Listening in the car

Right now my car listening is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. I have the actual book but have never made much headway in it, because it is boring, as most behavioral finance stuff is. I have been listening to a lot of this kind of non-fiction in the car, vaguely stuff that is supposed to help people learn how to think about stuff and manage life. I can't even list all the titles, and I also start to forget the authors a little because they blur together a little (but include Angela Duckworth, Daniel Pink, Ray Dalio...)

In fact, narratives stick better in my mind, including the bios of John Hope Franklin and Trevor Noah, as well as The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Probably I should listen to more of those. I was, after all, a literature person rather than a philosophy or other social science one, and there's a reason for that.

But of course!

A fair amount of ink has been spilled in the financial press this weekend about the troubles at Kraft/Heinz and how that has impacted Berkshire Hathaway's results. The story basically goes like this: "Kraft/Heinz got pummeled because the American consumer is moving away from legacy brands like Oscar Meyer and Heinz ketchup, but these are the kinds of brands Buffett likes so therefore Berkshire's model is at risk." And we all say, "but of course, that makes all the sense in the world." And it does, and I, having read one very fat bio of Buffett plus about 50 of his roughly 55 annual letters, can attest that this thesis makes a lot of sense.

Problem is, I didn't see it coming beforehand, even though I was aware both of the ever-diminishing stickiness of American brands as consumers move more to store brands, generics, fresh food (kinda) and so on. I was also aware of Buffett's love -- thanks to the strong influence of Charlie Munger -- of a good brand.

That's because there are all too many themes, trends, and theses out there in the marketplace, and tracking and weighing any of them consistently and confidently is deucedly tricky. I'm sure there are a few gurus who saw this coming and will bask in the financial media sunshine for a few days for having done so. Some of them may have made good money placing bets here. But guessing which guru will be right cycle after cycle is its own game. It is therefore imperative that in thinking about markets, we focus on data over long periods of time and the things that have offered consistent incremental advantage, namely factors, and investor behavior.


nb. By far the best thing to have come out of the reporting of the Kraft/Heinz results was the piece in the Journal on Saturday about Buffett's Brazilian partner 3G and its practice of zero-based budgeting, how it has influenced management in consumer goods companies worldwide, and how the relentless focus on cost-control at Kraft-Heinz meant that it wasn't paying enough attention to the consumer and got hammered. That was where the wisdom was.

Driving and scrapping

Graham and I went out driving at the Friday Center parking lot for the 3rd time today. He put the car in reverse for the first time, which is an odd thing for sure. There are very few analogous experiences in life, there's not even much that preps you for that in the experience of riding a bike. I suppose back in the day bumper cars helped prep us a little. But my kids have never been into going to the rides or the State Fair -- we were never really at the beach enough for it to be an issue.

In a recent conversation with another parent of a kid on the spectrum, I learned that that kid -- now a college graduate -- was living at home and refused to go places because he didn't know his way around town, except to go to the gym. So I am beginning, as consistently and programmatically as possible, to try to get Graham to pay attention to where we are going and to have him give me directions to common places we go. It is surprising how little attention he pays, how few places he knows how to get to. So we will work on that.

After I got back Mary and I got into a little scrap. As a matter of policy, I don't delve much into marital difficulties here on the blog. Ultimately for us -- and I think for many -- many of our disagreement come down to the question of who is giving up the most, who is making the greatest sacrifice, for the sake of the household. Which is a tough thing to work through. But conversations with many others, women as well as men, confirm that I/we are not alone in this.

What is mine

At my normal Saturday morning meeting today, my mind continued to focus on a business meeting I had yesterday, in which one of my partners kind of rode roughshod over our plan in a way that annoys me and is reminiscent of my dad. I was able to listen to what was shared some, but not too much, perhaps not quite as much as would have been optimal.

After the meeting, I said hello to a client with whom I hadn't been able to connect for a while. He shared a bunch of issues with me, some of them kind of financial, some of them familial. Some of them are in domains in which I could be of service, if asked, or I could refer him to someone who could: and he knows it. But he didn't ask, because he was too far down in his own weeds.

And I realized it was time to get Graham to martial arts, that I can't ultimately control either of these folks, and I shouldn't let myself be subsumed by them. In the case of the Friday's meeting, we either get the business or we don't, neither is fatal. With my client, I just need to give him what he wants.

Self torture

Today is a holiday for me: Presidents' Day. I could work, but I'm not going to, aside from working on my taxes a little. And I'll do some reading, indeed, have already done so, about the new economic zone on the border of Kazakhstan and Xinjiang and how the politics of China's Belt and Road Initiative are complicating things there, even as BRI itself breathes life into an otherwise sleepy place.

So it would have been nice to have had a restful night of sleep. But no, my brain's not gonna let that just happen. Instead, somewhere around 5 in the morning, it starts obsessing about the 4 main things that go into underwriting a mortgage. I only know about this from a project I did back in the summer of 2003 doing a time and motion study of mortgage underwriting for a private mortgage insurer.

I could think of 3 of the 4 (the borrower's credit rating, income, and assets), but not the 4th. Somewhere around 630 or so I realized the fourth might be the appraisal of the property being bought (it is). Mostly my brain just tortured itself.

But why, we may ask. Why would it do that? Maybe because Mary was pregnant with Graham then, indeed, it was during that project that I was in Albany in August 2003 when the power went out all up and down the East Coast, scaring the shit out of me, since I initially assumed it must be September 11 redux. Then yesterday I'm out teaching Graham to drive.

Or maybe it's because it was on that mortgage underwriting project that, while visiting with our client down in Raleigh, I found myself across the table from an African-American woman from my high school class that I had never heard of and could have sworn I had never laid eyes on, but she was our homecoming queen. And tonight we have a 35th reunion meeting at which there will be a couple of African-American women, and I can't begin to put faces to names.

It is a very odd thing. I was in almost all honors and AP classes as high school wore on, and there weren't many black people in them. I knew all the black guys because I played basketball with them -- like any NC male, I played ball, but there were few black women out there (Pam Clarke), and few in classes with me, so I largely don't know them.

Killing cinema

Today's obit in the Times for Bruno Ganz made me ponder the state of the cinema today. It listed so many films I had never heard of, by directors I know. There was a time that I stayed on top of this kind of thing, but that time is long, long past, having been superceded by the earning of dollars and the raising of rugrats.

But I wonder if we have perhaps failed these very rugrats by not letting them know that we care about cinema. Mary and I used to go to a lot of movies, even films. Our very first real conversation, after all, was anchored by sharing our love for Dushan Makaveyev's work (and Wikipedia now tells me that Makaveyev died a few weeks ago).

So there is this very broad corpus of great work to which we haven't exposed our kids at all. Yes, we have shown them Monty Python, and Peter Sellers's best work (including The Mouse That Roared), and Airplane. When they were young, I had a copy of Mr Hulot's Holiday and I tried to get them involved in it, with a little success. I think we've shown them a little Hitchcock.

But mostly not. Mostly we watch whatever we can get them to watch, which has been a lot of sitcoms for Natalie and an awful lot of adventure for Graham. A lot of Star Trek, which has been good for me.

And I guess they are just at the age at which the great and slow stuff might even begin to appeal to them. To get to that stage myself, I basically had to consume such a huge volume of genre stuff that I was exhausted by its conventions -- that I basically already knew what was likely to come next.

I think Graham is getting there. We're in the middle of season 3 of The Wire now. Barksdale just got out of prison, and has reentered the world of his criminal enterprise, which has been nurtured by Stringer Bell in his absence, who has substantially corporatized and defanged it, making it more profitable and less deadly, but something Barksdale can't understand. Graham looked at Stringer and Barksdale and said: "I think within three episodes one of those two will have killed the other one." I agree.

Bezos and his dick

Yesterday's news that Amazon will not set up HQ2 in Long Island City is big. I won't go too far into it, save to say that I think it is a loss for New York and for America, in the sense that we are not nurturing our densest metro area which -- for all its faults -- is one of our great treasures, and has been slammed by a lot of things, but nothing so much as the 2017 tax bill and its treatment of state and local taxes, which has provided people with yet another reason to leave the tri-state area. So much good happens there. I will refer you again to Broughton grad Ryan Avent's The Gated City and his well-reasoned defense of density and its benefits writ large.

I am sure that I have shared my love-hate relationship with Amazon and the tech giants. We all have it. We love them and we fear them. Amazon has been ruling the most in the last few years, so it is front and center. As an investor with a data-driven reticence to focus on the selection of individual securities, I frankly expect it to revert to the mean before too long, as most investor infatuations do.

And it is interesting to see how that might be happening: having become the world's richest man, Bezos gets a little caught up in Hollywood, glamour, and beautiful people. Has an affair with a supermodel looking woman. Gets caught. Moves toward divorce from his wife of a quarter century or so.

So now, all of a sudden, Bezos -- who had viewed HQ2 as a way of decentralizing power within the organization -- is staring down the barrel of a divorce which could see his holdings in the company cut in half, roughly, which would further erode his control of the company. So -- HQ2, having been split in half already, is dialed back. The Northern Virginia campus will continue to grow, but it will be a lesser outpost, as will the new Nashville facility. Amazon's core strategic growth for the foreseeable future will continue to be focused in Seattle, a place which is already having a huge affordability crisis. So it is going to be hard to attract and recruit talent there. They are already having to hire just whoever is already there.

Wellness

Everybody in my industry talks about holistic financial planning, and there is tremendous buzz about the concept of financial wellness. Many of my reflections here on the blog have been about the interrelations between aging, decay, and maintenance, and you can be assured that in the back of my mind I am thinking in terms of time allocation, which can be managed with and translated into money. And I have often made the analogy between the financial advisor/planner and the general practitioner physician, in conversation if not here.

The more I think about it, I am increasingly of the mind that there is no fine or firm line between financial wellness and wellness generally. They are intimately bound up together. This thinking is to some extent being facilitated by William Goetzmann's Money Changes Everything, a book by a Yale professor which looks at the roots of finance going back to Mesopotamia. It is not light reading.

I have to present to a 401k in a couple of weeks on financial wellness, am in the process of developing the presentation. We'll see how much I meld the concepts of financial with physical/mental wellness in this presentation.

Funny pages

While we were gone to New Orleans, the newspaper delivery person -- someone I actually know from high school, which is cool -- slipped us a free copy of the News and Observer Sunday paper. Which included funny pages, which I haven't seen for a long time.

I took the time to read through them, and was mildly amused. There were no moments of convulsive guffawing, just some low-volume chuckles and slight curling of the mouth. But, as someone who makes and has made an effort to produce a volume of hopefully readable and worthwhile text over a long period of time, I have all the respect in the world for the people who draw and write the comic strips. It ain't easy to just keep producing, day in day out, or week in week out, year after year.

Perhaps more importantly, it's very helpful for me to adjust my expectations of what constitutes good humor. What's wrong with dredging a slight moment of sympathetic recognition or a remembrance of childhood from the funny pages, as opposed to the full body laughs that came from the best of Dave Chappelle's first season? You can't have genius all the time, and if you are demanding it of the universe constantly, you're setting yourself up for unhappiness. Much better to accept what's on offer and roll forward.

Big and easy

Mary and I are getting ready to go to New Orleans tomorrow for the weekend, our first time ever. The occasion for the trip is a little talk I have to give at a conference of Slavists on alternative career paths -- the last time I am ever doing this for free, unless it's a short drive from home.

It's also the first time we've ever gotten on a plane to go somewhere for a weekend for fun, and our first weekend alone as a couple for several years. We did it maybe in 2015 in Asheville or so after dropping Natalie off at camp or something.

It's obvious that it's a good thing to do for our relationship. Graham is 1/8th of the way through high school now, and of course it's clear to me that that will be over tomorrowish, the way time flies at our age. We need to relearn how to spend time together enjoyably as a couple.

The other day Adam said the blog was sometimes repetitive, and I know that I have been thinking about this theme for a while, so it's likely I've blogged about it. So I'll stop.

The great cycle of forest-trimming

I got home from lunch and a couple of errands yesterday, and what should await me but a bunch of Asplundh trucks in front of our house, trimming back branches. Making a lot of noise. Great.

I remember well the last time they were on our block, I wrote about it in this post. So now we can see they are running in about 5 year cycles here, at least in our mature, forested neighborhood. Their deployment was no doubt occasioned by the couple of outages we've had this year, though I honestly can't say if our neighborhood is worse than any other around here.

One thing that does appear to be the case, at least anecdotally is that Duke Power is being proactive and mindful about managing the risk associated with overhanging trees. Hopefully it has done enough, unlike PG&E, the Northern California utility that was forced to file for bankruptcy last month because of claims arising from all the fires in that region -- many of which have been put down to its failure to keep its power lines safe.

Of course, the weather (and climate?) has been kinder to North Carolina in the last decade or so than it has to Northern California. We haven't had a drought, so our trees are healthy, whereas NoCal's have been weakened by drought. The story is more complicated than that, to be sure, but I can't speculate further right now, because it's time to pack up and get ready for first tennis (coming for you, Z), then work.

College fun

We had a nice video call with Natalie on Sunday evening while granny was over for dinner. She was working in the Branford library, then had to go outside because the fire alarm kept going off, then, once that was over, she retreated to the Branford common room where a Super Bowl party was going on and sat in front of a mirror (details added for future memory sparks).

She told us that she had a paper due for her essay-writing class the next evening at 8, and that it was hard because it was in the autobiographical mode, which wasn't something she was comfortable with (despite having written fine college essays).

Then, yesterday evening at 7 she texts mom a picture of the menu from a pescatarian (mostly vegetarian) Chinese New Year feast she was attending, and said it was running longer than she was expecting and that she didn't have her paper done. This made Mr. Achievement over here nervous, and I nudged her a little. She said that she would only get marked down a third of a grade for being late, and that it wasn't worth rushing.

In the end, I think she made the right decision. Trying new stuff out, meeting people, experiencing the world, those are the benefits of being in college and going to a place like Yale where there's a lot on offer. Her grades will be fine, she works plenty hard and is super organized. Straight As her first semester, something I never quite pulled off. And Lord knows I wasted tons of time doing many things much less productive than eating a bunch of interesting Chinese food.

The lesson for me is, clearly, back the fuck off.

Evolving identity

Over dinner last night I learned that Graham needed to focus on Latin homework rather than starting season 3 of The Wire with me because he had gotten a 40 on a Latin test. Not a quiz, a test. Now, this teacher is known for giving hard tests and for letting kids make up their mistakes, but a 40?

We are paying $80 a week to an executive function coach to help Graham with issues around studying and being organized, and a few weeks back she came and found me after their session to tell me that Graham was on top of his Powerschool, which I interpreted to mean that I should get out of his jock. I perhaps shouldn't have backed off as far.

Then I sat with Graham to help him with his Latin, a language which I only took 1 year of, 35 years ago, more or less as a lark because it wasn't an honors class and it was super easy. Needless to say, despite years of Spanish and French and traveling in Italy and Brazil and also knowing Russian and other Slavic languages so I am comfortable with a language with cases and declensions, it wasn't easy. Particularly since they were translating pretty abstract passages from freaking Cicero.

And Graham did not have a handle on it. He was struggling pretty mightily.

So now Graham is on the cusp of getting at least one B in his first semester in high school. Which would axe his chances of being a valedictorian, i.e. being in the top 10% of his class. Sigh.

So I guess I need to be more attentive and offer more guidance. Mostly around the structured process of how to study, the need to put in the work, and making choices (maybe not staying at Robotics Club till 9 several nights a week).

Over the course of our lives we learn to distinguish between the things that come to us more or less by nature -- in our case (me and Graham) great memories, curiosity, persistence in searching down answers -- and the things that come to us by adjusting our natures to the demands of the world so as to channel our gifts towards accomplishment. In some real if paradoxical sense, it is only the latter -- what we become by learning the Way of the World -- that can really said to belong to "me," because it reflects intentional effort on my part. Which is to say, to extend beyond the logic of Descartes' cogito ("I think therefore I am"), that my truest "I" is the part of me that overcomes the tendencies bequeathed me at birth.