Category: Wealth

Investing The Oligarch Way

“Even for billionaire playboys, three o’clock is pushing it. The price of leading a double life, I fear.” – Batman Begins

I tried to find a good joke about carpentry, but nothing wood work.

Most of my life I’ve lived in places that were sparsely populated.  On Wilder Mountain during the school year, the nearest kid between the ages of 5 and 16 was about 8 miles away.  Ma Wilder would tie a pork chop around my neck so the dog would play with me.

I kid.  The solitude was nice.  I hiked by myself.  Some people “summered” there, meaning they had enough money to turn a season into a verb.  That was nice because that meant the same kid would show up year after year and we would go fishing or biking.

Right now, I have probably a hundred neighbors within a two-mile drive.

By many standards, that’s sparse, too.  For me, it’s just on the edge of “crowded” but since my daily commute consists of one stoplight that’s generally green, I can make it work.

You want scary?  North Korea has a missile that can hit New York City.  If it can make it there, it can make it anywhere.

The trend, though, isn’t small towns like Modern Mayberry.  The trend is amazingly large and increasingly dehumanized cities.  I was watching the zombie movie set in South Korea, Last Train to Busan, with Pugsley last year.  It was really Seoul-crushing.  I decided to use the Internet to find pictures of what South Korea looks like when zombies aren’t chasing mass transit.

I was shocked by the density.  It turns out that South Korea has an average population density of 1,326 people per square mile, which is even more zombies per square mile than that German zombie movie, Shambler’s List.

Sure, you say, South Korea is only half of the population density of the city of Houston.  But that’s the urban part, and not including the ‘burbs.  The country of South Korea is, on average, nearly twice as dense as heavily populated suburbs.  On average.  That includes forests and rice paddies and zombie storage lots, er, cemeteries.

Despite the obvious inferiority for personal defense when the Moderna©-Pfizer™ Vaxombies inevitably show up (That means it’s working), cities continue to draw people to them.  The biggest reason, I suppose, is jobs.

Ever think that the evil aliens from They Live were a lot nicer than the human leaders we have today?

Having never grown up in that density, when I lived in a Houston ‘burb that had a population density of around 800 people per square mile.  I always felt lost and anonymous in that number of people.  With the flow of traffic, a five-mile jaunt to the supermarket could take 15 minutes or more.

Why did I do it?  My job.

Before writing this, I wasn’t sure how long this could go on.  A quick DuckDuckGo® search quickly told me the answer – Houston.  Certainly farther than Houston density:  one slum in Mumbai has a population density of 720,000 to 870,000 people per square mile depending on the source you choose to believe.  That’s a square (roughly) of six feet by six feet for each person, which includes streets.

36,300 people would be mashed into my five-acre lot.  I hope the ones that get assigned a space in the lake can tread water.  At heart, I’d prefer an Italian slum to an Indian one – I think I’d do okay in a spaghetto.

In other news, I now count as a family of three.

I’m pretty sure that mankind wasn’t designed in any way to live in conditions like that.  One article (which attempted to make the slum sound a lot less like a war crime) still mentioned the smell.  I guess in India none of the houses had base-mints.

Again, a slum in India isn’t a how-to manual for human habitation on Earth, but that’s a major trend in the United States today.  When I joke that they want you to live in the pod and eat the bugs, keep in mind that’s more than a joke to the powers that be.

See, I’m not kidding.

The solution, of course, is to own actual land.  Bill Gates and the other members of the Oligarch Class certainly have figured that out as well.  Bill recently bought 242,000 acres – enough to hold nearly 1.8 billion people by Mumbai-slum levels of packing ‘em in.

Although Mr. Gates is recently become exposed as über-creepy, no one accuses him of being stupid, except for the time when Melinda Gates told him, “Bill, this marriage isn’t working.”  Bill responded, “Well, let’s get divorced, remarry, and see if that doesn’t clear up the problems.”

The land rush is on.  Generally, these booms are followed by busts.  But when one of the things that is likely going to go bust is the currency itself, well, a small fluctuation in land prices doesn’t seem to matter much.  It must be a good deal, too.  Nearly half the land in Scotland is owned by just 432 people.  That might be why people are unhappy there – I hear even their flag is cross.

They want you to have a Land Rover® and a landlord.

Over time, the Oligarch Class has managed to create a pretty good way to hang on to wealth for generation after generation:  massive tracts of land, art, and precious things.  The Oligarch Class isn’t stupid – they keep the land and art in trusts so it moves from generation to generation seamlessly.  They never own it, but they control it.  I imagine that it would be even to imagine some of the assets tied up in trusts by the Oligarch Class.

Art?  If you have art in your family for 100 years, well, it’s bound to be worth something.  If you have it, you can sell a Picasso when revenues are down, and buy a Monet or a Manet when revenues are up.  And jewels and gold are great ways to move lots of assets in a small package.

The nice thing about being in the Oligarch Class means that no one ever gets to tell you to live in the pod and eat the bugs.  Heck, they’ve already got every need covered.  I thought about trying to set up a charity for the Oligarch class after the last land bust, but then I realized they already had one:  the United States Treasury.

Is it possible to generate this type of wealth?  Sure, some people have done it.  It’s not easy, and something tells me that behind most amazingly large fortunes are amazingly large crimes.  But after a few centuries?  Most people just forget about the crimes as you marry your kids off with other members of the Oligarch Class after they meet at Harvard™.

Getting in with the Oligarch Class is tough – entry level isn’t measured just in billions, it’s also measured in years.  Newly minted guys with just a billion or so need not apply.  They have to have standards to keep the little people out.

I’m not a hermit, at least I’ve never heard anyone call me that.

For now, at least, I live in a part of the country where I have instant and unfettered access to hundreds of acres of land to hunt on, shoot on, or just visit.  It may not be Wilder Mountain, but it’s much closer to that than Houston was for us.

Now, did I leave that Picasso in my other chalet?

What Advice Would You Give A Kid In 2021?

“My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors® last night. I guess it’s pretty serious.” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

What does a German scientist say when he runs out of beer glasses?  “Nein stein.”

One thing I’ve done with my kids is try to give them the best understanding of the world as I know it.

The problem with advice is that it assumes a set of conditions where the advice is valid.  If you’d assume that learning how to balance a checkbook would always be useful, sending you back to 1066 or forward to 2036 would probably convince you otherwise, though the Normans might find your penmanship amusing.

The most common set of conditions that we assume is that tomorrow will look a lot like today.  That works pretty well most of the time.  Heck, there are entire millennia of human history where tomorrow looked exactly like today.  “Uhh, Grug make rock into pointy spear, kill mammoth, maybe get Mammothlix and Chill with Samantha.”

A second set of conditions is that today’s trends will continue.  This is similar to the first one, but involves, well, trends.  One trend is that electronics keep getting more advanced, and the pace of technological change keeps increasing.  That seems logical, but . . . well, look around.  It’s not like we’re getting any smarter, so there’s a limit there.

There are times when neither of these things is true.

Hobbits may not be smart, but they are well rounded.

A few years ago (has it been that long???) The Boy and I were discussing his future college plans.  There were two good state schools he was seriously considering.  He was also considering either Annapolis, West Point, or Colorado Springs.  His swimming looked much like a swan attempting to change a tire on a 1993 Buick® without a lug wrench.  I mean, it’s possible, but there is a lot of unnecessary motion involved.  And feathers.  Feathers everywhere.

Part of me was hoping that The Boy would be interested in one of the military academies.  He had the grades and the athletics, and certainly the love of country.  He rejected them.  Perhaps he saw then what I see now, that the United States military is being very quickly absorbed into the Leftist collective.  Or maybe he just decided that the military would keep him from his ambition of starting his own cryptocurrency and buying Paraguay.

Who can say?

I hadn’t anticipated the change in the rank and file of the military, so quickly.  The military has had issues over time, but I expected that the Oath would matter more than the occupant of the White House.  Everything I see now points as evidence that the Left is moving exceptionally quickly to politicize the military.  The idea is simple:  drum those out who don’t conform.

So, me telling him to go to a military academy would have been very bad advice.

I guess if you’re hungover at West Point, the advice is to use breath mints, like Tac-Tics®.

What other advice doesn’t ring true in 2021?

How about, save money and buy a house?

That has been wonderful advice since, oh, 1945 or so.  Before then, I assume, you wandered into the great frontier and hewed a cabin out of logs.  Oh, wait.  The Great Depression caused a previous mini-mansion real estate boom to collapse.

My bad.

But does it make sense today?  In many urban areas, would it even be in the realm of possibility for a kid today?

Not in San Francisco.  The median home price there is now $1.4 million bucks.

  • What about Miami? $385,000.
  • Minneapolis, a city I regularly make fun of? $325,000.
  • Salt Lake City? $485,000.

If I do the math, just the payments on a $450,000 loan are about $2,000 a month.  Add in taxes and insurance and you’re probably closer to a monthly payment of nearly $3,000?  At that point, even an average home in Salt Lake City is out of reach of most people under 30, unless of course, they were bringing home in excess of $120,000 a month as a family.

Possible?  Sure.  But at that level of debt payment, there’s very little margin for error.  Mom loses her job making PowerPoints® about (spins wheel) “Overcoming Group Synergy Issues In Dispersed Work Environments” and now the entire family is just a month or two away from knife fights with bums over great overpasses to put a box under.  Well, I guess that’s still real estate.

I tried to offer 0% loans for houses, but there was no interest.

Oh, that brings up other old advice:  save your money.  I consider savings great.  It’s a moral thing to do, and virtue should always pay off in the future.  Unless, of course, the Fed® is printing money as fast as the computer can add zeros.  Then, what you saved soon becomes worth less, and eventually worthless.  Spend it as fast as you can on pantyhose, PEZ® and elephant rides because tomorrow you won’t be able to buy a used disposable razor with that cash.

So, there’s another value inverted.  Honestly, I’d rather suggest that my kids save money in Bitcoin over the dollar.  At least the Fed® can’t (yet) print Bitcoin.  If I were to give my kids advice, I’d say to stock up on all the silver they can.

At least silver holds value.

If the werewolf was clueless?  He’d be an unwarewolf.

Or it has in most times and places.  After the Romans left Britain, though, silver was pretty much ignored because the concern was getting food after civilization collapsed.  Newsflash:  you can’t eat silver.  Yes, that’s a very cherry-picked example, but there are circumstances where even precious metals cease to be precious.   Except for the One Ring.

What about education?

I used to be a “if you can go to college, go to college” guy.  I am not any longer.  College is like any other business proposition.  If a degree has a positive rate of return?  Go for it.  That’s probably limited to a few select degrees in 2021, especially with the price of college.  It certainly doesn’t include any degree that ends in “studies”.

If someone else is paying for most of school, it probably is a good idea to choose a degree that’s in demand, that can’t be done online by someone from Mumbai or Shanghai at $0.43 per hour and has a credential that an illegal alien can’t (yet) get.  Remember, if a degree can be replaced by a machine or computer program or an Internet search?  Don’t do it.

But if it’s not going to cost a kidney or require later “repayment” to gentlemen from extortionist rackets, like organized crime people who make student loans.

Then, go to college.  Otherwise?  Get a job that requires a credential that an illegal can’t (yet) get.

The best advice I’d give today is this:

  • Be adaptable.
  • Be useful.
  • Be optimistic.
  • Learn skills, and understand that learning never stops.

What skills?  Figure out a strength that helps people and earns your keep.  Then get good at it.  Then learn a skill that complements it, a next-door neighbor, if you will.  Then?  Repeat.

Here’s my example:  I always tested well and performed well in language stuff, umm, things.  But for most of my career it was just a complement to the other work I did.  Since I’ve been writing these blog posts I think I’ve gotten a bit better at writing, and much, much better at editing.

Why could the Bible have used a better editor?  Well, to make a long story short . . .

The big result is that I can now tear through an amazing amount of communication-stuff at work with little effort.  They don’t seem to like the bikini memes I keep throwing into emails, though HR keeps laughing.

The world has changed.  Bigly.

Not all of the Millennials and Zoomers are lazy.  The advice Pa Wilder gave me was tried and true and lasted for decades before he shared it with his odd Gen-X son.  Mostly, it worked, and worked really well for me.

But society has moved on.  And, after my study of history, I cannot see the trends we see before us lasting for more than a decade.  Herbert Stein (Ben’s dad) said it very well:  “If something cannot go on forever, it will, Bueller . . . Bueller . . . anyone . . .  stop.”

I see before us several things that are near their stopping point.  In reality, everyone before the Millennials and Zoomers had it easier.  No, not easy.  Easier.  We worked hard.  We put in the time.

But the old rules still worked.  Now?

Not so much.

Think about it:  what is the best advice you’d give a 15 to 30 year-old kid in 2021?

Cassandra Says: Look Out Below

“Doing so might allow the energy to escape, with potentially catastrophic results.” – Lost

What do you get when you cross the Titanic with the Atlantic?  Halfway.

There is a rumor in The Mrs.’ family, that her Great-Grandpappy, the banker, warned all of his clients to pull their money out of the banks before Black Monday on October 28 of 1929.  According to the legend, he was a hero because he saved that money for all of his friends.  I heard that as an old banker he was sad, because he always drank a loan.

I have no idea if he saved all of that money, but the legend serves a purpose:  it confirms that, in most people’s minds, that there are wise people who can see trouble coming.

I can do that, too.  When The Mrs. chucks a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew® at my head, well, I know instinctively that if I don’t duck I’ll end up with a crescent impression on my favorite noggin.  The Mrs. generally chooses stew instead of soup, because when she checked the pantry we were out of stock.

Pattern recognition and seeing trouble coming was something that the dead Roman philosopher, Seneca did fairly well.  Like a good Roman, he took a stab at it.

In one observation, Seneca noted that it’s really hard to build things up:  whether it be getting into good physical shape, or building a house or creating a civilization.  Purposeful, positive growth is hard and takes time.

Where did Brutus get his knife?  Traitor Joe’s.

But if I want to ruin my health it only takes half the time as it does to get into good shape.  A modern American house burns down so quickly that firefighters tell me that they don’t even try to save them.  If a Goodwill® store catches fire, they stay far away – they don’t want to inhale second-hand smoke.  If you want to destroy a civilization?  Well more on that later, but they evaporate much more quickly than it takes to build them.

Here’s what Seneca said:  “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”  Actually, he said something in Latin, but when you quote Latin it sounds like a doctor is trying to pick up on a lawyer while gargling vodka.

I came across this concept while reading Italian chemistry professor Ugo Bardi’s blog (Cassandra’s Legacy) back in 2011.  That initial post I read back then is here (LINK).  Since that time, Dr. Bardi has written two books and now bases most of his blogging on that one philosophical statement.  Some people ride that one pony and ride it hard, and it looks like Ugo has found his.

There are some other things I’ve noticed that are related to this concept:

Generally, things go on until they collapse.  Is it easier to tear down a system and build a better one, or keep the old one going?

Duh.  People don’t like change.

They aren’t mentally wired for change.  During the few times in my life when electricity was out for extended times at the house (think hours or days), I find that I’ll walk into a dark room and absently reach out to turn on the light.  My rational mind knows that the power is gone, but I expect it to be there.

I hear at this blackout, people in New York City were stuck on escalators for hours.

When things collapse, there is generally a lot of energy built up in the failing system.  People try to prop up the system with all of the duct tape and baling wire they have.  This rarely makes things better.  Filling a failing dam up with more water doesn’t make the flood that comes after the dam fails better.

It makes it more catastrophic.

Failures like I’m describing tend to have the following characteristics:

  • They are cataclysmic. The end state isn’t predictable.
  • They happen all at once. As systems fail, they trigger the failure of related systems.  And so on.  It’s a chain reaction.  To go back to the flood analogy, these failures scour the landscape, ripping out useful and useless features alike simply because of the amount of energy that was released.
  • The more energy that’s stored (i.e., the longer we push back paying the piper), the bigger the destruction and the worse the hangover.

What’s the difference between a dam and a sock?  Almost everything.

Examples of this sort of near-apocalyptic societal transformation are actually abundant in history.

  • The French Revolution. In just a few short years, the French monarchy was deposed and replaced by a ruling junta of Leftist animals.
  • The first United States Civil War. It went from zero to armed combat across half a continent in just a few months.
  • The First World War. The Russian Revolution.  The Second World War.
  • The collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • I could really keep writing this list until dawn, but at some point I need some sleep.

The penalties are tough for misgendering in France. 

Just because the initial change happens in an instant, doesn’t mean that those changes will resolve in an instant.  The French Revolution started in 1789.  If you date the unrest that started on that day, you could pick the date that Napoleon went into his final exile as perhaps the end.  That was in 1814.

A girl born in 1789 in France would have been, perhaps, 25 then.  She would nearly certainly have been married, and probably would have her own child by then.  When we study history we encompass entire generations within the span of a paragraph, though some say that Moses started history when he got the first download from a cloud onto a tablet.

As I said, The Mrs.’ Great-Gramps apparently saved the day for his depositors because he looked around and saw what was going to happen.  True or not, it sometimes happens in reality.

Michael Burry did it, and more than once.

Who is Michael Burry?  Well, he’s the guy who shorted the real estate market in 2008 and made $100’s of millions of dollars for himself, and nearly a billion for other people in the process.

Christian Bale was movie him in The Big Short.  Burry just might have an idea or two about the economy.  What’s his take?

I wonder if they could get Chris Hemsworth to play movie me?

All I can say is be prepared – a day too late is far worse than a year too soon.

Money And Computers – Disaster Coming?

“Cats and dogs, living together.  Real wrath of God type stuff.” – Ghostbusters

A hacker got my friend’s bank account.  The hacker was so disappointed he started a fundraiser for my friend.

I drove up to the local generic national pharmacy that has systematically absorbed all the local pharmacies like Hillary Clinton absorbs the souls of the innocent.  The Mrs. had asked me to pick up a prescription for my scalp polish – she said she wanted to bounce a signal to the people up in the International Space Station.

To my surprise, I drove up to the drive-through window and saw this sign:

I had cash, but I figured it must be a nightmare inside for the people in the pharmacy.  I figured it would be easier on them for me to wait until they got it figured out before I came back.

After I saw the sign, I knew what was up:  yet another critical failure of an electronic data system leading to (probably) a nationwide outage.  I was right.

This is scary to me because of . . . money.

Money today is much more complicated than it was 200 years ago:  back then, it was (mainly) gold and silver and copper bits that we traded back and forth.  Most citizens of the newly-formed United States didn’t trust paper because the Continental Congress printed so many stacks of Continental money that it became as worthless as a math book to AOC.  This inflation and currency collapse gave rise to the phrase, “not worth a Continental.”

This is the direct reason that the Constitution had the clause that “no State may . . . make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts”.  Today, however, an arbitrary thing we all call a dollar exists.  But in many cases, those dollars may be entirely virtual.  I got paid by a direct deposit of electronic dollars into a bank account that, when I write a check, will send some of those electronic dollars to another bank.

This requires secure computer systems to work.  As we have seen, from oil to water treatment systems to my pharmacy, these systems are very capable of being hijacked.  Just this week, a list of 8 billion (yes, billion) passwords were being downloaded into the Internet, 6 billion of which were just “password”.  Chance are good that one of them was mine.  And one of them was yours.

It gets worse.  Should we even be trusting our computers?

A Russian research team found something scary:  undocumented instructions on Intel® computer chips.  As the researchers found out, these particular instructions couldn’t be run in the chip’s “normal mode.”  But why are they there?  Who could have put them there?

The NSA?  The CIA?

Want to bet that the NSA doesn’t really care how you encrypt your communications because they can read your typing and watch your screens in real-time?  I don’t know if the “Odin” post is some anon just making up a story, but with everything we’ve learned over the last decade, I’d be surprised if something like this didn’t really happen.

I would be shocked if they didn’t have the ability to take full control of my computer.  The United States government certainly reacted in a pretty negative way, pretty quickly.

What happens when you find a vulnerability?

Even turned down from sharing information about their data at the world’s most elite gathering of hackers.

Why wouldn’t Intel® want to know about vulnerabilities on their chips?  Hmmm?

Maybe the NSA could share tech with McDonalds®?

But if that backdoor vulnerability is there, what’s important to know is who has access to it.  As we look back, Stalin had not only a better mustache, but also better regular progress reports on the Manhattan Project than Truman did.  Who wants to bet that China doesn’t have backdoor data (if it exists)?  Who wants to bet that Chinese manufacture of motherboards and other electronic control architecture don’t have little extras added in?

I wouldn’t.

And, I’m not saying that the Chinese are evil for attempting to gain these particular secrets or this advantage – it’s a matter of self-preservation.  If I were President of the United States and had the ability to infiltrate all of the industrial, financial, and military assets of potential enemies, would I do that?

Sure.  But in this case, if you’re President of an increasingly weak government over an increasingly fracturing population, what do you do?  Anything you can in order to keep control, even if it means building in dangerous backdoors to critical products.

Which brings us back to money.

Money is essential to society as it is now configured.  A breakdown of the electronic systems that control the flow of money would, at minimum, bring utter chaos.  Matt Bracken famously asked this question nearly a decade ago:  “What if a cascading economic crisis, even a temporary one, leads to millions of EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards flashing nothing but ERROR?”

We saw what three days without gasoline shipments did on the East Coast.  That would be nothing compared to what we’d see if the money system broke down.

Well, I think the pharmacy will be back up tomorrow, and the impact, for us, has been zero.

This time.

Money Is Not The Only Form Of Wealth

“Well, as I said, time has no meaning here. So if you leave, you can go anywhere, any time.” – Star Trek:  Generations

What do you call a rogue sheep with a machine gun?  Lambo.

When I lived in Houston, my job was all consuming.  It’s been my theory that people move to Houston for one reason:  to work.  The climate is difficult.  The freeways are often lines of cars creeping along like Joe Biden in an elementary school.  One upside is that there can’t be a (Some) Black Lives Matter® protest because the Houston Astros© always steal their signs.

When I was a Temporary Texan, my life was consumed by work – and it was stressful work.  Each day brought a new crisis we had to solve.  It got so bad that   I left home early to avoid the traffic, so I got to work early.  I left work late to avoid the traffic, so I got home late.  A fourteen-hour day wasn’t uncommon.  I put blood, sweat, and tears into that job, so it was good that I wasn’t working at a restaurant.

The last time I went out for dinner, I asked the waiter how they prepared the chicken for frying.  “Nothing special.  We just tell them they’re going to die.”

For many weeks, I was gone every hour that baby Pugsley was awake during a weekday.  I would, however, catch up with The Mrs. when I got home.  That was a priority.  We knew what we were getting into when we made the move from Alaska.  Moving to Houston was, for us, entirely about work.  I should have known during the job interview that something was up:  they asked if I could perform under pressure, but I told them I only knew Bohemian Rhapsody.

Most (not all!) weekends I was able to keep the work at bay.  I’d sleep in on Saturday, and then we’d do something as a family.  By Saturday night I felt, “normal” but by Sunday afternoon I’d realize that I’d have to go back in to work on Monday and repeat the whole thing again.  That made me feel pretty gloomy – it felt like time was slipping away.

This was how Sunday evening felt when I worked in Houston.

One Sunday night, however, I was getting my things ready for the next day.  I was looking for my dress shoes (I was in an office that required them at that time) and couldn’t find them.  Since I always took them off at the same place, that confused me.

After looking in all the logical places, the only choice then was to look in all of the illogical places.  When you live alone, everything is pretty findable.  When you have a wife, things move around on their own.  When you have children under seven?  The toilet gets clogged with decorative clam shell soaps that The Mrs. bought.

So, when I found my shoes under Pugsley’s bed, I wasn’t really surprised.

I was, however, touched.  As near as we can figure, Pugsley had come to the conclusion that I only wore those shoes when I was gone all day.  As near as his Gerber®-addled mind could conceive, if I didn’t have the shoes, I could spend every day at home with him.

Not bad.  And I was touched.

I tried to buy running shoes the other day – but the only ones I saw were stationary.

One of the ideas of wealth is money.  And I was in Houston, like everyone else, to make money.

But there’s another idea of wealth:  time.

There are a group of people who are driven by playing that game and devote themselves exclusively to their business.  That makes sense.  The world needs people who are single-minded in wanting to change it.

Most people have read about people like Edison who never slept more than seven minutes a night and spent most of his life at work while making a fortune, and Elon Musk who famously slept in the factory to get car production worked out.  And Musk and Edison both have another thing in common:  they both got rich off of Tesla.

Meanwhile, the GPS is saying:  “Recalculating . . . recalculating . . . “

If that’s what they choose?  Fine.  The idea of spending time on their passion for business is exactly that – a choice.  Just like having a finite supply of money gives you a set of choices of what you can do in life, there is another budget – a finite number of hours.

And that is life.  Life is made up of those hours that we use.  Just as inflation eats away at the value of money, distraction eats away at the value of life.

What kind of distraction?

Well, pointless things – think Twitter® and most of Facebook™.  I was on Twitter© a while back, and found it was good at exactly one thing:  making me irritated.

I even take this aversion to not wasting the hours and minutes of my life unless it was a conscious decision to absurd levels.  For several years of my life, I ate something I didn’t like all that much for lunch because there was no line.

I hate the idea of waiting five minutes of my life when I don’t to.  This still applies even if I waste those five minutes on something unproductive.  For a long time, I avoided history – I just couldn’t see a future in it.

I’m reading a book about the history of lubricating oils and bearings.  Best non-friction book I’ve ever read.

But now society is built on creating and feeding distraction to people – the more distraction that’s consumed, the greater the profit level for these companies.  And these are not even distractions that make us feel better – but distractions that in many cases just consume time.

I’m not sure that the idea of a “balanced” life is one that exists in reality.  A human life is built up in phases.  The long languid summers of youth give up to days that are packed with all the trappings of a family and work and the fullness of life.  When my youngest, Pugsley, heads out into the world, who knows what I’ll do with the time?

Perhaps I’ll spend it finding places to hide his shoes.

The Alice Cooper Economy

“You want the solution to inflation? Hi, friends. Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we’re lowering inflation not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living s**t out of high prices.” – Used Cars

I apologize – I didn’t mean to rehash a potato joke.

I had saved my money. It was near my birthday, and we finally went on a trip where I could spend it in the most elementary school way possible.

Living on Wilder Mountain, as I have noted before, we were a good 45 miles from the nearest movie theater. We were so remote, there was only one escalator (at the JCPenney’s®) within at least 120 miles of us. At that time, I think there was only one elevator (on a two-story building, no less) within the same range.

But on occasion, Ma and Pa would get a wild hair and we’d drive into a nearby largish city. What was large? More bars than churches. We only did that a few times a year, and I was excited. I stocked the backseat with comic books and off we went.

I took my few dollars ($10?) and bought a cassette. It was the first music purchase I had ever made with my own money. My music collection until that day consisted of three handmedown cassettes from my older brother, who for legal reasons I’ll call “John Wilder” since that’s his name, too. Turns out my parents got me in a poker game with a band of outlaw bikers. Their ante? An old Slim Jim® beef stick.

It was a rough day for them when they lost that hand.

Yes, this was one of the cassettes. I’ll never forget, “I’m leaving, on a small single engine plane, I don’t think I’ll ever be back again.”

All kidding aside, my brother’s first name really is John Wilder as well, but he gets a bit upset when I call him Juan, too. I think it’s because he’s older than me and all.

Anyway, the cassette I bought was Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits. After the clerk pulled off the big plastic “don’t steal me” antitheft device, I was thrilled. I poked my fingernail under the cellophane wrapper and skillfully slit the clear plastic open. The ride home was going to be over two hours, and I had a fresh set of C-cell batteries in the cassette player (mono) which was also a handmedown from big brother John.

Yup, that’s Groucho on the album cover. How he got there, we’ll never know.

As I slipped into the back seat of the Chevy® Impala™ coupe that was Pa Wilder’s 400 cubic inch pride and joy, I shared the backseat with the cassette player and Alice Cooper.

The Sun was bright as the pavement slid underneath the Impala™’s wheels and as Pa put his foot into it in the mountain air.

I hit play.

I don’t think it was quite seven minutes into side one of the tape when the cassette player stopped making noise. I hit “eject” and saw the carnage. The cassette player, which had never, ever eaten a single tape, had not only feasted on my brand new tape, but had also . . . broken it. No rewinding it.

The tape was dead. Oh, sure, I tried to resurrect it for a month with all manner of ideas that came to my fevered elementary school mind, but not one of them worked. $10, a fortune to me, gone.

I still liked Alice Cooper, though.

Yes, officer, that was the one that did it. I’m sure.

Eventually, my finances improved and I managed to get several Alice Cooper albums, and I had learned. I bought the album on vinyl and then copied it onto a blank cassette tape. I bought the album for Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits for myself the second time with my sixteenth birthday money.

Although it wasn’t on Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits, the song Generation Landslide by Mr. Cooper was always a fun one to listen to. It also has these lyrics:

Sister’s out till five, doing banker son’s hours
But she owns a Maserati® that’s a gift from his father
Stop at full speed, at one hundred miles per hour
The Colgate™ Invisible Shield© finally got ’em

And I laughed to myself at the men and the ladies
Who never conceived of us billion dollar babies

Give it a listen. Good stuff.

As a banker’s son, (even from a small farm bank) I liked to imagine what a Maserati® might be. There was no Internet, so it was obviously Italian, but yet not made of pepperoni.

Even though I was a banker’s son, I ended up driving an old GMC™ pickup with the most gutless engine that GM© ever dared put under the hood of a pickup, vinyl bench seats, and rubber floor mats. It wasn’t a Maserati™, but the local fräuleins didn’t seem to mind too much.

I loved that truck.

But in 2021, I think of these lines from the song:

Stop at full speed, at one hundred miles per hour
The Colgate™ Invisible Shield© finally got ’em

I think about this couplet a lot. It’s not great poetry, but it has always brought to my mind a system, out of control. Everything is moving along, as fast as it can. And then?

Stop.

High speeds bring energy. A lot of it. The kinetic energy of a moving object in a non-relativistic reference frame (trust me, the readers of this blog will call me on that if I don’t mention it) is equal to the mass of the object times the speed of the object, squared.

KE=1/2mv2

That means that an object that is going twice as fast carries four times the kinetic energy.

So, speed matters.

A lot.

And the primary policy of the economic wizards that try to “manage” the economy of the United States is: putting the pedal to the metal is the easiest way to keep the party going. Whatever it takes to keep the economy growing and accelerating in that growth is the policy of the day. Who needs booze when you have meth?

If the economy seems to falter? The only answer is from both our government and the Fed® is, “faster, faster, put more gas to it.”

As most drivers know besides a Biden driving a car, the faster the car goes, the more vulnerable it is to any imbalances. Prudent drivers know when to slow down if the road is wet. Even fools know to slow down when the road is glaze ice. The main thing I try to keep teaching Pugsley and The Boy about driving on icy roads is this: turn or (brake/accelerate). Choose one. Otherwise, things tend to get spinny. Sometimes very spinny.

And it’s not the speed that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.

I wonder how this plays out? Who could predict it?

Our economy has been goosed in the last decade (and even more so recently) by:

  • Artificially, and permanently low, interest rates.
  • Rampant money printing.
  • A never-ending supply of “stimulus” packages and tax cuts to goose the economy.
  • An experiment in Universal Basic Income by paying out of work people more than they were paid working to not work.
  • Blatant political cronyism far in excess of the usual – your elected representatives are even trying to bail out Jeff Bezos’ so he can compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX®. This is actually happening (LINK).

One hundred miles per hour sounded like it was really fast to me when I was driving a pickup truck that wouldn’t go that fast downhill on a mountain pass (topped out at 95). But the economy is so goosed now that we see $100 plywood sheets tumbling in the breeze as we cruise down the highway. The stresses from the velocity as we shamble and skitter between the lines are evident.

What’s next, a $50 ribeye?

Speaking of printing, some people are now 3-D printing guns. That’s nothing. I’ve had a Canon® printer for years.

Maybe we can bring it back under control. I don’t know. But I do know what Alice said:

And I laughed to myself at the men and the ladies
Who never conceived of us billion dollar babies

La da da da da, indeed.

Specialization And Generalization, Take Two

“If you do not return with the plumbers and the rock, I shall personally . . . kill you.” – Super Mario Brothers (Movie)

I bombed southern France too many times.  Now I don’t have too much Toulouse.

Last week I wrote a post about specialization versus generalization (LINK).  As a part of the discussion, Aesop chimed in with a rebuttal post.

Specialization Versus Generalization: The Economy Chooses

I love it.

His post was called, “Yes, BUT…” and can be found here (LINK).  RTWT.  If Aesop were President, during his first term he’d solve all our national problems in the first 10 days and then would be able to take the rest of the 1451 days of his reign teaching Nancy Pelosi to beg for crackers.  Heck, he might even take the time to housebreak AOC.

There are very few words I’d disagree with in his entire post.

Von Mises (he of the incredibly heavy tome “Human Action” that I’ve referenced before LINK) wrote about just this.  Von Mises noted that you could if you really wanted to, break a rock with another rock.  You could get gravel that way.

A Brief Guide To Human Action – Which Leads To Human Freedom

Ugh, Grug make gravel.

Please be gneiss.

But it’s as slow as Biden trying to do a connect-the-dot picture of a straight line.

Pounding one rock against another is the most direct, the most general way to make gravel.  You can use this tried and true method pretty much any time.  Heck, I did that when I was a kid and tried to make arrowheads out of the rocks up on Wilder Mountain.  I do know that it didn’t take long to knap an edge so sharp it could do my algebra homework for me.

There is, however, an alternative to pounding one rock against another.  You could, if you had patience, get a hammer.  But, first, someone had to make the hammer, which involved mining ore, smelting, and then casting or forging the head and mating this with a wooden handle.  Plus, you could use the hammer to smash avocados and make whack-a-molé, guacamolé’s ugly sister.

A hammer is much better at making little gravel than hitting a rock with another rock, but it’s more indirect.  Even better is to wait until a chemical industry forms, wait for dynamite, use that hammer to drill a hole in the rock, drop in some dynamite, and make lots of little rocks, all at once.  Von Mises successfully showed that indirect methods are much more efficient than direct methods.

Indirect methods require specialization, and more than one chemist blown to bits before rocks can be blown to bits.

A terrorist blew up my rugs. That’s what I call carpet bombing.

I have no disagreement that this is, by far, the more efficient way to do it.  It’s the best way to do it, until (of course) people develop the metallurgy to make complex rock crushers that make tons of gravel hourly.

This all happens in a stable society.

That stability has waxed and waned throughout history.

Once upon a time, the Romans controlled Britain.  They did this because they decided they didn’t want to control the whole world, they just wanted to control the countries that were adjacent to the Empire.  And then the next set of countries that were adjacent to the new, larger, Empire.  And so on.

Archeologists love dinner plates because people (like Pugsley) washing dishes drop them and break them.  Because they’re ceramic, they last nearly forever in a garbage dump.  Imagine the archeologists from Tau Ceti visiting Earth in the year 1,238,631 thinking that the people in our time sat on toilets all of the time because that’s one thing that will definitely outlast anything that mankind ever made.

Our future name, “The Poopy Potty Sitters of Planet Three” will be chosen by Zamorg Flooglplaz, Ph.D., Polaris University (Mascot: Gelatinous Brainsuckers).

I didn’t have breakfast on the tectonic plate, instead, I had the continental breakfast.

Like I said, archeologists love plates.  And when they dug into the trash heaps in London (no, I don’t mean Johnny Depp’s house) they found that when the Romans were there, people ate off of “pretty nice” plates, “pretty nice” being a technical description that by definition excludes Johnny Depp’s place.  It turns out that most of those plates were made in the south of France (which we now call, “France”), and then shipped throughout the Roman Empire.

The people in the south of France were really good at making plates because they had yet to learn how to smoke and wear berets, and the Roman Empire was big enough and stable enough that the French could specialize in making plates.  Since they specialized, they got pretty good at it.

But then society became unstable.  The Romans Legions left, promising, “Hey, Britain, I’ve got to go to work.  I’ll call you next week, promise.  Oh, look at the time.”

When the Roman Empire collapsed, so did the trade in plates.  100 years after the Romans (and their cool plates) left Britain, the king ate off of plates that were worse than any commoner could easily afford when things were nice, stable, and efficient under Roman rule.

Stability in society leads to specialization which leads to efficiency which leads to (generally) higher standards of living for everyone.

But instability doesn’t have to impact an entire Empire.  Instability can impact individuals throughout their careers.  Why did the journalists hate it when their “learn to code” mantra go thrown back in their face when they were booted to the curb and they found that they had no other remotely marketable skills?

Because journalists are rich kids who weren’t smart enough to get into law school.  Writing snarky columns about “10 Reasons Your Dog Is Transgender” isn’t really a marketable skill after HuffPo® decides to fire them.

What programming language did George Lucas use?  Jabbascript.

Unlike most journalists, I’ve had (sort of) a Swiss Army Career™.  I’ve developed a particular set of skills (not the Liam Neeson ones) that have allowed me to do a lot of different things, but I’m only an expert in one or two.  But that suite of “pretty good” skills has allowed me to, like a Swiss Army knife, be incredibly useful from time to time.  Scott Adams calls this a “talent stack” and not all of them are equal.

Had I limited them to a single expertise, I would have been less valuable, and much less employable when the industry I was in slowed down and another one was hot.  As I look at the success level of many of my colleagues, it has been due to their variation in skills rather than their expertise in a single skill that led them to success – and some of them are wildly successful.

To further explain Swiss Army talent, Steve Martin can do several things at a world-class level, (including comedy, and acting), and is really good at musicianship and writing and sort of okay at singing.  Together, this blend elevated him to a national treasure.

(And no, I’m not comparing me to him, just using him as an example of someone who inspires me.)

If Martin had kept slaying them nightly as a standup, odds are that as fashions change he would have been a “Remember that guy with the arrow through his head in the 1970s?  He was funny,” trivia answer.

He would have been the Gary Mule Deer of his generation.

“Thankfully, perseverance is a good substitute for talent.” – Steve Martin

Another point I raised was certification.  In last week’s post, I made light of certification that can be found in many, many careers.

In a highly technical (and stable) world, certification is (sadly) essential to keeping people alive in certain professions.  Aesop brought up William Mulholland.  To quote Aesop,

“He (Mulholland) emigrated to America from Ireland, and started out as a literal ditch-digger for the city of Los Angeles, scraping mud out of the irrigation canals that supplied the bustling metropolis of 10,000 with all the water that could be gotten from the muddy semi-annual creek known as the Los Angeles River. He was an uneducated, unlettered, self-taught civil engineer who worked his way up to chief engineer of the city from scratch, just because he could figure things out.”

But, (also from Aesop):

“He (still Mulholland) was working on another project, still large and in charge, and he placed an earthen dam in one of the canyons north of Los Angeles. What he didn’t know was that the rock there was a terrible location for a dam. Which hydraulics, geology, and physics all demonstrated rather rudely one night in 1928, when the whole thing collapsed, killing at least 431 people (they’ve found bodies up to as recently as 1994) in the ensuing flood, ending Mulholland’s career, and he died a broken man.”

Mulholland’s error can be found again and again, even with credentialed professionals – re:  Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which was designed by the best and the brightest.  Stuff happens when you push the envelope of what we can do.  Part of the reasons that people don’t die on commercial airlines (very much) anymore is because we’ve discovered most of the ways that the airplanes can fall out of the skies.  Because airplanes built by credentialed engineers fell out of the skies, other credentialed engineers fixed the mistakes that made them fall out of the skies.

To be clear, before the planes fell out of the sky, the designers (mostly) had no idea they were making a mistake.

Mario’s™ favorite state?  Luigiana.

Our reliability is built on a sea of failure, sort of like I always imagined that the Marios® I killed in Super Mario Brothers fell on an infinitely deep pile of Mario skeletons.  It’s like the Tom Cruise movie, Edge of Tomorrow (If you haven’t seen it, it’s like Groundhog Day with the backdrop of an alien invasion of Earth).  Cruise’s character dies again and again but is reborn right where he was the previous morning with the knowledge of why he failed.

Engineering is like that.  Fail and learn and fix and stop failing.  Elon Musk’s SpaceX® exemplifies that sprit.  There’s another spirit that he exemplifies, and that’s the Robert Anson Heinlein quote that I tossed up last week:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

I’ll admit that, off of RAH’s list, I haven’t conned a ship, I haven’t set a bone, and I haven’t yet died.  I do think I could plan an invasion as well as Churchill did at Gallipoli.  Probably better, though I think Churchill could have taken me in a drinking contest.  I have done most of the others if you replace “hog” with “deer”.

Yes, that exact list?  Okay, it’s not my list.  But I’ll bet that you (and most people who end up here or at Aesop’s place) have multiple talents on a comparable list.  You can do lots of things that Bob never could have done – heck, I bet your list is better.

And being a generalist matters when novel solutions are required.  Novel solutions require (often) a combination of lots of different knowledge and experience.  Generalists are the pioneers and the people who keep the fires going after Rome leaves.  Generalists are the ones who figure out how to make the next sets of dishes after the supply from ancient France (now known as “France”) goes dry.

Aesop is right.  Specialists win when the weather is fair and the seas are calm.

I’m right.  Generalists win when the path is unclear and the seas are rough.

If I discover a way to make gravel out of rocks faster, I’ll let you know – it will be a ground-breaking discovery.

I prefer to live in a society where specialists help us create a great standard of living and keep increasing human knowledge.  But I also know that humanity forgot how to make concrete (which the Romans used in making the Pantheon in 126 A.D., which is still standing today) until about 1750 A.D., and we really didn’t get good at it until 1900 A.D.

Specialists make the world better and can achieve far more than generalists ever could.  They help the world see farther, and do more.  Generalists help the world advance in weird leaps that sometimes have horrible unintended consequences, but they also keep the fire of civilization burning.

Why not both?  Me?  I’ll be in the other room, making little rocks out of big rocks.

Specialization Versus Generalization: The Economy Chooses

“Hey, you’re really trying to be accurate.  Is it getting hot in here?  Wait a minute! What’s happening to my special purpose?” – The Jerk

You could say a generalization made by a farmer is an overall statement.

The economy has been really stable for a long, long time.  Certainly, there have been dips here and there, but for the most part, we have seen amazing amounts of . . . stable.  Even the Great Recession (after a liberal application of amazing amounts of money) was made as smooth as leather – I’ll never be suede in that.

In many ways, the solution for the economy for the last twenty years has been exactly what a college freshman would ask at a party at 2 AM:  “Dude, I’ve got a $20.  Can we get more beer?”  The Fed® has a fake I.D. and decided to add more money.  Keep the party going.

Of course, everyone loves a party.  And everyone loves stability.

But what does stability bring?

Specialization.

In a stable environment, every ecological niche gets filled with very specialized variations.  Look at the Arctic.  It may be cold, but it’s stable because the climate varies only a little.  There are very specialized variations of bears and foxes and birds that exploit the ecosystem.  Likewise, the equator with its constant miserable heat produces the same thing:  amazing amounts of specialization including a zillion things in the Amazon jungle that will kill you just for a picture that they can post of Facebook®.  The anteater comes to mind:  a creature so specialized that it eats only ants and has a tongue specialized just for that.

Anteaters can’t catch COVID.  They’re filled with anty-bodies.

In the economy, this flourishes as credentialization©.  Microsoft® doesn’t recognize that word, so I put a little © next to it so now I own it.  Ha!  Take that!  I’d make a “Bill Gates is getting divorced joke” here, but he’s had a hard enough time already.  I’ve already been rejecting his updates since 2017.

We live, however, in an economy built on amazing levels of specialization.  How does one prove their ability to work?  A credential.  The number of credentials has flourished, even in my lifetime.  There was even one where all I had to do to get the credential was apply for it, as it was brand new.

I didn’t apply.  I still look upon that particular credential with disdain – as Groucho noted, why would I want to be in a club that would accept me as a member?  This particular credential is entirely built upon the idea that if I know a specific set of terms that they agree on, I can put a few letters after my name.

Pfffft.  Nope.  Though I did speak at one of their meetings for a few beers.  I may have standards, but they’re low.

Let’s get in a time machine so we can have some fun.

If I wanted to be a doctor in 1821, how did I do that?  I called myself one.  If my patients lived, I’d get more of them.  If they died?  I’d have to move to another town and give bad advice there.  Or run for Congress.

I might not save patients, but I’d be a popular doctor.

One of my personal heroes is Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  Why?

Isambard built stuff and set the stage for the entire twentieth century.  What kind of stuff?  Docks.  Boats.  Railroads.  Bridges.  The first transatlantic steamship.  The first tunnel under a real river.  He even built a hospital that was prefabricated and shipped to the Crimea for all of those Light Brigade guys that rode half a league, half a league onward.

One ship he built, the Great Eastern, could travel from London to Sydney, Australia (it’s somewhere south of Kentucky) and back.  Without refueling.  The second Transatlantic Cable, the one that worked?  It was put down with one of Brunel’s ships.

Did Isambard Kingdom Brunel have to take a test to prove he was an engineer?  No.

If there is a mountain worthy of the name mountain, it’s Everest.  If there is a man who is worthy of the name engineer, it’s Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  Credentials?  Isambard don’t need no stinking credentials.

His work speaks for itself.

What do engineers use as birth control?  Personality.

But now we live in a credentialed world.  Landscape architect?  You have to take a test to call yourself that.  Trim nails and put polish on them?  In many places, you have to have a credential for that.  Cut hair?  Yup.  Have to pass a barber test in many places.

But nails and hair grow back.  If you have bad landscaping, there’s no worry because chainsaws are a thing that exists.

The number of jobs you can’t do without formal credentials keeps expanding.  Do some make sense?  Well, probably.  But I’d suggest that 90% of credentials that exist do so only to prevent competition.  Need a teaching certificate to teach children?

Why?  I can’t think of a single reason other than to eliminate competition.  Laura Ingalls Wilder (from whom I stole the Wilder moniker) graduate grade eight and then . . . was a teacher.

The sea of credentials that we find ourselves surrounded by is also an attempt to avoid liability.  In an attempt to avoid responsibility, lawyers and lawsuits require more and more credentials in jobs where credentials are mostly meaningless.  Oh, and the lawyers were some of the first to pull the ladder up.  Let’s be real:  90% of being a lawyer is reading comprehension.

That’s what comes when you live in a stable economy.  Specialization increases, even to ludicrous levels.  People have jobs where they are so remote from any activity that produces actual value that they don’t even know what their company does that produces value.  HR, I’m looking at you.  Oh, wait, there are at least 12 types of credentials that you can get for HR.

See?

Oh, and I’ve probably made 99% of my readers mad at this point.

But what happens in an unstable economy?  The real winner is the generalist.  I’ll turn to a Robert Anson Heinlein quote I’ve used before:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

See, I come screaming out with all of the new themes.  This one is sooooo fresh.

I’ve done almost every one of the things that Heinlein talks about.  I’m hoping to save the “die gallantly” until it’s useful, since it seems it would be wasted if I were to use it in negotiating with DirecTV® over my monthly bill.

In a stable economy, specialization (and the dreaded credentialization©) is valued.  In an economy where things are unstable?

Generalization wins.

The Mrs. bought me a suture practice kit for Christmas.  I was thrilled.  It had a scalpel, needle, and thread.  I can now sew up a wound in plastic.  I would not try to sew up a wound unless you were going to die if I didn’t give it a go.  That’s the definition of unstable.

I’ve taken first aid courses throughout the country.  The second best one was in Alaska.  They spent time teaching skills.  In the lower 48, most of it was, “dial 911 and keep the patient comfortable until the EMTs arrive.”  So, my job, when a human life was on the line?  Make a phone call.

This is Specialization at its peak.

Understand, as long as the economy persists in being stable, specialization will increase.

But when Winter hits?

Or was that generalizations about broads?

Generalization wins.

Personally, I am not very good at supporting increased specialization.

We’re humans.

We can do more.  And if the economy goes where I think it will?

We will need to do more.

Good Advice And Bad Advice

“Jack-San, if you want Yoji’s advice about the babes, you come to Yoji with respect!” – Mr. Baseball

The last thing Pa Wilder told me was, “Son, it makes sense to spend money on good stereo equipment.”  That was sound advice.

One thing we often do as a family is go out for dinner at an Italian place on Friday nights.  When we went out, it was a no-cellphone zone.  Everyone had to leave ‘em at home in a pile by the door.  We also didn’t apologize – we figure that everything was left in the pasta.

The other dinner rule was that only one subject was off-limits:  computers.  It is a subject that The Boy, Pugsley, and I could talk about for hours, but one The Mrs. has no real interest in – as long as her electronics work, there really isn’t a need for them to be discussed.  We couldn’t even talk about spiders, since they’re web designers.

But one night, The Boy was going on and on about Bitcoin.  He was in fifth grade.  Bitcoin this.  Bitcoin that.  An endless stream of information about Bitcoin.

I finally looked him in the eye and said, “How many Bitcoin do you have.”

“Seven.”

“How did you get seven Bitcoin?  Did you mine them?”

“No, mining them is too hard for my computer.  I mine Litecoin and then when the price of Litecoin is high and the price of Bitcoin is low, I trade for Bitcoin.”

You can’t eat Monopoly®, either.  Tastes too gamey.

At that point, Bitcoin was worth about $500.  So, I was presented with my fifth grader having set up a cryptocurrency trading scheme that had netted him about $3,500.  He even started up his own server to discuss cryptocurrency trading.

Some kids mow lawns.

The price of Bitcoin dropped pretty low.  He traded Bitcoins for, of all things, web hosting.  All I know is that his stash of coins disappeared, otherwise he would be sitting on enough money to buy a house today.

The Boy even gave me half a Bitcoin for father’s day one year.

I gave it back to him when he wanted to buy something.  Silly me, giving back a $25,000 (today’s prices) father’s day gift.

The advice I gave him when he had seven Bitcoins?  Save them.

Oh well.  If I didn’t follow my own advice, why should he?

We have a restaurant that serves breakfast at any time.  I chose medieval France.

But each of us has been given good and bad advice throughout our lives, and we took it or we didn’t.  When it comes to money and work, there is a world of free advice out there.  Here is some bad advice I’ve gotten over the years:

  • (From Pa Wilder, before my first marriage): “Well, they say that two can live as cheaply as one.”  Well, the divorce cost me the price of a Lamborghini®, so, that’s not really true.  Still, I’m happier to have the divorce than to have owned a Lamboâ„¢.
  • “Gold, why would you buy gold? It’s fallen in price to $300 an ounce!”  I would have ignored this, but I didn’t have $300.  Because of the divorce.
  • “Buy new cars. That way you’re not buying someone else’s problem.”  Again, this was Pa Wilder’s advice, which might have made sense in 1960, but not in 1999.
  • “A car is one of the biggest investments you’ll make.” A car salesman.
  • “Don’t move from company to company.” Again, this was Pa Wilder.  Every single time I got a great raise, it was from moving from to a company that valued me more.

If you ever think you’re a failure, remember this:  you’re closer to being worth $900,000,000 than Jeff Bezos is.

I’ve had some good advice, too:

  • “Buy more ammo.” The Mrs., 2018.
  • “Really, you need to buy more ammo.” The Mrs., 2019.
  • “Buy land. If it blows up, you still own a hole in the ground.”
  • “Do not forget, stay out of debt.” – Hamlet as seen on Gilligan’s Island
  • “Modern used cars are generally a good deal.”
  • “Don’t make fun of bald men. If you do that you’ll go bald.”  Too late.

Part of the problem in life is that good advice sometimes sounds exactly like bad advice, and vice versa.  Also, Pa Wilder’s advice was good based upon what he knew, and the life he had led up to that point.  Job hopping, in his world, was the sign of an unreliable employee.  In my career, moving from job to job was what people did.

Alas, my kids were gnome schooled.

When given at the wrong time, good advice can be bad advice, which sounds suspiciously like luck.  Is it all luck?

Certainly not.

Does luck matter?

Certainly it does.

I’ll turn it over to you:

  • What’s the best advice you’ve gotten?
  • What’s the worst advice you’ve taken?
  • What bullets did you dodge?
  • What advice would you give a 20-year-old?

And I’ll take my own advice next time, and keep any $25,000 gifts that any of my kids give me.

If The Market Is Being Gamed, Why Not Cheat?

“Well, if you could cheat for $84, you could cheat for $800.” – Green Acres

I had a scam caller the other day threatening to put me in jail for tax fraud.  Heck, I don’t even pay taxes.

First, I’m not a financial advisor, so please consider this commentary by an Internet humorist entertainment – you shouldn’t trust me since I lost $75 betting that Oprah would eat weight watchers in 2008.  Not the food from the company Weight Watchers®, but actual people who were watching their weight.

I’m willing to bet that the people who give tips to sitting Congressmen aren’t, financial advisors, either.  They’re insiders.  Sure, a law was passed in 2012 that was supposed to ban insider trading.  But Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped $1.7 million in travel stocks (in 33 transactions) on February 13, 2020.

I like Mongolian poetry, but it has prose and Khans.

You know, in February.  When he was getting classified Corona briefings where the CIA admitted that they’d have to overthrow the United States government instead of the Russians because of the planned travel restrictions.

But Senator Burr got those briefings before travel stocks tanked.

If it was me who sold that stock right then, you can be sure that the Feds would wonder where I got the psychic ability to make trades.  After all, the Feds put Martha Stewart in the slam after they investigated her for insider trading.  (Yes, I know that Martha went down for lying to the Feds and not insider trading, but that just generally results in an additional term in Congress for most people.)

But not Senator Burr.  Nope.  The FBI investigated him, and the Department of Justice concluded that what he did was just awesome sauce, and awarded him six more terms in the Senate.

I met a baker that was a natural at stock trading – buy dough, sell pie.

The financial performance of sitting Congressvermin is amazing:

  • Representative Collin Peterson, Minnesota, started in 2008 with $123,500. In April of 2020?  He was worth $4.2 million.
  • Representative Judy Chu, California, was worth less than $100,000 in 2008. By April of 2020?  She was worth $7.1 million.
  • Senator Roy Blunt, Missouri, went from $602,000 to $7.1 million in the same time span.

How did these people do that?

I’m sure it was careful investing and not at all sweetheart deals that aren’t available only to powerful members of Congress.  I mean, it makes sense that Barack Obama entered the White House worth $1.3 million and today is worth somewhere between $70 million and $140 million.

Biden is busy in the White House – he spends most of the day watering his hair.

Where did he make that money?  Books.  Public speaking fees.  Netflix® opening up a truck and shoveling money down his mouth.  Certainly, none of this sounds like a payoff, does it?

But every Senator and Representative can’t be shoveled money like that.  I’m betting that in many cases, the payoff is just a tip here and a tip there.  That’s not protected, but remember that Congressparasites can just decide to not pay their taxes and not suffer any significant consequences.

There is, however, an idea that I’m thinking of doing.  I haven’t done it yet, but at some point (maybe next week?) I was going to start checking out trading ideas from here (LINK) or here (LINK).

They had to bribe my brother to be good when he was a kid.  Me?  I was good for nothing.

Yup.  People are now making it easy to track the trades of the people getting paid off in Congress.  Are all of the trades going to be winners?  Of course not.  But the stock purchases by Congressrats outperform the market by between 6% and 10% per year.

Maybe the Congressswine are just picking stocks that are already doing well and jumping on the bandwagon?

No.

The stocks that senators bought had zero abnormal performance before the senators bought them.  After a year?  Those same stocks had abnormal positive returns of 25%.  This is a rock star level of performance – put any of these people at a hedge fund and they’d be billionaires in less than a decade.

This is not chance.

They’re cheating.

Does it matter how they’re cheating?

When Warren stopped running for president, it was the second race she left that year.

Probably not.  As long as they consistently do it, though, who cares?  There does seem to be a skew to it – Senators in their first term seem to do the very best.  Perhaps that’s when they take the ticket and sell out their principles for high returns so they can be blackmailed later?

Nah.  That’s silly, right?

Regardless, although you and I can’t get book deals and have people sell us real estate for ludicrously low prices, I’m going to check to see if I can’t cheat like the pros.