IRL again

The news broke this week that Facebook was under attack by the US Dept of Housing and Urban Development under the charge that its microtargeting of specific demographic categories, when carried to a logical extreme, replicated the "redlining" practices whereby, in days that seemed to be of yore, African-Americans and other minorities were excluded from buying houses in specific developments, which turned out to be almost everywhere except where white people wanted them to live.

We were talking yesterday after our soccer game about how game designers employed behavioral psychologists to figure out how to make games more addictive, just like they used to tune the nicotine content of cigarettes to keep people puffing.

More and more, the virtual world, as it extends to encompass all aspects of our lives, comes to replicate the ills we have sought to curtail IRL (in real life) through accrued wisdom, so we have to learn lessons all over again.

It is reminiscent of nothing so much as the world of Jose Luis Borges, in which the noumenal world extends to be coterminous with the phenomenal. As in the famous fable of the map which comprises the story "On Exactitude in Science"

... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

But now it is time to shave and get ready for brunch.

Kids

A little annoyed right now at my beloved daughter. I'm working hard to coordinate flights for her around Europe and home in late June right now, and she goes dark on me, despite me communicating with her entirely in the coin of the young people's realm: the text. Ah well.

On the positive side, our soccer team won today after getting whumped last week, and most of us had to play the whole game because of the large number of slackers off galavanting on some beach cuz it's Spring Break. I will have the last laugh late in the season, when I do some of my own traveling, because it will be hotter then. Cosmic justice, you gotta love it.

Mary is working in the yard now, and won't want to come in till it's pretty much dark, so I should really go have a snack.

Starting the day

One of the great things about not being on the road is being able to more easily adhere to healthy rhythms and practices, and one of the absolute best and most crucial for me is my early morning quiet time.

I get up early, before everyone else, when everything is quiet and do basics: make coffee, feed cats (so Rascal will leave me the fuck alone). While the coffee brews, I have pure quiet time. For some time it was closer to the "prayer" modality, which is to say that I sought to channel my thoughts intentionally and often in the form of words towards some other presupposed entity, if not necessarily an anthropomorphized deity.

More recently, I am moving towards more of a "meditation" mode, which I view as being more about focusing on clearing the mind. I put "prayer" and "meditation" in quotes because who knows what the words actually mean. In a sense the practice of engaging in either or both of them is groping towards one's own workable conception of them, or perhaps rather one's practice of them, inasmuch as each of them are actions of a sort.

Then I mix in crunches and push ups.

By now the coffee is ready, and I do some reading. The reading has varied over the years. It began with Al-Anon daily readers, but it has branched out to include other spiritual traditions. To date select Jewish stuff has been best, especially Abraham Joshua Heschel, but a slim volume of the stoic Epictetus was also good, as was Tim Galloway's The Inner Game of Tennis. Right now I am reading Chogyam Trungpa's Shambhala: The Way of the Warrior. I haven't found anything Christian that I can read just yet.

After breakfast, prior to working on morning correspondence, I read Nick Murray's daily reader for financial planners, Around the Year. To date Murray is the only one who has grasped and gone after the truly holistic demands of what we do as planners.

Soreness

Natalie came out for lunch yesterday, and before feasting we went for a bit of an exercise walk to "justify our love" for the delicious food we were about to inhale. Natalie has been playing club ultimate frisbee at Yale, meaning she is exercising more and more consistently than she did in high school, where she nominally did frisbee but was really too busy doing mock trial, debate etc. to go to practice much.

I had discussed with her a few times how much doing sports was integral to a good life for me, to the enjoyment of life, and how some baseline level of physical fitness was too. So I asked her if she was enjoying the fitness part of it more, and she said not really, and specifically cited being sore all the time as part of the problem.

I had never really reflected much on the issue of continual soreness, but I will say that it has been with me so long that I think of the mild discomfort as itself just part of life. A little muscle or joint ache tells me that I have done something recently. And if it is not there, I feel slack. Particularly on vacation, I actively want to get to the end of most if not all days having pushed myself hard. I would rather walk seven miles than three miles. And for sure, part of it is that it lets me eat more. No doubt.

Which isn't to say that I don't wrestle with laziness and actually getting out there and doing something. Even as I write this, I'm realizing that I need to hustle to pack my bags for work, including a gym bag so I can stop in to Planet Fitness end of day and put in my statutory 3 miles or so on the treadmill. I don't do it every day, but I need to do it enough days so that I don't have to go out and buy new jeans, which are always uncomfortable at first. And so we can check out Don Chicken on Elliot tonight!

Bad pop music

Natalie is home for spring break, and right now she is back in her room listening to some crappy pop music I have never heard before, singing along. There is a fire in the fireplace, as I try to burn off all the wood I brought onto the screened in porch before it gets warm, so I don't have to haul it back up to the wood pile. All in all, life is pretty good.

Robotics

Mary, granny and I rolled out to day 2 of East Chapel Hill's quest to win a robotics competition in Gibsonville. Graham's role on the team has been limited. He is part of the build team but it's unsure just what his specific responsibilities are. Which is cool. Mostly he is learning about being on a team. He has been staying rather late in the evenings, occasionally to the detriment of his school work. But he's sorting that out too.

The competition was rather intense. It was pretty amazing to see how different the robots were. Each team had to make decisions in the design phase about what aspects of the game to focus on. East's robot focused on "cargo" (hefting bouncy balls into chutes -- worth 3 points) and being a high climber (at the end of each round, the robot hauled itself up to a high platform worth a whopping 12 points). Other teams (Carrboro's team - in its rookie season) specialized in hanging disks (worth two points) and playing defense (making forays into the other team's area, banging against their robots, and generally messing them up). After the qualifying rounds, teams picked others to join "alliances", since it's always a game of 3 on 3. During the qualifiers, Graham was a statistician, and he did a fine job at that. It was important to form teams of complementary skillsets, as opposed to just the ones with the hwas ighest scores.

In the end, East came in 2nd (of 36) and won some special awards. The whole shebang was surprisingly engaging, and when it looked like East might get knocked out in the quarters, I was momentarily crestfallen. They came back.

All in all, I have to give it up to parents who do this all through their kids' childhoods. That is, haul themselves off to soccer, basketball, chess, whatever kind of competition. It's a total time- and soul-suck, involving an epic selflessness. Or does it? Certainly one hears of all too many instances of parents getting excessively wrapped up in living through their kids' accomplishments, and the college admissions scandal that broke last week may be just the most extreme instance of that. My point being that this utter level of commitment is not in some sense so selfless at all.

Our team picked the team from Orange High School as an alliance partner, which was a little surprising initially because they weren't ranked that highly. But the parents were right next to us in the stands, and they knew what they were watching (unlike us). They were also vigorous cheerers, and there was a lot of back and forth between alliances between rounds. Blue Alliance vs. Red Alliance, etc. True call and response. At one point in time, the opposing alliance, across the gym, started chanting "We believe that we will win" and then pausing, waiting for us to respond. I was ready to shout them down. The Orange parents did not. The woman to my left, a schoolteacher, explained to me that they did not like that cheer and did not participate in it. Good eggs.

Back and forth

I have been toin and froin a bit since last I wrote. A stop in through San Franscisco to see some peeps, now down in N Myrtle Beach to pick up Natalie from Spring Break. Having an all too rare sighting of the Atlantic Ocean as we speak, here at this condo "resort" where they only had non-dairy creamer for coffee not just in the room but also in the breakfast place (conveniently right across from my room). The woman was about to charge me $2.15 for a cup of milk for my coffee but I reminded her about the internet. Since she gave me some milk I will refrain from naming the resort.

Otherwise all good. Nice to see the sea, slept with my sliding glass door open, but my phone kept beeping at me. I didn't need that.

More later.

Home again, as it were

Back in this same cafe in Seattle near Mark's from whence I posted two years ago. The croissants are so damned good.

Not surprisingly, I return to the same theme, or a variant thereupon. There was a woman about my age, OK, probably younger, who was in here with her young girl (that's how I know she was younger). She started talking to a woman standing next to her about how she was from Ann Arbor and moved here a few years ago and how much Seattle was like Ann Arbor, blah blah blah.

I resisted the temptation to jump in and say: "My wife went to school there and her dad is from there and I really want to visit and get a sandwich from Zingerman's blah blah blah." Because the game she was playing and that we play all the time is "I am from the same tribe you are and we are educated and affluent and isn't that nice?" And that's all there is to it. We are from the same tribe. It is good sales technique.

And look where that has got us.

Whiplash

At around 8 on Friday night, I was headed up to Josh's house at the lake. It was a nasty night. Driving rain made the brights almost counterproductive. When I got to PayJay's on Route 1, I pulled off into the parking lot to enter the lake house address into my GPS so it would guide me the last bit, which I didn't feel confident to navigate in the dark.

I pulled off into the exit from the parking lot onto the road, so that my car was parallel to the road. In retrospect, it wasn't the absolute best place to perform this task, but there was plenty of space behind me, at least two if not three car lengths, where anybody could get around me to get into or out of the parking lot, and I wasn't gonna be there but 30 seconds, and my lights were on.

All this notwithstanding, I'm sitting there with my phone in my hand when I hear a crunching sound off to my right and I feel the rear of my car shifting to the left with a reasonable amount of force. Yes that's right, fair reader, somebody exiting the parking lot had slammed into my parked car, going pretty fast. I exclaimed something, most likely an expletive, but then within a microsecond or so my brain, ever the optimist, entered into denial and thought "that didn't just happen, did it?" But of course it had.

I got out, looked at my car, then looked back into the parking lot where some small car had a portion of its front bumper hanging off. I went up to it and knocked on the window. A guy was sitting there with his cellphone in hand, and I asked him "Are you OK?" (honestly, what he should have been asking me), and he's like "Yeah, I hit someone." "That was me." "Oh, I didn't see you, my windshield was a little bit fogged up." When I told him I thought we needed to call the cops he said. "Do we have to? My license is a little bit messed up. But I do have insurance. I was just calling my guy about my insurance."

Anyway, this is taking longer to narrate than I thought it would. I called up Josh because I didn't think he was in front of me and confirmed we needed an incident report, then called 911. Not too long thereafter, Melvin (the guy, who was entirely apologetic, and promised he had insurance) and I were waiting inside the store, and Josh shows up. Being hungry, Josh of course availed himself of not one but two pieces of the fried chicken I had in the back of the car, and I joined him in a drumstick while we waited for the sheriff's officer to get there. It was still hot.

In due course, the officer arrived, took our licenses and plates, but not our insurance and registrations, surprisingly, and in any case it didn't really matter because Melvin "didn't have no GEICO card on him" -- which somewhat begged the question of how he had been calling his insurance guy earlier. The officer promised a report would be available at the Warren County Sheriff's office on Monday morning, which we shall see about soon. Josh's professional assessment was that Melvin almost certainly did not have insurance, and the cop didn't want to embarrass him further by citing him for it, and I get that.  It was a rainy Friday and the guy had fucked up his car or, worse, his mom's or cousin's, and there was no reason to mess him up worse. He was a nice guy and was sincerely contrite. It's for situation's like this that we carry uninsured motorist coverage.

As to whiplash, my back felt and feels a little bit achy but I think it's getting better. Konanc didn't make it up there to give me a free professional opinion, sadly. Even more sadly, I didn't play basketball although the court was, surprisingly, dry enough. The car drives fine but I wouldn't be shocked if it needs $7k in work.

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.