Lunatic Fringe

I'm standing here on the ground
The sky above won't fall down
See no evil in all direction
Resolution of happiness
Things have been dark
For too long

Don't change for you
Don't change a thing for me

INXS 1984

          So if Trump is elected president, we’re all going to have to leave the country, right?  Racist, xenophobic, narcissistic, misogynist, he will end America as we know it.  Or maybe it’s Hillary who’s the root of all evil.  Dishonest, conniving, careless, she will destroy the country if elected.  The hatred of these two runs deep, with everyone sure this is a seminal moment in our history.  If the wrong guy or gal wins, we’re toast.

I know you don’t want to hear this, but it doesn’t make a bit of difference. Neither candidate will affect the short or long-term prognosis for this country.

Let’s start with immigration.  With Trump, the government is going to pluck every Hispanic man, woman, and child who’s in the country illegally and ship them the hell out of the country.  We’re also going to build a sky-high wall, and not one Mexican will dare to come into America illegally (I’m a little worried that if we build, say, a 20 foot high wall, that the Mexican will find a 21 foot ladder.  But I’m sure Trump will figure it out).  Lastly, not one Muslim will be allowed to come in this country during his presidency.  Of course none of this is going to happen (if you don’t know why, I’m sorry but I can’t help you).  But let’s say it’s all true.  Within one year of the Trump presidency, the US is substantially whiter.

It just doesn’t matter.  By the year 2050, and probably well before, the minorities in the US will be the majority.  In other words there will be more black and Hispanic fellas than whites.  Like it or not.  Look it up. Demographics don’t lie.  Something about “higher birth rates”.  Clinton and Trump just aren’t going to have much effect on this, if any.

But the real difference is the economy, right?  I don’t think so.  Currently every conceivable indicator is poor; GDP close to recession levels, stagnant real wages, nonexistent manufacturing, historically low labor participation rate, tepid job growth, record high debt, etc. There’s probably about 25 more off the top my head I could think of.  Neither candidate has any interest in reducing spending, so we have no chance of seeing real improvement. We’re close to 4 trillion a year, and growing.  This would be like giving credit card to my tween son, with a budget of $100 a month, and him spending $300 every time. “Don’t worry son, the one promise I will make to you is to not take away your credit card, at least until we go broke.  Hopefully that will make you like me”.  It’s unsustainable.

When Bush was president the debt skyrocketed.  With Obama it shot up even faster, and will soon hit 20 trillion.  Yes, you go broke a little faster with Democrats, but does it really matter?  Trump, a lifelong New York liberal who’s reinvented himself as a Republican, has recently proposed some good ideas, such as lower taxes (our corporate taxes are the highest in the developed world).  I’m guessing that will never pass.  A, I don’t think he really believes in lower taxes, and B, there is no appetite, either with the public or in Congress, to lower wealthy company’s taxes.  Whether you vote for Trump or Clinton, we’re still going to be stuck with an economy in recession (I believe we’re already in one) or one on the verge.

So get fired up about this election!  Keep posting on Facebook lunatic fringe stories about these two.  Personally I’m going to kick back, have some Laphroig, find out what a lepo is, and watch the debates and election.  But just remember one thing.  At the end of the day, your country will look the same, whether you paint yourself red or blue.

Have a good night everyone.

JR

Square Peg

     
You may be right
I may be crazy
But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for
Turn out the light
Don't try to save me
You may be wrong for all I know
But you may be right      
                       Billy Joel 1980

          A while back, I wrote an article acknowledging that I didn’t feel like I was an expert in anything.  Happily, I can now report that I was wrong.  I’m an expert in one thing: being the minority opinion.

Like an insidious disease, this realization snuck up on me.  When I was young, in my teens and 20s, I was too self-absorbed to really think about what was going on in the rest of the world.  Over time though, slowly, I started to realize that my beliefs were running against the mainstream. You know this from my blogs; on virtually every major (and minor) issue, my thinking is different.  Just to name a few:

Politics - Libertarian vs. Republican or Democrat;
Religion -  modern orthodox Judaism, a minority within a minority;
Diet - low carb vs. balanced;
Finance - don’t get me started.  Austrian vs. Keynesian economics, strong currency being a  positive, deflation being a good thing, etc.
Government - virtually none.

          You get the idea.  The point is not to try and convince people that I’m right, because I don’t care, and as there’s over 7 billion people in the world, it wouldn’t work anyway. Uniformity of opinion is impossible and changes over time.

          No, the point is to give solace and advice to the other sad, sad square pegs in a round world, whose brain doesn’t turn off.  As an expert in being a square peg, I feel uniquely qualified to give advise on this topic.

  The first bit of advice is, you better damn well be right.  If you are going against the consensus, and you’re wrong, you’re not alternative, you’re not edgy, you’re not clever. You’re just an idiot.  Why? Think about what you’re saying.  Many, many smart people have come before you, and together they have come to consensus on a topic.  The heavy lifting has already been done.  You’re confident/arrogant enough to think that the majority is wrong and you’re right.  If you’re going out on a limb like that, you better know what you’re doing.

  Now the solace part.  Life is more exciting on the right side of the bell curve.  Almost by definition successful people are in the minority.  Don’t be intimidated, or depressed, if you think differently.  There are more Camrys sold than 488 Spiders, but that doesn’t mean it’s a better car.  All the people that you truly respect (respect, not necessarily like), whether you’ve met them or not, I’m guessing they think differently than the masses.  Think about it.

  So hang in there.  You may be right.  Maybe eating fatty foods is good for you.  And the US will be in a recession within two years.  And camp’s dangerous.  And Van Morrison is as brilliant as Beethoven.

Or you may be crazy.  Eventually you, and I, will find out.  

  Have a good night everyone.

JR

Stopping Power

He sang a song as on he rode 
His guns hung at his hips
He rode into a cattle town
A smile upon his lips
He stopped and walked into a bar
And laid his money down
But his mother's words echoed again

Don't take your guns to town son 
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town

                                Johnny Cash 1958

          If you’ve read some of my blogs, you know my belief that anyone can quickly figure out the correct answers to the important questions we face in life (health/diet, finance, government, raising children, etc.).  All the information is now at our fingertips, we just have to sift through the non-evidenced based garbage to get the right answer. The problem is ideology, which causes the garbage to be written in the first place, and why so many people have difficulty sifting though it to get to the impartial evidence.

  Which brings me to guns.  One of my primary motivating factors in life is protecting my family from harm.  You would think it would be a simple task to examine the objective evidence to determine if owning a gun helped or hindered.  You would be wrong.  The problem is the articles tend to be hopelessly biased, one way or the other.  Gun ownership is like the ideological bellwether of our time.  Nothing is more of a hot button issue, and nothing produces more opinionated, partial articles.

Even if the writer is trying to write objectively, political correctness and multiple variables make it difficult to get a straight answer.  For example, comparing other countries to America is not so helpful when the demographics are different.  Facebook and the news don’t exactly help either.  Whenever there is a mass killing, I am bombarded by very loud, very visceral reactions on both sides.  Most of the articles posted are designed not to get to the truth, but to arrive at the author’s hoped for conclusion.

So my usual strategy of dumping my ideology and seeing where the evidence takes me doesn’t really work here.  At least not yet.  If I were to stick with my ideology the answer would be easy.  Of course I would own a gun.  I hate just about all government, and owning a gun is the quintessential symbol opposing government overreach and tyranny.  My whole libertarian political philosophy is of freedom, and guns are also a symbol of that.  And guns are just damn cool.

But none of that protects my family.  So at the end of the day I had to make a call based on the best sifting of the objective evidence that I could do, even if I don’t feel as firm in my conclusion as I normally do.

My call was to get a gun.

As best as I could gather, the deterrent affect of showing or using a gun outweighs the tiny risk of your family getting shot, either by accident or the perpetrator.  I find, Your Honor, that the media in study after study is shown to be overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, and under reports the times where the perpetrator is deterred.  I further find, Judge, that people greatly overestimate the risk of certain dangers (like children getting shot from a gun in the house) while underestimating the risk of other dangers (like children swimming).

So there it is.  I got one.  Okay, maybe more than one.  I don’t want to go down, but if I do go down I’d rather be on my feet than my knees.  With hopefully everyone else safe.

Have a good night everyone.

JR

Diversity Delusion

Welcome to the working week
Oh, I know it don't thrill you, I hope it don't kill you
Welcome to the working week
You gotta do it till you're through, so you better get to it

                        Elvis Costello 1977

          Like many bad ideas, the concept of diversity sprang from good intentions.  In this case, to combat discrimination.  Besides the usual reasons why discrimination is a bad idea, from an economic perspective it will never work.  It reduces the pool of capable workers, so it will always reduce efficiency.

So at first diversity just meant don’t discriminate, which was good.  But then it morphed into the idea that every group or organization should have representatives from different skin colors, genders, ethnic backgrounds, and religions.  It took on a life of its own.  It became the ultimate American value.  Within a few years every business, politician, religious leader, and speaker couldn't go five sentences without telling us how great diversity is.  “Diversity is our greatest strength”.  “We strive to have a diverse workforce”.  “We want our company to look like America.”

          There’s just one problem with this.  It’s not true.  It’s nonsense.  There is no evidence that diversity makes any group or company stronger either economically or otherwise.  I've yet to see an impartial study showing that businesses or countries are more productive or wealthier the more diverse they are.  There are two reasons for this.

First, just as discrimination reduces the pool of available talent, diversity reduces it.  Let’s use an example from my favorite small business: me.  I have 8 employees, six are black and six are women.  I chose everyone based on their ability to help me with my favorite business activity: making money.  Let’s say there was either legal or societal pressure to change the demographics of my workforce.  Could I do it? Yes.  Would I be less productive? Yes, and drastically so.  I would basically be saying that the people I thought were the most productive would be replaced by individuals that I did not think possessed as good a skills as the first group.  Almost by definition I would be less profitable. The odds that group 2 would have the same demographics as group 1 are between slim and none.

Second, all the factors that go into today’s diversity have no bearing on whether someone is a good employee.  I look for 3 main characteristics when hiring; brains, talent, and the ability to get along with coworkers.  How exactly does someone’s skin color affect any of these three? Or religion? Or sex? When you put people into business positions where anything except brains, talent, and personality are primary, the results are predictable.

I know some big companies have long-winded statements where they extol how they strive to be a wonderfully diverse place to work.  Since I’m a small fish I don’t have anything like that.  But if I did it would go something like this:

“Thank you for applying to my firm.  If you have a vagina, congratulations, but it will not help or hinder you in working for me.  I don’t care about your sexual orientation; trust me, we won’t be sleeping together.  Your skin color is irrelevant, because I haven’t yet figured out a way to convert the color of your skin to green in my pocket.  I don’t care about your background or how you got to me, I just want to know that you can do the job today.  Your religion is also irrelevant, unless you can convince whatever God you pray to to bless me with prosperity.  In short, are you smart, do you work hard, do you get along with people? Yes, yes, and yes?  Fantastic! This could be the start of something wonderful...”.

Have a good night everyone.

JR

The Golden Tulip

Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley
We'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in fields of gold
                               Sting 1993


Do you remember Dr. Phil?  I never watched a minute of his show, but I remember talking about him with my wife.  She told me that he had a best-selling weight-loss book.  I started laughing and responded honestly, “But isn’t he fat?” I’ve never understood this type of thinking.   Why do people constantly follow the advice of people who have either no track record of success, or a clear track record of failure?  As I recall, Dr. Phil was somehow affiliated with Oprah.  You’re really going to take marriage advice from a woman who’s never been married?  You’re going to listen to a stranger without kids tell you how to raise your own children?  How does this make sense?

I’ve always found that the easiest way to be successful is to just do what the successful have done to get there.  In whatever endeavor, finance, health, personal relationships, etc. Tweak it to suit your personality, but the rule holds.  I’d love to sit down with Oprah and have a long conversation, where she could give me advice on accumulating wealth.  Just not how to lose weight.

Let’s run back in time for a minute.  You remember the year 2001, right?  The dot.com mania was in full force.  You would turn on CNBC and hear the experts tell us that this was a New Age, that traditional stock valuation formulas no longer mattered.  Profit and fundamentals were out; revenue and following the trend were in.  Old ladies who had never invested a penny formed investment clubs over tea to discuss how much money they were making.  The financial geniuses egged them on.

The slaughter, as slaughters usually do, happened quickly. Stocks lost 98%, 99%, 100% of their value.  People were wiped out.  Daytraders had suicidal thoughts and had to look for work again.

The financial geniuses weren’t quiet for very long.  The same people who advised the masses into bankruptcy soon had another tulip to cheerlead, the housing market.  “Houses never go down in America”.  “You’re an idiot if you’re not in this market”.  “God ain’t makin’ no more land”.  CNBC was again a really fun place.  Shiny happy people, who failed miserably before, were again looked at as experts by the sheep.

You know how the game ended.

Which brings me to gold.  People who have read my past blog posts know that I put 100% of my money in gold years ago.  Although overall it’s been a good investment (I got in at around $880, it’s now at about $1,300) last year was horrid.  It went down 28%.  Never mind that it’s gone up 11 out of the last 12 years and is up again this year; that’s a tough 12th year.  So what am I doing now?  I’ve doubled down and then some.  On the days when gold trends slightly higher I borrow between 1-2 million dollars of someone else’s money (in this case TD Ameritrade), and buy more gold.  By the end of the day, and sometimes within 30 minutes, I give them their money back.  If gold goes up I get a nice little hit; if it goes down I get hit.

My point of this particular post is not to discuss why I think gold is still a fantastic investment (if you’re interested just call or e-mail me), but to point out one inescapable fact. Literally every single one of the guys and gals that called either one or both of the bubbles is bullish on gold.   Everyone.  We’re not talking a big group here.  Not many had the brains and guts to go against the majority.  Likewise, there is not one analyst I know who is bearish on gold that called any of the bubbles correctly.  Do your own research.  It’s shocking the same idiots are still on TV.

This is not brain surgery.  At the end of the day, you can follow the fools and the folly.  Or you can pay attention and see how the winners play chess.  I know which direction I’ll go.

Have a good night everyone,

JR
\

The Endgame

          Let’s get this out of the way early: violence works.  This is a difficult concept for most people in democracies to grasp, because we don’t think of ourselves as criminals.  But occasionally righteous people in righteous countries find themselves in a situation where it is kill or be killed.  The only way to conclusively defeat an enemy that has no interest in peace, but an intense interest in murdering you, is to thoroughly and convincingly defeat them militarily.

Fortunately, history judges us favorably in a moral sense when we unleash the violence.  Nobody blames America for the 7 million Germans who died in World War II.  Very few blame us for stopping the Japanese kamikaze pilots with a well-placed nuclear bomb.  Likewise, history judges us very unfavorably when we unleash the violence when there is no threat to us, such as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan in the latter 90% of the war.

Which brings me to Israel.  As I’m writing this, the country is being bombed by terrorists, this time in the Gaza Strip.  It’s a frequent scene, whether the enemy is Saddam Hussein, Hezbollah, or Hamas.  Every few years the Israelis are terrorized.  It’s a bizarre situation, as militarily Israel could kill every human being in the Gaza Strip, and quickly.  But they choose not to.

Meanwhile America, for as long as I’ve been living, relentlessly pressures Israel, and to a lesser extent the Palestinians, to make peace. This especially ramps up in the second term of American presidents, a.k.a. legacy building time.  It fails every time.  I lived in Israel in 2001. Believe me, the people there totally understand what Westerners don’t get: the Palestinians have zero interest in making peace.  Hey geniuses, maybe the first clue was when they started teaching their kids in school maps showing Israel magically erased.

So how about a different approach.  I propose a modified Ron Paul/Rand Paul approach.  First, the Ron Paul approach.  Israel, we have total faith that you can defend yourself militarily.  We are not going to impose ourselves on you morally to force you into a crappy peace plan, with you giving up part of your most treasured possession, Jerusalem.  We’re actually not going to pressure either side.  Also, we are not going to second guess you in deciding how you are going to defend yourself against your enemies.  If you decide you need to kill some people  to defend yourself, so be it.  We will not impose our moral judgment on you.  We, and the rest of the world, understand what the response would be if America was repeatedly bombed by Mexico.

If you decide you have to really unleash the violence, and kill a lot of people to defend yourself, so be it.  And if you decide that you have to permanently end the conflict with overwhelming military force, we won’t make any judgments there either.  You will never hear the idiotic phrase “proportionate response” from our lips.

The Rand Paul part comes in when we verbally express our strong support for Israel, unlike Ron, who refuses to take sides between countries.  Check out YouTube.  I’d love to have a libertarian in the White House, but unfortunately Republicans won’t win another election in my lifetime.

Back to Israel.  Look, I know that many people think that this approach would be horrible for the Palestinians.  However, I really, really believe that giving Israel a free reign would ultimately be good for them.  Back to my examples above.  Germany is now a strong democracy and has the strongest economy in Europe, and it’s not particularly close.  Japan has been Democratic since World War II and has the third biggest economy in the world.  When Israel’s enemies finally understand that attacks on Israel actually lead to the pain and suffering happening to them, the attacks will end.  They can then move towards a democracy where women can go out alone and drive, people are not used as human shields, hospitals are not storehouses for weapons and terrorists, and innocent civilians are not bombed.

Have a good night everyone.

JR

Mulling Marriage

We've only got each other to blame
It's all the same to me love
'Cause I know what I feel to be right

No more lonely nights
You my guiding light
Day or night I'm always there
May I never miss the thrill of being near you
And if it takes a couple of years
To turn your tears to laughter
I will do what I feel to be right

And I won't go away until you tell me so
No, I'll never go away

Paul McCartney 1984

You know what’s the best thing about writing a blog?  You can write about things you know absolutely nothing about.  Take bad marriages, for example. Luckily, I don’t really know much about them.  Amy and I have been married more than a decade, and we’re happy.  My parents have been married over 50 years, and I’m guessing they hit 75. Seriously.  Although some of my friends have gotten divorced, the vast majority have stayed together.

So when I first got married, I was a little naive about marriage.  I just assumed that you spent all your time together, and wanted to; if you didn’t you had a poor marriage that was in trouble.  But I started noticing a really interesting strategy that some couples used. They intentionally spent frequent and consistent time away from each other, almost as if they liked to hang out in short doses, but too much time together would kill the patient.

Nowhere do I see this used more than by professionals (and quasi-professionals and wanna-be professionals).  Whatever you do for a living, there’s always an out-of-town conference somewhere, right?  Even if you’re a maid, I’m sure there’s a conference next month in Vegas to teach you how to clean better.  Work is another great excuse.  “Honey, I’m so sorry that I have to spend the next 6 straight weekends out of town. Videoconferencing and the telephone just aren’t the same, and if I don’t go we’ll all be out on the street.  You don’t want that to happen, do you?”  There’s also always a simcha. Who wants to be the mean spouse that says no to going to your old buddy’s 4th kid’s bar mitzvah?

Why does the other spouse allow this?  Often they want some alone time too.  If one spouse doesn’t want to spend a lot of time with the other, the feeling’s probably mutual.  This does not necessarily mean that the two don’t like each other, or that they have a weak marriage.  For some couples, time away from each other keeps things going.

Look, I’m not saying this is ideal.  I sure wouldn’t want to be in that type of marriage, and I never will be.  I’d rather be McCartney/Eastman (less than 1 week apart in 30 years of marriage).  Also, I’m guessing there is at least some correlation between time apart and divorce rate.  But for some couples, the time apart works, and it’s precisely what keeps them from actually getting divorced.

Everyone’s different.  In life there’s not always a 1 size fits all solution.  If it works it works.

Have a good night everyone.

JR