【每日阅读训练第二期——速度越障5系列】【5-4】

xinnono

跟了小分队一个月了, 能明显感觉自己的进步~ 感谢大家之余, 也想回报一下~ 今天第一天发贴~ 大家多提建议~ LZ人在北美, 和国内有些时差, 只好提前几个小时发贴啦~ 这边晚上12点多吧, 国内是下午4点? 不多说啦, 看贴~

速度
计时1
Financial Advice for Those With Small Nest Eggs
(摘自The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/your-money/financial-advice-for-those-with-hummingbird-nest-eggs.html?pagewanted=1)
When Merrill Lynch recently discouraged its thundering herd of brokers from taking on new clients with under $250,000 in assets available for investing, it wasn’t a big surprise.
Brokerage firms have been making these sorts of moves for years, and Merrill is notorious for a leaked memo in the late 1990s that discouraged “charity work” for clients with less than $100,000 in assets — “poor people,” as the memo put it.
That patrician view is probably a minority one: if the people who run Merrill Lynch felt that way, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing now, which is trying like mad to figure out a way to service those smaller accounts profitably.
But Merrill’s decision to tell its brokers that they might not get paid if they persisted in working with such people reflects one of the sorriest truths of the financial services industry: Nobody has figured out a way to consistently give large numbers of people reasonably priced financial advice across all areas of their life and to do so in an ethical manner.
The case of Merrill — and its effective opposite, a start-up called LearnVest — is instructive in part because it reflects how the world of managing money has changed since Merrill Lynch first started hanging shingles on Main Streets all over the United States.
Charles E. Merrill & Company opened for business nearly 100 years ago, and the company (along with Merrill’s current owner Bank of America, interestingly enough), resolved to serve Main Street, not Wall Street. Charlie Merrill put it this way, according to the 1994 book by my colleague Joe Nocera, “A Piece of the Action.” In it, he quotes Mr. Merrill as writing the following: “A new guild has sprung up in the [investment] banking profession which does not despise the modest sums of the thrifty.”
(310字)
计时2
Many brokerage firms have backed away from that sort of stance in recent years. An old saw in the industry notes that the little old lady with the diminishing balance who hounds you when her dividend checks arrive late takes up five times as much time as a 50-year-old millionaire.
Besides, you make more money serving richer people. So the big firms (and thousands of smaller operations and individuals) fight hard over the 1 percent and then siphon off a small cut of their assets each year through fees and other revenue mechanisms.
Everyone else ends up at Charles Schwab or Fidelity and pays roughly $1,500 to $3,000 if they want a full financial plan with advice on insurance and mortgages and other things beyond investments.
A few years ago, Citi took a bold step with its myFi service that aimed to provide just that sort of holistic guidance from bank branches. But it introduced the service at one of the worst economic moments since World War II, and the bank shuttered myFi when it did not succeed quickly enough for its tastes.
Nowadays, a thrifty Merrill customer with modest sums is told to use a service called Merrill Edge. And Merrill is taking its best shot at attracting and keeping them (and eventually) upgrading them to a real broker), given that it believes that there are 28 million households with $50,000 to $250,000 in assets.
The people who service them are called Financial Solutions Advisors. There are more than 500 of them in bank branches and the company will hire 500 more in 2012. There are currently about 800 F.S.A.’s working in call centers as well.
The company (to my great surprise) could not say how many of them were certified financial planners, the sort of people trained to look at a client’s whole life before making investment recommendations.
(310字)
计时3
If Merrill isn’t tracking this, it’s tempting to conclude that the company doesn’t make the credential (and holistic advice) a priority and that all it wants to do is push investments. Still, Merrill does the right thing and encourages people to earn the certification by covering classes for F.S.A.’s who want to become certified financial planners.
Dean Athanasia, the executive who oversees Merrill Edge, said that any good investment advice had to be holistic by its very nature. “If you have a mortgage and debt, then you need to factor that into the consideration of your planning for the future,” he said. “You can’t just look at assets.”
The Merrill Edge investment account costs a flat $125 each year if you are working with an F.S.A., though the company will also manage a portfolio for you for 1 percent of your assets annually. As for the underlying mutual fund fees, the firm collects “the appropriate fees based on our agreement with the firm and the prospectus.”
Anyone working this way needs to ask their adviser for a plain-English explanation of how much money, if any, Merrill stands to collect in any way, shape or form now or in the future, based on the mutual funds it selects for you. And if any of you have asked an F.S.A. for a collection of low-cost Vanguard or similar funds, I’d be curious to hear what the reaction was.
On compensation, Merrill appears to be doing the right thing, meanwhile; advisers earn a salary plus incentives based on the amount of assets they gather and manage, whether it’s in bank savings accounts or in mutual funds or other investments.
The most curious thing about my conversation with Mr. Athanasia is that he didn’t once mention personal budgeting.
(294字)
计时4
Contrast that with LearnVest, which opened for business in late 2009 with a focus on helping younger women. The company patterns itself in part after Weight Watchers and offers content, tools and a financial dashboard that pulls information from all your various accounts. It also conducts what it calls “boot camps” for people looking to make financial changes; 280,000 people have signed up for at least one so far.
LearnVest’s most intriguing offering, however, is something it introduced earlier this month: three tiers of access to financial plans of varying detail. Customers also get e-mail or phone access to live certified financial planners who can help put the plans to work. Prices range from $69 to $349 for varying levels of phone and e-mail access.
“We don’t think financial planning should be a luxury to anyone,” said Alexa von Tobel, the 28-year-old founder and chief executive, who is quick to point how warped our world is when you need a plan to build wealth but need wealth to hire someone to build you a plan, given that the advice can cost well into the four figures.
But you get what you pay for, and the biggest thing you do not get from LearnVest is investment advice. It’s not a registered investment adviser, so it can’t tell you what mutual funds to pick. Yet the company persists in calling its plans “core” and “complete” and mentions retirement planning when promoting one of them.
Sheryl Garrett, who runs a network of financial planners who charge by the hour and says she admires what Ms. von Tobel is doing, worries that LearnVest customers may feel misled in this regard. “Those terms are really, really dangerous,” Ms. Garrett said. “I would fully anticipate that some kind of investment advice would be given when looking at these plans.”
(303字)
计时5
"We are confident that the language used in our marketing, terms and conditions, and disclosures clearly define what is and is not included in each plan package,” the company said in a written statement. “We have received great demand in the last week from members across the country and have not encountered any confusion."
And Ms. von Tobel, who practically bursts with ambition in person, seems set on offering investment advice one way or the other, pretty soon. Until then, the company’s disclosure efforts sure seem as if it’s trying to wash its hands of any regulatory or other responsibility for the advice it offers up. “LearnVest is not a financial adviser, planner, broker or tax adviser,” it reads. “The services are intended only to assist you in your household and financial organization.”
Meanwhile, her fees are cause for suspicion; can she really pay her seven full- and part-time planners a good wage and turn out a good plan while charging such low fees? She said that she was confident enough in the profit margins she had built into the service that she was willing to take the same no-new-fee pledge (for 24 months in this case) that my friend Suze Orman agreed to in my column last week about her new prepaid debit card.
That said, Ms. von Tobel reserves the right to charge more for extra services beyond what her three plans include today. LearnVest might also build additional packages that might cost more than the current $349 top rate.
As for those planners, Stephany Kirkpatrick, trains all of them. And her newest hire, who is not working with customers quite yet as she’s sitting for the certified financial planner exam in two months, is Mina Black, who is 32 years old.
(294字)
自由阅读
LearnVest hired her from Merrill Edge, of all places, where she worked in the Bank of America branch closest to the Occupy Wall Street protests. “I have a lot of friends within this market,” Ms. Black said. “When they came to me as a Merrill Lynch adviser, there was only so much I could do with them.”
In recent days, according to Ms. von Tobel, the company has seen keen interest from customers. But there have also been a lot of Web site visitors from other financial services companies, including Merrill itself, that might have cause to worry about their younger customers being poached.
“The way we think about this is that we would love to have those clients,” she said. “Everyone is looking. We’re one big fishbowl.”

越障 (1101字)
China’s railways
Less express
What the country needs is a more efficient network, not faster trains
(摘自The Economist, http://www.economist.com/node/21542420.)
CHINA’S love affair with fast trains is gathering steam again. Undaunted by horrendous accidents and massive cost overruns, officials are planning further expansion of the country’s high-speed rail network. A new service has begun between the southern cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, nearly halving the travel time to 35 minutes. With trains capable of travelling up to 380kph (236mph), the service will eventually be extended to nearby Hong Kong. For those craving even faster speeds, CSR Corp, China’s biggest trainmaker, has unveiled a supertrain (pictured above) said to be inspired by the shape of an ancient Chinese sword. It should slice through the air at 500kph.
Supertrains are sexy. Politicians love to show them off. But to allow more Chinese people to get where they want to go at a reasonable price, then three less glamorous types of investment would yield better returns. China Rail, the state near-monopoly, is deficient in all three.
The first is safety. Standards are patchy. In July a high-speed train crashed near Wenzhou, leaving 40 dead. Officials attempted a cover-up, prompting a wave of popular outrage on the Chinese internet; even the state-controlled media wailed that development had become “stained with blood”. The mood has lifted a little following the recent publication of a surprisingly harsh official report that finds fault with both the design of the railway and its management. It calls for more than 50 officials to be punished. Deeper reforms are required, however.
The second neglected area is information technology. Chaos broke out this week when a new system for online ticket sales at China Rail became overwhelmed. The demand for tickets was completely predictable, as 2.8 billion rail journeys are expected during the Chinese New Year holidays later this month. But instead of enjoying a convenient alternative to queuing all night for paper tickets, as they have done in the past, customers were frustrated by hours wasted online trying to find out if they could actually get the tickets they thought they had paid for.
The third area is pricing. Fares have historically been tightly regulated and heavily subsidised. This began at a time when China Rail had a de facto monopoly not merely of rail but of inland transport in China. In those days, tight regulation was justified. But no longer, says a new paper by the World Bank. China’s roads are much better, and railways must compete with booming airlines, too.
Average incomes in China have risen tenfold since the current pricing and subsidy regime was put in place in 1982. Liberalising fares would allow services to be tailored to meet customers’ needs. In Europe, for example, rail operators offer a wide range of fares and discounts for those who book in advance, travel at odd times or bundle the fare with a packaged holiday—much as airlines have long done.
Poverty too could be better addressed by targeted subsidies, off-peak discounts and other measures. The evidence from rail liberalisation in North America and Europe suggests that such reforms could actually reduce fares. With a free hand, railways tend to squeeze more trips out of their trains, provide better service and make more money.
In short, China needs to rethink how it spends money on rail. That may happen. Although it did not receive the same attention as the supertrain, Sheng Guangzu, the railway minister, was recently quoted by China Daily, an official organ, as saying that there are now plans to slash the investment budget for railways to 400 billion yuan ($64 billion) in 2012—some 44% below the level in 2010. If that makes for a better rail network, then many Chinese will agree that speed is not everything.

China’s space programme
Rockets galore
The next decade will see China become a space power, as well as an earthly one
(摘自The Economist, http://www.economist.com/node/21542379)
BY ONE well-known (if fictitious) criterion, the purpose of a space programme is to boldly go where no man has gone before. China, however, has a different plan: to boldly go back where men have already been. Specifically, with the release on December 29th of an official space-policy paper, it has said it wants to send people to the moon.
The last earthling to leave a footprint on the lunar surface, Eugene Cernan, did so in 1972. He was (and is) American. According to the new paper—the first of its kind since 2006—the next print in the regolith is likely to be Chinese. The country’s experts have long discussed the possibility of such a mission, but this is the first official acknowledgment of a decision to proceed.
The document is, however, more than a mere claim to vainglory. It outlines a programme that will, if fully implemented, make China a space power equal to America and Russia.
One goal for the next five years is to improve China’s Long March rockets, the workhorses that launch its satellites. The Long March-5, in particular, is intended to be able to lift 25 tonnes into low Earth orbit. (Perhaps significantly, this is 600kg more than America’s space shuttles could manage.) Another part of the plan is to upgrade the country’s satellite networks. A series of high-resolution Earth-observation satellites is to be launched over the next five years, and by 2020 the Beidou global-positioning and navigation system, a set of 35 satellites equivalent to America’s Global Positioning System, should be in place. That will provide a boost to the command and control capabilities of China’s armed forces. Progress was also promised on Tiangong-1, China’s newly launched space station. And there will be unmanned flights to the moon, including sample-return missions, and manned orbital flights to test life-support systems.
The one place China does seem unlikely to be going, ironically, is the so-called International Space Station. This is an American-led venture and the United States seems reluctant to extend the term “International” to include China. That is partly because of paranoia about sharing technology with China, according to John Pike, the head of GlobalSecurity.org, an American think-tank. But it is also possible to detect a sense of pique that China is willing to do things (like going to the moon, and even just having a space programme that can put humans into orbit) which America, at the moment, can’t.
Ultimately, manned space flight is futile. All the scientifically and practically important stuff can be done by robots. Nevertheless, symbols count. If the next man (or woman) on the moon is Chinese, many people will see it as a sign that America has been surpassed again.

evamimi

几天没来立马从4-16到5-4了让我情何以堪...
速度：
01:39
01:28
01:17
01:18
01:17
00:29

越障：
05:18

本文极有意思，我看的那个认真
关于中国高铁的讨论

中国即将建设深广高铁，速度要到380+km/h，继7月动车事故之后，中国仍然要花大价钱投资在superrailway上
考虑的问题有三个：
1.安全
7月动车事故以及事后的处理，是否让天朝政府将高铁安全纳入眼帘
2.信息
天朝春运买票的悲剧，考验着天朝政府处理大量信息（应该主要指购票的便捷程度）的能力
3.票价
虽然天朝屁民收人上升了，但是票价是否能设置在一个合理的范围内
总之，虽然深广高铁的建设并没有向之前那样万众瞩目，但是巨大的投资是否能够做到更好捏？天朝人民将认同速度不是一切啊亲~

铁板神猴

really? MY bench. Speed for tomorrow.

输入法好了~~
2'04''
1'53''
1'39''
1'42''
1'46''

h14zpsn

楼主在加州啊~

xinnono

楼主在加州啊~

-- by 会员 h14zpsn (2012/1/16 4:45:38)

是呀~

xinnono

越障1:
though china's train had bad accident last year, caused N people died, china's still investing a lot in the rail industry. it's planning to extend the railroad to south china, and then further to close to hongkong. china's targeting new super train, which will have the top speed of 500kph.
other than speed, china will have to invest railroad in the following three areas:
1. safety. accidents happened, need attention.
2. IT. big demand for a seat during the new year season. instead of stand in line for tickets, people go online. but it's hard for the customers to find the ticket they bought online.
3. ticket fare. speed is up, but the price is not cheap. china should learn from other countries, giving discount at different hours, to people who buy in advance, and to people who buy tickets with some holiday package, as many airlines have been doing.
then summary.

Periwinkle

2'14
1'50
1'50
1'30
1'15

xinnono

越障2:
at the end of 2011, china had announced its space plan. usually people try to go place no one has gone before, but china decided to go somewhere others had. china plans to man-land on moon, which was done by an american in 1972.
besides this, china plans to upgrade its high-resolution satellite network. new rockets will be able to carry big weight into the lower orbit, far more than the US can currently do.
it seems to be a vainglory. but anyhow, symbols count.

xinnono

1'55
1'54
2'04
2'11
2'18

xeyyxzty

1'23''
1'21''
1'17''
1'27''
1'13''
好久没读了~看完完全没有印象~要加油了

3'14''
speed is not everything~
China will spend more money on rails in 2012, especially on the speed of trains.
there will be a supertrain~
but we should not neglect something also very important when it comes to speeding up
first~safe~温州动车事故~the government tried to cover it up but failed~there are errors in design and mistakes in management~
second~technology~online booking tickets also wastes time~
third~pricing~high speed means high price in some degree~industry of rails is a monopoly~
投资在铁路上的钱不意味着投资在提升火车的速度上~虽然速度的提升让人感觉很好，但是其它方面不能忽视