Don’t worry, this is neither a story about car insurance mascots nor tropical lizards. Rather, what got me started on this theme is Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) character, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas (he won the Best Actor Oscar for it). Stone, whose father was a Wall Street stockbroker, built the character from several ’80s figures including Ivan Boesky (the biggest source). His 1986 Berkeley commencement line that greed is healthy became Gekko’s…
The older I get the more I think that while I’m not a communist. I may be a Marxist (Karl as opposed to Groucho, though I did like Groucho’s chutzpah). Marxism is the body of social, economic and political theory that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed in the mid-1800s. It rests on a few core ideas. Marx’s “historical materialism” holds that the way a society produces its goods and services shapes everything else: its…
Every day we deal with personalities. We do that mostly without noticing. We read and adjust to personality in nearly every interaction. We are forced to read people and form quick trait impressions from voice, posture, and word choice, and they’re often surprisingly accurate, especially for extraversion. We are constantly adjusting our approach to people based on our assessment of their personality. We give the anxious colleague more reassurance, we keep it brief with the…
Today I read an article on listening and how to do it better. They called it “reflective listening”. What is reflective listening? Reflective listening is most often used by therapists (remember the “how does that make you feel” questions?). But psychologists who have studied the technique say it’s a tool everyone should have in their back pocket in order to get the most out of our communication with others and therefore in our relationship with…
A few years ago I wrote about my travails in getting fire insurance in the collapsing homeowners insurance market of California. The problem was mostly wildfire related (perhaps some seismic and tsunami in certain areas, but no so much here). Since then we had the devastating Palisades and Altadena fires in L.A. that further crashed down on the heads of insurers and caused the state’s assigned fire risk pool plan, called The FAIR Plan to…
In 1976 I was rushing to finish business school because I had secured a good job at a large, Money Center, white-shoe bank headquartered on Park Avenue. That was Bankers Trust Company, the sixth-largest bank in the country and one with a very storied past that included being founded by none other than J.P. Morgan, among other financial dignitaries of the day. Technically, Bankers Trust was a commercial bank, which under the confines of the…
I am home again this morning after two and half weeks of traveling to five countries and what I would call eight cities (one Dutch, one German, one French, four Swiss and one American). It’s good to be home and back on my sofa this morning typing away on my iPad, which is one of my favorite plantar to be…smiling across at Kim (busy doing her games and reading) and Buddy frolicking at my feat…
The big topic on CNN this morning is an essay by Dario Amodei of Anthropic. On Saturday (Sept 12), Dario published an essay called “We Must Pace the Frontier,” where he argued the industry must slow the pace at which it improves AI model capabilities. This doesn’t mean stopping development altogether, but regulating it with high priority. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s approach has been consistently deregulatory and “pro-industry”, favoring a light-touch, federally uniform framework over state-level…
Medicare was established in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law as part of the Social Security Amendments of 1965. It began covering enrollees the following year, on July 1, 1966. Johnson signed the bill in Independence, Missouri, with former President Harry Truman present. Truman had proposed a national health insurance program back in 1945, and Johnson gave him (and his wife Bess) the first two Medicare cards as a symbolic gesture.…
The Canadian trade dispute has escalated sharply this week. In January Mark Carney, a Harvard-trained and Goldman Sachs employed economist who is now the Prime Minister of Canada, gave a widely-discussed address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, titled “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path.” The core message of that was that the rules-based international order is effectively over. He argued that Canada was adapting by building strategic autonomy while still holding to values like…