Quoted: Occasionally a bored business publication goes to the zoo, rents a monkey and pits him or her against a mutual fund manager. Lo and behold the monkey who doesn't know a beta from a bunghole beats a significant majority of the active managers. Barron's should probably create a yearly Monkey Roundtable. These journalists must be pretty good monkey pickers and should probably start a MFoF (Monkey Fund of Funds) charging 2% and 20%. We are the Third Chimpanzee and it seems as if evolution must have robbed us of our stock picking skills, but boy can we pick monkeys.

Quoted: So what is going on? Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett both hint at it in various writings and books; my favorite is Charlie's Poor Charlie's Almanack. Warren calls it de-worsification, or the fact that many portfolios get worse as more components are added to them. The theory which he pretty well proves via his actions is that the more holdings you have, the less likely you are to know a lot about any of them. He doesn't say it, but most managers also jump the median, the investment equivalent of jumping the shark. Buffett and Munger both hint at investing being similar to parimutuel betting.

Quoted: If you've ever struggled to play a file you downloaded from the hinterlands of the Web, you clearly didn't try opening it with VideoLan's VLC media player, a free, hugely popular, and open-source media player. VLC can open anything.

Quoted: The reason that societies ban pyramid schemes outright, instead of relying on the market to make them unprofitable, is that most people trust their intuition, and their intuition leads them astray. If you were to wait for the market to run its course on a pyramid scheme, the losses could devastate a whole country, as Albanians found out a few years ago.

Quoted: This Linux command-line reference guide, from The Official Ubuntu Book, can help when you're trying to remember the syntax for a specific Linux command. They should work with all versions of Linux.

Quoted: 8.1 percent unemployment in February, the highest in 25 years. We're now at 4.4 million jobs lost. Meanwhile, Speaker Pelosi's office updates The Scariest Chart Ever with the new data:

Quoted: If you’re in business school now and thinking about launching your company, I want you to ask yourself: Will you be ready to get down and dirty in the code if no one else can? Will you enjoy working long hours tweaking your SEO strategy if you can’t hire someone to do it for you? Will you be psyched to attend technical webinars about new services for the cloud?

Quoted: And do you have the technical background to make a difference?

Quoted: If the answer to any of these is no, then I highly recommend you focus on a path to funding rather than a path to profitability (topic for another blog post). Because the market can turn and you, the founder, need to be ready to adapt.

Quoted: Second, in the last two years I have gained a different perspective on journalism and the Internet – as the CEO of a company that spends lots on advertising. So I have seen first-hand from the other side that the idea that quality journalism can be financed by its website advertising is a mirage.

Quoted: A stupid frat-boy business idea is an idea that sounds attractive on the surface, but ignores the graveyard of failures before it. It’s usually hatched when a few guys get together, drink a lot, and end up talking about stuff that “should” exist. Sometimes the discussion gets entrepreneurial and they talk about a few ideas, which one of the guys will pursue the next day (when everyone else forgets about it).

No idea how big of a story this is going to become....

Quoted: Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.