All too often Seeking Alpha

I occasionally visit Seeking Alpha, which is more or less a social media platform for the investment community. A broad range of people chime in their, for the most part focusing on the investment prospects of this, that or the other security or asset class, and the probability that it will do well in the future. It is a wonderful source of information, lots of super-smart people contribute.

For the most part, from the perspective of doing my job for my clients, it is a time suck. Even worse, it is an illusion, as it fosters the impression that Alpha -- the ability to outperform the market -- is something we can reasonably aspire to do on a consistent basis. More often I can help my clients do other things. Right now:

• One client wants an exit strategy for a business
• Another needs to work with a relative to figure out how to buy the latter out of his share in a vacation home
• Another, an entrepreneur, has had a couple of awesome years and is absolutely getting crushed by Obamacare and also tuition to a private university -- despite the crazy variability of his income. For this client I need to look into PEOs (professional employment organizations) to figure out a way for his/her healthcare burden to be shared across a large pool. 
• One is out of work and needs help finding a next situation
• One needs clients for a management consulting practice
• Two want strategies for downshifting to work less over the next decade
• 70% need to save more
• Several need estate planning 
• 3 need life insurance
• And so on

These are all higher value-add things for me to be doing with my time. Sort of.

But the markets are so interesting, so compelling, so dynamic...  And paying attention to them is necessary. And there are so many lessons to be learned, so much wisdom to be gleaned.

It is not unlike the difference between running and ball sports. It would be more rational in some sense to just run and to cross-fit kinda stuff. But tennis, soccer, and even basketball engage the soul.

And it is also true that, it is not reasonable for most of us -- even those of us who spend a lot of time immersed in the markets -- to beat them, it is reasonable for us to continually ask which of them we should be in.

Right now, however, it is time to go swimming before the lake gets too hot.

Neither human, nor corporate

As I mentioned a week or so back, I started rereading William Gibson's Count Zero not long ago. It had peaked out at me from my shelf, and I kept thinking about a scene in which one character -- who specializes in helping people defect from one corporation to another -- is shepherding a defector across the wasteland of the America in which they live, and the shepherdee looks at him and says (I paraphrase) "Don't you find it scary, to live without a corporation?"

This is a sentiment which has resonated with me at times throughout my life, and in particular when working as an entrepreneur, lacking the safety net of benefits and social capital that comes from tenure with a large company.

But then I started reading it and found it taxing. Much of the language and many of the concepts with which Gibson works are so novel. He was a creative guy, after all. So I put the novel down.

But somewhere in there one of the protagonists of one of the three streams that come together at the novel's end reflects on Joseph Virek, the superrich guy who manifests himself through computer projections who is pulling the strings behind everything: "and it occurred to her that the extremely rich were no longer even vaguely human like the rest of us." (again, a paraphrase)

Then, a couple of weeks later, I read this Douglas Rushkoff article on "The Survival of the Richest" in which the author advises a few hedge fund guys on strategies for surviving the upcoming apocalypse. One thing mentioned is how Ray Kurzweil and others are seeking to upload their consciousness onto computers (and if you read Michio Kaku's The Future of the Mind, it is clear progress is being made in this direction).

Once more, I had a sense that Gibson had anticipated a lot of what has come -- as did other great sci-fi writers, mind you -- and I went back to the novel. And I finished it, and it was good. It stretches in places, asks the reader to make considerable leaps of faith, but then what doesn't. That is the nature of fiction.

I remember feeling that, of Gibson's trilogy, the Neuromancer had been the best, then Count Zero, but that Mona Lisa Overdrive, the last novel, had been a let-down. But perhaps it is time to revisit it.

Presence

So here I am at the keyboard, with no fixed theme. Another week of swirling, trying to get things done on various fronts. Meeting with a client couple today who are too busy to meet during the week, I am reminded of having to do something for them on another Saturday a year or two back, feeling momentarily resentful of it, and then realizing that I was in fact living the dream, in that I was wearing shorts and flip flops, working with people I loved, in a place I love, etc. And here I am again.

Today it is milder, really I should be checking the weather right about now to make sure that it's not going to rain. But then again, I could just use the gym membership for which I pay but which I use so rarely. Whatever I do, I should try to fold Graham into it. The woman who led the Executive Function workshop he attended this week talked about how important regular exercise and movement was for kids with executive function challenges (read: everybody living in the era of omnipresent screens and connectivity). The problem with that is that exercising with Graham means I have to do something with him for a short while at a low to moderate level of intensity, and then keep going for the same amount of time after I drop him at the house, just to be certain I get enough exercise to justify my ambitious levels of food consumption.

And then there is fundraising. Natalie is up in Roxboro today canvasing with a friend, so proud to see her ramp up her engagement. I need to keep gearing up and getting event sponsors in the door for the two events I am working on over the next 10 weeks.

But it is so quiet. A perfect time to read. And I am in the middle of so many excellent books.

For now, however, there is an article on the Kiddie Tax in the Journal, and the changes that were made to it in the new law that passed in December. And this is pertinent for my 12:30 meeting. So I should read it.

Sore

My shoulders were in great pain from my once-a-year foray onto the basketball court, where I made the strategic error of playing 1-on-1 with Z before the 3-on-3 with the gang. I think I burned some of my annually available "rookie magic" in that game. Ah well.

Then, yesterday evening I did a baby triathlon of running around the lake, then playing frisbee with Graham for as long as I could keep him out there, then swimming maybe a hundred yards - out to the outer float and back. Today I am toast.

I did reintegrate myself into my re-reading of William Gibson's 1986 Count Zero, inspired by this Douglas Rushkoff article. Rather disturbing stuff -- I will explain the link later. Which reminds me to keep my nose to the grindstone and focus on the essential. Hang out with family. Serve clients. Work to help elect Democrats and facilitate dialog between warring factions in America. Exercise. Sleep. Repeat.

Driving with Graham

Once more I am driving Graham to chess camp in the mornings. This year he is a junior counselor, which is awesome. With Natalie leaving the house so soon I am very focused on spending as much time with the kids in as many ways as possible.

Again -- and I may have written about this before -- I have decided to always put him in the front seat and to programmatically leave the radio off. No NPR. We get plenty of information.

Today we discussed the Strzok hearings, which Graham had watched clips of and then Colbert's commentary or skit or whatever. Graham said the most striking thing was the amount of cursing that he heard. At which point in time I launched into a long disquisition on the attitudes towards foul language over time, how it has increasingly permeated higher registers of discourse where once it was anathema -- for example TV news and also politicians' speech -- and how generally the erosion of norms of discursive behavior had evolved into a problem that makes it difficult to have productive dialog. Which is different from how it seemed to me as a kid-teenager-young person.

I realized that I was sort of dadsplaining.

We talked about other stuff too, boredom, attention issues when reading on the internet, optimizing gas mileage in a Prius, how people sometimes get irked at Prius drivers for doing so. Blah blah blah.

It was awesome. At lunch today I will take him to a new dumpling place in Apex. Psyched for that.

For now, back to the coal mine.

A rare day, and being second born

It feels almost like autumn out there, and yet here I am at my desk with a daunting task list at my right elbow: bills, travel planning, event planning and other political stuff. Piles of periodicals and resumes and folders containing... the only way I know is to open them.

On my left, the books. The Henry James novel I'm 2/3rds through, the Doris Kearns Goodwin book I'm 1/8th into and really need to finish before I go to Larchmont in a month, just so I don't have to carry it up there. Buffett's annual letters. I think I'm on 2008, almost done with this volume (goes through 2012).

Natalie has gone to IKEA in Charlotte to do dormroom shopping with a couple of besties, and also to meet her future roommate (of all things Yale could have picked an Indian girl who went to Charlotte Country Day) for lunch.

Over our vacation, as we were having family meals, it occurred to me that all too many of our stories from the early days of parenting were of Natalie, of course because she was our first experience of parenting. And from the experience of the parent you are going through two big things: having a child, on the one hand, and being a parent, on the other. By the time Graham was born we had more than 3 years of the parenting thing under our belts.

And when we tell the stories of those days there is a special emotional intensity of the early days for Natalie, child 1. There just can't help but to be, because she ushered us in to the new dimension of our lives that was parenting (and appreciating our own parents differently). So how does that sound to child 2, in our case Graham? I wonder if he catches it, in the back of his mind.

There's a book by a guy named Frank Sulloway called Born to Rebel, which talks about the significance of birth order in people's development. In short, first born kids are more inclined to be conservative, order-takers, whereas second born kids pushed back against norms and changed things. I remember having a copy of this book and reading some of it in my very early years in the private sector, between 2000 and the blog's inception date. At the time, it was too heavy, I was learning too much between work and parenting, didn't have the bandwidth to grok it. Now I might. I put it back on my list.

Driving in Montana

There was an LED sign near the west entrance to Glacier National Park which proclaimed that there had been 59 traffic fatalities in Montana when we got there. It was up to 61 by the time we left.

Montana has more fatal automotive accidents and more traffic-related fatal automotive accidents than any other state in the country. Anecdotally, I will also say that I was struck by how few police officers I saw while out there. I'm pretty sure it was just one, while we were in a 45 zone coming into Columbia Falls from the west. I would have spaced out on that cop had Mary not said something.

That said, from a speed perspective, I think Montanans, like most folks west of the Mississippi, do a better job self-regulating than we do back east. Here we are always hurrying to something. It seems they aren't in as much of a rush out west.

But there were an awful lot of bars out there. In the town where we stayed, Martin City, the only two retail establishments, one of which, seemingly anticipating my arrival, had put this excellent sign out by the road.

Overall out there, there is a lot of focus on selling big things with big engines. Trucks, boats, ATVs, chain saws, what have you. I get it. Nature is big out there, you have to work hard to keep it at bay. Push electrical mowers and dinky shit like that ain't gonna cut it. We have historically used big machines to keep nature at bay. We still do, even here, we are just duplicitous about it. It happens while all of us office workers are off doing our thing, crews of people -- many of them hispanic and quite likely less than perfect from a documentation POV -- come in and cut the growth back. Hence the impossibility of working from home on the east coast without hearing mowers, leaf blowers, string trimmers, etc. Nature fights back.

But I have riffed on this before. Time for lunch.

Young old people

When I was a kid at the beach I had a sense that I was preternaturally aged because I sat in a squat chair in the waves and read books all day. First mysteries and espionage stuff, later some Russians and other stuff. I swam a little to cool off.

We don't go to the beach much because Mary isn't into it and my family is fair-skinned. So we go to natural parks and walk around. Over spring break we walked around Charleston. We go to a lot of historical museums.

Most of the people we see are older people, though there are some other families. But our kids never go to amusement parks, they don't like going on rides, etc. I think they would have gone to Disneyland or certainly Harry Potter World, it just never happened.

And now Natalie has gone and gotten Ken Burns's 12-hour documentary on America's national parks. We started watching it this evening. That is some true old white people's shit.

To her credit, Natalie has her mind set on visiting all of America's national parks. She has gotten a few under her belt by now, is well on her way.

Why people hate soccer

Today's games have been pretty boring, technically. 1-1 Spain-Russia, 1-1 Croatia-Denmark after 110 minutes now.  Not a lot of close moments. But, since I was trapped in the mountains of Montana with no TV and really crappy throttling of highlights on YouTube because of the low bandwidth, I have been unable to stop watching.

Despite the slowness, it is good drama. Denmark is unquestionably playing with more confidence.

Holy fuck, Luka Modric misses a penalty at 115.