Category: Opinion

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Books Health Ideas Opinion

If Your Luck Runs Out

Maybe this is medical week, my last post was about “hands only” CPR. But it made me think about what happens if your luck runs out. For me that would be the case of being trapped in an unresponsive body, being in a  vegetative state or anything requiring prolonged heroic efforts to keep me alive for a long time.

Have you seen the movie “The Diving Bell And The Butterfly” or read the book? It’s about a lively and successful big-time magazine editor who suffers a massive stroke and revives with a clear mind but only being able to use and control his left eyelid. It’s a great movie and a good story, but it seemed horrible. And then it turns out he dies less than two years later.

I started wondering if there’s an easy, clear “Do Not Resuscitate” medal or tattoo that medical personnel look for and would honor. I checked with a doctor I trust and here’s the answer I got “Leave a letter with your internist, plus a bracelet, with a statement of no prolonged life-sustaining treatment. And a note on your driver’s licence for organ donation is worthwhile too.” That makes sense,  saying “no prolonged treatment,” because you do want doctors to try, just not to prolong their efforts.

There’s also a connection to the blog I wrote last month about “The Secret Lives of Doctors.” It seems many doctors choose not pursue extraordinary measures to extend their own lives, opting for quality of life over quantity of life at the end of life. That’s good enough for me too.

 

 

Categories
Opinion

Giving Thanks For YouTube

Whenever I want to see a video online and see that it’s on YouTube I’m always happy. YouTube videos load and play quickly; plus the video has good quality. The video itself might be crap but that has nothing to do with YouTube, only with whoever shot it.

I haven’t posted any videos on YouTube, but my guess is that it’s easy to do. On the consumer end, a YouTube experience is not remarkable which is really all I’m after – I just want to be able to quickly see a decent quality video on my computer.

My original title for this rant was “F***ing Vimeo!” That’s what I usually say to myself when I see that a video online is from Vimeo. The video quaility is good but the wait for it to load is long and very unsatisfying. If there are supposed better resolution or other advantages that come from posting via Vimeo it’s not worth it from a consumer’s  standpoint.

I won’t even click on Vimeo videos any more unless I’m very compelled by the subject and therefore willing to wait around (and around) while it loads.

I guess I’m just amazed that such an unsatisfying experience is still surviving on the internet. I hope it evolves or dies off soon.

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Ideas Opinion

When Bonuses And Bailouts Mix

Nassim Taleb wrote an interesting op-ed in the NYT about bonuses in banking. I’ve taken the liberty, below, of boiling it down.

Pairing big bonuses with “too big to fail” has lead to catastrophe. The change needed to stop bankers from taking risks that threaten the general public is to eliminate the bankers’ bonuses.

Bonuses in banking are incentives to take risks. The bonuses encourage bankers to game the system by hiding the risks of rare and hard-to-predict but consequential blow-ups. For bankers, there’s a bonus if they make short-term profits and a bailout if they go bust, violating the effect of liability that’s so fundamental to capitalism.

The promise of “no more bailouts” in last year’s Wall Street reform law, is just that – a promise. The financiers (and their lawyers) always stay one step ahead of the regulators. And financial institutions are still blowing themselves up; look at MF Global and Jon S. Corzine.

Anyone working for a company that, regardless of its current financial health, would require a taxpayer-financed bailout if it failed, should not get a bonus, ever. In fact, all pay at systemically important financial institutions like big banks, some insurance companies, and even huge hedge funds should be strictly regulated.

We trust military and homeland security personnel with our lives, yet we don’t give them lavish bonuses. They get promotions and the honor of a job well done if they succeed, and the severe disincentive of shame if they fail.

Banning bonuses would go a long way in reducing the separation between an agent’s and his client’s interests. Nearly 4,000 years ago, Hammurabi’s code specified: “If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.”

The Babylonians understood the builder will always know more about the risks than the client, and can hide fragilities to improve his profits, by cutting corners in the foundation, for example. The builder can also fool an inspector; the person hiding risk has a large informational advantage over the person trying to find it.

From 2000 to 2008 there was a very large accumulation of hidden exposures in the financial system. But, 2010 brought the largest bank compensation in history. Supervision, regulation and other forms of monitoring are necessary, but are insufficient considering the Federal Reserve insisted, as late as 2007, that the rapidly escalating subprime mortgage crisis was likely to be “contained.”

What would banking look like if bonuses are eliminated? It wouldn’t be too different from what it was like in the 1980s before the gutting of regulations, culminating in the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the law separating investment and commercial banking. Back then, bankers and lenders were boring “lifers.” Investment banks, which paid bonuses and weren’t allowed to lend, were partnerships with skin in the game, not gamblers playing with other people’s money.

Hedge funds, which are loosely regulated, could take on some of the risks that banks would shed. While we hear about the successful hedge fund, the great majority fail without making the front page. Typically, their investors manage the governance and ensure the manager is hurt more than any of his investors if there’s a blowup.

Simple processes are necessary for some complex problems. So instead of thousands of pages of regulations, we should enforce a basic principle: bonuses and bailouts should never mix.

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Movies Opinion

Rise of the Planet

I saw “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” yesterday and thought it was really good. Both the acting and the story are engaging, I think it’s worth seeing. The movie is a prequel to the existing movies in which the apes are running the show and the humans are gone.

Humans are the smartest of the great apes. In the this new movie the other apes get smart through a botched experiment and  then proceed to initiate the “rise of the planet of the apes.”

It’s a good story but the possible futures for either group of smart apes is likely similar. Once the apes are dominant and the humans are out of the picture, life on earth continues on in normal fashion.

But what if certain other creatures disappeared?

What would the earth look like in 50 years if either insects or humans disappeared from the earth?

If the insects vanished, life on earth would probably be over for most of the other creatures too or radically diminished within 50 years.

In fifty years, if the humans (and the other great apes too) vanished, the world would likely be thriving and look more robust.

Poison is in the dose. There’s nothing inherently wrong with people but there’re just too many of us for the earth to handle now and hopefully we’ll sort it out soon.

Categories
Ideas Opinion

What’s The Story?

Lately a big topic of conversation with my friends is about the big changes happening to the work world for Westerners. One of the ideas is about the growing importance of “story.” It’s always been important; but stories and narratives are gaining more importance due to some big shifts in our world.

For many, many generations we told stories to each other within our tribes of extended family. During all that time that we were in small groups, we worked using our feet mostly for hunting, scavenging and wandering about. Then we started working with our backs during the agricultural age and again in the industrial age. Then along came the information age and we switched to working mainly with the left side of our brain – crunching numbers and setting up systems.

But now, most manufacturing is cheaper to have done somewhere in Asia. Plus if you can break a task down into a series of steps, now either a computer can tirelessly crunch through it or a well-educated person (lawyer, doctor, computer programmer…) in  Asia will do it remotely and much cheaper than you will.

What’s a Westerner to do? Well, it’s time to shift again. Now Westerners need to focus on the things that your brain’s right side excels in, making connections and creating narratives. In other words, the stuff that can’t be done by a computer or a clever off-shore worker. Basically it’s storytelling. We’re moving more and more toward working by using the right side of the brain.

If you pull back far enough, the progression of work for Westerners looks like this: with our feet, with our backs, with the left brain, and now with the right brain. The good news is that humans have always told stories. Stories and narratives just didn’t seem as important during the heyday of the information age as they had before. But I think stories are back and they’re important. What’s your story?

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Opinion Trends

Observation from NYC

This is one thing I really noticed on our trip to New York City. Gold jewelry doesn’t look good on white men. And tattoos don’t look good on black men.

I think I started noticing this around the time of Micheal Jordan’s heyday, when he was sporting a gold earring. It looked very cool. Gold jewelry looks good against dark skin whereas gold jewelry doen’t contrast much against light-colored skin, sorry.

Tattoos, once mainly worn by sailors and prisoners to mark a passage or an event, have gone mainstream in the past couple of decades. Now they’re on soccer moms and high school seniors. There are lots of black guys with tattoos suffering from the opposite of the gold jewelry on a white guy effect. There’s not enough contrast between dark skin and a dark tattoo to make the tattoo pop. This seems especially true for tattoos of script usually done in monochromatic dark ink. If a tattoo is prominent placement it’s probably intended to be read, but dark ink on a dark canvas doesn’t lend itself to easy reading.

You can see these two fashion problems a lot in NYC which is why I’m mentioning it now. A free fashion memo, just in case it’s not too late. If you’re Hispanic, congratulations! You’ve got the best of both worlds.

Categories
Drink Opinion

The Wine Whine

Over the years, I’ve worked at some very nice restaurants that have expensive wine lists. I’ve sold lots of bottles costing hundreds of dollars, even a bottle of wine for $1,500.

I thought a $1,500 bottle couldn’t possibly be 100 times better than some wines selling for $15 a bottle; or could a $150 bottle be even ten times better? Wine prices seem to be driven higher mostly by scarcity.

Expensive wines tend to be from smaller vineyards and over time there’re fewer and fewer bottles for sale as they’re consumed or squirreled away. Then the mystique increases around certain wines driven by reputation as well as the expectation of goodness that comes with a price that high.

Over the years I’ve attended lots of wine seminars, some were informative and others a lot of foolishness. But the situation with wine often becomes one like the king that has no clothes. Everyone has to go along with the highest status person’s opinion in the room.

I’ve been listening to the Freakonomics Radio audio podcast. It’s really good. If you enjoy “This American Life,” you’ll like this show, the hosts even sound the same. Anyway, each show digs into a different subject attempting to shine the light of reason on that subject’s often unexplored nooks.

One show asked “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?” The short answer is just what I’ve always thought, no. And most of the “experts” don’t have much more sophisticated taste buds than the rest of us. Sure, they’re up on region and varietal names, know who’s who, and how to describe what a particular wine tastes like. But, when it comes to choosing which wine is which in blind tastings they don’t do too well. Have a listen.

Some of the best advice I’ve heard about wine is to drink what you enjoy and to try branching out and try different types of wine.

And who buys a $1,500 bottle of wine? No idea who he was, but he just drank a couple of cocktails, not the wine, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy them.

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mens clothes Opinion Travel

The Zip-off Pants

I was just talking about traveling light and being able to carry your bag on Friday. But I feel like I should be clear that you shouldn’t  travel light by wearing zip-off pants. No zip-off pants.

Nothing is much better than these things, at shouting “tourist!” I know they seem to be a good idea, but they’re not. Especially if you have any desire to blend in at all with the local populace. The only people I’ve ever seen sporting zip-offs are tourists. And that can be ok if you want to remain  immersed in a clot of your fellow zip-off pant wearers.

I’ve found when traveling, the more you blend in the better your experience of another culture can be. So, being somewhat sensitive to local fashion can help. For example in Mexico, as you travel inland from the coast, adult men don’t wear shorts. Sure, if you have blue eyes and freckles you won’t be mistaken for a local Mexican man even if you’re wearing long pants, but you don’t want to work against yourself either.

Zip-off pants are the tip of the attention drawing iceberg of bad travel practices. Last week I saw this article, How To Avoid Looking Like A Tourist, by Kate Kuhlman.  The article covers almost every travel fashion faux pas from the wrong footwear to cameras used as necklaces. She beat me to it and did a good job on the subject, it’s funny too.

So remember, the people hawking travel wear like zip-off pants have their sales numbers in mind, not what you’ll actually look like outside of the shop or catalog.

If you went to a beach in Brazil populated by women who looked like the one below, do think she might be using a secret tip-off signal for her friends – to check out your zip-off pants?                                                                                                                                                                                              

Categories
Ideas Opinion

What’s So Funny?

Most guys will find the illustration to the right funny or at least  amusing. But I think lots of women will say “huh?” Whenever you try to explain anything that’s humorous you usually just get an unenthusiastic “Oh.”  Better to live with the idea that some people get jokes others won’t. And then sometimes, there’s just a difference between what men and women generally find funny.

Here’s a funny take on men’s rights (whatever that means) from Scott Adam’s blog. Scott is the guy behind the cartoon empire Dilbert. I don’t follow comic strips so I don’t know the Dilbert material; but I know it’s popular. I think his blog is clever. Recently, Scott’s funny post about men’s rights was taken down because some people didn’t think it was funny. It’s cached at Google; I cut and pasted it below for you:

This is a surprisingly good topic. It’s dangerous. It’s relevant. It isn’t overdone. And apparently you care. Let’s start with the laundry list.

According to my readers, examples of unfair treatment of men include many elements of the legal system, the military draft in some cases, the lower life expectancies of men, the higher suicide rates for men, circumcision, and the growing number of government agencies that are primarily for women.

You might add to this list the entire area of manners. We take for granted that men should hold doors for women, and women should be served first in restaurants. Can you even imagine that situation in reverse?

Generally speaking, society discourages male behavior whereas female behavior is celebrated. Exceptions are the fields of sports, humor, and war. Men are allowed to do what they want in those areas.

Add to our list of inequities the fact that women have overtaken men in college attendance. If the situation were reversed it would be considered a national emergency.

How about the higher rates for car insurance that young men pay compared to young women? Statistics support this inequity, but I don’t think anyone believes the situation would be legal if women were charged more for car insurance, no matter what the statistics said.

Women will counter with their own list of wrongs, starting with the well-known statistic that women earn only 80 cents on the dollar, on average, compared to what men earn for the same jobs. My readers will argue that if any two groups of people act differently, on average, one group is likely to get better results. On average, men negotiate pay differently and approach risk differently than women.

Women will point out that few females are in top management jobs. Men will argue that if you ask a sample group of young men and young women if they would be willing to take the personal sacrifices needed to someday achieve such power, men are far more likely to say yes. In my personal non-scientific polling, men are about ten times more likely than women to trade family time for the highest level of career success.

Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights:

Get over it, you bunch of pussies.

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

How many times do we men suppress our natural instincts for sex and aggression just to get something better in the long run? It’s called a strategy. Sometimes you sacrifice a pawn to nail the queen. If you’re still crying about your pawn when you’re having your way with the queen, there’s something wrong with you and it isn’t men’s rights.

Fairness is an illusion. It’s unobtainable in the real world. I’m happy that I can open jars with my bare hands. I like being able to lift heavy objects. And I don’t mind that women get served first in restaurants because I don’t like staring at food that I can’t yet eat.

If you’re feeling unfairly treated because women outlive men, try visiting an Assisted Living facility and see how delighted the old ladies are about the extra ten years of pushing the walker around.  It makes dying look like a bargain.

I don’t like the fact that the legal system treats men more harshly than women. But part of being male is the automatic feeling of team. If someone on the team screws up, we all take the hit. Don’t kid yourself that men haven’t earned some harsh treatment from the legal system. On the plus side, if I’m trapped in a burning car someday, a man will be the one pulling me out. That’s the team I want to be on.

I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he’s smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people.  A man only digs in for a good fight on the few issues that matter to him, and for which he has some chance of winning. This is a strategy that men are uniquely suited for because, on average, we genuinely don’t care about 90% of what is happening around us.

I just did a little test to see if I knew what pajama bottoms I was wearing without looking. I failed.

What’s so funny? What’s not so funny?


Categories
Ideas Opinion

Things Are Looking Up

Money will always flow toward opportunity, and there is an abundance of that in America. Commentators today often talk of “great uncertainty.” But think back, for example, to December 6, 1941, October 18, 1987 and September 10, 2001. No matter how serene today may be, tomorrow is always uncertain.

Don’t let that reality spook you. Throughout my lifetime, politicians and pundits have constantly moaned about terrifying problems facing America. Yet our citizens now live an astonishing six times better than when I was born. The prophets of doom have overlooked the all-important factor that is certain: Human potential is far from exhausted, and the American system for unleashing that potential – a system that has worked wonders for over two centuries despite frequent interruptions for recessions and even a Civil War – remains alive and effective. We are not natively smarter than we were when our country was founded nor do we work harder. But look around you and see a world beyond the dreams of any colonial citizen. Now, as in 1776, 1861, 1932 and 1941, America’s best days lie ahead.

I’ve excerpted what you’ve just read from Warren Buffett’s February 26, 2011 annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway’s investors. If you’re curious, here’s an interesting little insight into how the company is run:

… Many of our CEOs are independently wealthy and work only because they love what they do. They are volunteers, not mercenaries. Because no one can offer them a job they would enjoy more, they can’t be lured away.

At Berkshire, managers can focus on running their businesses: They are not subjected to meetings at headquarters nor financing worries nor Wall Street harassment. They simply get a letter from me every two years and call me when they wish. And their wishes do differ: There are managers to whom I have not talked in the last year, while there is one with whom I talk almost daily. Our trust is in people rather than process. A “hire well, manage little” code suits both them and me.

Berkshire’s CEOs come in many forms. Some have MBAs; others never finished college. Some use budgets and are by-the-book types; others operate by the seat of their pants. Our team resembles a baseball squad composed of all-stars having vastly different batting styles. Changes in our line-up are seldom required.

All sorts of issues other than optimism are addressed in Buffett’s annual letter (it’s 26 pages long!) if you’re interested in how this multi-billion company runs. I was. Here are a couple of things. He’s now 80 and discusses how his eventual replacement was selected along with insights he’s acquired over his long successful career. He even discloses the rent on their headquaters ($270,212) and equipment costs ($301,363) for everything from high tech stuff to furniture; pretty good cost control for a company valued in the billions.

It reminds me of Seth Godin’s quote “Optimism is hard. But it’s usually worth it.”