribe to keep up the good work over the next few years, and more so to prevent them from going off and doing their own startups.

Have you ever tried building a business? I have taken two stabs at it, and the ability to bring in revenue is by far the most valuable skill one can possess. And that's what these guys are being paid for.