Playing With Your Life One of the areas that I spent a great deal of time in during my professional life was the arcane arena of life insurance. Somewhere over the years, the business of life insurance took some very strange turns in this country. To begin with, the lobbying army that represents the industry is formidable, and they have done a wonderful job of making an arcane arena all the more arcane by purposefully…
Repricing the Universe FIRST TRIP FILLER STORY IN CASE I DON’T KEEP UP About 20 years ago a guy came on the scene in New York City, and he became a bit of a phenomenon. His name was Jimmy McMillan and he coined the expression the “The Rent is Too Damn High!”. He formed a political party with the same name and ran for the Mayor of New York City in 2005 and 2009 and…
Bangkok Bound Tomorrow we fly from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok. That means we are going from a Muslim state to a Buddhist state (Thailand is 94% Buddhist). Our stay at the Mandarin Oriental here has been very pleasant. The facilities are very nice and the service is excellent. These people know who they serve and as I look up at the ceiling of our room I see another sign of that. There is a small…
Tax-Us or Texas The World Economic Forum at Davos started fifty-three years ago but has really gained momentum and notoriety among globalists in the last decade. I have never attended (when I was in my corporate prime and realistically a candidate, Davos was not yet a must-do) and now I doubt I ever will go (now that I am a mere bystander and observer of the world and decidedly not a mover and shaker), but…
Econometric Confusion The study of economics is called the dismal science. It was called that by Thomas Carlyle during the Victorian era of England because another famous economist and demographer called Thomas R. Malthus had postulated that human population would always grow faster than man’s ability to grow sufficient food to feed itself. That was a very Dickensian outlook that was before the Industrial Revolution (first, second, third or fourth), when technology started to improve…
O’Biden We just had a surprise visit (at least it was a surprise for me) from our dear friends from San Francisco/Sonoma. One of the things they do is is keep a list of great limited series shows based on true life events and movies of the same genre. I must admit, I haven’t considered that genre for its uniqueness, but when we do happen to watch one (as we did with Dopesick, Painkiller and…
Networking In the business world, there are those who spend their energy being part of the “who you know” universe, and there are others who stay comfortably within the “what you know” world. In my day, I liked to think I was a top-notch content manager who spent a lot of time focused on what I needed to know to do the job best. I always figured that if I did that well, I would…
Columns & Rows I have started a new spreadsheet. I love spreadsheets. Ever since I first met a VisiCalc spreadsheet back in about 1979, I have been in love with spreadsheets and what they can do. I actually think that spreadsheets may be the most impactful invention of my time. I know people will scoff at that in light of everything from EVs to Smartphones, but my logic is quite simple. Spreadsheets enabled all innovations…
Economic Optimism I watch so many movies about the wars of the 20th Century that I find myself wondering what it must be like to be facing the world with nothing in your pocket and no particular prospects for things getting better soon. The two movies I watched yesterday were of this sort. The first was a real D-list movie called Air Strike. This was a 2018 film that was made in China and represents…
An AI Experiment Out of the blue, a friend and former colleague sent me a book called Command the Page by Charlie Deist. The book is intended to help writers embrace AI for the benefit of their writing and to do what he calls “future-proof” your future creative career. Deist goes through his own journey over the last year of ubiquitous presence of AI in the hands of the general public. We have all heard…