I am doing a case with a group of lawyers located in Perth, Australia. Western Australia is an intriguing part of the world for me for some reason and I have no explanation for that. One of my old high school pals in Rome was from Perth, but it’s hard to believe that has anything to do with it. I suspect that it has more to do with the fact that the western side of…
In the past two days I have had business calls with two financial professionals in connection with a process of possibly joining a board (something I generally am not inclined to consider). Why don’t I like boards and board membership? Not really for the same reason that many in my position have. Many people are troubled by the potential liability of board membership, but that is much less my concern than the potential for some…
For people of a certain age and temperament, there is a wonderful Chris Farley and David Spade movie called Tommy Boy, made in 1995. The duo are on an epic roadtrip to sell brake pads and Tommy (Farley) has a hard time containing his natural exuberance. Spade, on the other hand is a cynical young man who finds everything Tommy does as some combination of distasteful and idiotic. In one scene, Tommy is trying to…
In my recent meanderings through anthropology and human development, I stumbled on a book titled Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink by anthropologist Richard L. Currier. Currier’s thesis is that over roughly five million years, eight key technologies (broadly defined) gradually freed humans from the limitations of our animal origins. Those eight he defines as tools, fire, clothing/shelter, symbolic communication, agriculture, technologies of interaction (wheels, ships, travel),…
Today is our first activity day of summer vacation with our grandkids. One of the things we like to do every year is go to the San Diego County fair at the Del Mar fairgrounds. Like much of California, San Diego County is truly a blend of urban coastal elite areas with expensive homes overlooking the Pacific Ocean and rural ranch country where cattle and coyotes are still the main topics of conversation. In between…
Today I saw a reposting of the June, 2024 cover of Rolling Stone that had a picture of Donald Trump adjusting his tie with the headline: “The Most Corrupt President Ever. Ever.” It went on to say, “From self-dealing to abuse of power, no president in history has put personal greed ahead of the country like Donald Trump.” And of course, that was BEFORE he started his second term and his recently exposed $2.2 billion…
On Wall Street in the era when more and more work was being done on the trading floor on the computers, all sorts of new problems arose that required us to make adjustments. I was working on the trading desk in 1982/83 when Apples and PC started coming into the mainstream. Prior to that there were computers, but they were either mainframes in some remote location of mini-computers located on a different floor wired into…
I have taken note of pervasive trend in entertainment. I am tempted to say that it pertains to attention span, but I suspect there is a lot more to it than that. It boils down to this; an increasing number of people prefer short snippets of content rather than getting involved in a full-length feature film, whereas others of us (you all know where I come out on this debate) greatly prefer a good old…
I am sitting here at almost 11pm on a Tuesday night at the age of 72 wondering who I am supposed to talk to about the fact that I’ve put in five unexpected hours of expert witness work tonight rather than writing a cute story for you all to read tomorrow morning. I got a surprise email yesterday from my Australian client asking for a Zoom call tomorrow night to review my in-process report. That…
This sounds funny, but I have spent almost all of my 72 years in a tunnel. That metaphor could mean many things. A tunnel metaphor typically conveys one or more meanings. The most common is one of confinement / restriction. A tunnel is a narrow path with no lateral movement. There is no choice but to go forward and one’s vision is limited to what’s directly ahead. It can also mean a journey through darkness…