Reverse Polish Logic I’ve discussed my love affair with the Hewlett-Packard 12C financial calculator. It is from that device that many of us learned about Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). It’s the logic protocol used by the 12C for operating the calculator. With it, the operator (the numbers) come before the operands (the function like addition or multiplication) when inputting the equation one is looking to solve. RPN was invented in the 1920’s by Jan Lucasiewicz,…
Responsible Hosting I have owned vacation homes since 1986. That is 33 years. Over that time, I have owned vacation homes in the Berkshires (2), The Hamptons, Park City (5), San Diego and Ithaca. By my count, that is a total of ten vacation homes. At one time, I have owned as many as three at once (what a headache). The big issue is always how to maintain the home in my absence. By…
Day Tripping In 1998 when I was at the apex of my banking career, I met Terry. I was on the Management Committee of Bankers Trust Company, where I ran both the Global Private Banking and was Vice Chairman of BT Alex. Brown, responsible for their Private Client Services business. It was a big job with loads of perks, easily the most I ever received. The biggest perk was a car and driver, which was…
Whining About the Future Have you seen the recently published maps of Europe with the heat profiles that we are suffering this summer highlighted? It was shocking when we saw those heat maps for the Eastern United States a few weeks ago, but now these European maps are astounding. We are witnessing before our very eyes the transformation of Sicily, Spain, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, much of Greece, the Western shores of Italy, the Adriatic…
Beyond Meat I am intrigued. Beyond Meat, the California start-up that launched its highly successful IPO a few months ago, now trades at over 100X sales. What’s especially interesting is that the concept of an alternative protein that provides a substitute for meat products (beef, pork and chicken) is hardly new. Where is tofu with its patent infringement claims? How upset must the ubiquitous veggie burger be at this turn of events? Even Bacos…
Hurting and Healing When I lived on Staten Island, I lived a mere several hundred yards from the place where Eric Garner was choke-hold wrestled to the ground and killed by police over a charge of selling untaxed cigarettes. Both of my sons lived even closer to that same spot. Tonight, I saw on the Democratic debate the discussion about reparations to African-American’s who descended from slaves. It seems 73% of African-Americans favor those…
Grindr Goes Global Admit it, you’ve heard of Grindr, the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people. My wife Kim and I have many gay, one trans and probably a lot of queer friends (even though I do not think I could adequately define that term with any precision). You notice I do not suggest we have bi friends, though we may, because how would we know unless we…
Life on the Bubble What is a bubble? On the one hand a bubble is a globe-shaped amorphous item with a gas inside of a liquid formation. If you had to live on a bubble, it would be a very tenuous existence for sure. A bubble can also be a situation where market prices are unsustainable and artificially high. That’s an economic term usually applied to situations that cause many people to make a…
Pseudo Back in 1999 lots of funny things happened. It was very much an end of an era for me. I was the end of a twenty-three-year career, with all the incumbent ups and downs, with my primary employer, Bankers Trust Company. We sold ourselves to Deutsche Bank for $93 per share and all got lots of money from our pent-up options and restricted stock. Some of us got our walking papers, some got…
Road Show Last night we went to New York City Center for a performance of Steven Sondheim’s musical Road Show. This is a twenty-year-old version of a story which has been produced under various names like Bounce, Wise Guys and Gold!. While we thoroughly enjoyed the show, it had little to do with the production and almost everything to do with good music/singing and the captivating story of the life and travails of the Mizner…