Darrell Silver!

Rick Warren & Me

I guess I’m on the fence about what to think of the symbolic role Obama has given “Pastor Rick” in his inauguration ceremony.  Rick Warren doesn’t differentiate between gay marriage, polygamy, incest and pedophilia when it comes to marriage.  But he’s vaguely amenable to equal rights for everyone, presumably as long as we use different language.  From a recent interview with Warren:

The issue to me, I’m not opposed to [partnership benefits or hospital visitation rights] as much as I’m opposed to redefinition of a 5,000 year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?

Oh , I do. For 5,000 years, marriage has been defined by every single culture and every single religion – this is not a Christian issue. Buddhist, Muslims, Jews – historically, marriage is a man and a woman.

Some form of his argument seems to me the most pragmatic solution to current gay rights infringements.  Instead of focusing on the legal definition of the word “marriage”, we should use whatever vocabulary necessary to make sure that we do not discriminate.  Wouldn’t this accomplish the equality we’re really looking for?

But I hesitate to give up on “marriage” in favor of different language for exactly the reasons Rick Warren lays out.  That marriage has had a consistent definition across many religions does not seem to me a reason it should receive special treatment in our laws.  The religious history and underpinnings of marriage are exactly the reason why our government shouldn’t be involved in defining its scope and meaning.  For government, gay rights needs to be seen as a subset of civil rights.  If it is defined as a subset of religious rights, both will suffer.  Government should have no role in defining my religion, nor should it restrain me based on my identity.

Pushing Past Performance for Retail Investors

A growing number of personal investment startups threaten to cost people real money.  This is despite what I assume are the good intentions of the founders, who are trying to take on the massive and opaque mutual fund industry.  Covestor, Cake Financial, and most recently kaChing offer many features, chief among them a ranking of their members’ investments, calculated one way or another from their past performance.  We are then offered the opportunity to invest in the same trades as the star performers (and the poor performers as well, I guess).  KaChing even advertises that they will soon allow you to setup your actual investment account to automatically trade on the decisions of other members.

Investing money in stocks because they are recommended by a highly ranked member of one of these sites is a costly mistake.  Not to belittle the achievement of someone making money when most of us are down 40% this year, but in any random selection of stock picks, about half will outperform the market on average, and a much smaller percentage will do so by an impressive margin.  This distribution is what makes the market average the market average.  But the past exceptional performance of these lucky winners will tell you nothing about what will happen next.  Even worse, using this performance to inform your investment decisions will inevitably lead to losses from overconfidence.

What’s interesting is that there are so many opportunities to inform and help retail investors.  Fifteen years after retail trading commissions came down from $100/trade to about $10, the finance world is still dominated by information not available to those of us who can’t spend $1,500 a month for a Bloomberg terminal.

For education and analysis, these sites are onto something of real value, but it is more than undermined by this nonsense about picking winners among random portfolios.  The challenge for these startups is to lower the barriers to seeing and understanding information for retail investors, without misleading us into falsely simple outcomes.  What we need are tools that allow us to better allocate our investments based on our needs, not tricks telling us we can outsmart some average.

"GTD"

When I returned from San Francisco in September to focus on Jelly Desk, I was amazed at how tiny changes in my habits resulted in hours more productivity each day.  An article in the WSJ this morning writes it up too:

Mr. Mann has moved away from being a purveyor of tips, and has become an advocate for a more comprehensive approach to productivity. He argues that inefficiencies are the result of bad habits, not because of something so superficial as the layout for computers monitors.

Article here.

Nick Paumgarten is Awesome!

I am searching for a way to express my fanboy-ness for New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten.  From The Pits, discussing NY’s building boom:

Keep an eye on the construction pits that developers dug to make way for the foundations of new buildings. The town is pocked with them.

…

What will become of the pits? Can we turn them into half-wild swimming holes, like the granite quarries of New England? Ring them with barbed wire and convert them into debtors’ prisons or internment camps for the culprits who structured synthetic C.D.O.s? They’d make excellent ha-has, for livery horses or livestock. Corn mazes. Extreme-cockfighting arenas. Or perhaps they could serve, over time, as urban tar pits, entrapping and preserving in garbage and white brick dust the occasional unlucky passerby for the scientific edification of future generations, if there turn out to be any. Or they could become parking lots.

He is also the author of another of my favorite articles, Up and Then Down.

Bailout Fuzzyness

I was sure Mark Zandi was the most honest one in today’s “Big Three” bailout hearings, until I come across this little tidbit from his written testimony via Paul Kedrosky.  Every assembly line job lost means almost another one lost in auto repair?  Don’t people still have to drive their existing cars, especially if we’re not buying new ones?  And the biggest category in a breakdown like this shouldn’t be “other”.