Month: August 2014

Low-Cost Robo-Financial Advisors

Robotic Financial Advisors

My last career was as a financial advisor. I gave up my registration when I retired, so I give away advice, which I guarantee is worth what you pay for it!

There is such a thing as a great financial advisor who more than repays their fees in tailoring your portfolio to your future needs, risk tolerance, and tax situation. But these people are rare: many have migrated to managing hedge funds, and the good ones still in individual practice tend to be hard to find or only accept clients with very high net worth (upwards of $500K.)

So what is a middle-class person to do? You can roll your own low-cost strategy which beats 80% of advisors and managed funds by using low-fee index funds from a company like Vanguard– often one for global stocks and one for bonds. You set your preferred volatility level by choosing, for example 70% stocks and 30% bonds. Then you forget it — and once a year or so on a set date, rebalance by transferring as needed to maintain those percentages. This generally bumps up return slightly over a static strategy without a lot of trading or effort.

The Wall Street Journal has a story by Liz Moyer on new online services that do simple investment management for you at much lower cost than personal advisors (full story may be behind a paywall):

The Internet has threatened the livelihood of travel agents, video-store clerks and mail carriers. Now high-tech startups are aiming to put another profession on the endangered list: financial adviser.

A new breed of online advisers is using computer models available on their websites to tailor portfolios of inexpensive exchange-traded funds for individual investors and offering to manage those investments automatically.

The firms promise to save customers money by charging low management fees and avoiding pricey investment products. By contrast, traditional advisers and brokers develop personal relationships with clients but sometimes impose hefty management and investment fees.

The online advisers can be a good option for investors who want low-cost advice about the appropriate mix of stocks and bonds to buy and hold for the long term, and who are content to monitor their investments on a home computer or a mobile app.

Sachin Rekhi, who is 30 years old and lives in Menlo Park, Calif., was wined and dined by advisers from Wall Street banks after selling his software company. But he concluded he could get what he wanted from Wealthfront, the largest of the online startups in terms of assets.

“I wasn’t getting access to anything special from the traditional wealth advisers, and they were going to invest my money the same way,” says Mr. Rekhi, who opened an account with the Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm in 2012.

…

But “robo-advisers,” as they are sometimes derisively known, aren’t for everyone. Investors who prefer to hear a familiar, reassuring voice when markets gyrate may feel cast adrift. And those who face complicated tax or estate-planning issues may need to seek separate advice from a professional.

The firms—which also include Betterment, Personal Capital, FutureAdvisor, SigFig Wealth Management and Motif Investing—also can vary significantly in the amount of hands-on assistance they provide and in the services they offer.

Online advisers collect basic information from investors about how much risk they want to take and what they are investing for. The firms then use the information to create portfolios intended to match those profiles and goals, and often adjust those portfolios automatically in an effort to boost returns or curtail volatility.

…

Most online advisers were formed by veterans of large tech firms, and employees of tech firms are often a target audience. Together the online advisers, which manage $4 billion in assets, represent a tiny fraction of the estimated $17 trillion wealth-management market, according to Aite Group, a consulting firm based in Boston.

But they are growing fast, and have attracted high-profile backers. Wealthfront surpassed $1 billion in assets under management in June, about 2½ years after launching its website, and manages $1.25 billion now. Its chief investment officer is Burton Malkiel, whose book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” is widely regarded as a classic by advocates of index investing.

Betterment, which is based in New York and manages $740 million, received a $32 million infusion in April from Citigroup’s C -0.12% Citi Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and Northwestern Mutual Capital. In May, J.P. Morgan Chase, JPM -0.04% Goldman Sachs Group GS +0.12% and other investors put $35 million into Motif Investing, a San Mateo, Calif.-based firm whose board members include Sallie Krawcheck, a former Wall Street executive, and onetime Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt.

Low fees are central to the pitch. Investors often pay around 0.40% to 0.50% of assets annually—or $40 to $50 on a $10,000 portfolio—based on a typical management fee of about 0.25% of assets and ETF fees of 0.1% to 0.25%. By contrast, traditional advisers often charge 1% or more of assets, and sometimes recommend higher-priced investments that can further erode returns.

Online advisers often accept clients with relatively small amounts to invest, though some target investors with $100,000 or more in assets. The firms can appeal to a younger tech-savvy generation. Adam Nash, Wealthfront’s chief executive, says 60% of the firm’s clients are under 35, and 90% are under 50.

…

All three firms do most of the heavy lifting on an investor’s behalf. Bo Lu, a former Microsoft engineer who co-founded FutureAdvisor, got the idea for his website from fellow engineers who had money to invest but not enough to attract the attention of traditional advisers.

“They all wanted accounts of a million or a half-million [dollars] and we had, like, $8,000 to invest. We decided to build it ourselves.”

…

If stocks or bonds rally or drop significantly, Betterment automatically adjusts his account back to his baseline asset allocation, typically by directing dividends and new deposits into underweighted assets. The tactic, known as “rebalancing,” essentially pushes investors to buy assets that are relatively inexpensive, which can boost returns in the long run.

In addition, Betterment automatically sells some investments that have lost money to offset gains in other investments, which can limit his taxes on overall gains.

Wealthfront, too, automatically rebalances accounts with more than $10,000, and customers with at least $100,000 invested in taxable accounts also get automatic tax-loss harvesting. FutureAdvisor, which launched last year and manages about $200 million in assets, also provides both services.

Betterment and Wealthfront don’t charge investors for trading costs incurred while rebalancing. FutureAdvisor says investors may incur trading costs due to rebalancing, but that it only rebalances if the benefits for the investor outweigh the expense.

This stuff is hardly rocket science — which is why rocket scientists cleaned up by going into the investment field in the 90s. Automating portfolio managament isn’t tough — what’s hard to manage is client expectations; clients who aren’t ready to ignore gyrations in portfolio value and stay the course may need all the human support they can get. Otherwise they will trade out on declines and in on highs, and do worse than the market over time — as most do investors in stock mutual funds.

Feminism’s Heritage: Freedom vs. Special Protections

Suffragettes – jebkinnison.com

Peter Wright at AVFM pointed out the division among early feminists between those who wanted freedom to enjoy the rights and opportunities of men (voting, professional employment, equal treatment under the law) and those who wanted special treatment (exemptions from military service, favorable alimony and custody rules, lighter criminal sentences, lowered physical qualification standards for physical jobs.) He pointed me to the work of Ernest Belfort Bax, an early (1913) men’s rights advocate:

Modern Feminism rose slowly above the horizon. Modern Feminism has two distinct sides to it: (1) an articulate political and economic side embracing demands for so-called rights; and (2) a sentimental side which insists in an accentuation of the privileges and immunities which have grown up, not articulately or as the result of definite demands, but as the consequence of sentimental pleading in particular cases. In this way, however, a public opinion became established, finding expression in a sex favouritism in the law and even still more in its administration, in favour of women as against men.

These two sides of Modern Feminism are not necessarily combined in the same person. One may, for example, find opponents of female suffrage who are strong advocates of sentimental favouritism towards women in matters of law and its administration. On the other hand you may find, though this is more rare, strong advocates of political and other rights for the female sex, who sincerely deprecate the present inequality of the law in favour of women. As a rule, however, the two sides go together, the vast bulk of the advocates of “Women’s Rights” being equally keen on the retention and extension of women’s privileges. Indeed, it would seem as though the main object of the bulk of the advocates of the “Woman’s Movement” was to convert the female sex into the position of a dominant sexe noblesse. The two sides of Feminism have advanced hand in hand for the last two generations, though it was the purely sentimental side that first appeared as a factor in public opinion.” — The Fraud of Feminism – Chapter I: Historical (1913)

Bax is part of the “patriarchal” reaction to early feminism — these men were horrified that the suffocating sentimentality of women and what they thought was woman’s overly emotional reaction to issues would, with women’s suffrage and increasingly equal roles in the world, lead to disaster and the end of civilization as they knew it. For a pop culture model, imagine Professor Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady — grumpy, male chauvinist, orderly intellectual. Bax was quite reasonably complaining that the law had already started to bend to favor women over men in some areas (divorce, criminal punishment) for sentimental reasons, while feminists continued to push for even more special treatment, at the same time demanding equality where it would favor women. WWI is what actually ended the fin de siècle order of the world, but feminism continued, contributing in the US to the Progressive movement and its errors (e.g., Prohibition and eugenics.)

Feminism as a movement continued and expanded, each victory leading to more issues needing its attention. Public sympathy for the rational goal of equal legal and professional treatment coexisted with the reservoir of sentimental feeling for women and ingrained desires to help mothers and children, which affected decisions on governmental support and handling of divorce. Enlightened and empowered women joined academia and government in large numbers, until today they are dominant in some departments and fields.

But the split identified by Bax is still there.

Feminist thinker Naomi Wolf tried to influence the future of feminism with her 1994 book Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It. From the Amazon page:

[T]he book argues that women should renounce “victim feminism,” which casts them as sexually pure, fragile, beleaguered creatures whose problems are all the fault of men. As an alternative, Wolf outlines an anti-dogmatic “power feminism” which sees women as no better and no worse than men, celebrates female sexuality and encourages women to claim their individual voices through a variety of tactics. These include “resource groups” for sharing contacts and increasing access to information and services; consumer campaigns; and pressure on the media to alter their portrayals of women. Wolf theorizes that little girls, as much as boys, have fantasies of absolute dominion but learn to repress their “will to power” at a very early age. Wolf here sketches a psychological road map designed to help women deal with their ambivalence about success, power, equality and money.

I don’t agree with Naomi Wolf much of the time, but in this she was on the right side: a feminism directed toward remaining real issues of equality, empowerment, and respect would be far less authoritarian and far less harmful to women’s partners in continuing civilization, men. But the cadres embedded in Woman’s Studies departments, government, and NGOs were not interested in giving up the easy demonization of men and continued to seek refuge in grievance, victimhood, and moral superiority.

One of the problems with Social Justice Warriors and activists generally is their myopic focus on their own culture and government, applying their search for ever-smaller irritants (“microaggressions” and remaining disparities in treatment) to the most progressive societies on the planet while ignoring the far more serious maltreatment of women, gays, religious and ethnic minorities, and poor people in other countries and cultures around the world. They elevate and sentimentalize other cultures as more “authentic” and seem to assign blame for most problems there to the imperialism and interventionism of Western countries. I would agree that societies on the other side of the world should not be lightly trifled with and Western countries have been foolishly intervening for centuries, but the treatment of women and minorities in those places was in place long before Western powers showed up. And yet activists spend far more time and energy on lobbying government to pressure businesses to provide free birth control and weaken standards of proof in university rape cases than they do on improving girl’s schools in Islamic countries or combatting female circumcision.

Today’s column in Toronto’s Globe and Mail by Margaret Wente continues the effort to get away from “victim’s studies” thinking:

Do we still need feminism? According to many younger women, we do not. For the past few weeks, a Tumblr hashtag campaign called #WomenAgainstFeminism has been stirring up a lot of angst in the Twitter/blogosphere. As part of the campaign, young women submit selfies with handwritten signs that say: “I don’t need feminism because [fill in reason here].” The reasons include things like: “My self-worth is not directly tied to the size of my victim complex!” “I love being an engineer, but I’d rather just be Mom.” “I like men looking at me when I look good.” “Feminism has become a pseudonym for bullying.” And, on a lighter note, “How the [bleep] am I supposed to open jars and lift heavy objects without my husband?”

Naturally, this campaign has been like a red flag to a bull, if I may use that expression. Shock, horror, ridicule and satire have ensued, along with a great deal of reproachful head-shaking from those who say that women who reject feminism are ignorant and misinformed.

To make sense of the debate, the CBC’s The Current convened a panel. It was the type of panel that muddied these already turbid waters even more. I felt sorry for the moderator, Jeffrey Kofman, who was stuck trying to elucidate the views of three not-very-interesting young women (two feminist, one anti). They left me longing for the days of Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer – fierce, magnificent, passionate, witty lionesses who would put any modern feminist to shame. They never stooped to academic jargon. They never spoke in uptalk, either, a mannerism these panelists unfortunately had not shaken. It’s hard to take anybody seriously when she’s droning on about oppression, colonialism and imperialism, especially when she’s uptalking.

This being the CBC, the audience reaction was predictable. Older, affluent, liberal, second-wave females generally agreed that we all have feminists to thank for our freedoms, and the anti-feminists shouldn’t forget it. Also, they protested, feminism has been badly misunderstood. It is not a bunch of shrill, hairy-legged man-haters, as the antis seem to think. Any younger woman who knew the slightest thing about feminism would be one!

So how come they’re not? (Most polls say fewer than half of younger women identify with feminism.) One big reason is: We won. Thanks for your hard work, Gloria and Germaine. The heavy lifting’s over. You can rest on your laurels now.

Another reason is that #WomenAgainstFeminism is essentially right. There is a hard core of misandry and victim-culture in modern feminism that is deeply disturbing. #WomenAgainstFeminism is in part a reaction to the #YesAllWomen campaign, which began in reaction to the murder rampage of Elliot Rodger last May. The lonely misogynist – who killed two women and four men, before killing himself – was cast as a symbol of the worldwide war against women. As one Facebook comment (quoted in Time by Sarah Miller) said: “If you don’t think this is about misogyny there is something wrong with you.”

Modern feminism has split into two distinct strands. The mild-mannered mainstream version, having achieved most of its objectives for equality (and then some: upward of 60 per cent of postsecondary graduates are now women) is focusing its efforts on ever more elitist issues, such as the lopsided gender split in Silicon Valley and the shortage of women on corporate boards. Will all due respect to the problems of the one per cent, I do not think these are the types of issues that will send young women to the barricades.

The leftist, postmodernist strand of feminism insists that women are still oppressed, and the world’s still stacked against us, and there is basically no difference between the rape epidemic in India and the one in North America. One example of this thinking is The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti, who, in response to #WomenAgainstFeminism, wrote: “[D]enying that women are a victimized class is simply wrong. What else would you call a segment of the population who are systematically discriminated against in school, work and politics? How would you describe a population whose bodies are objectified to the point of dehumanization? Women are harassed, attacked and sexually assaulted with alarming regularity in America and around the world.” This is a belief system rather than a depiction of reality, and, as with all belief systems, there’s no point arguing about it with the faithful.

Views like this wouldn’t matter much, except that they have real-life consequences, as Cathy Young has pointed out in Time. One is the destructive “rape culture” myth that has gripped campuses across North America, along with the meme – utterly fictitious – that one in five women will be sexually assaulted by the time she gets her degree. This claim is on the face of it absurd, but it has spawned an epidemic of victimology and abuse of due process that will take a generation to undo.

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.

The “Fairy Tale” Myth: Both False and Destructive

Prince and Princess of the Fairy Tale Model

In Bad Boyfriends: Using Attachment Theory to Avoid Mr. (or Ms.) Wrong and Make You a Better Partner, I briefly take on the “Fairy Tale” model of romantic relationships:

[T]he ideals of romance remain culturally strong; every fairy tale, every Disney animation, (almost) every Hollywood and Bollywood movie idealize the One True Love, who you will see across a crowded room at just the right moment, fall madly in love with, marry, and live happily ever after with in a vine-covered cottage with a picket fence.

The hazard of such cultural programming:

One day we realize that we are completely possessed and dominated by a set of beliefs that we, as individuals, never chose. It is as though we breathe them in from novels and movies, from the psychological air around us, and they become part of us, as though fused with the cells of our bodies. We all know that we are supposed to “fall in love” and that our relationships must be based on romance—nothing less will do! Every man knows what he is entitled to demand from his [partner.] It is spelled out in detail in some unseen layer of the unconscious mind. This is “romance”. —anonymous

Note the word “demand.” It is a self-centered expectation that my needs will be satisfied, my happiness will come from my partner. This is a child’s narcissistic view of a relationship—it’s all about me. The fairy tale model tells you you are entitled to happiness and your partner is to provide it. Or else! Of course this is not a relationship of adult equals in loving attachment—it has no place for real life, for struggle toward goals, for temporary unhappiness and loss for the sake of a future goal. And those who cling to it generally fail.

Idealized romantic love was not considered especially desirable before Medieval troubadours promoted it. Adult long-term relationships have historically been about family, property, and influence, with eventual love a desirable but not necessary factor. In wealthy urban societies, long-term married persons often sought sexual outlets and the thrills of romance from secondary relationships.

Peter Wright, writing in A Voice for Men, captures the problematic cultural relic of the Fairy Tale with more scholarship than I could muster — we’ve been exchanging emails. From his point of view, modern feminism and the Fairy Tale are closely entwined, and modern feminists don’t recognize how much their beliefs owe to a feudalistic ideal of female privilege (the “Fairy Tale Princess” model):

Feminism promotes a neurotic vision of what constitutes true love. It takes its model directly from the Age of Feudalism which saw vassals bowing down and kissing the hands of Lords. In the 12th century that model served as the basis for a new kind of love in which men were to play the role of vassal to women who played the role of an idealized Lord. C.S. Lewis, back in the middle of the 20th Century, referred to this historical revolution as “the feudalisation of love,” and stated that it has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched. “Compared with this revolution,” states Lewis, “the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.”

Not only has this feudalistic notion of love permeated almost every corner of the globe today, it continues to be vigorously promoted by both feminists and traditionalists alike. The love we are referring to is what Hollywood, romance novels, and other media refer to as “romantic love,” the fantasy to which every modern man and woman pledges blind obeisance…. [C.S. Lewis commented:]

Everyone has heard of courtly love, and everyone knows it appeared quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century at Languedoc. The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. Here is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man’. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’. The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’. This solemn amatory ritual is felt to be part and parcel of the courtly life.

C.S. Lewis wrote that many decades ago; I’m not sure “everyone” knows it today. We ought to remember his words, because in the long sweep of human history, what we think has been with us forever is something people only a few generations ago knew to be mostly an artificial, idealized notion.

One of the issues of the modern age of electronic media and overabundant entertainment is the lack of accountability and feedback — in earlier eras, most of a child’s time was spent with parents, siblings, and peers in the real community, and their self-image was molded by feedback from those real people. Today many children get less guidance from adults, and spend much of their early years viewing entertainments from Disney and others that were drenched in the Fairy Tale model of romance. The content of these tales has grown more sophisticated in recent years, but they still often center on either a girl who is pretty and does well by finding the Prince Charming to whisk her off to Happy Ever After Land, or a boy who bests his competitors through wit and daring. Neither of these scenarios is an actual experience with the feedback required to sharpen life skills; both allow a sort of lazy, I-am-owed-this fantasy view of how life works. The willingness of the most effective teachers to demand excellent performance from their pupils has been buried by bureaucracies punishing teachers for upholding high standards, and refusing to let teachers remove disruptive students from their classes. Even worse, the “self-esteem” movement called for praising and rewarding all children, no matter what their performance, lest their self-esteem be damaged — but untested, unreal self-esteem based on false praise crumbles as soon as it encounters real-world setbacks.

Peter Wright goes on to suggest a view of marriage or partnership as friendship-plus — the values of friendship with the addition of sex and family interests — as a healthier way of looking at it:

The field of attachment science concludes that an absence of close and consistent human attachment causes children to literally wither and die, refusing to thrive despite being provided with clothing, food and an adequate number of toys. Likewise adults literally commit suicide to escape feelings of isolation and loneliness, especially after a relationship separation. Even if we don’t end up suiciding from loneliness we have to ask ourselves if the absence of an intimate relationship in our lives leaves us limping, or somehow unfulfilled? Some would suggest we can fill our intimacy void with friendships, but this leads to a further question of whether there is an adequate formulation of friendship that can satisfy our needs – a relationship that doesn’t rely on the usual vassal and lord model at the core of romantic love.

In ancient cultures friendship was a more lofty aspiration than it is today. It was synonymous with love and it often involved sexual intimacy. In Ancient Greek, the same word was used for “friend” and “lover.” In our culture we have succeeded in separating friendship from the category we call love, and excised all trace of sex from friendships. Today when we say, “They are just good friends” or “she’s only a friend” we are indicating the absence of both intimate love and sex.

…

Sexual attraction and desire also need to be put in their place. They may generate some chemistry and may be the first thing that attracts you to a person, but like the shiny trinket that catches your eye at the shopping mall, you will first stare at it in wonder, maybe have a feel, and then decide whether you really want to take that thing home and share your life with it. Friendship is much the same, and if a person you meet has little in common you will be inclined to leave them on the shelf and move on, despite their sexual attractiveness.

…

I once again note that the breakdown in relations between men and women has been painful, and men have suffered the most in this I would think; in the current socio-political climate, marriage and even cohabitation is like jumping out of an aeroplane with a chute you’re not even sure is going to open. And all change can’t simply be political. Still, if we are ever to look forward to a cultural change that might make for a new era of improved relations between the sexes, ditching these feudalistic attitudes about “romantic love,” and restoring the ancient tradition of seeing intimate friendship being the highest ideal for a relationship, would probably by a major step in the right direction culturally. This will require a shift in the attitudes of men and women alike, but the evidence for this being possible is strong; we’ve done it before, and we still see it in some cultures today. It’s not impossible for human beings to think and act this way. So can we return to a culture where that’s the more normal way of thinking? I’d like to believe that possible for us today, or at least in the future.

In one of those elisions, Peter comments: “One of the worst-kept secrets about married couples is that they often treat their friends with more kindness, compassion and generosity than they ever do for each other. When best friends are together they are charming, engaging, helpful and courteous, but when they return home to their spouses they appear resentful, angry and uncooperative with each other.”

I think we disagree about this. When the arranged-marriage, marriage-for-property-and-dynasty system went out of style, marriages became a choose-for-yourself project, with a much larger pool of candidates to choose from. While this freed many to find more compatible partners, it also cast the losers into a game of musical relationship chairs where most of the remaining candidates were problematic; 50% of the population have insecure attachment types, and freedom of choice meant those insecure people were more often thrown in together into dysfunctional marriages. No longer feeling obligated to make a marriage work, and finding a year or two in that their partner is either too controlling and clingy or too cold and avoidant, the sniping and the negative communication games begin. You could call this another facet of assortative mating, where the best partners find each other and leave the worst to deal with each other.

There’s also a selection effect: we notice the marriages where people fight or snipe at each other. The half of marriages that do well do so quietly, and it’s easy to assume married people treat each other badly behind the scenes when nearly everyone tries to maintain status and self-image by presenting a falsely positive view to outsiders. Those whose marriages are happy tend to quietly enjoy themselves and get on with their lives, while the unhappy participants in bad marriages are more likely to let everyone know just how awful their partner is, after presenting a glowing but false picture at first.

There is a real world, and a couple has to join together and face reality as partners to be successful both with each other and in surviving and thriving in a sometimes harsh environment. A real partnership grows stronger with adversity overcome by mutual effort; if one or both partners think life should be easy because they are goodlooking, or great at sports, or Daddy’s Little Girl, the normal setbacks of life will have them blaming their partner and running for the exit. Happiness — or great sex or a perfect house — is not the goal of a successful relationship; the goal is a bond that strengthens both of you and helps you be more the person you want to be. Happiness in marriage, when it happens, is a byproduct of love and loyalty and accomplishments together over time.

Belief in the Fairy Tale Model is crippling, often leaving believers battered, poorer, and alone in middle age — ask many of the bewildered divorced fathers. And the divorcées, having moved on to what they expected would be sexier, more attentive men? Having thrown away their shared history and often damaged their children by depriving them of a father’s guidance, their lives are not improved. What they wanted was an illusion.

Another excerpt from my book, the list of “Fairy Tale Assumptions” from a friend who now knows better:

There is only one person for me. Really? With five billion other people walking around, that’s a rather unlikely assumption. If you can only partner with one person on the planet, it seems more likely your requirements are so demanding there is no one who could meet them. It’s probably wiser to strive to be the kind of person who could be a good partner to lots of people. Yes, they should be very special—but not the only one!

Money doesn’t matter. Only when you’re rich. You have to be able to talk about money. Who makes what? Does the person who brings in more money have a bigger say in how it gets spent? Do you have a spending plan? A savings plan? What if one of you gets a great job opportunity in another city—will you move?

Love will keep us together. Love is not a force in the world. It doesn’t pay the bills or get you a job or make you smart; in fact, you could argue the reverse. Love is a reason to try hard, to go above and beyond, and to accomplish things that ordinarily you wouldn’t do. Because no one is perfect and even your perfect life-partner will forget to take out the garbage or will wake you up with his incessant snoring.

You can only love one person at a time. Attraction is a function of brain chemistry. Companionate love is what remains when the limerence finally leaves. There’s nothing to prevent you from having strong feelings for more than one person. You have an infinite capacity to love.

This relationship will never end. All relationships end. Everyone dies. Everyone’s circumstances change. Instead of imbuing one relationship with magic picked up in an after-school special, it might be worthwhile to tell someone how much they mean to you and then work on showing that. Because words are cheap. Signing on a dotted line for a mortgage or having children or jointly caring for family elders shows that you’re not just another bed warmer. And all those people in high school you absolutely loved? You won’t even remember their names in 30 years.

People should love me for who I am. Oh dear. Have some more kool-aid. Just because you exist doesn’t make you lovable. If you have to do things to manipulate how people feel about you, then you are a mess. Clean your mess and stop using other people until you have.

Sex is bad. Don’t buy into that. Sex is neither good nor bad. It is a natural function, like eating and breathing. Using sex as a weapon for nonconsensual dominance or withholding sex as punishment are childish games.

I am the center of the world. You may be pretty and smart, but there are many people who are prettier and smarter and they do more chores and make more money and can run marathons. Just be your best. Love your friends. Talk to your kids. Do a good job.

The world owes me. The world doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you, nor should it. You are no more important (and no less important) than anyone else.

People never change. Do you think your mother married a balding oaf whose idea of a good time is to fart the alphabet? Did your father marry a woman because of her intense bingo addiction and her desire to wear polyester stretch pants in colors not found in nature?

My sweetheart will love me if we have children. It is morally wrong to use other people, especially children, to get what you want. Having babies to keep your man in a marriage does not work. Leaving your wife and kids because you don’t like children makes you a douche, not a dad.

I can change him or her. Guess what? Alcoholism, obesity, compulsive gambling, drug addiction, and sex addiction don’t exist because of you. You can’t fix them. You can help them get help but you have to understand that you are not the change agent.

You have to be honest about what you want and how you feel. You have to give honest feedback. Lying helps no one.

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.

Vitamin D: Anti-Dementia?

Vitamin D

Via Instapundit, “New Study Supports Links Between Dementia And Vitamin D Deficiency” in IFLScience:

Adding to an ever-growing body of evidence, a new study has found that vitamin D deficiency is associated with a substantially increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s and dementia. While previous studies have drawn similar conclusions, this is the largest, most robust study carried out to date. The results have been published in the journal Neurology.

Vitamin D is an essential vitamin that is produced by the body upon exposure of the skin to sunlight, but it can also be found in small amounts in certain foods such as oily fish. It plays a variety of roles in the body and over recent years our understanding of how it helps to maintain optimum health has dramatically increased. For example, it’s thought to reduce the risk of certain bone diseases, bacterial and viral infections and autoimmune diseases.

Interestingly, some studies have hinted that vitamin D may play a neuroprotective role. In support of this idea, several recent studies have found links between vitamin D deficiency and the risk of dementia and cognitive decline. However, one study also found no associations in men.

To find out more, an international team of researchers, headed by scientists at the University of Exeter, enrolled 1,658 adults aged 65 and over who were able to walk unaided and were free from dementia, cardiovascular disease and stroke. Vitamin D levels were assessed at the start of the study and the participants were then followed for six years in order to investigate who went on to develop Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia.

The researchers discovered that participants with a moderate vitamin D deficiency had a 53% increased risk of developing any form of dementia, and those with a severe deficiency had a 125% increased risk. Similar results were also found for the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, which is the most common form of dementia. Interestingly, they found that there was a threshold level of 50nmol/L vitamin D in the serum, below which the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s was markedly increased.

While this shows vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased risk of dementia, it does not prove causation; it’s possible that since oily fish contain lots of D, the Omega-3 fatty acids and other components of fish oil, which has already been shown to reduce dementia, are responsible, since people who regularly eat oily fish won’t suffer D deficiencies. And any number of other cofactors may play a role.

What’s the story on vitamin D supplements? A few years ago, medical professionals themselves were taking 2000-4000 IUDs every day believing these larger doses would be protective against a variety of degenerative diseases. The evidence since is inconclusive. Here are some studies:

Vitamin D and Cardiometabolic Outcomes: A Systematic Review
Vitamin D and calcium: a systematic review of health outcomes.
Vitamin D supplementation for prevention of mortality in adults.
The effect of vitamin D supplementation on skeletal, vascular, or cancer outcomes: a trial sequential meta-analysis

For more on supplements and life-extending habits:

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!
Low-Dose Aspirin Reduces Pancreatic Cancer
Daily Aspirin Regimen Reduces Cancer Rates
Almonds: Superfood, Eat Them Daily for Heart Health
Fish Oil Supplements Ward Off Dementia
Lower Back Pain: Acetaminophen (Tylenol, Paracetamol) Useless
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Scams: Multi-Level Marketing, Herbalife
Fish and Fish Oil for Better Brain Health
Salt: New Research Says Too Little May Be Unhealthy

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

Month: August 2014

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