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 Reloading the Surveyor's Intrument? To be very, very clear, I do not believe that Sarah Palin has any direct connection to the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and I think that it is extremely unlikely that one could ever lay responsibility for something like this on a single poster or slogan. That said, she cannot be allowed to claim that these were “surveyor’s symbols like you see on maps” as her media aide is saying now.
The screen capture of her Twitter post shown here is still a live part of Ms. Palin’s feed. It points to the Facebook page here . She also refers to the “bullseye” message here.
To portray this as anything other than an emphatic underline that these are gunsights is political asshattery of the highest order. You don’t, of course, reload surveyor’s instruments, and Ms. Palin knows this. If she really wants to be the bigger and better person, she should follow her own advice. I don’t agree with much she says, but “the more honest you are about the past, the more likely it is you will gain the support of the American people” statement she posted here rings true.
I’m not the first to say this by any means, but this tragedy can become an opportunity if we use it to enforce some introspection and honesty upon our political system. Calling for 2nd Amendment “remedies” or using violent rhetoric of any sort in politics is wrong. Note that I’m not saying that it should be illegal. This is something that should transcend any need for laws and should spring from a place far deeper in our souls than any political or legal concept; It should be taboo. Given her lightning rod status in US politics, imagine the impact of Ms. Palin making a public pledge to refrain from using violent imagery or words. A pledge of this sort by Ms. Palin would almost certainly force the middle and left to follow suit (While you are at it, Ms. Palin, make a similar pledge to not use any more PAC money — Look at the trouble it caused you this time…). If she really wants to make America a better place, this would be a great way to start.
In the end, the only thing we should be targeting is our lack of honesty as a citizenry. When we accept utter lies as truth because it makes us feel better about who we are and what we believe, how can we expect those who lead us to take the more difficult road of introspection, honesty, integrity, and tough decisions? We flap about and expend great energy demanding these qualities from those whose ideas we oppose, but the truth is that we should demand an even higher level of commitment from those we support. We’ve all seen it in our families — Criticism hurts most when it comes from close to the heart. It also is the criticism that is most likely to take hold and make a difference.
Define the American Dream. Is it that three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath home in the suburbs? As our politicians talk about the current financial morass, they’d have you believe that. Change the channel, and still another politician or pundit will tell you of an American Dream where all children are covered by healthcare and where getting sick doesn’t carry the nuance of possible financial ruin. Change the channel again and you’ll get another remix talking about how we need to reclaim the glory of years past.
But they’re wrong. All of them. The “American” in American Dream isn’t possessive, it’s purely adjectival. The American Dream is the dream of opportunity, nothing more and nothing less. It is a dream shared of course by many Americans, but also with dreamers across the whole world. A tailor in Calcutta bending over his cloth, a rice farmer in Vietnam working in his field, a shopkeeper in China tallying the day’s sales, or a carpenter in Mexico framing a house have the same dream. It is the idea that if you obey the rules, work hard, and try to be a good member of society, you will be rewarded with success, and, yes, maybe that house in the suburbs. It is a dream that has perhaps best been realized in America, but it is owned by the world.
We must be careful, however, not to tie the American Dream to only material things. It is about potential. It is about getting back from the world what you put into it, and also about giving back to the world when you get a bit luckier than the person down the street, the next city over, or across the border. The American Dream, in the adjectival sense, is simply aspirational. It captures the very human desire to better ourselves and to build a better world for our children. America, for all its problems and follies, is in many ways the best we as a species have been able to achieve. The world knows this. It’s why we are admired, despised, hated, and loved. We are – or at least could be – anything to anyone.
And that’s where things get sticky. Aspirational dreams can become nightmarish quagmires when we continually struggle towards them without seeming to get closer to the goal. Tied too closely to material success, the American Dream transforms into a horrible race of keeping up with the Joneses. To prevent this, the focus must be on the dream, and the dream must change as the people dreaming it change. Americans who ask “What happened to the American Dream?” don’t get it. They don’t understand that you can’t look backward for the American Dream because it is inherently a forward looking construct. They don’t get that while they may be actors in the Dream, the Dream is not only dreamt in America. They don’t get that the Dream never ends, and that every generation has necessarily different aspirations. Without that, the value of the Dream disappears and we fall back into the trap of trying to buy our way to the next level of happiness.
For much of the late 1990s and into the new millennium the Dream became less attractive. The world changed and much of America did not. Sure, parts did. Silicon Valley innovated with a speed not seen since the Renaissance, and Wall Street brought in quants and used some of that technology to launch a revolution in the markets. Capitalism won the day, but somewhere along the way we lost sight of the nonmaterial things we were losing. We gave up on the idea of a greater good, and when we did that we gave up a part of our collective soul. Unfortunately, the part we lost was the part that dreams.
America is going to survive the current financial, structural, and social schisms that now threaten to overtake our lives. To achieve this, however, we need to stop the multitude of delusions that afflict us. We need to realize that the American Dream is only that, a Dream. We deluded ourselves into thinking that we could pay for things today with money borrowed from tomorrow, and that somehow the Dream would make things work out all right. It didn’t and it won’t, because it can’t.
We need to reflect on what made America great. It wasn’t people of a certain nationality or skin color, it wasn’t members of a particular religion, and it certainly was not because the system of government America offered was radically different than other places. What made America great was that the people who came here were willing to work hard, they were willing to persevere in the face of adversity, and they were willing to learn to live within a new system, a new society, and a new culture. They were willing to do all this because at the time the potential and opportunity in America were outstanding, and they wanted a shot at building a better life. They were the original Dreamers, and it is from them that the Dream spread and became what it is now.
Today, America still has its Dreamers. The immigrants of today may not look like or speak the same languages of the original Dreamers, but they and their children share the drive and hunger of those original Dreamers all the same. Now, however, America also has a huge number of people who were born here, grew up here, and who have lived the Dream. Only some of them don’t think so. They look at their home, their car, and their TV, and they wonder why all of them aren’t bigger or newer. They look back on the gains their parents made, and they feel that they should have more. They feel as if the system somehow shorted them on what they were due. They’ve bought into at least the material side of the Dream, but they’ve forgotten that the Dream isn’t a promise. The Dream only shows what’s possible, and those possibilities constantly change. None of us can reclaim the American Dream of our forefathers because it doesn’t exist any longer.
In two weeks we will go through another election cycle, one that promises to be a milestone in American history. Americans on both sides of the aisle are aghast at the financial situation the US has found itself in after years of spending without reason or reward. It is our challenge as US citizens at this time to find the political will to know we have some hard times coming, to accept that fact, and to make the cuts and raise the taxes necessary to balance the books. It is our challenge as Americans to prove Marx wrong and show that Capitalism is not inherently corrupting, and that it is possible to better a society through progressive social reform while still maintaining the efficiency and drive of a capitalist system. It is our challenge as Dreamers to take it upon ourselves to fix things now so that our children have a better world in which to live in the future.
It’s time for America to reset. Two years ago we took a first step in this direction by electing a President who spoke of hope, of possibilities, and who evoked another era and man who also spoke of dreams. Whether you are conservative or liberal, the importance of President Obama’s arrival in the White House showed clearly that the United States was reevaluating itself, what it was, and what it wanted to be. The world cheered at those elections because the world had already dreamt them, and we showed the Dream to still be alive and true. But the Dream moves on and the world moves on. The economic potential and opportunity in America is being challenged by China, Brazil, and other models. The countries of Europe have changed radically in the past 30 years and now in several cases outpace the US both in economic growth and socioeconomic stability. The Dreamers don’t just dream of America any longer. They have options that previous generations didn’t have; they can seek their Dream elsewhere.
It is inevitable that the time will come when America is not the largest economic power on earth. We do not, however, have to lose our role as a leader. It is critical, in fact, for America to maintain it, but we need to do so not by force of will or force of arms. We need to do it by force of spirit. We need to recapture the indomitable spirit of the pioneer, of the bold face willing to try new things and forge a new way. Most importantly, we need to remember that the Dream will forever be changing and that the ability to adapt always beats the desire to hold on to the status quo.
So, go and vote. Make your voice heard. But before you do so, think about the American Dream and what it really is, a global referendum on the United States and what it stands for. Right now it’s still the American Dream, but remember, “American” is an adjective and that adjective can and will change unless we provide leadership. The world doesn’t just want our military to act as a global police force or for our economy to power the world out of yet another economic downturn. It wants something much greater, something much more human.
It wants us to dream back.
It’s just before 2am in Bangkok. The sidewalks on Sukhumvit are busier now than they were at 2pm, and everyone is concerned with the order of the hour. Beet-nosed expats slough on down a side soi toward their homes. Sweaty tourists with bleary eyes and sweat dribbling down their necks laugh at each other and hit high-fives. Local shopkeepers are trying to hustle those same tourists, placing cheap t-shirts in front of them with wide smiles and well-used one-liners. The working girls make eye contact, predatory and demure all in one glance. They can read a man instantly and I merit no more than a blink before they pass on to more hopeful prospects. They can see that I have a purpose, that I’m looking for something, but it’s not them and they have no time to waste – 2am is the witching hour, and soon they will know whether they will make money tonight or not.
The noise is incredible. Sukhumvit is three lanes in each direction, and red taillights stare from both sides as far as one can see. Scooters nuzzle up to huge tractor-trailers in a bid to gain a few more centimeters of progress. Taxi drivers call out to potential fares. A policeman’s shrill whistle pushes back on the din and attempts to draw some order on the chaos. I look over at the officer and notice that while he is waving his arms and making a show at moving traffic, his eyes never leave the row of women selling themselves. He almost certainly gets a cut.
At one stall, a lady-boy is busy shuffling bottles around. She looks up at me and smiles, inviting me to sit for a drink. She’s beautifully made-up, and her words and actions are cute and playful – the perfect bar hostess. She has a top on that reveals just enough cleavage that you can see that she has at least started the physical transformation into whatever it is she wants to become. I smile back and wave her off – No more drinking tonight.
The smells are a complicated mixture of old and new. Sweet strawberry and apple scents from the hookahs on Soi 5 mix with the smells of garlic, prik kee noo chilies, and nam plah fish sauce from the ever-present food carts. Diesel fumes jar against the smoke from cheap incense sold at one of the tourist stalls. The older Caucasian gentleman walking in front of me smells distinctly of too much Old Spice, while the overweight Middle Eastern man in flowing bisht I just edged past reeks of masala and sweat.
At the corner is what I’ve been looking for. Food stalls are everywhere, but I’ve been coming to this one for years. Two pots simmer away, and I point to the lighter colored one and then the yellow noodles. The lady nods and gestures to a line of cheap plastic tables and stools near the curb. As I sit, I notice that under the stall lies a dog, fat as a pig and with teats stretching out from her belly like stubby octopus arms. She’s oblivious to the chaos around her in the way of city strays across the world. She’s safe under her aluminum and plastic shell, free from the possibility of a crushing step or well-placed kick. Like all of us, she knows that the night in Bangkok is the best part of the day and she’s making the most a dog can of it.
My noodles arrive. I pay my 30 baht and add dried chilies, pickled chilies, and chopped peanuts in almost equal amounts, followed by a small spoonful of sugar. A quick swirl to distribute them through the liquid and I take the first sip from a cheap stamped-metal Asian-style spoon. The liquid is OMG hot, and as I choke it down I manage to get a big chunk of chili tucked up just under where my sinuses drain into my throat. No choice but to push forward at this point, so I grab a tangle of noodles and noisily slurp them up. They clear the chili, and as they slide into my gut I sit back and take what feels like the first real breath I’ve had all day. I notice that the old lady who tends the stall is looking at me and smiling. I give her the thumbs-up sign and we both laugh.
I get back to work. The soup is amazing as always. It is pork-based, with that rich umami that comes from pork bones boiled for oh-so-long. The noodles are fairly typical egg noodles, and their purpose is really just to add some body to the soup and small pile of toppings added just before serving. The toppings consist of a couple of thin slices of red-stained pork, another small pile of what I think is sliced bits from the pig’s heart, and an assortment of fish balls with two or three bright green leaves of something fresh laid on top to blanch in the soup’s heat as the bowl is carried to the table.
I’m almost half-way through the soup when I look up and see an overweight white woman looking at me with an odd mixture of fascination and disgust. From the looks of it she’s in her mid-fifties, and I imagine that two things disturb her. First, I’m eating at a street stall while a few meters away a pile of garbage is rustling with long-tailed rats grabbing juicy bits of things that people like me left earlier in the evening. Her bright pink, red, turquoise, and yellow muumuu might as well be a giant blinking neon sign floating over her head that says “AMERICAN TOURIST ON FIRST TRIP TO ASIA”, so I’m guessing that she arrived late that night and came out from one of the four or five-star hotels nearby for a quick look around before going in to shower and sleep. She’s appears to be in shock at the overall scene, and I am sure that a thousand dollars couldn’t convince her to try a sip of this incredible soup.
More likely, however, her fascination with me is not so much what I’m eating, but how I’m eating. I’m deep in the bowl, hunched over and sucking up the noodles and soup in equal and loud measure. You have to do it this way – Hold the noodles in your battered pink plastic chopsticks too long and the delicious soup drains away leaving you with a mouthful of bland starch. Try to eat too fast and all the next day your tongue will be able to play with flaps of skin hanging off of the roof of your mouth.
The trick is to slurp hard and mix air in with the soup as you eat. The air cools the liquid to a merely painful, as opposed to dangerous, level, and it helps aromatize the chili, garlic, and other spices, allowing you to get a deeper and more rounded flavor from them. So you slurp, you slosh, you get your face down into the bowl, and you assume the intense demeanor of someone with an important and difficult task to accomplish. Your eyes narrow to slits against chili and steam. Lips pucker out to gingerly grab the top strands of blisteringly hot noodles. Your chest heaves with each influx of heat and air, and sweat blossoms from every pore in your body as you make small grunting noises. It’s as close to heaven as I’ve even been in public, but for this lady looking at me I am something she cannot understand and perhaps even the topic of a postcard she will write to her church group tomorrow while sitting in Starbucks after the morning group tour.
In the few seconds we are staring at each other, my mouth hits the jackpot. There are always two or three in each bowl, and this is the first one tonight. My eyes roll back in my head a little bit as I lift away from the bowl. There is a rivulet of liquid running down my chin, soup or sweat I don’t know or care. I chew again and get another burst of flavor before the pea-sized source of my pleasure dissolves and I swallow. I’m not sure what this is, but it’s why I come back to this same stall every time – sometimes multiple times – I am in Bangkok.
I know that it is deep-fried, and the closest I can come to describing it from a western vocabulary is a small piece of crispy pork fat, but that doesn’t do it justice at all. There’s definitely pork and shrimp in it. And salt, and maybe garlic, and most likely other things that I can’t even guess at. It arrives in your mouth still crispy, and I swear that even before you bite into it you know that it’s there. When you do bite into it, it crunches once in a single staccato counterpoint to all the soft noodles and then immediately dissolves into an intense burst of rich flavor that caresses your mouth for an instant before you double down and renew your efforts in the bowl, trying to find that next Nirvanic morsel. That’s what I do, and I don’t look up again until the bowl is empty except for a few chili flakes stuck to the bottom. When I do look up, the lady is gone, but Sukhumvit is exactly the same.
I wipe my nose and mouth from the roll of toilet paper sitting on the table, stand up, and am lucky enough to immediately catch the light so that I can cross the street and walk back to my hotel. My back is now plastered with sweat and I’m thankful for the short haircut I got that afternoon. The heat from the soup and the chilies has stood every hair on end and opened every pore on my body. I feel like a live antenna, and I am blinking a quick Morse code to keep sweat out of my eyes. Ten minutes later I’m in the ice-cold hotel room and stripping off clothes to shower. I leave the water at a cool temperature and stand there for a few minutes. I’m very alive, the world is very good, and I’m going to sleep very, very well.
Over the past two weeks I have had the very interesting, and in some ways motivating, experience of dropping into an “Alice in Wonderland” world where things are not as they seem, people agree to battle and then run off at the sight of something scary, and arbitrary shrieks of “Off with his head!” ring out on a regular basis. This is the world of conservative politics on Facebook, or at least extreme conservative politics.
The trip started because of a simple post by Sherry — no last name necessary. She asked a rhetorical and highly provocative question about the new health care bill that garnered from one of her friends the label “jackass” and listed the post as “asshattery”. Two things struck me about the exchange. First, the person who made the jackass-asshattery comment had summarily been defriended, so the original post was gone and he was no longer around to see what was being said. Second, and the only reason that I knew it had happened at all, was that Sherry took the offending post and placed it as her status, talking about how rude the post was, how she wouldn’t stand for it, and how he was now gone.
Fair enough, I suppose, although it seemed pretty in-your-face to defriend someone, then take their post and put it in your status. If someone calls you a jackass and you don’t want to be their friend any longer, that’s entirely up to you. Posting about it and calling the person rude, when the instigating comment was yours and was completely designed to evoke a strong reaction, seemed incongruous. Also, as neither the late friend nor anyone else was still able to see the original post (As I learned later, when you get defriended, everything disappears into that great Facebook in the sky.), there was no way for any of us to know if the post had been edited, selectively quoted, or kept in its original form.
So at this point I entered the rabbit hole by asking whether, just perhaps, Sherry’s post might be a little over-the-top. We soon went through the “It’s my opinion” phase and I suggested that we discuss, or debate the topic a bit. Things started out slowly — Sherry wasn’t interested in debating — but the deeper down the rabbit hole I got, the more cookies were laid on tables and the more potions I was asked to drink, the more disturbed, but interested, I became. You see, one of the very few advantages of being a citizen of a country while not living in that country is that you get to see things from a distance. This distance takes out a lot of the emotion. Not all of it, but a lot, and in my case it had made me almost completely unaware of how radicalized parts of the US populace had become.
In the past two weeks I was given direct, full-frontal exposure, with all the hairy and dangly bits in place, to something that I had thought was a caricature. I had Sherry tell me that President Obama was brainwashing children. I had her tell me that the new health care bill would cause children on Medicaid to get worse service than before. I had her direct me to a video claiming that President Obama was raising a private army to station in the USA. I had her tell me that YouTube and other internet sites were being censored to prevent the truth about President Obama from coming out. I watched her make a backhanded comparison of him to Satan. I had her tell me that he was subverting the Constitution. And, something that irritated me the first time I heard it and which continued to gnaw on me in almost every following post, I was told that President Obama is not listening to the people, that he was not listening to the citizens of the USA.
Let’s think about that last statement and the implications it makes. President Obama is not listening to the people, the citizens, of the United States. I’m a citizen, and I think he listens (More or less, but that’s politics…) to me. I think that he listens to a lot of people. In fact, he was elected with the most absolute votes in his favor in the history of the United States. If you want to look at percentages, you need to go back to President Reagan’s victory over Walter Mondale to find a win by a larger percentage.
The implication of this statement, then, is that the people President Obama is listening to are not citizens of the United States.
Ouch. And I just paid my taxes.
In any case, Sherry and I were discussing things and slowly I was beginning to get a picture of who she was. I showed respect. I stayed on-topic. I was consistent in my arguments. Sherry got frustrated — angry perhaps — with me on several occasions, but that happens. In some places we agreed, and in some places I even saw her make some effort to rein in the even more radical statements being made by some of her other friends. What made me break down and write what I thought really needed to be written, however, was not anger. It was a little smilie emoticon tacked on at the end of a sentence. The sentence said that if I posted anything further, it would be deleted.
Ahh, censorship. You can, of course, defriend someone on Facebook, which is exactly what Sherry did to me after I posted again. I would have much preferred her to have said that — “I don’t want your posts on my wall. If you post again, I will take you off my friends list because I don’t have the energy or time to deal with it.” What I got, though, was a long post that twisted my words (A common occurrence over the exchange…) and made some outright false accusations about me before ending with,
This is my last reply to this thread any other comments will be deleted I’m a woman I get the last say :)
Nope. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t piss on third base and then threaten to take your ball home if anyone complains.
So, I posted, and in the end I challenged her on her openness to the ideas of other people and on her censorship. I challenged her to leave what I posted up and prove my allegations wrong on both counts. She didn’t, which I expected, and which was why I kept copies of the three later and longer threads. I knew that she would either delete the last one, or potentially defriend me and therefore delete them all. I hate it when I fail to give people the benefit of doubt and then they still prove me right.
So here are the copies. As you will see, we had already had a short exchange about censorship and the fact that it wasn’t possible on the internet. In my last post I reminded her of my position and wrote that if she attempted to censor me, I would be be forced to prove that it is impossible in a free world with an open internet. I like to keep my promises.
Thread 1: In which Peter learns a Joke and New Song
Thread 2: Where Peter begins to bow to reality
Thread 3: The light at the end of censorship
The outrage from conservative America over Obama’s bows to Asian leaders borders on the ridiculous. First of all, if we felt secure about our role and standing in the world community I’m quite sure that the reaction would be much more muted, after all, it was with President Eisenhower here.
 Eisenhower bows to Pope John XXIII Or here.
 President Eisenhower bows to Archbishop Lakovos Or (Merci!) here.
 President Eisenhower bows to French President de Gaulle. Or, perhaps, its better to kiss?
 The Bush family and the Saudis have a strong relationship. No, bows are definitely better.
 President Bush (Jr.) bows to the Pope Nixon liked them, too. Here with Mao.
 Nixon bows to Mao And also to Emperor Hirohito.
 Nixon bows to Emperor Hirohito. And there are more of these — Many more. Go back to the 1800′s and everybody bowed to everybody else — Handshaking was a much more informal way of greeting someone else, so for formal occasions, one bowed.
What it comes down to is that traditions change with the times. Asia never had a strong tradition of shaking hands and yet they accepted the Western practice for dealing with the international community. Now that the Asian nations are gaining more standing and their cultures are more well-understood around the world, it is only natural that some of their practices also gain more exposure.
This all said, it is often dangerous for a non-Asian to bow, not only because they may do so incorrectly, but because the other party is likely to not expect it and may already have a hand extended or be otherwise unprepared. In the case of Obama’s bow to Emperor Akihito of Japan, the bow was done correctly and in accordance with Japanese protocol. I am sure that it was discussed with the handlers on both sides prior to it being done, and except for the blusterly outrage of what I have to believe are uninformed people, it was nothing particularly special. Ironically, the same people who criticized the Obamas for not following British protocol strictly enough on their trip to the UK are typically those who have also criticized President Obama for his adherence to Japanese protocol during his trip here. You can’t have it both ways, people — When you try, you get seen for what you are.
President Obama’s bow to President Hu Jintao, on the other hand, was most likely an off-the-cuff response and it should never have been done. First, things like that among world leaders shouldn’t ever happen without planning — People read far too much into it and the rabid masses on both sides have a field day. Also, modern Chinese don’t normally bow. It’s an old tradition that — almost exactly like the USA — has died off except for use in some religious ceremonies. That said, it probably went over better than this did.
 President Bush getting President Hu Jintao's attention Some things are just never correct protocol.
Ok, this is some stinky fish. I wanted to try the my.hamachi.cc website with our Hamachi network, so went to go create an account there. Only I can’t, because I won’t accept the license agreement for a license that is "TBD".
Uff Da!
I surprised myself recently — FB friends may have seen a note to that effect. What surprised me is that I am significantly more conservative in my investing profile that I thought I was. Ask around and my guess is that the people who know me best (Although not Jan when I asked. After this long, she knows me better than I know myself it seems…) would say that I am a risk-taker. In many ways I think that they are right — I’ve started companies, invested in start-ups, eaten from street vendors all over Asia, and do any number of things that a typical Type A personality might do, but when it comes to investing for retirement I’m a complete stick in the mud.
The following charts come from E*Trade Brokerage’s Risk Analyzer function. You can click on them to get a larger size chart.
 1 Month Chart as of June 14, 2009
3 Month Chart as of June 14, 2009 
 YTD Chart as of June 14, 2009
1 Year Chart as of June 14, 2009 
 3 Year Chart as of June 14, 2009
When I first looked at one of these charts, it happened to be the YTD chart. My initial reaction was “Wow, I’m getting my hat handed to me compared to the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000.” But when I started to look at what was actually happening, it became apparent that my risk appetite was what was driving the difference. If I went to the 1-Year chart compared to the YTD Chart, the performance results switched places, and if I went to the 3-Month chart the difference became even larger (The 1-Month chart has me beating the S&P, but there’s too much noise in only a month’s worth of data, particularly with current levels of volatility.). What is absolutely apparent, however, is that according to E*Trade (Well, Riskmetrics, who runs this particular service.) my portfolio is significantly lower risk than either the S&P or the Russell.
I was floored at this, because in my portfolio now I include names like the ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury (TBT) and Linn Energy (LINE). I have had a significant commodities position since about 2007 through Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc. (FCX), the Fidelity Select Gold (FSAGX) mutual fund, and various oil stocks, including over the years British Petroleum (BP), Conoco Phillips (COP), PetroChina (PTR), and Pengrowth (PGH). These, I was sure, were pumping up my beta and making my portfolio generate a higher return and well as a higher risk profile.
Wrong! Obviously my beta is nowhere near where I thought it was (And thankfully so…). So what’s going on? I’d like to make sure that I can keep these long-term trend lines and alpha compared to the S&P, but for the last 3 months I’m underperforming by a huge margin.
It comes down to two things: First, I don’t like risk that I can’t measure. For that reason I went from almost 100% equities in late September to about 50% equities before the first big drop in early October. I stayed there until late February-early March, when I went back to about 75% equities until late early April, when I started going back to cash and dropped to about 60% equities, which is where I am now. I did this because the biggest driver for me in investing is a macroeconomic focus over 12-18 months, and right now I can’t get the macro-economic picture to agree with the stock market. The US government has spent or committed to spending somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 trillion dollars. To put that in perspective, let’s say you’re a world-class auctioneer and can count 1 to 10 in 1 second. If you counted for 7,925 years you would just get to 2.5 trillion, and that’s without toilet breaks… That has certainly propped up the market, but like a cripple leaning on a crutch, unless the source of the problem is addressed the problem doesn’t get better. And in the case of this analogy, it must be noted that the crutch is borrowed and must be returned at some point in the future.
This $2.5 trillion figure is interesting as well because it also happens to be about how much money the US government raised in taxes for the 2008 tax year and give or take a $100 billion or so is also about how much they plan on getting this year. What is more telling is how US government debt is growing. — and let’s not forget those “off-balance-sheet” debts over at the Fed. To think anything other than that this is ultimately US government debt is just ridiculous. In the end, the investors in US Treasuries, such as China, the Gulf Oil States, and other net creditor nations, have to make a decision that their money is generating a return that will at least counterbalance the risk of investing in those securities. At some point we’ll reach that final dollar that breaks the proverbial camel’s back and those investors will flee. Scarily, this will not be an orderly, long-term trend, but in most probability will be a catastrophic “singularity” type occurrence after which the history books will refer to something other than “Pax Americana” when referring to the era.
I just can’t make the numbers work between this worldview and the current stock market performance.
The second thing is that I *do* have a risk appetite that is higher than most people if we structure that statement to only be valid for the stocks in which I invest, not my entire portfolio including cash. I have no idea what my beta is over the last two years (I’m way too lazy to go back and calculate all that.), but for the stocks I have now, my beta is around 1.2, meaning that over time my portfolio should move at a rate of 1.2x the S%P 500. In other words, if the S&P 500 moves 1 percent, my portfolio should theoretically move 1.2%, and if the market moves 10%, I should move 12%. However, if my cash position is also included in the calculation of my overall portfolio return, it works as a stabilizer. My inherently conservative Scandinavian soul sleeps better at night right now with cash in the bank, some gold and oil stocks as proxies for not directly holding more foreign currency, and some some yen-denominated assets here in Japan to complete the balanced picture.
In the end I, like most other people, have lost money in the stock market over the past three years. What frightens me is that I don’t see the next three years being better than this one, so I’ll sleep with that cash a bit longer. Get me back to 750 in the S&P or around 7000 in the Dow and I’ll be back to 100% equities for at least a while. At S&P 850/Dow 8000 I’ll probably get to 80% equities. Failing that I’ll stick around 40% cash and the rest in companies with strong balance sheets and fat dividends.
<edit>
So, it’s July 10 and I’m up to around 70% equities, although most are hedged toward conservative plays in medicine and value-oriented stocks such as Walmart.
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And now it’s January 1, 2010. A good year all around. :-) This is from our E*Trade account. For some reason Fidelity is not allowing access to performance reports right now, so I’ll have to add those later.
There’s a cost to being a pain in the ass (PITA). Whether we are on the cost generation side or cost bearing side, we all know this. A lot of businesses, however, don’t explicitly work these costs into their business model. By not doing so they implicitly create a system where their good customers (Low PITA factor) subsidize their bad ones (High PITA factor). This is *exactly* the wrong result you want from a pricing strategy.
In the system I have used for years, the base PITA value is 1 (one). When you start with me or with my company, your PITA factor is 1, which means that when we quote you, we do so on a purely traditional cost basis. The following example shows that with a PITA of 1, there is no change to keeping or dropping the PITA factor from the calculation.
Input Cost *( Mark-up * PITA) = Selling Price
becomes
Input * (Mark-up * 1) = Selling Price
becomes
Input * Mark-up = Selling Price
So, by increasing the PITA factor we increase the selling price. If PITA=2, then we get the following.
Input Cost * Mark-up * PITA = Selling Price
becomes
Input * Mark-up * 2 = Selling Price
becomes
Input * Mark-up = 2*Selling Price
The customer now gets a price twice as high as they would if they were less finicky, less pushy, required less handholding, or any number of other reasons that would drop their PITA factor. Likewise, if PITA=0.5, the customer’s price drops in half. Obviously these are extreme examples, and my typical PITA factor swings between 0.9 and 1.2.
On thing that becomes apparent here is that (At least in my case…) customers get penalized more for bad behavior than they are credited for good behavior. Why is this so? Well, to be a bit snarky about it, because we can. To be more precise in the answer, there is a lower limit to the price we can offer a customer and still make money. On the other hand, there is no theoretical limit to how much we can charge. To make another extreme example, the price that a US company will sell a military component to a British company is many, many multiples less that the cost of the same component sold to Kim Jung Il, whose PITA factor include legal risk, payment risk, sovereign risk, and get-kidnapped-and-held-in-a-North-Korean-prison-camp risk.
Nothing in the idea of a PITA factor is new or revolutionary, but I have seen very few companies that make it an explicit part of their pricing activity. One reason is that it’s hard to explain to a customer that you can’t lower your price any more because they are a pain in the ass. You can and should, however, explain to them that with certain modifications to the business relationship, price reductions could indeed be possible. This forces both you and the customer to evaluate where the costs lie and it changes an implicitly unfair and ineffecient system into one where you make the relationships more explicit, and then use that additional information to drive sales and pricing activity.
The spam trollers will hit this, bounce to any one of 3.2 trillion randomly generated pages, and then start downloading an infinite number of completely random e-mail addresses. Once their database of e-mail addresses has been sufficiently polluted, it becomes unusable due to the high number of resources required to successfully send e-mails, and therefore it becomes unsalable.
Uff da! (In a good way!)
Something strange happened just before the holidays and XP (Pro) became very unstable. At the same time, our router stopped working completely — no power-on light — and three hard disks developed sector errors, so my guess is that we had a spike that fried the router and crashed/rebooted XP in such a way that things died. My account was the one that was logged on at the time, and among the various oddities that occurred were things such as minimized programs not appearing in the task bar, not being able to access certain shared directories that other accounts could access, etc., etc. After spending several hours trying system restore points (all failed), I did a repair installation of XP.
After the repair installation, XP appeared to work fine for everyone except me. My account still had issues with minimized programs, etc., so I created a new account, moved my data to the new account, deleted the old account, and then renamed the new account with the old account’s name. Now everything looks like before — and actually works again — unless you go and look at the directory structure. Renaming the new account with the old account’s name changes things on the surface, but inside the new account keeps the new directory name. C’est la vie.
Now I have updates to do. The downloads begin and I go to sleep. The next morning, I shut down the account and see that 88 updates are going to install. That’s going to take a while, so I go get coffee. When I come back up, XP has restarted, so I force another update and am surprised to see that I still have 88 updates to install. Time to run the cycle again…
This time I watch, and as XP starts to shut down it begins by saying “Installing update 1 of 88″ and gives the various warnings about not powering down the machine. Seeveral seconds later, however, it gives the “shutting down” message and indeed shuts down. When I reboot and check, nothing has been updated. Off to updates.microsoft.com where I manually go through the update routine and get a failure message. I search Microsoft support for various terms, including:
XP update failure
XP update fails no error message
XP update downloads but will not install
XP updates will not install
etc.
Nada. Zippo from Microsoft. Don’t get me wrong, the knowledge base has hundreds of entries which show when searching for the above terms, but nothing relates to my problem. I eventually search using a whole sentence from the failure message.
“A problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed.”
But this still gets me nothing. Finally, I search all of the above terms on Google, and on that last sentence I find what I need. It seems that when you do a repair installation of XP, certain modules may not get registered in the kernal properly and must be manually registered. Some of these modules affect the operation of Windows Update. The process to register them is shown below.
- Click your START button and go up to Accessories.
- Find “Command Prompt” and start it. An ugly black box with some white text in it will appear. For those of you who never got to experience DOS, this is what it looked like.
- Now you need to type in some text. Type each line below exactly as you see it and press enter. After you press enter, a confirmation box that the “DLL was registered” will appear from Windows. Just click OK and proceed to the next line.regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll
- When done, you can rejoin the modern era by closing the Command Prompt window by clicking the ‘X’ in the upper righthand corner like a normal Windows program, or you can type ‘exit’, followed by enter. Either way, Command Prompt goes away.
At this point, Windows Update should work fine.
Uff Da!
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