That assistance was so obvious, specially towards the end of the trading session. You could tell the stock really wanted to break below $38, but every time it touched that price it was nudged back up. Looked totally artificial and trigger-directed. Obviously the bankers didn't want to look foolish by having the stock close below IPO's price. That would have meant that they didn't do their homework. At least this way they can claim they priced it in the Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

Well, the founder and a bunch of other people that matter became uber-wealthy yesterday and there's still a chance that the stock may get its footing and actually climb. Sure, it's an expensive stock with the P/E ratio currently at 122, but Amazon's P/E is an astounding 175. Going by Amazon's measure, Facebook should at least be worth $55 per share.

For a quick verification I went down a list of stocks I follow and none even came close to that figure. Even Priceline with its unbridled share price growth, has a P/E of 34. The rest of them average somewhere in the teens.

Granted, Amazon is the number 1 online retailer, sells a nifty reader and a tablet, is a cloud computing pioneer, and is trying to break into the high fashion market, but 184?

Maybe if it were a startup with expectations of explosive growth in a year or two, that figure could be justified. But Amazon, at nearly 20 years old, is hardly a new kid on the block.

How is AMZN worth 13 AAPLs? - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech

Showrooming is how Amazon encourages its users to visit various physical stores, check out or even try out various merchandize and then go back to Amazon to order them for cheaper prices. In a sense Amazon uses the physical stores as showrooms for free and that creates an unfair advantage in favor of Amazon.

Sure, people can visit Amazon's site too to shop around but a page visit costs Amazon a tiny fraction of a penny while a shopper roaming the isles of a store, and specially inspecting and trying various items could cost the stores multiple dollars.

Target may feel good about removing Kindles from its shelves but that maneuver will be but a blip on Amazon's bottom line. Making the playing field fair will be tall order but for starters Amazon should be required to collect sales taxes on all items sold. If there's heavy resistance, then stores should be exempt from collecting sales taxes as Amazon is.

Paying sales taxes on Amazon purchases will not be popular, but if Amazon is allowed to push physical stores out of business through the unfair loopholes, that will result in a monopoly and there's little doubt that its pricing policy will not favorable by any measure once the competition is wiped out.

So these women sell sexual services. What exactly is wrong with that, if they're of age and not forced into it? Before you judge these women on moral grounds, consider how many wives would deny their husbands sex, if their men stopped lavishing them on holidays or birthdays.

A bunch of cheap and perverted men on a presidential trip tricked these women and stole services from them, and the women are the prostitutes? The real prostitutes are those pathetic men and the media for demeaning these women.

Open Channel - Prostitute at center of Secret Service scandal: 'I would have been able to get any information'.

There are some who have criticized her for exerting herself to that point and many label marathons as a dangerous sport. Yes, marathons could be dangerous and in some cases deadly, so what? Life is dangerous and eventually deadly.

As a fellow runner I admire this woman's conviction and her compassion to tie her love of running to a charitable cause. She died doing what she loved and supporting a cause she cared about. That deserves a ton of respect.

On one occasion I was overcome with heat just after a run and passed out. When I came to, I thought that this is how I would like to die, doing what I love, not battling advanced age or illness on my death bed. Nothing wrong with the latter, it's just not my preference. I'll be in the upcoming NYC marathon this year, and if anything, this young woman has given me more motivation to keep on running.

Still, one never knows when the extra storage may come in handy, so it's welcome news.

I can whine and complain about the new style but in the end it's Google's service and I'm using it for free. If I don't like it, I can leave, but not going to do that for now, I still like Gmail better than Yahoo and Hotmail. This attitude is not unprecedented at Google. When they took away the FTP feature of Blogger which was my blogging platform then, I complained too. In that case I decided to migrate my blog to Wordpress on my own site and have been happy with that decision.

What also ticks me off is that there are no themes to make Gmail look like its past version. That would have been so easy for Google but alas, there are no retro or classic themes. It's like Google wanted to wipe away even the tiniest connection to Gmail's past. For now the best choice for me is the compact mode with the high-contrast theme. That's neither compact nor high-contrast, but eventually I'll get used to it. Meanwhile I'm sure Google is already working on an uglier next version of Gmail.

While the paper commodity market (aka futures) can be useful in some instances, for example to insure companies against price swings or smoothing out price fluctuations, it's ironic that most of the swings and fluctuations are likely caused by the futures themselves.

I'm not sure what can be done about the commodities markets. The capitalist nature of the markets is always resistant to regulation and control, instead placing its confidence in the markets' ability to self-regulate and self-correct.

Maybe so, but can vital and essential material necessary for life be entrusted to the vicissitudes of markets that are easily manipulated and corrupted? The prices of oil, rice, wheat, oranges, and pork bellies are so easily relegated to trading pits and people that never come in contact with what they buy and sell. But what if that self-correction doesn't come in time?

Ban ‘Pure’ Speculators of Oil Futures - NYTimes.com

Amazon is squeezing everyone out of business. I don’t like that. They’re a predator. We’re better off without them.

Google's mantra of "don't be evil" should really be "don't be like Amazon". It cheats its affiliates, it dodges taxes, it's anti-competitive, it abuses publishers, and it does all that with the attitude of hubris and entitlement.

Amazon wants us to believe that it's all about "out with the old and in with the new." Nice try, it's more like "out with competition and in with monopoly."

Amazon’s E-Book Pricing a Constant Thorn for Publishers - NYTimes.com.

Disclaimer: I have disliked Amazon for some time.

The young can be excused for being too inexperienced to realize the consequences of over-sharing. But then there are simpletons who claim they don't fear sharing because they do nothing wrong. Bet they are the first ones screaming bloody violation of their rights the moment that data is used against them.

Cops can request a copy of your complete Facebook activity - Technolog on msnbc.com.