Mary rollerblades with a friend about 20 miles on the American River trails nearby.  Last week a photographer from the Sacramento Bee was there, so Mary (right) ended up with her picture on the front page. To me, it looks like she’s in trouble with the police (center).  I told her to hide her drugs better!  I also think the photo makes Mary’s friend (Christine, left) look kind of like a Power Ranger.

According to a Time magazine survey in 2000, 19% of Americans believe they are in the top 1% in wealth, and another 20% think that they’re not in the top 1% now, but will be, some day.

So when progressives talk about additional taxes on the top 1%, 39% of us think that means us.  We’re dumb that way.  Apparently, if we’re a little better off than most of our neighbors, we think we’re in the top 1% nationwide.

To be in the top 1%, you have to have at least $3 million in non-home assets.  I think if progressives start talking about extra taxes for people with over $5 million, instead of just using terms like, “ultra rich,” people would realize that ain’t them.  Be specific!

I did a little math, and a tax of 2% on non-home net worth over $2 million would lead to an additional $350 billion in federal revenues.  And you can bet those millions in assets are generating a heck of a lot more income than 2%, so it wouldn’t even hurt.

I’ve been seeing lots of talk recently about how our oil problems would be solved if we could just get the darned duck-squeezers to stop preventing us from drilling for that sweet, sweet oil trapped under ANWR.

They have something of a point. Most people who oppose drilling are environmentalists, who somehow imagine that drilling will ruin the beautiful wilderness and destroy our last great frontier. This is baloney. Drilling for oil is probably the single cleanest mineral extraction there is — it doesn’t bulldoze mountains, there aren’t vast quantities of pollutants and offal, and it can be done to be fairly friendly to local inhabitants.  Just look at the thousands upon thousands of oil wells that have been in Los Angeles for a century — very few people even notice them, and surely we’re touchier than caribou about that sort of thing.

That said, I oppose drilling in ANWR. It wouldn’t hurt ANWR, but my theory is that in a few decades, that oil will be more valuable than it is now.  If we were to take the oil now, it would knock the price down, temporarily, and thus allow our consumption to grow again — for a while.

In 50 years, people are going to look back on this time and say, “Wow, back then people used to just set oil on fire for heat.”  Much like we say today about old-growth oak and cypress in the 19th century.

If we extracted 100% of all oil in ANWR, it would supply the US for maybe a year.  At most two.  Wouldn’t it be nice to actually have some reserves in, you know, reserve?

OK, he didn’t really win, but since we’re running out of delegates available, every time he doesn’t suffer a landslide loss, his certainty of ending the primary season with a delegate lead becomes even more certain.

Obama pretty much had the nomination locked up months ago, after his big win in Wisconsin. After that, even if Hillary won every single remaining election, she still wouldn’t have enough delegates, unless the margins were far larger than they had any hope of being.

Of course, since then, he’s won a couple of states, and more importantly, Clinton’s victories were hollow in delegates. Her “victory” in Texas, for example, yielded five more delegates for Obama than for her.

I admire Clinton’s toughness for keeping up the fight, but really I can’t get behind anybody who can’t do math. If you use Slate’s delegate calculator, you’ll see that Clinton could now win every single remaining state by a margin of 68-32 and still come out behind.

Her best hope for getting those kind of numbers is restricting future elections to only allowing white women overy 70 to vote.

Heck, if Obama can somehow hold North Carolina and Oregon to two-point losses (he currently has large leads in both states), he could afford to lose every single other remaining state by 60 points, 80 to 20.

It’s over, and it’s been over for a while. Only the willfully blind would argue the point, and I’ve had enough of willfully blind presidents.

Whether Obama will beat McCain in November is certainly up for debate, but it’s hard to see how Clinton campaigning against him will help the chances of the Democratic Party.

My prediction is that Hillary will concede after Obama wins North Carolina on May 6.

I bought ICO on the recommendation of Motley Fool’s Hidden Gems back in March of 2007 — 500 shares at $5.26.  The shares have been up and down, but the numbers have been less than thrilling.

My biggest fear of our energy crisis — and the crises of food, water, and money really all come down to energy — is that we will solve our energy problems with coal.  It’s plentiful, cheap, and long-term horrible for the planet.  Exactly the kind of solution our politicians love!

I’m hoping that next term’s politicians will have the fortitude to resist that self-destructive urge.

In any case, my guess is that ICO might make a profit of $50 million next year (they lost $150 million last year), and that rapid growth is unlikely, making them pretty overvalued.  It’s difficult to see how they might double, and I see no sense in having a stock in my portfolio that can’t double.

The main reason coal is booming at the moment is that the dollar is collapsing, meaning that companies like China can now afford to import their cheap raw materials from us.  Hooray.

I sold all 500 shares at 8.49, for a profit of about $1600.  I never liked the company, and I’m happy to be out of it in the black.

I sold half of my ISRG (20 shares at $359.99) earlier this week.  I like the company, like its growth, but it had gotten even more overpriced than when I bought it.  Now I look smart, because ISRG plummeted today to  $290 a share.

Why?  I can’t really figure that out.  They announced earnings today, and near as I can tell, they were excellent — revenue up 54%, income up 88%.  I guess when you’ve got a p/e of 100 on excellent profits, expectations can run pretty high, and even 88% growth doesn’t stack up.

Now the price looks a lot more like it does when I bought it in the first place — it looks worth maybe $230 a share, and that growth looks pretty exciting.  I’m not piling on more until it drops another $60 (which it probably won’t), but I certainly wouldn’t mock anybody who wanted to get in now.

I bought IAAC back in May of 2005 because I was looking for a company that could profit from the rapid growth in trading in Asia — 400 shares at $6.51.  I was going to buy more when it dipped, but it never did.  I sold off 100 shares in August 2006 at $19.51.  I felt pretty good about the prospects, but it seemed like it had risen awfully fast, and might easily dip — in which case I’d buy it back, cheaper.

It didn’t dip for a while, though.  I put in another sell order at $51 per share, but it peaked at about $48 in December 2006.  The nature of their business — basically holding metals and other commodities that are being traded by big financial institutions — means that their declared income can vary dramatically quarter to quarter depending on commodity prices — though they lay off any risk they have, so an unusual profit or loss one quarter will be balanced the next.  Stock purchasers didn’t really understand that, so an unusual profit in 2006 was extrapolated from, leading to the giant bubble in the stock price.

I rebought the 100 shares I sold at $27 after the bubble popped.  It’s very rare to see me purchase a stock after it appreciates.

So what’s it worth now? It’s hard to measure.  They’re handling huge amounts of money, showing $2 billion in revenue last quarter — an awful lot for a company with a $200 million market cap.  Zero analysts are following the stock, and it’s hard to tell whether last quarter $13 million profit was a new baseline or an aberration.  Cash flow is miserable, but that’s not surprising for a company growing at an insane rate.

It seems like IAAC might well make close to $2 per share this year, and with their growth, that might well make the company worth $60+ per share. I should buy!  On the other hand, financial services companies seem especially risky right now, and their accounting is baffling. I should sell!

I’m glad I hold this company.  It may well dip dramatically when next quarter’s results come out, since they’re bound to not be as awesome as last quarter’s — and then I’ll buy some more.

I like these guys, but I don’t really understand their business, which is often a good reason to avoid a stock.

I’m evaluating all my holdings, and I’m going to start with the largest. Right now, that’s Intuitive Surgical, which makes surgery robots.

Here’s my comment from October 2006, when I bought it:

“I also bought Intuitive Surgical (ISRG ), which makes a surgical robot system. They’re way overpriced, and not normally the kind of stock I go for. (I tend toward kind of boring, predictable companies.) These guys are probably worth about $75 a share, and it’s selling at $110.”

Hmmm.  Not super useful.  I bought twenty shares at $103.50, and I must’ve liked the idea after a little more research, because a month later I bought another 20 shares at $97.21.  Right now it’s $348.07, so I’m feeling pretty smart.

What’s it worth?

Revenues have grown at 64% and 61% the last two years.  Nice! Clearly unsustainable, though, and net income is growing at a much slower rate — though that seems to be largely because they’re paying income taxes now and they didn’t three years ago.  The balance sheet is really good, and cash flow looks good.  I see $200 million in cash going to “investments,” which worries me a little without knowing what the investments were (AOL used to call those free CDs “investments”), but I’m going to pretend they’re good rather than do research.

There’s still room to grow (market cap is $13 billion), and near as I can tell this is still a relatively unknown company.

Insiders seem to be selling off quite a few shares, and the officers don’t hold that much stock in the first place.

By my calculations, ISRG is worth maybe $220 per share, so the current $348 is even more overpriced than when I bought it.  Too overpriced?  Maybe not.  My gut inclination is to sell half, reducing my exposure.  On the other hand, ISRG, while my largest holding, is still less than 10% of my total stocks, so it’s not like that stock plummeting suddenly will give me ulcers.  My tendency to sell half of stocks that have risen higher than I thought they should has turned out well sometimes, and poorly others.

Another factor is that ISRG is not in our IRAs, but in a taxable account, so the profits from selling it will be reduced.  (By 15% for long term capital gains?  That’s not bad.)  Maybe I’ll stall until I evaluate a sell a couple of my crappy stocks for a loss, and use those to balance each other.

OK, I just put in a limit sell for half of my shares (20) at $360.  That’ll lead to about a $5,000 taxable profit, so my goal in the next few days will be to shed $5,000 worth of losers to balance it out.  Now that I look, I don’t even have $5,000 worth of taxable losses, so I guess that’s not going to happen.

I haven’t been keeping up with detailing my stock purchases and sales.

One of my basic philosophies of investment is to try to limit the number of companies I hold to a very small number, and somewhere along the line I seem to have blown it.  Another philosophy is to only invest in companies with a good reason, and while that might have been true, I haven’t been documenting the reasons, so a few months later I’ve forgotten.

This means I own an awful lot of companies that I have little idea why I bought in the first place.  What’s more, a lot of them have done terribly.

I guess I’m not the only one whose portfolio isn’t worth a darn nowadays. But I should know better. I’m going to try to evaluate all my holdings over the next couple of weeks, and eliminate those I wish I didn’t have — even if I have to dump them at a loss, which I hate doing.

My most recent purchase was Apple (AAPL), on February 22.  I had four shares, left over from a purchase in 1997 at $4 per share (split adjusted). I had sold the other 1000 shares at $7 per share back in 1998.  I meant to repurchase, but forgot.  The latest dip finally let me dive back in, and I luckily got 50 shares at 116.89.

Most of my stock holdings I think were purchased at the suggestion of the Motley Fool Hidden Gems service. They did cheerfully give me a refund of the several hundred dollars for the newsletter when I pointed out that their suggestions were consistently underperforming the market, but that doesn’t help my portfolio, which seems full of dogs like New York and Co. (NWY, down 64%), Irwin Fiancial (IFC, down 62%), Jackson Hewitt Tax Service (JTX, down 51%), and Select Comfort (SCSS, down 65%(

My tendency to sell stocks as they rise means I dumped 325 of the 400 SCSS shares at twice what I paid, so that one actually made a healthy profit. See, it worked! Of course, if I never sold any stock, I’d be sitting on $200,000 in Apple stock and $200,000 in CEDC.  On the third hand, I wouldn’t have had money to buy the AAPL or CEDC if I hadn’t sold the AOL, Quantum, and Multiple Zones.

In any case, while some of my stocks have done great over the past year or two (ISRG, RSTI), most have not, and I’m down some 15% from my peak in May 2007.

Like I said, I’m going to go through my portfolio, and any stock I own that I calculate is worth less than half its current price I’m going to sell.  (That may well mean some of the outperformers, too.)

Some schools suck. It’d be nice to say that it’s because we don’t respect the underprivileged, and we don’t allocate enough resources to those who need it most, but it’s an unfortunate fact that the worst schools often have the most per-student spending, while excellent schools often spend the least. Private schools often spend the least of all.

Throwing money at the problem doesn’t solve it, because the real problem isn’t the schools. It’s the parents.

If a child underperforms, some parents will apply pressure and discipline to force the child to perform better. They allocate time for homework and remove distractions. They support the teacher’s decisions, and enforce the school’s rules at home. These kids grow up to be hardworking and successful, and if there are lots of them in a school, the school is “good” and there’s peer pressure on the other kids to behave themselves, too.

On the other hand, some parents will completely ignore their child’s relationship with the school. Others will take the child’s side, and call the school to complain, force the teacher to re-evaluate the curriculum, and insist everyone lower expectations to such a level that the child is deemed a success. These kids often grow up with a sense of self-entitlement and laziness, and end up in prison or politics. If there are lots of these kids in a school, the school is “bad” and there’s peer pressure on the other kids to conform to the worthless norms.

In a system in which there’s school choice, the parents who care will remove their kids from weaker schools, magnifying the weakness. This is a benefit in some ways to the student, but in other ways it’s harmful. The student (and parents) often spend a great deal of time commuting to and from the “good” school, the student no longer has close relationships with kids (and others in the neighborhood) who are geographically close, and they get a distorted view of their world.

Letting kids switch schools does give more opportunities to good parents stuck in bad neighborhoods, but it doesn’t address the root problems.

To address those roots, we need to address the real problem: The parents. Free classes on how to raise kids to do well in school would be a good start. A posse of educators that go door to door meeting with each child’s parents would be another good move.

It’s not the dog who learns from dog obedience classes — it’s the owner.