Thoughts In Grey

Making changes, some big, some small

Posted this on Facebook earlier, and repeating here.

I guess a bunch of people made a whole bunch of resolutions for the new year. I've never been into that, but here's some stuff that's changing right now or in the immediate future.

1. I'm going to say "no" a whole lot more. I've allowed myself to get way too pissed off way too many times as I've tried to adjust preferences to suit others around me, either because I said yes when I shouldn't have, or got overly enthusiastic about something or somebody when I should have known better to begin with.
2. In that vein, decided to skip the planned trip to Steamboat Springs. It's not really one of my favorite places to ski, and spending a lot of money on transportation, tickets, etc. just because the accommodations are free makes no sense. Better to save all that money and go someplace I want to rather than someplace that somebody else thinks I'll love.
3. I've listed both my Snowbird timeshare weeks for sale. Having large units doesn't make sense for my life anymore, if it ever did. I love that mountain, but it would be better to maybe buy a week or two in a small studio that suits my needs rather than spending the annual maintenance dollars on the bigger units, then struggling to find people who want to fill it up.
4. While I'm at it, I will be giving up one of my Snowbird lockers. In the old days when you could dash to the airport with a carry-on and 20 minutes to spare, it kind of made sense to have a locker full of clothes waiting. You can't do that anymore and I'm skiing other places more often, so want stuff accessible at home. I'll keep a locker for powder-specific gear I only use in Utah and check a duffel bag for the rest.
5. Changing my workout routine completely since it wasn't working. When I ski next year, I want to feel powerful again.
6. When my term as president of the Los Angeles Chapter is up at the end of June, I'll be backing out of UCLA Anderson Alumni for a while. After a dozen years of being involved and two years as president of the chapter, it's time to take a break. The chapter needs new blood and I need a new challenge.
7. Also, for the first time since graduating, not taking an active part in running my college reunion. I just don't get that much out of my association with Columbia anymore. Might be different if I were on the east coast, but it just isn't all that relevant where I am right now.
8. Looking for a job working for somebody full-time. I'm a great project manager but I'm really not much of a salesperson. Spending so much of my time on business development just really saps my enthusiasm. Once again, gotta live the life that's right for me, and I'm just not a salesperson.
9. HBO, Showtime and a bunch of other premium channels have been gone for a while because I couldn't justify the cost for the little I watched them. The DVR has been gone for a month and I don't miss it either. Now I find myself wondering "do I really need a TV at all?" Certainly, I don't need two of them! My office TV is about to be history along with about $10 a month in TW Cable fees.
10. Part of the cable TV savings have been invested in a Kindle and a new reading lamp. Much better use of my time I think. Which is a nice way of saying: less TV, more reading.
11. Cutting back on the red wine. I still love a nice red, but those nice reds do seem to have a way of finding themselves and their calories tacked onto my waist.
12. Some people are just pure poison and need to not be part of my life anymore. They've been pissing me off endlessly lately and leaving me in a rotten mood, which has in turn been poisoning friendships with others.
13. Done with Foursquare. The supposed benefits don't seem to exist. My friends know where to find me. People who aren't my friends don't need to.
14. Leaving my cellphone home a lot more, or at least turning it off.  A time may come very soon when I again don't have a choice, but right now I do.
15. Seriously working on my photography. As I've gotten more and more proficient with PhotoShop CS5, it's become more and more fun. Maybe a gallery show sometime in the future? There's a new artists-coop gallery nearby that might just be worth being part of in the future.

I think 15 is enough for now.

-mg

Less "connections." Better understanding.

Last week, when Whitney Tilson sent a link to this article in the New York Times around I was both interested and somewhat horrified. As I read through it, I kept thinking "sounds a lot like me." Or at least it sounds like where I was a couple of months ago.

As readers of this blog have probably noticed, and my friends in the real world certainly have, I decided about a month ago to start backing off some of the online "sharing" I've allowed to take over increasingly large chunks of my time. I decided to read more. worry less about being "linked" to others, especially in cases where that "linkage" seemed to generate no real benefit to myself, just a lot of distraction.

What's interesting is that I did all these things before reading that set of articles or doing the tests associated with them. Something in my brain was telling at me -- arguably had been screaming at me -- that my life had gone in a bad direction. Reading those articles has redoubled my concern with what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. I'm now avoiding email, Facebook and all the rest on weekends. I suspect my waistline will benefit. I'm again reading more and even watching a few more Netflix movies rather than hopping around between three screens on my desktop. (I've actually got one of them more or less turned off permanently.) My twitter feed has been whittled down to those tags and authors whose information is not merely amusing, but which has actually proven to be regularly useful.

It's a bit hard to tell, but so far the experiment in disconnection is paying off. In fact, the real impact is that I'm connected more in ways that matter and less so in the ways that don't. Not having my phone with me at all times means I'm actually having useful conversations that get into complex issues. Not wasting my time constantly checking Twitter, Facebook and email feeds means I get to focus in on complex problems and solve them. My trading -- however limited -- is better than it was a couple of months ago. Not surprising since I'm not finding myself in constant "data paralysis" that makes sane decision making and risk management impossible.

Taking this step has also changed my view about what I'm looking for in work, and in life in general. For months I've been feeling like all I want to do is escape. Getting away from people (and the electronic tether) has been my primary source of joy. I've sought out those ski days on the back side of Snowbird and up at Alta, because those are the places where cellphone coverage sucks and digital data services are all but nonexistent. As I've limited my use, I've found myself less concerned with getting away. I get away by focusing on stuff that's right here. No need to find a mountaintop somewhere where nobody can find me.

I know for certain (as if there were ever much doubt) that I need work that allows focus, not to mention some time for myself to deal with problems without lots of interruption, but as I've been limiting meaningless interruption and "connection" I've paradoxically felt less and less like I need to be fully isolated. I just need to be able to isolate myself and to force myself to avoid unnecessary and productivity-reducing disruption.

Few people are good multitaskers and while we all want to claim to be in that special 3% of "supertaskers" most of us are most certainly not. In fact, if the tests accompanying those New York Times articles are at all accurate, it would seem that I'm great at focus, great at getting things right (in the "switching" test at right, I got every single one right), but not so great at quickly switching my focus and not surprisingly I tend to get frustrated when forced to do so frequently.

Looking at this also served to explain why I find myself less and less interested in what technology is about anymore. When I got into technology, I understood that there was a combination of stress and accomplishment that went along with it. But in recent years the focus has changed to the aspects of tech that are stressors to me: newer and better ways to interrupt my concentration and focus, more shiny things to dazzle me with and take me away from the things that are important. Less really interesting and complex problems to solve.

Interesting to note that Tilson, through whom I originally heard of this article and these tests, scored similarly. Perhaps because value investors like himself tend to need to focus in on analysis and detailed understanding of the companies they invest in, and thus the very nature of his field tends to attract individuals like him and myself who have precisely that skill set and temperament.

I don't think there's anything that should be surprising in all this, and I don't think the technologies will or should go away. As noted, I started realizing something was wrong long before I saw these articles. Clearly though, all of us need to be careful about how we use these technologies and how much we organize our lives around them. As with most tools, misuse tends to result in problems and we should avoid that, regardless of what the various individuals with vested interests continue to tell us. Sometimes, "connection" matters a lot less than real understanding and engagement.

mg

Bandwidth use pricing? It's high time.

So today AT&T (NYSE: T) has finally told us what was probably inevitable. The offering of unlimited bandwidth to everybody was not working out well and it's going to be phased out.

As an existing iPhone user, I was a bit put off. True, I'd be able to keep my unlimited bandwidth for $30 for as long as I own this phone, but I know that in time I'll want to replace it and then things will change. By the time that happens, Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL) may offer me an alternative network, hopefully Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless , but I'm not counting on it.

But I did a little checking. Looking at the meter on my phone, I note that I've done about 1.3GB of downloads in the life of the phone, and barely 300MB of uploads the phone was replaced about 9 months ago. Checking my bills online, I saw that there has not been a single month in which I exceeded 200MB of use. This means that I'd be able to continue using no more than I already am and cut my cost from the current $30 unlimited use to the new "basic" level at $15 for 200MB. If I prefer not to "cut it close" and maybe allow me to see some streaming video now and then, I could still drop to the 2GB plan at $25 per month. That would allow me to increase my use tenfold and still not get hit with additional fees.

Now at the end of the day, I'm sitting here thinking "Thank you AT&T, you're going to save me money."

I don't think this ends here though. AT&T has just put out a template for what pricing is likely to look like in the future for all bandwidth providers, whether wired or wireless. The basic plan will be very reasonably priced and most likely will suit the needs of 65% of the population, more or less one standard deviation off the mean. The "heavy user" plan will extend available bandwidth to cover the needs of all but the top 2-3% of the population, or more or less all but those who are two standard deviations above the mean. I expect that over time as bandwidth availability increases along with use, we will see the bandwidth providers move the caps upwards while keeping the general scheme in place.

The top 2-3% will lose their subsidy and will be forced to pay progressively more for the bandwidth they consume. The rest of us will be allowed to stop subsidizing them. Bad for those who can't survive without endless streaming video on their phones, good for the rest of us who have been providing the subsidy.

This is how it should be. As I've noted before, I hate having to subsidize others through my subscriptions. I don't like it when it's the cable company forcing me to pay big fees for packages including ESPN and local TV channels that I don't watch or want, and I don't like it when it's the wireless company making me pay $30 a month when I'm using only a fraction of the bandwidth of some others paying the same price.

And there may be the added benefit of forcing some of LA's worst drivers into finally getting off their Blackberries and iPhones and paying attention to the road.

mg

Taleb should stay off TV (and we're all worse for it)

Taleb was on TV briefly yesterday. I actually turned up the volume on CNBC to hear what he had to say. I should not have bothered.

Not because Taleb doesn't have a lot to say, he most certainly does. Not even because his involvement with one Universa Investments, who may or may not have had something to do with last Thursday's momentary crash, prevents him from commenting on some things that might be interesting.

Taleb shouldn't go on TV because there's just no point. Taleb's ideas are as complex as the financial mess the world finds itself in right now. Inviting him in to discuss one point in time, or to try to draw simple cause-effect conclusions just doesn't make much use of him or provide any illumination for the viewers. It's most likely why he's spent a good chunk of time recently avoiding TV appearances altogether, he knows that the vast bulk of media consumers just don't want to hear that the problem is far more complex than any one individual can possibly understand or solve.

Taleb and others like him are where the solutions -- or at least the pieces of the solution -- lie. Whether it's the world of finance, healthcare, immigration or just about anything else that plagues us right now, the situation is complex and the solutions will be too. That just doesn't come across well in a media world that has conditioned us to believe that meaningful content can be shared in 140 characters or that every question has an answer in a 20-30 second sound bite.

Unfortunately, Television and most of our media falls for what Taleb calls "The Ludic Fallacy," which is the notion that everything has an anecdotal and easy to follow explanation. The TV medium as it has been constituted today is simply unsuited for doing much beyond "telling a story." When the story fails to follow a clear "plotline" with obvious cause-and-effect relationships, it fails and is forced to grasp for something else, as the interviewers on CNBC did.

When I present this problem to some people, the response is that the people with the good ideas will need to adjust. They'll need to figure out how to explain complex and multidimensional problems by splitting them into little 20 second bits. I take the opposite view. Our problems are going to continue to escalate until we are willing to recognize that there are no easy solutions and that sound bites won't save us. I suspect further crises will need to happen before we get to that point.

It's too bad, but until we are willing to dispense with the notion that there are always simple solutions, Taleb should stay off TV. Those of us who want good analysis of the realities of the world have to look elsewhere, which is too bad.

mg

Some more on Foursquare

[Note that a previous entry on this topic has been deleted, as some of my criticisms have been resolved and some others turn out to be inaccurate, though it took a lot of searching to find the resolutions.]

I've played with Foursquare a bit since my last comment, and have decided that for now I'm done with it. Will not be cancelling my account, but just don't see much utility in continuing to play at this point.

There are lots of reasons for this including the wrong venue locations, horrible customer service, inability to get locations corrected, etc. But the core reason is that none of my friends are on it, none of them are especially interested in it, and none of the places I regularly hang out care about it at all.

To some degree it's generational, but also location and outlook, I suspect. Nothing could have crystallized the problem for me more than the fact that I "won" the "Far Far Away" badge after checking in a few places this past weekend. Foursquare, of course, doesn't actually tell you what you have to do to win the various badges, but there are some online listings that private individuals have come up with. Most of them suggested that the badge is won for checking in outside city limits. That didn't work. What did? Three checkins above 59th St. in Manhattan. Yup, those of us who don't live downtown or in Brooklyn are "far, far, away" according to the people who run Foursquare. Thanks assholes. You've confirmed your status as a bunch of useless faux-hipsters who think you're too good for the rest of the world. Did one of you send this text message too?

My personal feelings about this aside, it's just tough for me to use this in a way that is useful and beneficial to me. I'm not getting any benefits from my regular venues because they seem to exist primarily at other types of venues: coffee houses and cheap restaurants or bars, especially the impersonal chains that don't get to know their customers and/or have rules against rewarding them appropriately except as part of an organized campaign vetted by lawyers and marketing types. The places I hang out at most aren't especially looking for lots of checkins, they'd be a lot happier with a smaller number of high-dollar checkins, but Foursquare doesn't measure that. I am getting lots of frustration from not being able to check in at the places that I go to often because of mapping problems. A few weeks ago, up at Snowbird, I didn't even try. Why bother when you know the locations are all off the map, aren't getting corrected even when you report them, and the checkins won't work? And of course, my friends aren't on it.

So for now, my account's still there and I'll be watching how they're doing because the whole notion of location-based apps interests me, but for now the utility is nonexistent. I suspect that the technology will either be bought or reproduced by somebody like Facebook or Twitter. It would make a lot more sense if it were fully integrated into just about any other social networking platform.

mg

[The Foursquare logo is property of Foursquare,
used under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.]

 

Quick Friday Notes

The weekend couldn't have come soon enough.

• It's good to hear of at least one friend whose job has been "created or saved" this year. In her case, "saved," though her employer is a non-American company it will undoubtedly be counted as a victory for the "stimulus." Congrats Kara!
• Apropos my earlier post, Barry Ritholtz is demanding a well-deserved apology for those who smeared him, David Einhorn and others over their well-researched questioning of Lehman and its execs prior to the meltdown.
• Barry also notes the endgame of the chicanery and fraud that has been tolerated for far too long:

  All in all, the entire system failed. The situation is utterly disgusting, and if the investing public pulls its money out of the completely corrupt public markets for a generation or more, it would not surprise me . . .

  That's not a happy prognosis if you believe the markets serve an important function in providing funding to businesses that need it. But perhaps it's indicative of how far we've come from that basic thesis, that in fact the markets no longer are serving the "main street" interest of financing businesses all that well. Instead they've discovered it's more profitable to run a casino where the little guy is always betting against the house and they make money either way while providing no social utility to anybody. And maybe the public would be right to just go elsewhere until they actually do something anybody outside "the club" finds useful.
• And all this should serve to remind us that nothing's new. It appears now that Lehman may very well have been technically insolvent years before their problems became known, just like Enron. And their unwillingness to control risk is long-standing, extending back to this incident in 1998 and probably earlier. As Jim Grant noted at the time, on Wall Street there's no constituency for the truth.
• Lenny Dykstra's ego and penchant for coming back long after he overstayed his welcome is perhaps second only to Casey Serin's. His latest? He's hoping to sell you a subscription to a scammy newsletter far more expensive than the one he used to sell through TheStreet.com, but he's doing it without their help as even Jim Cramer's often-maligned web empire won't touch the guy. This, all while trying to get out of bankruptcy. Of course, this time you get an autographed baseball if you sign up, which may be the only tangible benefit to the whole thing.

And now it's time to head over to "The Palm Tree" where we will celebrate a job saved!

mg

Why Sirius-XM Fails

I purchased a new vehicle recently. Like most vehicle manufacturers, Honda (NYSE: HMC) has a deal with one of the two satellite radio services, in this case XM. For those of you who haven't been living under a rock, former competitors Sirius (NasdaqGS:SIRI) and XM were allowed to merge a year or so ago, and while they still support the two incompatible services, they are, or at least should be, operated as one company.

When it comes to content, lots of merging has already taken place. Some content (especially sports) is available only on one or the other and some (like Howard Stern) is only part of the basic package on one of the services, but not both. Some of the channel lineups aree different as well. These oddball differences are mostly the result of pre-existing contracts and in all likelyhood will be resoved when the contracts are renewed or renegotiated in the coming years.

But operationally the merger is a disaster. I know, because I've just recently had to deal with the customer service operations at both services, because my previous provider was Sirius and I needed to switch to accommodate the new vehicle.

You would think that with both companies under the same roof, you'd be able to easily switch from one the the other. But you'd be thinking wrong. There is no way to switch to the "other" service offered by the same company and no way to have an account that covers receivers on both, which means that to have two receivers with the "multi radio discount" I had to replace a perfectly adequate home receiver that has been connected to my stereo system for a couple of years. To me, the changeover has involved nothing but waste and annoyance.

Roll Over, Get Tough, or Sell Me What I Want?

Like many Time Warner Cable subscribers, I spent the weeks ahead of the New Year hearing that I had two choices in my cable rates. I could either back Time Warner in "getting tough" with the local Fox affiliates, or I could "roll over" and submit to the higher fees for programming that Fox was demanding.

This is another place where the truth is in the "grey area" between the two warring parties. The truth is that the real value for the Fox programming would become evident if I were actually allowed to vote on what programming I want to receive and pay for. I can state with 100% confidence that my expense for Fox local affiliates in that scenario would be absolutely zero, because I would not pay a penny for the schlock that is offered on most local broadcast TV, or most cable TV networks for that matter. [Nothing personal to my friends at Fox, except that this time they were the ones involved. I'm equally indifferent to the other three broadcast networks and their useless programming.]

The resolution, predictably, was a "fair" deal, the details of which they won't disclose, which will inevitably mean my rates go up. In the end, despite the hoopla, the only real issue on the table was which of these corporate behemoths gets which share. We won't get better programming, we won't get better service and we won't get the choice of telling them "take those awful networks and shove them."

But that's the one thing that both of these business organizations are unwilling to even consider, despite the fact that it's what most of the customers would like.

Today's Financial TV Stupid Moment

I usually watch financial TV with the sound off. The ticker is mildly informative and I can always unmute if some headline pops up. But the volume comes on often enough that I sometimes hear some really dumb stuff. CNBC tends to be the biggest culprit, because Bloomberg tends to avoid the "personality based" style that leads to idiots being on the air, and Fox Business is becoming less and less focused on the markets and business with every passing day. [Killing off the bulk of their pre-market coverage in favor of Imus was the end of their pretending to be serious about the markets, as far as I'm concerned. That's the most important part of the day people!]

Anyway, earlier today on CNBC:

Resident geniuses Larry (Republican idealogue) Kudlow and Trish (Pot reporter) Regan had a couple of lawyers on to discuss a case currently on the Supreme Court docket that addresses mutual fund fees, or more specifically the proper disclosure of such fees and the mutual fund companies' responsiblity to negotiate the best possible fees with outside advisers who manage their funds.

In this particular case, the allegation is that the management company failed to do its proper fiduciary duty by allowing the adviser to charge the fund's shareholders roughly double the fees that they charged anybody else for similar work.

It's a complex issue, and it would have been nice to see it explored.

But nobody even bothered to explain what the issue was, let alone provide any useful analysis! I had to look it up and found the details here. Trish and Larry focused on the rather specious "well, if shareholders don't like it wouldn't they just sell?" argument, which is at best tangential to the case. One of the lawyers used his platform to scream about fees being too high and the government needing to regulate them, which may or may not be true but is also pretty tangenial to this case. The other guy spoke about the fact that the case was before the Supremes because of a disagreement between other judges leaving the issue unresolved, blah, blah, blah...

Watching the segment, and especially listening to Regan's faulty discussion and Larry's biovating, one could have mistakenly presumed that the case was about government regulating fees, which it's not. I'm reminded that in years gone by I had a rule about changing channels whenever Larry came on, and I should probably reinstate it, except that I think he's probably good material for the blog.

mg