Financial Advisers, Future Predictions, and Three-Breasted Mars Women

Sharp-eyed readers will note that this is a reprint from 30 months ago – I’m under the weather right now, and need some sleep, but expect fresh stuff Friday.  

“Baldrick, I have a very, very, very cunning plan.” – Blackadder

ike

I wonder if she inspired the military-industrial complex speech?

Financial advisers have a pretty standard set of advice:

  • Get a job. Opening your own business is risky, so it’s best if you work for someone else.
  • Max out contributions to your 401k. Put your money in stock index funds.
  • Work forty (or more) hours per year for forty (or more) years, depending on how much you lost in the divorce settlement(s).
  • When you are of no further use to the corporation* anymore financially ready, retire. Fortunately, by the time you retire you’ll be so exhausted from all of the hours working that you’ll (ideally) just sit on your porch in a daze staring off and wondering where your life went and why Bob Barker isn’t hosting the Price is Right® anymore.
  • If you’re lucky, your kids will put you into a retirement home that doesn’t require that you manufacture basketball shoes for Nike® on a quota in exchange for individually wrappedhard candies.

That’s pretty much what a financial advisor will tell you, if you strip out the cynicism.  But why would you strip out the cynicism?  That would take all the fun out of it – we ain’t getting out of here alive, so might as well smile on the way, like Socrates did after his trial.  “I drank what???”

The problem with financial advisors, however, is that they give great advice based on what worked in the past.  Any weather forecaster can tell you that the best possible weather forecast is that “tomorrow will be just like today,” since it’s 85% certain that’s going to be correct, or at least my statistics professor in college said so.  The past really does predict the future pretty well.

Except when it doesn’t.

The thing the past doesn’t predict well is tornados, hurricanes, floods, volcanos and pollen.  I strongly support just calling them all torhurflovolpols just so I can see television broadcasters talking about the Torhurflovolpol index.  “Well, Brian, there’s a 45% chance of something on the Torhurflovolpol index.  So get out your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.”  I think they sell those at Eddie Bauer®.

It is certain, however, that we will be really surprised by the events that lead to the future world we’ll be living in 30 years from now.  Let’s jump back into the time machine and go thirty years in the past and look at some of the ludicrous predictions that would have been laughed at, but were nevertheless correct.

In 1989, if I told you that:

  • The Soviet Union would collapse in two years,
  • Donald Trump would be president,
  • China would be transformed from a communist totalitarian basketcase to an economic powerhouse and growing military power,
  • The United States would produce more oil per day in 2019 than the previous peak in output in 1973 and OPEC would be irrelevant,
  • People would willingly give all of their personal details to large corporations,
  • Music and long distance phone calls would be essentially free,
  • People would pay hundreds of dollars for “in-game” purchases on video games that seem more like a job than a game,
  • Keith Richards would still be alive with his original liver,
  • You could watch nearly any movie ever made, at any time, from nearly anywhere, and
  • People in Britain would be called fascist for rejecting rule by Germany.

Richards.jpg

If you have a really long term question, just ask yourself, What Would Keith Richards Do?

You would have laughed if I would have predicted those things, or called me a dreamer, insane, or just shook your head.  The general consensus was all of the “predictions” above were absurdly unrealistic.  The Soviets, for instance, looked nearly invincible.  We were worried that they were masters of technology, producing better Olympians®, military tech, and Robotic Opponent Overlord Movie Boxing Antagonists (ROOMBA).  From the outside, especially listening to certain journalists, people were worried that communism would be the ism that finally took down the country, although they looked a bit too happy when describing our glorious communist future.

The Soviets looked invulnerable, until it was obvious that they were so pathetic that they couldn’t even field a decent hair metal band.

Dolph Lundgren, the actor who played Drago in the Rocky movies has a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering, which means that he’s way more qualified in science than Bill Nye® and could also break Nye like a twig.  I would pay $200 to see a boxing match between the two of them.

But these improbable things did happen.

This allows me to state, categorically, that the future we will have in 30 years isn’t the one you’re expecting.  It will surprise you in ways that you can’t even imagine now.  In hindsight, we all make up excuses in our minds to explain that we anticipated even the unanticipated.  After the Soviet Union fell, all of the broadcasters and talking heads on television made the point that, unlike other people, they were the ones that had really seen this coming.  “It was obvious to me, Brian, that the Soviet empire was just a house of cards.”

We can guess about the future in broad brush strokes, but the general wisdom just over a decade ago was that oil was going to be gone and that we’d be close to pumping dry holes right now and wearing football shoulder pads and studded leather jockstraps and living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like walking into a Sears® or JCPenny’s™ in 2018.  This explains G.W. Bush’s energy policy, and, let’s be real, probably the invasion of Iraq.  Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.

And, I’ll admit, I never saw the amazing increase in oil production as a thing that could happen, either.  My best excuse for not getting it right even though I thought about it quite a bit was that I didn’t have a billion dollar budget and dozens of flunkies to do research on it, though I bet they would have just done a lot of internet searches on studded leather jockstraps.

But Qwest® had a pretty accurate vision of the future.  Qwest© was a communications company before it got bought out, but it had this commercial which means the future it predicted outlasted the company itself.  Guess Qwest™ didn’t have a crystal ball that could predict everything . . .

We can look to the past and paint in broad brush strokes some things that are more probable than others.  One thing that got me was a rainy Saturday re-watching of Total Recall, the 80’s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.  One of the things I was surprised by was the amount of technology they got absolutely right, from big screen flat televisions to communications to real-time airport weapon detection.  In many ways, the “gee-whiz” feel of the original movie was just gone.  Technology had made the miraculous (back then) “so what” today.  And, again, this is the span of only thirty years.  We still don’t either a Mars colony or three-breasted women, but I hear Elon Musk is working on both.

boo.jpg

Duh.  Three boobs exist only on Mars, silly.

Just like the collapse of the Soviet Union, unexpected things will happen.  Huge things.  And, if my guesses are right, the weather is ripe for big change in the next decade.  The changes, thankfully, will be good, bad, or just plain amusing.

So where does that leave you and I?  General Dwight D. Eisenhower said:  “In preparing for battle, I have always found the plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  As a direct descendent of one of his teachers (this is actually true and not made up), I always wonder if Great-Grandma Von Wilder might have said that to a very young Eisenhower first, and then Ike re-used it after planning D-Day when it was actually Great-Grandma Von Wilder who did the heavy lifting on the logistics after he pulled her out of retirement and into a tent in London.

But if I’m right, the next twenty years will be the most momentous in human history, even more than when the police chased O.J. Simpson in his white Ford® Bronco™.  I’m not sure if having a 401K or a 5.56mm is the number/letter combination that will be the most useful in a decade.  I’m willing to bet that living far away from large urban population centers is wise, even if we end up living in the world with the best possible outcome.  But I do know that planning is important, even if your plans are wrong.  Hint:  They will be.

yogi.jpg

Okay, I know someone is going to get this joke.

When you plan, you expand your mind, you think about future possibilities that you’ve never considered.  A mind not stuck on business as normal is crucial.  Yesterday’s weather be a good predictor of today’s weather, but it won’t predict volcanos very well.  The future is unknown.  The future will surprise you.  If you’ve prepared for the volcano, the tornado isn’t the same threat, but you’ll be ready to adapt.  Assuming you have your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.  I think they sell that at Wal-Mart®.

When it comes to being prepared for the future, remember this:  It’s better to look silly having prepared for a disaster that never comes, than not having prepared for the disaster and having to explain to your children why you didn’t.

Bet you never hear that from a financial adviser.

*For the record, my view of corporations is that they’re a tool, a convenient legal fiction to allow Very Large Things to get done.  The very name “corporation” comes from the Latin root word “corpus” which means a “place to have spring break”, or a “body” – corpus is also where the word corpse comes from.  Regardless of the definition, either of those can get you put into jail.  However, “incorporation” means, “giving a body to.”  A corporation is legally a person.

And, just like people, some are naughty, even if they once had as their motto, “Don’t be evil.”  I guess being evil pays pretty well.

I am not a financial adviser, paid or otherwise, so there’s that.  But I have seen Better Call Saul™, and that’s at least some sort of qualification.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

27 thoughts on “Financial Advisers, Future Predictions, and Three-Breasted Mars Women”

  1. A suggestion I read once that made a lot of sense is to plan on having capabilities rather than planning for specific events. Do not plan to deal with a zombie apocalypse, then plan for meteors simultaneously hitting the Atlantic and Pacific [*crosses fingers*] etc. Instead plan on being able to lock your house and live in the basement for a year. Get in your car with 10 minutes notice, drive 500 miles and not return. Put on a backpack and travel 100 miles on foot. Live on savings for a year. Live only on what you raise yourself for a year. For bonus points, integrate neighbors, friends, and relatives into your capabilities.

    If you have capabilities, you will hopefully have the tools to deal with specific happenings. But often people who plan for very specific happenings do so in very specific ways that do not help well with most other happenings.

    1. That comment is probably one of the wisest I’ve ever read. Maybe we should think of that type of strategic planning as:
      – Hunker down and isolate
      – Grab & Go
      – Provision up/Reduce overhead/Lean Living
      – Gather the clan
      We probably need to have all of those in mind, but the last may be the most important – find Your People (related or not), whom you can trust with your live and possessions. Better to go it alone than to trust the wrong people.

    2. Nice call. 10 minutes? That’s a sad call for me. It would take 30 for a great kit.

      10 minutes? Guns, ammo, food, and water kit.

      What about my cartoon collection????

  2. John – – A friend of mine revealed unknown history concerning Eisenhower’s warning about the dangers of a growing “military-industrial complex” which was first raised in Eisenhower’s Farewell Address. That term has been discussed and used countless times and is now a well-known part of our national lexicon.

    General Andrew Goodpaster was President Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff. After Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg, Goodpaster continued to serve and retired as a four star Army general in 1974. But a cheating scandal at West Point, prompted Jimmy Carter to recall Goodpaster back to duty in 1977, this time as a three star general serving as Superintendent at West Point. My friend served as one of Goodpaster’s three Aides-de-Camp at West Point.

    At one point my friend had a discussion with Goodpaster about Eisenhower’s use of the term “Military-Industrial Complex”. Goodpaster related that when he and Ike were working on the speech, Ike had originally written the term as “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex”.

    After some discussion, Ike decided that the legislators might see that terminology as a pejorative or an attack on their performance while Ike was in office, so he struck the Congressional reference.

    Truth was that the Congressswines well deserved such cautioning and exposure.

    So, in the end Ike pulled his punches…..makes me wonder how things might have been different if Ike had put the onus on Congress for their corrupting influence on national matters.

  3. Years ago I took to heart the motto “We should all care about the future, because we’re all going to live the rest of our lives there”. These days, I often say to my wife “The more I see of the future, the less I like it”. The biggest problem is I don’t get to wear aluminum foil jumpsuits like Will Robinson did, but there are other problems, too. You may have noticed a few of them.

    For a while when I would visit the Great Smokies National Park, I would think to myself “this is what the future looks like”. The beautiful forest looked this way a thousand years ago, it looks this way now, and it will look this way a thousand years from now in the future you are always wanting to see. Forget about predicting juicy advances in technology and just read Joyce Kilmer’s magnum opus if you want to see the future.

    Of course I know about pesky things like ice ages that put a chill on this viewpoint. We’re in the middle of an Ice Age (the “Holocene interglacial period”) right now, one that has enabled the spread of humanity out of Africa to Europe and North America and the development of agriculture and civilization. There is ice behind us, and in the future much more ice to come…

    What I didn’t forsee was an icy Greta and her even worse vision. Sigh. Yogi Berra had it right, the future ain’t what it used to be.

    You know the saying Think globally, live locally? Same for the future.

    On one hand, the future is just a point the size of a human lifespan on the line of Big History.

    https://www.bighistoryproject.com/home

    On the other hand, the future is what you make it. Enjoy the ride.

  4. John – – Not trying to hog the comments, but I wanted to share a joke that went around after OJ’s escapades:

    “Everybody remembers OJ Simpson driving in that white Bronco. But do you know where he was headed?

    “He was going to the University of Kentucky because it would be the last place anybody would think to look for a Heisman Trophy Winner…..”

  5. I’m a big fan of the Military maxim “than no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Not sure what is coming down the pike, but storm clouds are forming and I do feel we are going to be in for a bumpy ride.

    Hope you feel better soon!

  6. A couple of decades in the financial services business taught me that very few people are going to be able to follow The Plan and so it is smart to have an alternate path to how you will survive after you stop working.

    1. Ricky,
      re — moving away from fossil fuels
      .
      Looks like Gail is reading BisonPrepper James M Dakin!

  7. 1) I got the joke. It was like deja vu all over again.
    2) I’ve also got a Ph.D. in Real Genius. My first online alias was “Laszlo Hollyfeld”. I saw what you did there too.
    3) Good post. Keep it up. I have a supercharged Pontiac, an Australian Ridgeback, my own gyrocopter, and a holster for a sawed-off, just in case. But I’ll go with Dinty Moore over Dinky Doo any day.

  8. I seriously thought it would be funny to kick a good man while he was down, but on consideration I decided to break character and not quibble about your comments on the oil supply. This is my gift to you, you are welcome, and get better so that you can make three boob financial charts.

  9. re — three knockers meem
    .
    Somebody questioned the origins of her shower-curtain, wondering if it came from the scene of a gruesome homicide…

    1. Ha! She actually tried to pass that third one off as real for a while. That story deflated quickly . . .

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