Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
“Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself? What is its nature?” – Silence of the Lambs
So, if I’m reading this right, I’m not supposed to stress out the alligators? I’m not supposed to stress out the 400 pound armored killing machine? Okay, getting right on that.
I ran across a health article about heart disease the other day by an actual medical doctor, not an amateur Civil War surgeon like me (Motto: Splinter in your toe? Amputate.). Dr. Mercola’s theory was simple, that stress causes inflammation which causes the damage that kills you. Here’s a link to his article (LINK). Now this article was on a political site, so it wasn’t even related to the main focus of the site, but I read the article and immediately thought of you Internet. And also me, since I was looking for something to write about today.
It just might be that stress is a problem for you that actually might kill you. It also just so happens that I have a 2000 year old solution for you – all bright and shiny since I dug it up in my backyard last night:
“Your present opinion founded in understanding, your present conduct directed to good, and your present contentment with everything that results. That’s enough.” – Marcus Aurelius, Mediations 9.6
Okay, okay, you say, it’s John Wilder Talking About Dead Romans Again. And you’re right. Because they were ever so much more like us than you might imagine. Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic. And he was also Emperor. The book he wrote, Meditations, was just that. His thoughts that he meditated on. He wasn’t writing it for us, he was writing it to sort out his own thoughts and feelings.
Yeah, a Roman Emperor, able to command power few before or since ever had – King, President, Pope, and General all rolled up into one – had to work out his thoughts. This makes sense, because Marcus was the last of the Five Good Emperors (spoiler alert) and thought himself something of a philosopher. It’s like Vladimir Putin took time out of his busy schedule of wrestling bears while shirtless and dating Olympic gymnasts to attempt to deeply study and understand a philosophy of living that directly worked towards the quote from Marcus, up above.
But the quote above encapsulates in just a simple two sentences the core of the Stoic philosophy. Let’s look at how it can help you reduce stress.
“Your present opinion founded in understanding . . .”
If I were to take liberties, I would re-write that one, “Your present opinion founded in truth.”
Dealing with reality was the core of the philosophy – that’s why it came first. And if you are dealing with truth, you’re dealing in certainty. You’re not lying to yourself.
“your present conduct directed to good . . .”
So, you’ve studied and know the truth. Now you have the opportunity to turn your work towards the good. You’re doing the right thing, the right way.
“and your present contentment with everything that results.”
You did the right thing for the right reasons. You have purpose, clarity, and are taking positive action. And, the best part? You don’t have to win to win. Whatever happens, happens. If it didn’t work? You tried. Be content. If it did work? Great! This is a formula for a low stress life. The Stoics got to the core of it – things have meaning because we place meaning on them. We think that the world should be a series of results, instead of a series of truthful opinions and actions directed toward good outcomes.
What happens, happens.
I know this is hard, because every day when I try to divorce myself mentally from the outcome of an action that I’ve taken, and just be cool when it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to work out. The worst part? When I get upset about something that didn’t go my way . . . that didn’t even matter.
Perspective that I need to remember. Most things don’t matter – at all.
Back to Marcus:
Marcus Aurelius had a really, really awful son. Commodus. So bad Commodus’ wife poisoned him. So bad that Commodus’ best friend strangled him. So bad that they had Joaquin Phoenix play Commodus in Gladiator. Did Marcus have a clue that Commodus would be so awful? Probably. But he did everything he could. And his book has reached across centuries to us.
So, he did the right thing for the right reasons. And it worked.
After a fashion. To quote Marcus again: “That’s enough.”
John Wilder is not a doctor. Go see your doctor before you take medical advice from a blog written in a basement . . . .
“Everyone thought the agency was a joke, except the aliens . . . “ – Men in Black
Yes, this is gun camera footage from US Navy fighter planes. Yes, it shows something no one can explain. Yes, it’s the real, actual US Navy. Not pictured – Will Smith.
It’s the end of the year, so it’s the holidays. By holidays I mean, of course, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Penultimate Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day.
Okay, you’ve heard of most of those days, but Christmas Eve, really? Whose idea was that . . . ?
I kid.
We actually have a Wilder Family High Holiday, called Penultimate Day. Penultimate doesn’t mean the last (like many people do), it means . . . next to last. That’s one of the things I love about the English language – that there’s a word for “next to last” just like there’s a word for “throwing a person out of a window” – defenestrate.
Cool! But this isn’t a case of “Ask Mr. Language Person.” I’ll leave that to the MUCH older Dave Berry. This is just explaining our Wilder High Holiday.
It started (I think) in 2010 or 2011. The Mrs. had been having problems with her cell phone – at that point an actual Blackberry™ with a real, physical keyboard. We went shopping for a replacement on December 30. In order to get a new one from for/from our carrier, we had to drive nearly 100 miles. We went both to our carrier’s store and the local Best Buy®. We were frustrated by the deals, which were fairly incomprehensible unless you were fluent in a variety of Klingonese spoken only near Sherman’s Planet. And none of them were deals we liked.
We had a wide variety of their pasta (I think I had the one that mixed steak and fettuccini Alfredo) and joked about our frustrating search for cell phones. It was there and then, since it was December 30, the real and actual Penultimate Day that I proposed a new holiday, Penultimate Day. In order to observe Penultimate Day properly, one must:
Drive South.
Look At, But Not Purchase Cell Phones.
Eat Italian Foods.
I can see how religions schism. The Boy is adamant that the above list is heresy, and I could hear him conspiring with Pugsley that I should be cast down since the only true way to observe Penultimate Day was to:
Drive Two Hours South.
Look At, But Not Purchase a Sprint® Cell Phone.
Eat At Olive Garden®.
Perhaps one day after the apocalypse there will be a Council of Sheboygan where the Sheboygan Creed will come down that will indicate that to observe Penultimate Day, one must:
Look Southerly.
Have a race where one Sprints® and finishes second (Penultimate Place).
Eat an Italian.
While getting ready for our Penultimate Day celebration (which, for various reasons we had to celebrate late today), I looked at The Boy.
John Wilder: “So, with all of the crazy things this year, what’s the biggest new story of the year?”
I expected to hear something about Trump. Russia. Nuclear North Korea. Star Wars® being the worst movie of the year.
Nope.
The Boy: “Aliens.”
Yup. He got it in one.
Here’s the story: There were several United States senators who decided UFOs needed to be investigated. Since they were senators, they managed to get several million dollars appropriated. At the rate the Pentagon spends money, several million dollars would be less than they spend on attempting to milk mice with itty-bitty automatic mice milking machines to get enough mice milk to . . . well, its classified why the Pentagon needs mice milk. Move along, citizen.
Anyhow, they put together a program to monitor UFO sightings. In charge of this program was one Luis Elizondo. Here are a few of his recent quotes from Luis’ interview with The Telegraph:
“It was enough where we began to see trends and similarities in incidents. There were very distinct observables. Extreme maneuverability, hypersonic velocity without a sonic boom, speeds of 7,000mph to 8,000mph, no flight surfaces on the objects. A lot of this is backed with radar signal data, gun camera footage from aircraft, multiple witnesses.”
“. . . if this was a court of law, we have reached the point of beyond reasonable doubt.”
So, we have the person in charge of the government program researching UFOs indicating that we are seeing evidence of the amount and magnitude that indicates the phenomena is real. Not made up. Not swamp gas. Not little old ladies dipping too often into the cooking sherry or medical marijuana. Not even the Canadian Air Force (I hear their plane is working again, though).
This leaves us with several possibilities:
The evidence is faked.
The US (or Russians) have propulsion technology that allows them to do what no other aircraft in the history of aviation can do and no interpretation of our current physics can explain.
We are being visited by entities from off of Earth (in our solar system).
We are being visited by entities from another star.
We are being visited by entities from another dimension.
We are being visited by entities from another time.
That’s it.
That’s the full well of possibilities. There are no more. (taps well of possibility) Bone dry.
Let’s hit the possibilities one at a time:
Fakey Fakey UFO Bakey.
So, Luis and all of the Pentagon faked all of the data. Sadly, this is the most likely case. There is no reason that this would have happened, and plenty of evidence that past world leaders knew something was up . . .
The following is a quote from Mikael Gorbachev:
“From the fireside house, President Reagan suddenly said to me, ‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’” (source: Smithsonian.com)
Gorbachev agreed to a full truce and full cooperation in the event of an alien attack. Yes. This is a thing that happened.
I’m not inclined to believe this is a lie, but still the highest probability merely because it’s easiest to explain – not because it fits any facts.
We have the tech.
Attractive. It would be nice to think that we have this technology. But the energy and speed involved dwarf literally all known technology by orders of magnitude . . . .
So, to believe this we’d have to believe that we can create not only speeds outside of our ability, but also control inertia so that any pilots weren’t turned into paste through inertia. Let’s pretend that’s not the case – the structure of the craft alone would be distorted beyond all ability to fly. After the first turn. And if the USSR had this tech? We would all be studying Russian now, comrade.
This, oddly improbable as it is, is the second highest probability.
We are being visited by entities from within our Solar System.
The Earth is about 4.5 billion year old, and could have created several sets of intelligent species during the last 250 million years. Mars might have had a similar window, but several hundred million years earlier.
Could they have escaped doom and watch us, even now?
Not really likely. It would get very boring – more even than watching reruns. But it does solve one problem of the next possibility:
We are being visited by entities from another star.
Moving between stars is Hard. Capital H – italicized Hard.
Stars are really far apart. Not far apart like driving through Texas far. But far apart like driving through Texas twice with Alaska in the middle Hard. And there are no gas stations or rest stops and you just drank 20 Big Gulps®.
And the confines of the life spans we are familiar with aren’t compatible with interstellar travel. Traveling 1/10th the speed of light, (which is fast, almost 19,000 miles per second) it would take you 40 years to get to the nearest star – and we’re not sure there’s even anything interesting there. And it would take as much energy to get you going that fast as the world’s largest nuclear bomb – ever. Add in supplies? At least the annual electricity consumption. Of the world. Just for you.
So, if you could freeze yourself (if you could figure out how to do that) and then spend thousands of years getting here. Just so you could fly around nuclear bases and make US Navy fighter pilots nuts – “I don’t know what it is, but I want to fly one.”
Alternatively, there could be technology that would allow faster than light travel, even though there is no indication, ever, that there is any way to travel faster than light. But we didn’t think that heavier than air flight is possible for . . . almost all of history. Is there a physics we don’t understand? Certainly. Does it include faster than light travel? Unknown.
But what doesn’t require suspended animation and won’t die on a long trip?
Machines.
Here’s a (really short) story I wrote a couple of years ago. Enjoy.
It didn’t use radio.
No one knew how it communicated, but they couldn’t pick it up on any band that we knew. On the TV, they speculated that maybe it used some sort of “quantum” thing to communicate, but that didn’t tell me much.
It was on the moon.
At school, my teacher Miss Rachel told us that some person using their backyard telescope pointed at this crater on the moon – Aristarchus – had seen something one night. That had happened before, but this time the flashes, the glimmers, they didn’t stop.
It was moving.
It didn’t stop, either. By the time they wheeled Hubble over, they were able to see it in real time. There were clouds of dust, but that didn’t matter much. There isn’t any atmosphere on the moon, so the dust drops out real quick. Something was going on, but we had no idea what.
The rock that it launched hit Stanford.
The professor in the wheelchair used his machine voice to tell us that we were too close. Whatever it was up there was listening to us. It maybe always had been. And it was old, old as the whole solar system, maybe. It was a tiger trap, a wolf snare. Stanford was where the best AI research was, he said. Maybe they were getting too close. Can’t be too close now – Stanford is nothing but a crater, and about two million people died, according to the Internet.
It’s watching.
I guess it always was. I guess it always will be. Wonder if the dinosaurs got too close way back when? Right now, I’m wondering if this was a warning shot or a warm up.
Yeah. Sleep easy. Don’t worry about the Terminator under your bed. Or on your Moon.
This has a low probability. But . . . it’s at the same time nearly 100% certain. Aliens could easily create AI that could travel between stars. That tech is nearly available to us now. If there’s intelligent life it’s high probability it will develop to our level of technology given enough time. And if it took thousands of years? Who cares if your iPhone takes 100 years or 100,000 years to get to a destination? If designed well enough, it could prep and wait for . . . whatever it was programmed to wait for.
We are being visited by entities from another dimension.
Well, now I just throw my hands in the air. We do know that there are other dimensions, or at least are pretty sure that they are necessary to explain much of the physical phenomena we see around us today. It’s possible, likely even, that there are alternate universes out there. Maybe an infinite number. But what if you could go to one that was next door? That sounds really hard. But might even be easier to move between alternate Earths than moving between stars. We simply don’t know.
But if I could move between dimensions? I could see wanting to keep track of the neighbors . . . .
We are being visited by entities from another time.
This one is way weirder, and I consider much less likely. Why? Moving through time is probably way harder than moving through space. The Earth is moving around the Sun. So, if I tried to travel back in time? I’d also have to travel through space to the place the Earth is now, not then.
And the Sun is moving through space. It takes about 230 million years for it to do a lap – so it’s done over 19 laps around the Milky Way galaxy since it formed. And the galaxy is moving, too.
Sorry to disillusion you, but if Doc Brown sent Marty back 25 years in time? He’s die gasping for air in a DeLorean off in interstellar space, since the Sun is moving 30 miles per second in its orbit around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. He’d have been 24 billion miles from anyone who had ever heard Johnny B. Goode.
In space no one can hear your guitar solo.
This is the least likely scenario.
Regardless, it is “beyond a reasonable doubt” that something out there, came here.
Those are not my words. The dude who ran the program to study UFOs said this. Obviously he’s seen more than we ever will. I just hope he celebrates Penultimate Day in a non-heretical way.
“We’re doing him a huge favor!  And do you realize how extreme this is to go from no debt to good old fashioned American debt?  That’s the way to do it.  Plus, I’ve been envisioning someone else paying for this thing the entire time.†– It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Â
Yes, that’s stress. And you didn’t have to spend 8 hours in the car with it.
Stress. It will kill you. That’s what I heard on a commercial once. Or maybe it was the voices in my head. I forget. Anyway, probably it’s a good time to ask, “What causes stress?â€
Money – Yes. Not having enough money is amazingly stressful. At one point in my life after my ex-wife (PBUH) left (which made both of us happy) she handed me a plastic bag that represented my financial life. It took three months to sort out and at least be paying everyone something each month. And I realize how fortunate that makes me – some people go for decades like that. And it is the single most common stress – up to 75% of people are stressed out about money.
I feel really fortunate – I’ve not stressed out about money since (really) 2005. I paid off my last car in 2000. There just might be a connection.
If money is a stress – change your situation. The sheer discipline and communication required for a family to climb out of a debt pit might take years. But the day you write the final check to pay off the car. To pay off your credit card? It’s worth all the time you spent. And you won.
Lots of people have awesome plans, so there’s bound to be one that fits you. If you’d like my comments on a particular plan, email me or hit a comment. The plans all look the same on the basics:
Stop spending now.  Necessities only. Steak? That’s for future you. Current you gets rice, and Hamburger Helper® when you’ve had a really good week. Eating at a restaurant? That’s for rich people.
Get extra income. Work a second job.
Minimize transportation costs. Used cars you can buy with cash. Bikes if you can. Buy no new cars unless you have a million dollars in net worth (hint, when you get there, you won’t want a new car).
Get cheap, healthy hobbies, like hiking. Or hobbies that create income, like crafts you can sell.
Work – A little over two thirds of people stress about work. Sure. We’ve all been there. As a guy, for much of my life I’ve taken a significant amount of personal meaning from work, sometimes letting it be the thing that defines me. I go there, and I want to do something important. I want to go chasing dragons. I want to do meaningful things. I want to walk into a burning petroleum tank accompanied by two Chicago firefighters (spoiler, I’ve done that) and walk into stuff that’s just exploded to figure out how to fix it (spoiler, I’ve done that, too). But a significant amount of work we do today isn’t meaningful. And, based on observation? 60% of most people’s workday (assuming you’re in an office and not doing physical work) is wasted. Outside construction work, for example? I’m thinking about 40%.
TPS reports? Yeah, we’re doing a new cover sheet. Feel like your job has meaning now?Â
I’m not sure how girls feel, or even if girls have actual feelings (beyond light/dark or salty/sweet, I mean) but I get the sense that the meaning they get from work is most often secondary to the meaning they get from “being mom†or their social circle and social interactions.
So, if you’re not getting meaning from work, get it somewhere else. Be a kid’s sports coach. Brew craft beer. Find a passion to your life. Heck, if you’re really boring, you could even blog.
Economy – A little under two-thirds of people stress about the economy. This is borrowing future potential problems so you can worry about them today! With no interest charge! This was the most variable, but seemed stuck in third place. What would a stoic say? “Keep in mind you’re going to die, possibly in a painful and embarrassing situation involving a poodle, so the future economic indicators and the current price of bitcoin shouldn’t bother you.â€
If you’re stuck worried about what might happen? I can’t help you. You will have problems. They will get better. The economy will tank again, hard, during your life. The economy will grow again, massively, during your life.
Spend your energy improving you. And, be like me. When the stock market drops, microwave some popcorn and pull up a chair! It’s always fun to watch New York people panic.
Family Responsibilities – About six in ten get tied up about this. And at the point where I am in life, these take up about 50% of my free time. The Mrs. does more, but she also has more free time. But it really does seem like a vacation when you’ve had eight weeks in a row taken up by sports, Scouts or other kid activities and the ninth week you have NO PLANS FOR THE WEEKEND. Sometimes I don’t get out of bed until 1pm on Saturday. Delicious. I love having kids around. I also love time everlasting – time to play b-sides . . . and Blue Oyster Cult.
Okay, let me be the first to say, it looks like Blue Oyster Cult was right . . . according to our own Department of Defense. No, not about their beautiful 1980’s beards, but about not being alone. A future post on that, probably next month.
Relationships – More than half of people are upset about (romantic) relationships. Blah blah blah . . . people. I know.  I’ve been in a stable marriage for 20 years, so I don’t have as much as a foundation for discussing this. For half the people to be stressed about relationships? Yeah, sadly, that seems about right. Choose your mate well – and for the right reasons. Best case? PEZ® heiress. Worse? Johnny Depp’s ex-anything. Worst case? Johnny Depp.
The biggest driver of this has been a group of societal changes that have really messed up the way that men and women relate to each other, and not for the better. This will be a series of posts in the future, but I’m still working out the best presentation and point of view format.
Personal Health Concerns – A little over half of people are stressed about this. And not that many people are really sick. So, buck up, you hypochondriacs and stop worrying. The rest of you who are really ill? I’m with you, in spirit. Get better. I’m praying for you.
Housing Costs – Less than half are worried about this. Much less than half would worry if you just moved out of expensive places to live. Seriously. Don’t live there. Here’s a post on why your choice of location sucks (LINK). Never spend more than 15% of your income on housing costs.
Family Health – Less than half are worried about this. Math says that you’re worried about far more people than are worried about you. So, pick some family members to care just a little less about. Problem solved.
Personal Safety – This is pretty far down on the list of worries, but 30% get stress from this. About (0.4%) of the people in the United States are the victims of violent crime each year. If you’re that scared, I’d suggest you move from New York City if it bothers you that much. Move to an area that’s high in Republicans – since gun crime is lowest there. Oh, wait, stay in New York City. I’m sure it’ll get better. It’s not like you’d bring the same attitudes and values that made your location unsafe when you moved here, is it?
“We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact.” – Fight Club
Depression related to debt? Unpossible!
My Mom went through the Great Depression (she was pretty old when Ma and Pa Wilder adopted me, nearly fifty) as a child, so she told us kids ALL about it. To hear her tell about it, the Depression wasn’t all that Great from her perspective, but no one wants to talk about the Mediocre Depression. One of the ways that she was impacted by the Depression was her relationship to physical objects that might be of use someday. Tinfoil that you used to cover last night’s casserole? Hey, you might be able to use that again. Aluminum pie tins? They could be cut to make a great decorative lantern (no, they couldn’t, but Ma kept them anyway). They call this “hoarding” now. Pa even built a building to hold Ma’s stuff.
The reason for her obsession was understandable. During the Depression, many times her family had to do without basic necessities. Our family was well off by comparison, but Ma Wilder never got over the times when she had so little. We wrapped our Christmas presents one year in the comics section of the Sunday paper to economize. Food? Never thrown away. It fed us, then the leftovers went to the dog. During my life as a kid, we never spent a cent on dog food. Pa Wilder eventually got her to throw away old TV Guides® (kids – it’s a tiny part of the Internet that describes “what’s on TV” that they used to print out and send to us every week).
Perspective: Pa Wilder was the president of a bank at that time. We were NOT hurting for cash.
And I recall that Grandpa McWilder plucked a fiberboard suitcase for me out of the closet so I could pack my things to come and visit him and Grandma McWilder every weekend (LINK). The suitcase was missing its original handle. Grandpa took an old leather belt and cut it and wrapped it as a handle on the suitcase. It was (probably) better than the original suitcase handle. Whenever he needed something, his first trip was not to the store, but to his shop, where he would craft whatever he needed out of wood, leather or metal.
And Ma Wilder followed her dad’s example. Her crafts were legendary, making a passable statue of Ben Franklin out of a wine bottle, some sand, a sock, some blue felt and grey yarn and some copper wire. Our family was not in need of Ben Franklin statues, but Ma Wilder liked to keep in practice, since at that time the US was also tied up in a great period of inflation – it looked like the wheels were coming off of the great capitalist experience called the United States. Interest rates to buy a house were all in double digits. Even the Treasury notes were yielding 18%+.
What this did (looking backwards) was trim all of the non-productive investments from the economy, and I do mean all. If you could stick your money in a bank account and make 12%, you’d do it. Why risk your money in a business venture, unless that business venture was really, really good?
So what business ideas got money at that point in time? Only the best. And those great ideas had to have great teams behind them. The crappy ideas were laughed out of the bank. These high interest rates also depressed the stock market. Why buy stocks when you could buy government bonds at 15%?
This high-interest rate environment led to a recession, but what followed the recession was the greatest peacetime economic expansion in history – the stage had been set by winnowing away the crappy companies.
As time went on and as the economy expanded it also changed as small companies grew to enormous size and replaced large ones that didn’t serve a purpose in the economy anymore (MicroSoft® grew, Montgomery Ward™ exploded).
The interest rate was then lowered.
And lowered. And lowered.
The idea behind this (from the standpoint of a politician) is that cheap money encourages business. Which encourages hiring. Which is one way of using the people’s money to buy their votes.
And, it’s a great idea. Companies borrow money. That makes the banker happy. People get jobs when the companies use that money to invest in stuff, like buildings, stores, employee PEZ® dispensers, Johnny Depp’s ego, factories (once upon a time we made stuff here) and oil wells.
In a functional economy, some of these businesses flourish, and some fail. The flourishing businesses more than compensate for the lost incomes (and bad loans!) of the failures. This is healthy in an economy – bad ideas, like my Internet pizza by the slice company (no, we don’t deliver, you have to pick it up) fail. Good ideas, like Amazon.com, flourish.
But as you can see above, we got to a point where the graph went . . . flat, like Johnny Depp’s career. And flat as in zero. Also like Johnny Depp’s career.
So, if high interest rates force businesses out in a Darwinian competition that only the strong survive? What happens when interest rates are low?
Well, we live here in Smallville. Smallville is . . . small. It had some hotels built during the 1950’s and 60’s. And one obviously from the 1970’s. One might have been the late 1980’s. And one last hotel built around the late 1990’s. Most nights nobody is in any of these hotels. I’d bet it’s generally a 10% occupancy rate or so. Low. In a nearby town, you can buy one of the 1970’s vintage motels with 50+ rooms for $200,000 or so. Yes, you read that right. Annual income for the thing is about $120,000, and it probably nets out at $40,000 a year or so after costs. Sort of expensive for a $40,000 a year job.
But right now in our very lightly visited (and way off the beaten track of any busy highway) town they just built a brand new hotel. That might be 15% full on a good night.
Why?
Because money is historically cheap. Like 5,000 years of history cheap. Save it? Never! The investment only has to yield more than the interest rate of the loan to be profitable.
Cheap money is like gasoline to the bonfire that is our economy. To start the fire, a little is needed. But to really get the party going? Toss on more gasoline.
When there’s a competing economic system or discipline from organized investors, this won’t work. The confidence of the economic system would be lost, and interest rates would go up as people fled the money system.
If there’s an alternative. But today? There really isn’t a credible alternative to the dollar (the euro is too new, the yuan and yen are too closely held, and every other currency on the planet (except the Swiss and British) is generally more valuable as holiday wrapping paper than as actual money.
Without this constraint of an outside competitor, politicians did what politicians do. They opened the spout to the money supply. Yay! We can borrow and spend ourselves into infinite economic prosperity, right?
Not exactly.
A little debt adds a lot of GDP. It funds great ideas like desktop computers to massively increase business productivity. It funds control valves and robots and data systems that automate pipelines and car factories.
The big ideas get funded first. They change the world.
Eventually you get to funding ideas like “bigger cupholder” in a Camero®. You get less return, less profit with each dollar invested.
That’s shown pretty well on the following graph – it relates debt to GDP (GDP is like the country’s salary – it’s all the money the country makes). The first bits of debt (earlier on) produce the greatest growth in productivity. The last bits of debt? It shows that they aren’t horrible, but in reality this graph reflects consumers getting out of debt as fast as they can during the Great Recession – individuals don’t take on more debt when they’re not sure they’ll even have a job at the PEZ® factory next month. Unless you’re Johnny Depp, in which case you just buy $30,000,000 in castles and some albino bears.
This is called diminishing returns – the latest debt doesn’t add as much to the economy, unless you really need a castle filled with albino bears and can sell tickets. The later investments are worth so much less than the previous investment. Eventually? You get debt without GDP growth, so you pay interest on the PEZ® that you ate last night. Forever. Your bonfire? The wood has burned all away, and the only thing that keeps the fire going is the gasoline. And it makes a much smaller and more dangerous fire.
Yes, eventually the added borrowed money swings your income downward, as you pay interest on investments that produce nothing.
This was like another time in history. Just wish I could remember what it was.
“I’ve come back. Give me a drink, Brother Kipling. Don’t you know me?” – The Man Who Would Be King
Kipling in 1895. Good heavens, what a handsome mustache! No wonder the English ruled most of the world – any group that can create such handsome whiskers deserves to run the place.
I first heard this from a friend in 2002 or so . . . there were several of us that would get together to talk about ideas and concepts, and one of the participants told this story:
There is an old Chinese story about a farmer. One night, there was a terrible storm. The wind blew so hard, it opened up his corral, and his horses got out.
“Bad luck!” said his friends.
“Good luck, bad luck. Who can say?” replied the farmer.
The next week, his horses, lonely for home, came back. But while they were loose, they got in with a group of wild horses. The wild horses came home with them. The farmer now had twice as many horses.
“Good luck!” said his friends.
“Good luck, bad luck. Who can say?” replied the farmer.
A wild horse is good to no one, so the farmer’s son began to work on breaking the horses. Most of them were no problem, but one particularly fierce horse bucked the farmer’s son off. The farmer’s son broke his leg.
“Bad luck!” said his friends.
“Good luck, bad luck. Who can say?” replied the farmer.
The next week, the Emperor, having decided to go off to war due to a very dangerous threat against the empire, marched with his troops through the farmer’s town. They called up in a draft all of the able bodied young men to accompany them to war. The farmer’s son could not go – his leg was broken.
I think you can see where this is going.
But the story does stop there (thankfully!), though you see that it could keep going indefinitely, probably ending up with the farmer’s son constructing an evil robot army to enslave the human race that ends up saving us instead by stopping the invasion of the mole people from below South Carolina. Oops! I think that’s the plot of the sequel to Pacific Rim.
Source: Uproxx, by porkythefirst
Despite my firm belief in the power of self-determination, even I’ve got to admit that sometimes you just have no idea how an action will impact your future – what will the result be of a decision you make today. Opposite effects aren’t unknown.
For example, brush your teeth every day in order to keep them longer, right? Well, at one point they used abrasives in toothpaste in order to scrub off that yellow tint that evolves over time. Unfortunately, over time you weren’t brushing your teeth – you were sanding them down to nubs.
That’s an extreme example, but here’s another:
You work really hard at your job. You’re smart, and come up with innovations to make things work a little bit better. Your boss notices, but so does his boss. Rocket ship to the top, right? I mean, at least a promotion?
No. Your boss is lazy and scared that he’ll lose his job. The last thing they want to see is you breaking the curve at work. He is now focused on . . . . getting rid of you. Again, the opposite of what you’d expect, and the opposite of what your work merits.
Which brings me to this:
If
by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too.
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make a heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
I am an unapologetic Kipling fan. And in this poem is more good philosophy than you’ll find anywhere. Well, anywhere but here.
At a certain point, you realize that you’re not going to be a trillionaire. Or even a billionaire. You have to settle for what you’ve done and not feel regret that you’ve not transformed the world entirely. In reading history, it wasn’t just one of the best poets ever to live who understood that, but also, over a thousand years earlier people understood it.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Pretty cool statement. From? A frigging Roman Emperor, Caesar Marcus Aurelius. I’ve mentioned him before. His book, Meditations was something he wrote for himself. He didn’t write it for other people to read to see what a smarty-pants he was. No, these were his private thoughts.
And as Caesar, he had more power than most people on Earth have ever had. And he still worried about stuff. He worried about doing a good job. His back hurt him. He worried that he wasn’t being a good dad (he wasn’t – his son was horrible and was destined to be played by Joaquin Phoenix – a curse of history).
But Marcus, the unnamed Chinese farmer, and Rudyard all had it tuned into the same thing – we can’t understand exactly what the outcome will be. We can only go out there and do our best – break the horse, fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds of distance run, or do our best to run the most complex civilization ever devised.
So, today’s your day. Go out there, and run as hard as you can. Maybe, just maybe, one day you can have a mustache that will rival Kipling . . . .
“I told him that I had a daughter and he told me he had one, too. And he said, “Never give up on family.” And I didn’t. I took his advice. My God, the universe is random, it’s not inevitable, it’s simple chaos. It’s subatomic particles in endless, aimless collision. That’s what science teaches us, but what does this say? What is it telling us that the very night that this man’s daughter dies, it’s me who is having a drink with him? I mean, how could that be random?” – Breaking Bad
The Mrs. took this picture during a particularly pernicious rainstorm. They tell the kids to stay inside during a thunderstorm. Meh. If I get hit by lightning I’m buying a lottery ticket.
So, this is the 100th post. I think the best way to deal with this is to skip the structure of wealth, wisdom, and health for this post. The discipline of structure is nice, and I’ve learned a lot of things by doing it, but it’s nice to vary from that structure from time to time to be spicy, like taco-flavored kisses. So, here are some random bits of fog from my brain. Some of these may end up as posts at some point . . .
If someone is cloaking a concept in really, really confusing language, they’re lying or trying to cover something up. The desire to create an impression contrary to truth requires that they twist the language to the point of ripping. Using bigger words and confusing, academic phrasing are just camouflage for the lie. For example: At a dinner party, a gentleman was talking about overpopulation. His solution? Reduce the population by a billion or so through “caloric restriction.” He was confronted by another guest . . . “You want to starve a billion people to death?” Yup. Really happened, according to the article.
If you depend on someone to give you money or things so you can live, they control you. This is why welfare is control. This is why parents get to make the rules. This is why bosses can be arbitrary, and the Hollywood predator gang could stay so safe, for so long.
There is no objective morality without a belief in a higher power. Without that, we’re all just meat and cells.
Children need enough privacy to grow, enough structure to grow well.
Youth is rarely wise, but it might be smart. My brother, John Wilder (yes, we have the same name – just different parents – my family tree looks like an inkblot) talked about how his company had hired a 30 year old CFO.
Me: “He won’t last a year.”
Bro: “He’s smart.”
Me: “Yeah, but he’s got a LOT of growing up to do.”
The guy flamed out in a year.
I don’t know why wisdom costs us so much pain and difficulty in life. Is it because, like divorce, it’s worth it?
Liars lie. The only thing that stops them is when they get caught and something tragic happens, and mostly not even that. I’m not sure why they do it.
Cowards are the most dangerous of men. They will quickly befriend you even when you don’t deserve it. They will desert you at the first sign of an angry mob. And they’ll join the mob.
Being close to a coward is bad. But you can always count on a coward being a coward and acting like a coward. Having a liar close to you is worse. They might tell you pleasing lies for a time, and you might forget their nature.
You are the average of your five closest friends. Choose wisely.
People say, “Kids tell the truth! It’s natural.” Oops, I meant people who never seen an actual child say that. Kids lie as soon as they can figure it out, as any parent can tell you. No, I didn’t eat that cookie.
Between the ages of 10 and 14 are the only times you really have to parent. Before that, it’s teaching. After that, it’s supporting. Something happens between the ages of 10 and 14 that determines whether or not the kid goes bad. They’ve learned how to inflict pain and but haven’t learned empathy or kindness or responsibility – they’re a group of snotty acne-covered psychopaths. This is why middle school age children are such miserable creatures, and once you win the battle as a parent you can hit the autopilot once they hit high school.
Underarm hair grows back. A reputation doesn’t. In other words? One drop of snot ruins all the eggnog.
Always take an offered breath mint.
We waste a lot of time. (I include me in that.) Ben Franklin said, “If thou loveth lifeth, wasteth noteh time, for that is what life is made of.” And a big part of that waste is in pursuits that produce . . . nothing. I’ve been accused of being a “hillbilly” for fixing a faucet rather than buying a new one. In my defense, my name isn’t Billy. And I could fix the faucet for $5 and an hour of time, and some cussing and bruised knuckles. And I know how to fix a faucet now! A faucet that was last manufactured in 1980.
Buy new faucets instead of fixing them.
You can’t reason with someone who’s acting out of emotion. And you ESPECIALLY can’t reason with a crowd of people who are rioting. Fight reason with reason. Emotion with emotion. And rioters with force and/or Optimus Prime®. Thus the following is the best thing to wear to a riot (LINK) (and no, not getting paid for this link):
Reason is something we use to convince ourselves that what we want is wise and, well, reasonable.
Cultures aren’t all equal in the output they produce. Some cultures produce much more violence, less wealth, and much less freedom, and some even create all three negatives at once (Venezuela).
I invented a gravity cannon. It consists of two huge counter-rotating cylinders of the matter from a neutron star (this stuff is denser than a Kardashian at 900 pyramids of weight for a single teaspoonful). Thick cylinders, but hollow. I think it would only require a dozen or so neutron stars to build. To shoot it, you have to jam the inner cylinder into the hollow outer cylinder. The result is a vortex of gravity that might stay stable enough (if the cylinders are rotating fast enough) to slam into your enemy – an invisible ring of gravity death travelling at them at whatever speed you slammed the cylinders together at. It would also create a massive black hole and a huge gamma ray outburst that would roast a turkey from 100 light years away. Is it impractical using a dozen solar masses and the approximate energy put out by our galaxy in any given year for one shot at an enemy? Possibly. But maybe I need a government grant to study it? We wouldn’t want Russia to have one and us not.
There is bacteria growing on the space station. On the outside of the space station. While it’s in space. I sense a 1950’s B-Movie: The Fungus from Mars.
Tip well. Show gratitude when it makes sense and when you can afford it. Give a hard working waitress a $10 tip on an $8 dollar bill? They’ll mention it for days. Where else can you make someone so happy for so little?
Hope you’ve enjoyed the first 100 as much as I have. See you Monday!
“The only difference between Señor Chang and Stalin is that I know who Señor Chang is.†– Community
This duckbilled dinosaur could have been a kitten, if only it had been loved.
When I start a blog topic, most of the time I know where I’m going, and, generally where I’m going to end up. Most of the time. Sometimes I end up learning something completely unexpected that changes my conclusion. Sometimes I learn that we, as humans, are only scratching the surface of how really, deeply weird the world around us is. This post is deeply weird. Hang, on, buckle up and enjoy my favorite health post ever . . . .
Trofim Lysenko was born in Ukraine in 1898. Apparently the baby name books in Russia includes the name “Trofim†even though to me it sounds like a fitness product advertised on an infomercial at 3AM on The Discovery Channel® – get fit with new Trofimâ„¢! Frankly, Lysenko sounds like a bathroom cleanser – so poor Trofim was destined for failure, right?
Would you buy a used economic theory from this man? – photo of Lysenko, public domain, via Wikimedia
Trofim studied agriculture, and, apparently came up with a bunch of ideas about how plants could better grow around the time the Soviet Union was starting up. His theories included the idea that cows that were treated well would give more milk, and that plants could cooperate somehow to make more wheat.
Joseph Stalin LOVED Lysenko. His theories dovetailed exactly with Stalin’s Communism – the importance of genetics went to zero. With proper nurture, you could create a True Soviet Man – people weren’t just created with equal rights – they were BORN equal. If you could create the right conditions, everyone would BE equal, just like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and me. Oh, wait, that’s observably false. Brad Pitt could never get my SAT score, even if he studied. Clooney? Let’s see him go bald, huh?
Unrecorded in the West is the fact that Stalin’s giant head was carried in local parades by men in white suits up until 2003, when it was retired to a farm outside of Minsk where it now lives with gently treated cows and monkeys. – photo of MegaStalin, Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R78376 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Lysenko singlehandedly destroyed genetic research in the Soviet Union for forty years, as well as being responsible for the jailing (and sometimes execution) of everyone who disagreed with him. Certainly no one in the West would do that about people who dissent scientifically . . . right? Anyway, Lysenko set the standards for political correctness in research, and yes, the Soviet Union is where the term Politically Correct came from – the idea that ideas themselves couldn’t be discussed unless their politics were in vogue at the moment. And if you brought up politically incorrect ideas? Gulag for you, comrade.
Mao Zedong proved that this point could be taken to extremes when the Pakistani ambassador gave him a case of mangoes. Mao didn’t like mangoes. So . . .
In the afternoon of the fifth, when the great happy news of Chairman Mao giving mangoes to the Capital Worker and Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team reached the Tsinghua University campus, people immediately gathered around the gift given by the Great Leader Chairman Mao. They cried out enthusiastically and sang with wild abandonment. Tears swelled up in their eyes, and they again and again sincerely wished that our most beloved Great Leader lived then thousand years without bounds … They all made phone calls to their own work units to spread this happy news; and they also organized all kinds of celebratory activities all night long, and arrived at [the national leadership compound] Zhongnanhai despite the rain to report the good news, and to express their loyalty to the Great Leader Chairman Mao.
August 7, 1968 People’s Daily
Yes. The Chinese people worshiped (for 18 months) mangoes so they didn’t disappoint Chairman Mao. And it had lasting consequences for some.   A dentist was executed for saying the mango touring his village looked like a sweet potato.
Don’t believe me? A lot more about it here (LINK).
But, we were talking about Lysenko.
He killed genetic science because of the laughable idea that everything was nurture, not nature. We do know that there are lots of things that are totally genetic: intelligence, likelihood of being criminal, eye color, hair color, blood type, et cetera. For example, you can stunt a smart person’s intelligence through poor nutrition. But their overall capacity to be intelligent is about 70%-80% genetic.
DNA stores lots of information, but at a cost. DNA is information dense, but it is looooooooooong. Each cell has about 2 meters of DNA if you stretched it out. Take all of the DNA in your body and lay it end to end? (Do NOT try this at home, it’s kinda messy – if you’re going to do this, at least use the garage.) There’s enough DNA, laid end to end, which would be roughly diameter of all of the planets in our Solar System. That includes Pluto – we’re gonna take it back.
DNA is long. And since our cells aren’t 2 meters long, something happens to the DNA in your cells. Rather than tossing the DNA into the cell like The Boy and Pugsley throw extension cords onto the garage floor, the cell has little cord winders that wind up the DNA so it’s not all tangled up like Johnny Depp’s finances. So, the DNA is tightly wound around the cord winders. In my garage. In your cell.
But it turns out that the cord winders themselves (I know this analogy is getting a bit stretched) are very much impacted by your behavior. And, the scary part? Potentially your mother’s behavior. Scarier? Even your grandmother, and we all know what a tramp she was.
I recall reading a story about a Native American tribe in Arizona that experienced famine that killed off a significant portion of the tribe. The result? A bunch of really, really fat Native Americans two generations later. My theory had been that the people with the skinny genes had all died out, and that the remaining Native Americans had all had genes that were really, really efficient with calories. And liked Twinkies®. Makes sense? Sure.
But then? Epigenetics. Turns out that this phenomenon was repeated in Sweden, where in some really northern town, named “Rejëllyfaarnøørthernplåcedüde†there was a periodic starvation, because they didn’t live where any food was, except seals.
All the kids from Rejëllyfaarnøørthernplåcedüde got fat. Really fat. Turns out the operative theory is that the environment that the mothers grew up in changed not the DNA but the cord winders and how the DNA was wound up. Because of the changes to the cord winders (which are really enzymes) certain parts of the DNA were exposed that changed the way the cells work. This is entirely necessary, because when you’re a baby, your eye cell needs to know that it’s an eye cell and not a lung cell, otherwise you could see your guts and have to remove your glasses to breathe, which would make dating . . . complicated.
The end result of this epigenetic change was it made the kids more likely to burn off energy slowly – which is a great adaptation if you’re starving.
But it looks like there are a whole host of other adaptations that may be driven by epigenetics: addiction, depression, anxiety, fear conditioning, and that’s just the bits we’re beginning to understand. Yes. What scares you might be related to what scared great grandma. One experiment with mice shocked the feet of the mice when a cherry blossom smell was introduced. The mice babies from the mothers . . . who had never been shocked . . . were scared when they smelled cherry blossoms. The impact on the baby mice from the experience of their mothers was transmitted . . . without genetic change.
So, Lysenko was not totally wrong.
The health implications are stunning. Can there be a pill that you take that switches “on†a weight loss enzyme? Maybe. What other conditions can we change? Can we make Kardashians attractive? Sadly, no.
But beyond that, it may go to explain weird things . . . motherly love? The baby’s DNA is floating around inside the mother (you can determine a baby’s sex through a blood test of the mother, so, the DNA is there). How does this impact the way a mother bonds with a baby?
What about surrogate moms?
What about all of the things that we can change? We can’t make ourselves smarter through epigenetics, but . . . can we make ourselves better?
Like I said – this is weird territory, and we have a LOT more questions than answers. And, fortunately, we have plenty of mangos to worship. Just don’t compare epigenetics to Johnny Depp’s sweet potato.
“No, not unpopular, they just have a more selective appeal.” – This is Spinal Tap
Okay, there’s a time when your passion of throwing big rocks in the river should be followed. That’s whenever you’re at the river.
Pop Wilder was a banker. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, John Wilder is the banker’s son, summers in Maine, winters in Switzerland. No. Summers in the forest cutting firewood in Colorado, winters in Colorado on snowmobiles fifty miles into the back country. Okay, winters were better than Switzerland, at least since the CIA stole the secret of the Swiss “hot chocolate” technology and weaponized it in Swiss Miss® cocoa packets.
On occasion, especially after a few bourbon and waters, Pop Wilder would get a bit melancholy. “John Wilder, you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up, but don’t be a banker.” Although by any measure, Pop was successful. And he was passionate about his work. He left every morning before the Sun came up to open the bank. He got home two hours after the bank had closed. He unlocked the place and locked it back up. He never took more than 10 vacation days in any year, and I never saw the man take one day off due to being sick. (An aside: I’m stunned that’s the first time I came to that realization – I haven’t taken a sick day off since 2000. Wonder where that stubbornness comes from?)
Pop Wilder, you see, wasn’t the “snort cocaine off a stripper’s butt” type banker, but rather the “small town banker that drives a car to work that’s eight years old.” I think he might have not abused his power enough . . . I’m not sure. What’s the use of having power, if you don’t abuse it?
What always bothered Pop Wilder the most was when he had to explain to a person who wanted to borrow money that he wouldn’t lend it to them – he didn’t think the loan was based on sound collateral, or the borrower’s income wasn’t enough to cover their living expenses plus their debt. He was proud at the end of his career that he’d never had to foreclose on a single home. To him, the act of lending money was a moral event – you didn’t burden a borrower with more debt than they could pay.
That didn’t make the borrowers who he turned down happy. They were (understandably) upset that Pop had crushed their dreams, but in the process, he’d done them the biggest favor of their lives. In a weird way, his “no” had saved their financial future from the siren song (read The Odyssey or watch Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou (LINK) if you missed that reference) of their dreams and passions . . .
One of my favorite things to see is the garden variety successful person who’s being interviewed. Let’s pretend it’s me, since I’m rich and semi-famous:
Oprah: “What’s your secret, John Wilder? How did you get to the pinnacle of success and yet maintain those superb washboard abs?” (Oprah bites her lip. Perhaps I should have not worn such a tight shirt.)
John Wilder: “I followed my passion, Oprah. My passion is all consuming.”
Fade to Clip of Me Synchronized Snowboarding Off the Top of Mount Everest Accompanied by an Actual Yeti.
You’ve heard that, too: successful people telling you to follow your passion. I probably heard that two dozen times between high school and college. Follow your passion. Invariably it was by short salesmen who were in suits while I was wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt. And I was (really) thinking about going skiing or checking out the girl of the week. My passion did not and does not involve being an old man in a suit.
Hopefully you haven’t done followed your passion, because your passion is stupid, unless you are the ghost of Steve Jobs. Steve, you can follow your passion. Only you. Namaste.
I’m sorry to tell everyone else a simple fact: your passion is stupid. And my passion? My passion is stupid, too. Maybe even really stupid.
The Mrs. and I have been married roughly since the invention of dirt. We’ve thought about opening our own businesses several times, and even produced a business plan or two. All of them have been based on things we like, things we are passionate about. We’d discuss, fine tune, get the spreadsheets ready, and then decide if we were passionate about it. As you’ve hopefully read in the fine pages of this blog before – the best deals are the ones you don’t do. We’ve passed on most of the deals.
But one in particular we got all of our ducks in a huddle, got a small business loan application together, and went off to the local bank to ask for a small business loan with our spreadsheets and our plan and our proposals and estimates and projections. I didn’t go to the meeting – I was at work. But The Mrs. walked in, and the banker didn’t blink an eye before he got to his response. “No. Not now. Not ever. Please pretend we’ve never met.”
The Mrs. was upset when she got home. I shrugged, and we decided to carry on without opening that business. About a month or two later we read in the local newspaper about how someone had opened a business that was nearly exactly what we’d planned to open up. They did a detailed story on the place, nearly a full page, with color pictures. Amazing amounts of free advertising.
That business closed up before six months had passed. The banker who said “No” had saved us $55,000 of loaned money.
Oh. I get what Pop was doing. Rather than helping people live their passion, he was saving them from their passions.
The people who say that you should follow your passion are generally not passionate about the thing that they’ve done, whether it be roasting coffee beans or creating BookFace®. No. They’re passionate about success. They’re passionate about their business because it brought them success. It’s like pretending you like Tootsie Rolls Lollipops® for the outer candy shell. You don’t. You like the center.
And that’s the secret of success.
I am passionate about playing the guitar. I love to do it. Unfortunately, my guitar is as good as Johnny Depp’s personal hygiene or money management skills. So, of course, I devoted my entire career to playing bad guitar? NO. I suck at guitar. I will never be good at it. But . . . I do math and science-y things really well. I have the intuition on that stuff that Eddie Van Halen has for meth guitar. Maybe not that good, but I found that the combination of the math stuff and the science stuff and the planning stuff and the intuitive grasp of physical systems and processes (with a dash of normal human empathy) pops me into the top 0.1% (hint, that’s the only place the money is). That combination allows me to win where other people would lose (in certain situations). And in one instance the application of those skills allowed an IPO to go through that netted a company a billion or so dollars. Yay me!
And winning in situations like that makes me passionate about combining those skills. So, am I following my passion? Well, I’m following my success, which is a lot like following passion. Except following my passion would make me bankrupt because my guitar is only slightly better than my singing.
So it comes down to . . . what are you good at? I mean, really good at? Not what you’re passionate about. Let’s face it: you can be passionate about drinking bourbon, WWE, MMA or anthropology, but none of those things are helpful unless you’re part of the 0.1% AND you can figure out how to win/make money with that skill combination.
Can you make money with it? Most things you’re good at don’t pay any (really any) money at all. You’re in the top 0.001% of the world at trimming nosehair? No. Next. Your skill should translate into actual income. What does the best person in the world at what you’re good at make? Can you live on 1/10 of that?
Okay. You’re good at it. It’s a rare skill. You can make money at it. Good money. Now your challenge? Get better at it.
Most people take a decade or more of really hard work, over 10,000 hours, to become world class at a skill. Generally, the longer they execute the skill and the more they work at it, the better they become, peaking in their forties or fifties. These aren’t physical skills – those peak about 24, and take a big nosedive once you pass 30 or so, and if your skill is there, strike quickly – age will pull you away faster than you anticipate. What I’m talking about are mental skills that are honed by experience.
Passion? No banker will lend on that. They’ll lend on experience, skill, and excellence. Be passionate about those and the world will allow you to snowmobile in Colorado in winter . . .
People will call you lucky. Just smile and ignore the sweat.
“You know what it is?  You’re always attracted to someone who doesn’t want you, right?  Well, here you have somebody who not only doesn’t want you, doesn’t even acknowledge your right to exist, wants your destruction! That’s a turn-on.†– Curb Your Enthusiasm
Behold, the chainsaw of Creative Destruction. This one will take care of those pesky optometrists!
There were vast periods of human history where . . . absolutely nothing happened. If they had a newspaper, it would be blank for decades at a time. Our Neanderthal (many of us) and other cave-dwelling hominids (all of us) ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years with little or no innovation, and that innovation that did show up was not all that exciting. My bet is that most of them were fairly stupid, and it took generations of stupid people not having kids until humans were smart enough (and eloquent enough) to make an attempt at civilization.
Even with that first civilization, things changed only very slowly. A thousand years of Egyptian dynasties (the pharaohs ruled Egypt for three thousand years) could pass and no one invented Cool Whip®. You an Egyptian forward in time a thousand years and the only thing that had changed was that the music the kids listened to these days was too loud and just plain awful. To put how very stagnant these civilizations were in perspective: Jesus is closer in time to the people living today than He was to the time of the construction of the pyramids. This statement will be true for another FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.
The Egyptian empire lasted a really long time, and since nothing changed, like a televised baseball game, it seemed even longer. But then? The Romans began to change the world, with a much shorter period of dominance. And things keep changing faster, and faster. More perspective: an 85 year old has lived through 37% of the history of the United States. An Egyptian 85 year old would have lived through less than 3% of the total length of the 3000+ year span of the pharaohs.
But scientific progress undid the pharaohs in what economist Joseph Schumpeter would call “Creative Destruction.â€Â Schumpeter originally derived Creative Destruction from his readings of Marx (Karl, not Groucho). Creative Destruction is predicated on technological innovation coupled with entrepreneurial spirit in an effort to make money by disrupting previous economic structures and replacing them with new, more efficient structures. An example: Live performers were replaced by records. That were (briefly) replaced by 8-Tracks. That were replaced by cassettes. That were replaced by compact discs. That were replaced by .mp3 files. That were replaced by . . . streaming music. Each innovation replaced and (mostly) eradicated the previous iteration, making music more easily and reliably available. Unless you have our mobile phone service:  streaming doesn’t work so well, since our wireless phone provider uses a series of wire coat hangers where we live to broadcast signal.
On Friday (LINK) I wrote about the coming Optopocalypse™. This is another example of Creative Destruction in action. Records destroyed local bands – you could hear better at home anytime than the local talent. mp3’s destroyed record companies. And 75%+ of optometrists will be looking for work soon enough because technology will have made most of what they do irrelevant. And, outside of their families, the “Destruction†part of Creative Destruction results in greater value to all of society – more people will be able to see, since there’s hardly anyone that won’t be able to afford the low cost of the EyeQue®.
Another example is Zenni Optical (LINK). I got great glasses from them (via my new prescription from EyeQue™). I was testing out that prescription, and wanted to get some glasses. I put my order in, and was even allowed to pay via Amazon, so they didn’t get credit card information. I ordered my glasses on a Thursday, and got them the following Saturday (nine days later). They were perfect in every way! I then put in a new order for three more pairs. Total cost, including express shipping? About $200 for the three pairs, with the best lenses they offered, plus extra slip on sunglass attachments (and bifocals).
I ordered them on Saturday, and tracked progress. By Sunday they were complete.
Here’s the shipping:
Origin Scan CN 10/25/2017 9:49 P.M. Order Processed: Ready for UPS
Anchorage, AK, US 10/25/2017 3:26 P.M. Brokerage released the package. It will be processed through a clearing agency before final release to UPS.
Anchorage, AK, US 10/25/2017 4:46 P.M.
Departure Scan 10/26/2017 2:54 A.M.
Arrival Scan Louisville, KY, US 10/26/2017 5:32 A.M. Departure Scan
10/26/2017 5:51 A.M.
The glasses hit my hands about 2pm that day. And, just like the first order, they were perfect.
If you look, it appears the package goes back in time a bit, but remember about the whole date-line thing. Regardless, I’ll go with the story that my glasses came from the future.
Well, they did come from China. Express, for $18.
This is certainly a great way to add value, and it (by definition) changes the price that many people will pay for glasses. It’s Creative Destruction on a grand scale – Zenni will make billions. But it cuts off another revenue stream that will add to the Optopocalypse™. If you look online, optometrists are out in droves complaining about both EyeQue™ and Zenni®, some of which take the form of reviews that I think are less than honest.
And the optometrists are also fighting by trying to make innovation illegal – at least innovation that hurts their profit margin and their monopoly over information about your eyes. They typically will call the bill a “patient protection act†or something similar, so it makes it sound like it’s really for the benefit of the patient. I’m picking on optometry not because they’re unusual – they’re much the same as everyone else who is facing having their entire life and livelihood replaced by a disruptive app or Silicon Valley startup.
These regulations and laws actually end up hurting the economy – they make it more likely that companies like Zenni manufacture outside of the United States and not subject to US or state law rather than creating an eyeglass factory in . . . Kentucky, or Illinois. I’m not unsympathetic to the 55 year old optometrist – and I don’t have a good answer for what he should do. Becoming a roustabout in North Dakota in the oilfield is probably not a reasonable answer. In times past, however, people displaced by technology and Creative Destruction have found new things to do.
Maybe they could ascend to that highest throne of prestige and power.
“There’s only two things I hate in this world: people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.” – Austin Powers in Goldmember
Read this blog or this man will shoot that car.
People can be stupid.
People in groups are almost always stupid, and they can remain stupid until they do quite a lot of damage.
Let’s take a trip off to Europe (unless you already live in Europe) and back in time to 1636 A.D. (unless you already live in 1636 A.D.) and review the price of . . . flowers???
The Dutch (at least I think that’s what they call the people from the Netherlands, but you can call them Sven or Maria or whatever suits you) in 1636 were a seafaring bunch, who made money trading all over the world and had colonies in North America, South America, South Africa, India and all those islands between Asia and Australia. One thing that a Dutch guy brought back (and I don’t think this one was lost) in addition to the most efficient way to remove hair and lint from your bellybutton was the tulip.
In a parallel development, the Dutch were big on trading stocks in companies, like the Dutch East India Company, or in commodities like sugar or pancake mix. The markets were sophisticated. In 1632, you could buy sugar for delivery in 1633. This was nice if you wanted to guarantee your sweet tooth, but you could also trade that contract to somebody else for a higher price if they decided they needed the sugar to make PEZ® or Fruit Pies. Nowadays we call those “futures” contracts. Yup, the Dutch were doing this 400 years ago.
But a slight change in laws made those contracts different. The buyer could buy the right to buy sugar. The seller had to fulfill the contract, but the buyer had no obligation to buy it. It was his or her (yup, plenty of Dutch female speculators) option to buy the sugar. This is what is now known as “futures options.” And you could buy them on . . . anything.
Even tulips.
In November of 1636 something must have broken in the minds of a batch of silly dead (now, not then) Dutchmen and women. They started bidding up the futures options contracts on . . . tulips. And various colors and varieties became more valuable, especially one that that had a virus that changed and made a tiger-striped pattern. They looked awesome. But one tulip bulb went for the same price as ten years’ worth of a typical laborer’s wages. That’s $250,000 or $300,000 today. For a tulip bulb.
There appears to be little record of people going broke in big numbers when the bubble burst, but certainly there were some people who came out a bit poorer, and the entire reputation of traders was ruined. Not that it was that great in the beginning, but Jan Brueghel the Younger painted the fine painting below, Satire on Tulip Mania, depicting the traders as monkeys. If you look closely you can see the nifty tiger-striped tulip in the left corner. Myself? I’d pay much more for a monkey that traded futures options contracts, even if he did a lousy job.
Yes, it’s public domain, being nearly 400 years old, unless Disney® wants to try to make a movie about it….
This was the first recorded financial insanity of this type, and it was fairly benign.
What other manias occurred during history? Well, lots. But researching them all would take quite a lot of work, and far more wine than I have in the house right now. So, let’s just look at the ones that I want to talk about:
Salem Witch Trials – 1692 to 1693. Twenty people executed when a bunch of kids played a prank. Or there were real witches. This is still a bubble, but it was just teen angst magnified a zillion times. Fortunately, they had awesome wood floors, like in the picture below. Are those oak? I’m so jealous!
The South Sea Bubble – in 1720, the price of shares in the British South Sea Corporation went from £100 to £1,000 (the £ is the funny symbol that British people use for money). Sounds like a great deal, right? Well, the records seem to indicate that the South Sea Corporation spent most of their time issuing stock and very little time on actually, you know, making money. So why did so many people (including Isaac Newton himself) shove all of their spare £ into a company that just made stock? Isaac Newton is reported to have said: “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.” Apparently Newton couldn’t manage £1,000-£100=£ Below is a public domain picture by dead artist Godfrey Kneller of Isaac Newton when he was in his “looking like the guitarist from Queen” phase.
Radium – 1920’s to late 1930’s. Everything had radium in it or was named after radium. Drinking water. Watches with glow in the dark faces. My college mathematics classroom (yeah, after I took Calculus I, Calc II, Calc III and Differential Equations in the same room? Enough radioactivity to power all of North Korea and a lot of corpses that are technically nuclear waste. I have a straight razor case from the era. You guessed it: “Radium Straight Razor Company.”
1920’s Stock Bubble – The classic. Fueled by post World War I enthusiasm and the rise of new technology (radio, the automobile, phones, and PEZ®) people went . . . insane. Everybody was investing in the stock market, including a shoeshine boy, who famously gave Joe Kennedy (father of President John F. Kennedy) a stock tip. Kennedy then decided if shoe shine boys were involved in the stock market, too many people were in the stock market. He then proceeded to smuggle a bunch of liquor and manipulate a senator or two, then lunch.
Hula Hoops™ – Watch The Hudsucker Proxy to see exactly how this was invented. Okay, I kid. But the Hula Hoop® hit when Hawaii was just becoming a state, and there was a large mania about the place, even though it had been a part of the US for nearly a century. 100 million were sold within two years, despite the US population being only 180 million at the time. Sales fell off when people were finally told that there wasn’t a limit on the number of times a hoop could be hooped prior to it wearing out.
Johnny Carson’s Toilet Paper Run – in 1973, Johnny Carson (a late night television host back when there were only three channels and who was very popular) noted that there was a toilet paper shortage, but was referencing commercial grade toilet paper. He used that to make a few jokes. (Toilet paper is just plain funny). People took him seriously, and pretty soon there were shortages and rationing of consumer grade TP in several cities. Shortly after the commotion, Carson told his audience he was joking. People in the US could again poop without fear.
Pet Rocks® – A rock. As a pet. For money. Broke sales records, until people figured out that they’d paid $3.95 (plus tax) for a rock.
Beanie Babies™ – A really cute doll that spiked in popularity in the late 1990’s. The creator of the company decided to make special “limited runs” of a cheap, plush doll that looks like a dog’s chew toy. Middle-aged women fought each other in the aisles for these as well, but it was the 1990’s so they all had greasy ham-hair like Kurt Cobain. After a brief spike of popularity, most Beanie Babies are worth . . . dog chew-toy value. There are a very few that might be worth some change, but don’t hold your breath.
Dotcom Bubble – The thing I wrote about Beanie Babies™ above? Just replace “Beanie Babies®” with “stocks” and “Middle-aged women” with “greedy but stupid baby boomers.”
Next Mania – Well, maybe next time I’ll be in first and make all the money…
And financial markets work exactly the same way, but with less dog chew toys. People want to seek a return on their money, and when there’s enough money just lying around, stupid investments get made. And some of those investments pay off in a huge way, especially for those that got out early. The Dotcom crash? Plenty of people sold as it was on its way up, and made huge amounts of money. The housing crash? One guy predicted it and put in place investments so that he made hundreds of millions off of the crash.
But sometimes what looks like a bubble . . . isn’t a bubble. It’s a trend, and a real trend based on sound, rational economics. The guy who was sure that the smart phone was a fad (me), the guy who thought that credit cards would never catch on with a rational public (my dad), and the guy who thought that Europe would be plunged into a horrific war (my great, great grandfather). Oh, wait, the last guy was right.
And sometimes there are bubbles, and sometimes there are trends. One person working to figure out the difference is a geophysicist named Didier Sornette, who has an amazing Wikipedia page (LINK), and looked at the mathematics that surrounded earthquakes and compared it to stocks or other financial assets in a bubble. Turns out that the bubble was analogous to a really stressed mass of rock. He made some predictions after the Dotcom bubble, and was right enough that he got hired to just study financial crises in Zurich (LINK). Tough duty.
When you think a deal is too good to be true, or you see a group of people jumping on a bandwagon, think twice (cough Tesla® cough). You want to avoid the Hula Hoop® Witches™ without Toilet Paper.
This blog is NOT stock advice, I don’t own any positions in anything mentioned, and don’t plan on any for the next month or so.
