Today we are in Puerto Madryn, a coastal harbor with good natural attributes about halfway down the length of Argentina. I think Viking has done a good job of finding a reciprocal stopping point in Argentina to what we visited on the Chilean side in Puerto Montt. Where Puerto Montt was founded by Germans, Puerto Madryn got its foothold here on the northern edge of the Patagonian Pampas through the arrival of a large Welsh…
Last year Mark Cuban made headlines when he paid his $276 million tax bill. While his outspoken support for more liberal causes made some pundits ask if he was paying more than what he owed. he said that he pays what he owes. “This country has done so much for me, I’m proud to pay my taxes every single year,” Cuban went on to say that while he doesn’t expect all of his tax money…
A few weeks ago I got a call from a lawyer I had worked with on a case in November. He called to tell me the outcome of the arbitration. I only got the case in October, so it was not the usual careful and drawn out process that has characterized most of my expert witness work over the past six years. It was a case where I represented the respondent/defendant in an arbitration over…
Today I had to kill some time while the cleaning crew was at the house, so I went down to the local Public House, called the Sideyard. It was named that because the owners of the deli to which it is attached built it as an addition to their structure and created it literally out of the sideyard of the property. I remember seeing it under construction and thinking it was a really unfortunate place…
Back in 2010 I was teaching at Cornell in my Pensions class and I was trying to explain to a rather arrogant young graduate student that gathering enough wealth so as not to need to worry about retirement savings per se (i.e. insufficient pension asset accumulation or what is often called unfunded pension liabilities) was a false sense of comfort. My point was that you have to think about the broadest implications of such macro…
Today I called a long-time friend who stills lives in New York City. I tend to see him whenever I’m in New York and the last time was in mid-December when I met with him and another mutual friend. We spent a full four hours at lunch having a wonderful time talking about our days in the trenches at Bear Stearns Asset Management, back what is now eighteen years ago. That’s a long time. It’s…
I must have too much time on my hands because lately I have developed some macro themes as to what some of the next big things are that are going to assail us due to all the goings on. As much as I would like to blame everything on Donald Trump, I think that is becoming trite because while he is an empowering agent for much of the change which we are experiencing here and…
I have always been a guy who seeks to integrate various things in my life. What I mean by that is that I seem always to come upon overlaps or areas of common interest in different aspects of my life and rather than treat them as coincidental, I have always enjoyed finding ways to have them connect in more meaningful ways. For one minor example, this past weekend when our friend Chris was visiting, he…
This may be the most important piece I will write in a long time, so please try to stay with me. For over six months now I have been struggling to understand what has happened in this country, specifically what caused the massive shift to the Right which resulted in the election outcome that we are seeing implemented in policies every day now. Perhaps the most startling thing for people like me has been to…
I’m working through a proposal development process with a young guy who used to be a musician and has now become a podcast marketer. He has a nose ring on one nostril, which I wish he didn’t have, but it doesn’t seem to impact how his brain works. He seems very reasonable and picks up on things quickly even though he is learning about the expert witness business as he goes. You may wonder how…