Dominik Mueller » Café

How Americans spend their day

Dominik Mueller — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:34:49 +0000

The New York Times has published an interactive graph visualizing data from the latest American Time Use Study, which asked thousands of Americans to recall how they usually spend the 24 hours of a day. The graphic is cool, because the data can be broken down by gender, age, race, employment status and education inter alia.

But I find the statistics quite surprising. Living in Europe, I can’t tell first-hand how Americans spend their days, but personally I spend much less time watching TV and movies than those people who have been asked in the study. For example, the study says that around 6pm almost 20% of all Americans would watch television. On the average, almost three hours a day is spent on sitting in front of the TV. In my personal experience, I would say the time spent talking to people (on the phone, for example) and the time spent on the Internet actually surpasses the time spent on watching TV. According to the study, however, computer use only accounts for eight minutes of a day. I don’t know about you, but if you were asking me, I’d say the numbers are way off base here.

The only explanation I can come up with, is that, since people have been asked to recall their daily routine and have thus relied on their subjective perception when answering that question, most people underestimate the time spent using a computer. It may be that computers and the Internet, which can also be accessed from mobile devices, has become such an integral part of everyday life that we don’t actually think about using computers anymore. Every time you use your iPhone to browse Twitter or when you use your Blackberry to check emails, that’s actually use of a (small) computer, but we don’t really think “Hey, I’m using a computer now”, because we’re doing it on the train or while on the move. Computers, and especially the Internet, have gone mobile and by that they have been ingrained even deeper in our lifes than we might think at first.

Anyway, the numbers are still quite interesting, especially when looking at the stats for different groups of people. You should really give them a look when you have a bit time left (to use your computer).

German content category added

Dominik Mueller — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:44:43 +0000

For your information, today I added a German category to this blog where you can read the German articles that I will be writing in addition to the English content as of today. The German articles will not be visible on the home page or in the blog archive, so the posts will only be shown to those who really wish to read them. You can access the German content by clicking on the category link in the sidebar: German Posts (Deutsch). This is a separate content area.

If you’re already subscribed to this blog, nothing will change for you. You will continue to receive the English articles only. If you’d like to additionally subscribe to the German category, you can do so, of course. For that I have created a separate content feed that will serve the German posts. This way you don’t have to subscribe to articles in both languages unless you explicitly wish to do so.

The feed URLs are as follows:

English: http://feedproxy.google.com/HighEndWebNames

German: http://feedproxy.google.com/Dominik-Mueller-German

If you speak German, it may make sense to subscribe to both feeds because the English articles and the German ones will not be the same. I hope the decision to write articles in two languages will make the blog appealing to a larger audience and that I will have a bigger range of topics to choose from. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact me. Thanks!

Stock Markets Crash, Banks Crunch

Dominik Mueller — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:37:57 +0000

For the past few weeks I’ve been watching the stock market – not in fear, but in amazement. Before you continue reading you should know that I’m based in Germany, so lots of what I’m saying here is directly related to what I perceive to be the current economic situation in Europe, especially in Germany. I think, however, that some of it relates to the USA and other countries, too.

I’ve been watching the stock market and I’ve been reading the news. But this I do not understand: Why is it that everybody is selling off their stocks? By “everybody” I really do mean everybody. It is as if there was nobody left willing to invest in the stock market anymore. That doesn’t seem logical to me. Although most of the publicly traded companies will be affected by the coming recession, I don’t see how the extreme losses in the stock markets of 50% or more can be justified.

Let’s take Daimler as an example. Daimler’s stock price fell below €20 earlier this week, it was at €80 about one year ago. That would mean the company lost 75% of its value in the stock market, but that does obviously not represent its real market value. Daimler is still expecting to make a nice profit in 2008 (although it’s a lot smaller than what was predicted at the beginning of the year), and the company has cash available. In addition, it is an established brand well-known for its high-quality products, which it successfully sells to customers everywhere in the world. The company didn’t shrink to 25% of its value overnight.

I believe panic is a profound factor. Investors have been panicking and selling off their stocks as quickly as possible. I blame the media for playing a significant role in this, too. Whether you turn on the TV, read a newspaper or listen to the radio, it is nothing but gloom and doom these days. It is as if there was no tomorrow, as if the major global players wouldn’t be existing next week anymore. That might have been true for some banks and financial institutions, but it won’t happen to the businesses in the real economy. I’m talking about companies with a sustainable business model. The banks and funds that got caught up in the crisis mostly had eyes for quick profits. They didn’t seem to be thinking about the future of their businesses as long as profits were on the rise and managerial salaries and bonuses were gushing. The products they were selling were so complicated that even some of the bankers themselves didn’t fully understand them.

I am not saying there won’t be a recession. We have to face the truth. The global economy is headed for a recession, and the USA might be the first to arrive at that point. European and Asian companies will be hit, too. Revenues will decline, but they will get back up. I don’t believe the panic. I’ve been investing in companies with solid business models and “real” products to sell. Many of those companies are undervalued in today’s market, in my opinion. Make no mistake; investing now is risky given the uncertainty of most market participants and investors. You never know what they’ll be selling or buying tomorrow. (Nobody saw Volkswagen getting from €200 to €1,000 within two days, for instance. Hedge funds lost billions because of this unpredictable development.) So little makes sense in the stock markets today. But if you have money that you can afford to lose in the worst-case scenario and if you can wait patiently, this could be an opportunity for you to buy stocks at low prices. It will probably take some time, but stocks will eventually get back up.

The economy will get back on track. There is also a difference between some economic crises of the past and today, because this time governments and central banks have been faster to react. They’re pumping money into the markets to keep the banks liquid, which is risky, but it has been the right thing to do. One thing, however, has not been done very well, I think:

In Germany, the government decided to put up €500 billion for banks in need of money. That’s been the right thing to do, but the way it was done hasn’t been good. German banks do not have to take the money. Why would anybody refuse to accept billions of Euros in cash, you might think. Here is why:

Firstly, if banks take money from the hefty rescue package in Germany they must agree to cap the annual salaries of their managers at €500,000. That means the bankers are not very inclined to take money from the German government because it means they will earn a lot less annually. I would think the managers are intelligent enough to understand that the overall economy is more important than their personal net worth, but you never know. There sure is a conflict of interest that should have been anticipated earlier.

Secondly, most Germans have a hard time understanding why the government is putting up €500 billion to save banks that got into the situation they now find themselves to be in by their own fault. The taxpayers understandably don’t like the fact that it is ultimately them who will be financing the €500B package. Therefore, if a bank accepted money its image would be damaged.

A third reason why German banks have been so careful about taking money from the package, is that it could be perceived as a new sign of the bank’s weak financial situation, which in turn would lead to a further decline in the bank’s stock price.

Taking these reasons into account, I can only come to the conclusion that the situation has been handled a lot better in the United Kingdom. There, banks must take the money. That means they cannot be blamed for taking it and they don’t have much to lose. Yesterday, news came in that the German banks are going to claim money from the rescue money collectively to avoid bad press for individual banks. That’s a smart move the German politicians should have thought of from the beginning.

Summing things up, I wouldn’t panic in today’s situation. We’re headed for a recession, but the situation could be much worse. If you’re an investor, if you’re not risk-averse and if you have disposable cash, it could be a good opportunity to buy stocks from undervalued companies. Many companies are undervalued in today’s troubled market. Central banks and governments are doing their part to help get the banks and the overall economy back on track. I trust that it has been the right decision to pump massive amounts of cash into the markets, although it’s me and you who finance that package, because in the long run we will benefit from that decision. Without the various financial rescue packages, the recession would probably turn out much worse.

I’d be interested in hearing your opinions on the current economic situation, especially from an investor’s point of view. Do you plan to invest in the stock market now that many stocks can be bought for cheap or are you going to wait longer before taking that rather risky step?

Are you a Beatles fan?

Dominik Mueller — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:34:38 +0000

If you’re a fan of The Beatles and if you have a spare $1 million, you might want to check out this collection. By the by, the owner understands that having a relevant domain name is a first step towards making a sale; he uses UltimateBeatlesCollection.com to promote his collection.

House prices through the floor

Dominik Mueller — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:54:01 +0000

The Economist has a chart showing the trend of US house prices from 1920 to 2008. It shows that house prices have fallen by 18% in real terms since 2007. This means house prices have fallen faster than during the Depression in the 1930s.

European buyers are already entering the US real estate market, because they can now buy houses at very low prices. Many houses are being sold in foreclosure sales and on top of that the US Dollar is weak compared to the Euro, so Europeans pay even less than American buyers currently looking to purchase a home.

The same applies for domain names too, by the way. I’ve said it before: If you’re based in Europe you can save a lot of money when buying domains from US sellers now!

You talking to me?

Dominik Mueller — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:24:20 +0000

I’d never say that I know much about economics, but I’m very interested in economic issues and I try to read as much about them as possible. I do not know everything about movies, but I can say that I know a lot about movies, the making of movies and, of course, I enjoy watching them. Considering that I’m into both economics and movies, you can imagine that the following article from the Financial Times Alphaville blog got my attention today.

It is a post by FT Alphaville columnist John Authers, which is titled “The Travis Bickle Effect” and explains that Martin Scorsese’s 1976 movie Taxi Driver might very well be the most wealth-creating film in the history of motion pictures. Not the most serious theory in modern economics, but worthwhile and interesting nevertheless.

What was the greatest wealth-creating film of all time? Titanic might be a popular guess, but the answer, according to Columbia University’s Nobel laureate economist Robert Mundell, is Taxi Driver.

John Hinckley, the deranged would-be assassin who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981, claimed that he was inspired by it. (…) According to Mundell, the wave of sympathy for President Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Due to this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Professor Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed.

“Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP,” Mundell told delegates. “It’s the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5 trillion and $15 trillion of output to the US economy.”

Click here for the complete article.

For those of you who don’t remember De Niro’s “You talking to me?” line, here’s a part of the scene (via YouTube):

New Jobs category

Dominik Mueller — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 17:43:22 +0000

There is a new Jobs category on my blog now where I will occasionally post job openings by companies in the Internet industry and in the domain name space.

If you’re with an Internet company and you think the kind of person you’re looking to hire might just be among the readers of my blog, feel free to drop me an email with a description of the job. I will then post it in the blog’s Jobs section if I think it is appropriate.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Dominik Mueller — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:00:56 +0000

There haven’t been many new posts on my blog lately, so I thought I should take year’s end as a chance to let you know about my thoughts on where this blog is heading.

First of all, I should say that I quit brokering domains in November. Therefore, I’ve been in the process of changing focus in the past few weeks and I didn’t have as much time making posts as before. I will continue to blog about domain names and I even want to take the blog to its next level, but I will also change some things about it. For example, I’m interested in quite a few more topics than just domaining. That’s why I’m going to write articles on a broader range of topics next year, reorganize the categories, make the blog better to use. I’m especially interested in economics, marketing and basically everything Internet-related. These are additional topics I’m going to discuss instead of exclusively covering the domain industry, although the blog’s main focus will certainly remain on the domain name market.

I have also been offered the chance to publish guest posts on few domain blogs recently. I took my time to think about this possibility for a while and I finally decided to give it a try and write guest posts for other domain blogs and friends on a regular basis, see if their readers find my posts worthwhile. So, you might see some domain articles and comments from me on other blogs every now and then. I hope that this way I will be able to reach a wider audience than through one blog only.

Now that we’re approaching year end, I would like to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Successful New Year 2008! Personally, I’m going to take this year’s remaining days off. I hope you will stick with me, as I’m already having some articles in the making that I’m going to put out in January. See you next year!

Support wildfire relief in Southern California

Dominik Mueller — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 10:18:28 +0000

Google has a page up where you can donate money to the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army for the people affected by the wildfires in Southern California. Maps and other information on the fires can be found here.

Busy moving…

Dominik Mueller — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:10:25 +0000

I’ve been busy moving since the end of last week. Please bear with me, as I expect to be back to regular blogging by Friday. Thanks. Copyright © 2003-2011 Dominik Mueller. Follow me on Twitter.Busy moving…