Month: April 2014

Investment Outlook and Advice (from 2004)

[This entire series of posts is from 2004.]

As some of you know, I recently retired from my latest career as an investment advisor and portfolio manager. Now when I tell people this, they often assume I was forced out by the recent untoward market climate, but are too polite to pursue the topic further.

What actually happened? I beat the market so much for the years just past that my bonuses allowed me to retire when it appeared that to continue to make my clients richer than they already were was not doing humanity any favors. In particular, they had started to spend money like it meant nothing, while hypocritically thinking of themselves as good liberals, opposing school vouchers for poor children in failing schools while sending their children to private schools, that kind of thing. Too much of this and I had had enough.

I continue to manage my own portfolio. Those of you who were too scared to sell your stocks or reallocate your portfolio when the market collapsed, good for you — you did much better, now that the market’s almost back to normal, than those who decided much too late that risk was not what they had in mind… “I thought it only went up!” being a common refrain. Those of you who went to cash and are just now thinking of getting back in… too late! You would have recovered all your losses and then some by continuing to invest in those grim times, but buying in now would be unwise, since you know you won’t be able to stick to your plan when the storm clouds return.

This cute bit of graphics work was done by JB Oxford during the worst of times:

I usually have a collection of recommmendations for things to buy, but the market is high enough now that nothing remains on my bargain table. If you must put cash somewhere, a mix of Asian stocks and global bonds should be good for awhile. I particularly like Korea and some of the other funds managed by Matthews, like their Asian Growth and Income.

[Ed: And today, I can say that recommendation turned out very well. I may address investment topics from time to time here.]

On Addiction and the Urge to Rescue

Humans instinctively run to aid others in pain. The urge is so strong that people will dive into dangerous waters and risk their own lives.

I learned early on to avoid people who gave off signals that they didn’t value other people’s feelings. Most of us do this out of self-preservation. We can’t know what’s going on in their heads or why they can’t feel others’ pain, and we have enough to do taking care of ourselves and the nicer people we know.

I have an acquaintance who I’ve always avoided because of this meanness (and note that “mean” means stingy as well as unkind — mean people often acting that way because they cannot feel secure enough to be generous.) But I’ve also felt “there but for the grace of God go I,” because under the surface I sensed a congruency and could easily see how I might have gone down the same dead-end addictive path.

Not to delve too deeply into what I think the meaning of life is, but humans are also instinctively attuned to watch out for others who don’t pull their weight — who “cheat” by taking and not giving. Addicts have an unfulfilled need, a hole at the center, which is temporarily filled by the experience that they are addicted to — whether it be drugs, gambling, shopping, sex…. the need expands to take over as the organizing principle of their life, and everything they do is increasingly about getting more. More and more desperate, they circle ever closer to the drain; if they have a lot of resources, they can circle it for many years. But whether they fall in or not, their potential to do their bit for the human project is wasted while they are completely self-absorbed. They take more and more, and give less and less, and alienate their friends and community.

Who are you to try to change things? After all, you could be wrong — it’s easy to tell yourself that you don’t really know that this person’s in trouble, and it’s presumptuous to think you can rescue someone who hasn’t asked for your help. But once you’re sure, you’re obligated to at least try. And when you try, almost always you’ll be rebuffed, because the last thing an addict wants to acknowledge is that he’s not in control any longer.

It’s easy at that point to dismiss the addict, telling yourself you can’t help, he’s really a jerk, and to Hell with him. The hardest course is to stand back and let the addict’s needs consume him, while not taking it personally and remaining watchful for your chance to help — which comes when the addict realizes even the biggest hit won’t fill the need, and their life is in danger.

You are not the only person waiting to help, and you may not be the one with the key that gets past the addict’s defenses. And you may never be called on.

A friend pointed out this passage from an Iain Banks novel:

She told him he spread himself, too thinly. He wasn’t really destroying himself, he was stopping himself from developing. He was still in a sort of childish state, a boylike phase where numbers mattered more than anything, where obsessive collecting, taking, enumerating, cataloging all spoke of a basic immaturity. He could never grow and develop as a human being until he went beyond this infantile obsession with penetration and possession.

He told her he didn’t want to get beyond this stage; he loved it. Anyway, even though he loved it and wouldn’t care if he remained promiscuous until he was too old to do it all, the chances were that he would change, sometime, eventually , over the course of the next three centuries or so of life which he could expect… There was plenty of time to do all this damned growing and developing. It would take care of itself. He wasn’t going to try and force the pace. If all this sexual activity was something he had to get out of this system before he could properly mature, then she had a moral duty to help him get rid of it as quickly as possibly, starting right now….

She pushed him away, as ever. He didn’t understand, she told him. It wasn’t a finite supply of promiscuity he was draining, it was an ever-replenishing fixation that was eating up his potential for future personal growth.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

More on Attachment and Personality Types:

What Attachment Type Are You?
Type: Secure
Type: Anxious-Preoccupied
Type: Dismissive-Avoidant
Type: Fearful-Avoidant (aka Anxious-Avoidant)
Avoidant: Emotions Repressed Beneath Conscious Level
Serial Monogamy: the Fearful-Avoidant Do It Faster
Anxious-Preoccupied: Stuck on the Dismissive?
Anxious-Preoccupied / Dismissive-Avoidant Couples: the Silent Treatment
Anxious-Preoccupied: Clingy and Insecure Relationship Example
Domestic Violence: Ray and Janay Rice
Malignant Narcissists
Teaching Narcissists to Activate Empathy
Histrionic Personality: Seductive, Dramatic, Theatrical
Life Is Unfair! The Great Chain of Dysfunction Ends With You.
Love Songs of the Secure Attachment Type
On Addiction and the Urge to Rescue
“Bad Boyfriends” for Kindle, $2.99
Controlling Your Inner Critic
“Big Bang Theory” — Aspergers and Emotional/Social Intelligence
Porn Addiction and NoFAP
Introverts in Management
Dismissive-Avoidants as Parents

Bolo Ties and Railguns (and Nazis)

This from 2004:

I’ve been buying up vintage bolo ties on EBay. The cohort that liked them is dying and there’s very little interest in them since they’re so out now, so you can get nice ones in silver and stone for $15 or so.

In 1982 I did a series of short-term jobs to fill time before returning to school. One of them was at an odd little company near MIT called Electromagnetic Launch Research, where I was in charge of their little CP/M network.

The company’s emeritus intellect was Henry Kolm, in his 60s at the time, an old coot of the best kind. Henry had done a lot of work on electromagnetic propulsion — rail guns, mass drivers, maglev trains. He dressed in western shirts and bolo ties — very much a character out of middle Heinlein. Among the many stories I heard from Henry were his demonstration of the safety of the Xerox toner he had helped invent — he ate quite a bit in front of some fearful secretaries. Which is of course no guarantee it’s safe to breathe, which was the real concern, but he was so annoyed at the FUD of the time about it that he felt a public display was necessary.

[Ed: I did not realize at the time I wrote this that Henry had been the American intelligence officer in charge of Operation Paperclip, which secretly resettled Nazi scientists in the US to take advantage of their brainpower in the coming struggle with the USSR. At the time I knew him, of course, these were still Top Secrets.]

I probably got that job because I had lots of connections to railguns. A railgun is a device to rapidly accelerate a projectile via magnetic force; the projectile is on a rail or magnetically suspended, and coils along the line of propulsion are pulsed to accelerate the projectile as it travels along until it is released at terminal speed. In high school I had built a cheesy version which launched nails a few yards — the “control system” was a progressively-spaced set of electrical contacts on a board. You launched the nail by stroking the power wire across the contacts at a steady rate! Not the most reliable system, but it usually worked. This was inspired entirely by Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where lunar rebels use linear induction railguns to bombard the Earth in their effort to rebel against UN authority. Today’s systems, of course, use sophisticated sensors and computer control.

At MIT I had taken a seminar in space colonization with Gerard K. O’Neill, the L5 Society saint. My project was a study of gentle redirection of Oort cloud comets for terraforming purposes. Railguns were one of the means suggested for nudging the comets, and millions of them would have to be redirected to deliver enough volatiles to, say, Mars. Henry loved that idea.

None of the space colonization ideas were ever funded — though we do have an albatross of a space station which is next to useless, leaking, and cost upwards of $100 billion. Henry is gone now, but at least lived to see a few Maglev trains built and railguns incorporated into US military plans. They are being installed on Navy ships in large numbers now.

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!

I’m going to report some old material from my private blog to tell you guys more about myself (and hopefully help advise you in areas other than relationships!)

I was your usual young, shapeless tech worker until around age 28, when I took up running — at first to and from work, then longer and longer distances. I got fitter but retained a lot of fat. I looked rather like a pencil with a thick rubber band around the middle — not so great, but I just assumed it was my genetics.

Fifteen years later, I switched to weightlifting for primary fitness, with running and aerobic work secondary. I started to gain muscle, but retained the same old fat deposits, especially around the middle.

I had what was supposed to be a nearly perfect diet pre-2000: lots of whole grains, veggies, lean meats in moderation, fiber. But still something seemed to be keeping the fat on, so I started to read up.

I developed a diet that borrows liberally from popular ones like Atkins and The Zone, but is tailored for people in middle age who work out and need to keep up muscle mass while dropping the flab.

As historical background, note that the advent of agricultural societies changed the typical diet for the worse — while they could support many more people on farmed grains, the health of those people declined when compared with the conditions under which the species evolved — hunting/gathering of lean meats, fish, berries, and nuts.

Fat deposition occurs because humans (especially the subcategories adapted to northern climates) who carried a dense store of usable fat on their bodies were more able to survive famine or long periods of intense energy use. Your body stores fat when 1) your blood sugar levels are way above needed to run your body, so conversion to fats saves this energy for later; and 2) when the body has been stressed by low blood sugar levels enough times to reset the storage mechanism to store even more fat, just in case. Fat is not only stored in the layers just beneath the skin that we all feel, but in tissues throughout the body, intramuscularly and between major organs in the belly.

How do you avoid this higher level of fat storage? Be sure the body has what it needs to operate all the time. Supply it with many small meals, each balanced, and (especially if you exercise a lot) be sure each meal has enough protein. Secondly, keep blood sugar levels as stable as possible by avoiding large servings of foods that make blood sugar levels rise too high, too fast; these are called high glycemic index foods, the glycemic index being a measure of how quickly the food makes blood sugars rise. In this you will be acting as if you were diabetic, since diabetics use this same avoidance of high glycemic index foods to manage their blood sugar levels.

In general, reduce portions or avoid entirely breads, starches, potatoes, rice, and pasta. When you do indulge, try to stick to whole grain versions. While fruits contain large amounts of sugars, some are worse than others — bananas are particularly bad, while apples and apricots, for example, are better, because they are not as quickly absorbed.

For maximal fat loss, you seek the metabolic state of ketosis. This occurs when you have reduced carbohydrate consumption below what is needed to survive, and the body utilizes alternate metabolic pathways to consume fat for energy. This state reduces fat levels rapidly, but strains liver and kidneys as the breakdown products of long-stored fat must be removed from your bloodstream. This is why liquid protein diets got a bad name; some people already in ill health were placed on these diets and suffered organ failure as a result. However, if you are in general good health and haven’t abused your liver and kidneys by drinking or indulging, ketosis is a useful tool for getting that last layer of fat off.

OK, but how does a person leading a normal life manage to eat this way?

0) It’s what you do habitually that matters most. Change those habits, and the occasional pizza or late-night chocolate dessert has little effect — you’re free to treat yourself in moderation. It’s like doing an energy audit — focus on what you eat every day and change the habits that cause the most trouble first.

1) Small meals more often. Standard breakfast/lunch/dinner should be supplemented by a mid-afternoon meal and a late-night meal (the last optional, this is really aimed at bodybuilders who need to keep as continuous a level of protein building blocks in their bloodstream as possible.)

2) Every meal should have at least 30 g quality protein (if you weigh c. 180 lbs) — one can of tuna, medium chicken breast, one cup of low fat cottage cheese, 2 scoops whey protein powdered drink, protein bar, etc. Learn to love salmon! Again, it doesn’t have to be a full 30 g for non-bodybuilders.

3) Carbs of all sorts, but especially simple sugars and starches, need to be restrained to small portions and low daily amounts. Particularly likely to trigger fat deposition and blood sugar swings are the high glycemic index carbs (see http://www.glycemicindex.com/) — bread, some fruits (bananas), potatoes, etc. Anecdotally, a rule against any carbs after dinner seems wise. Particularly avoid regular consumption of typical mass-produced processed foods that use high-fructose corn syrup as a cheap sweetener — this is a product used primarily in the US because the government subsidizes corn and the sugar lobby has successfully driven the US price of true sugar so high. There is so much additional sugar in processed foods that avoiding them is really important. This includes things you don’t think of as sweet, like spaghetti sauce, cereal, and packaged dinners.

It helps to use artificial sweeteners to avoid the glucose pulse one would otherwise suffer from after consumption of sweet drinks — this is why sucralose (Splenda) is typically used to make protein drink mixes taste good. There are other reasons to avoid fizzy soft drinks (e.g. long-term effect on tooth enamel), but if you must, a diet drink is better.

4) Fats: avoid “bad” fats, supplement with “good” fats. “Bad” includes particularly the hydrogenated varieties of oils used in processed and baked goods. “Good” includes olive, canola, flax, sunflower, borage, etc. oils. One of the concepts behind the Atkins diet is that attempts to decrease fat consumption often lead to a greater rise in carb consumption, since the body needs some fats and feels starved when it doesn’t get a good mix. Adding a tablespoon of flaxseed oil to a cup of lowfat cottage cheese, for example, makes a tastier mix that provides important EFAs (essential fatty acids.) Snacking on small amounts of almonds and walnuts, instead of bread or potato-based products, is satisfying and furthers the program. Animal fats in moderation don’t harm a healthy person, and vegetarians on average are not as healthy as those who eat my suggested diet with moderate amounts of meat.

5) Help out your digestive system by getting enough fiber — lots of veggies (broccoli, cauliflower — did you know boiled or steamed cauliflower, mashed, are almost like mashed potatoes?), plus maybe a good high-fiber cereal (I like General Mills FiberOne, which tastes good and keeps carbs to a minimum by using a no-cal sweetener.) Also give your liver and kidneys a break by drinking lots of water.

The effect of this kind of diet is to increase use of fat for energy (allowing you to break down your existing stores) and decrease its deposition (by avoiding high blood sugar pulses and keeping a constant supply of necessary fats and proteins.) It takes months to see significant results, and you may experience some loss of energy for a few weeks as the transition to use of other metabolic pathways is not necessarily smooth. Full results of the changeover are only seen after a year (or longer, if you have a lot of fat to lose). Oh, and as you age you’ll be more likely to avoid heart disease and stroke.

And all of this presumes a good exercise program, which should at least get your heartbeat up to 150% of its resting rate for a half hour a day, some of which can be accomplished by walking places. If you want to be built as well as lean, then you’ll be needing to hit the weights unless you are genetically blessed. If you do a lot of heavy weight training, be sure you’re getting at least the minimum 30 g per meal of protein, and reduce your other exercise accordingly, since your cardiovascular fitness needs will be partially met by weight training.

An extremely thorough and detailed look at the science of minimizing fat: Gary Taubes’ Why We Gat Fat: And What to Do About It. Recommended.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

Month: April 2014

Investment Outlook and Advice (from 2004)

Like this:

On Addiction and the Urge to Rescue

Like this:

Bolo Ties and Railguns (and Nazis)

Like this:

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: