Happy Easter to everyone!

This post also marks the death of this blog, and the resurrection of it here.

Fumbled Mumblings has an interesting post on mutual funds. I know little about them, and have tried to focus investment on areas of which I have some relative understanding. (For example, I have avoided investing in real estate because I don’t understand the market forces affecting real estate prices, rental income, and so on. I will consider it as an investment in standard of living, and on that I have some idea of what would be a better “investment” for myself.) I’m in a relatively unique position of being able to invest in something I understand better than probably anyone else in the entire world, and so having a relatively good idea of whether it’s a good investment or not. Most people aren’t in that sort of position, but most people do have expertise in some area or another, that would probably allow them to better understand or read an industry and spot potential. When I was about 11 years old, I remember making a list of companies I would invest in if I had capital - because I was a relative expert in computers and so on. If a venture capitalist had invested in Anthony Holdings Corp. back then, he would have made a very good investment. The other thing to keep in mind is the concept of company “fundamentals” (associated with what I have called “real wealth”). If you think of markets as Mel Gibson-not-on-medication, you will avoid rapid oscillations of feeling good or bad about the fundamental processes occurring behind the scenes - if you in fact understand how those companies work, where their growth is going to come from, and so on.

This post over on Double Blind and the ensuing comments got me thinking about who my favourite directors are. Here are 5 I like, off the top of my head. (I should mention that there are many films by these directors that I don’t like …)

1. Ridley Scott. From Blade Runner to Gladiator, Scott’s visual style is stunning, and his themes often resonate with me. An English director. He is currently working on Robin Hood.

2. Peter Weir. Weir’s Master and Commander is his crowning achievement in my view. However, he has depth and versatility, including Mosquito Coast and Dead Poet’s Society. An Australian director. Currently making The Way Back.

3. Moving outside the Commonwealth to Germany, Wolfgang Petersen. Although I’m not familiar with most of his German language movies, Petersen’s Das Boot and Troy earn him a place on this list.

4. Mel Gibson. Although engaging in embarrassing public behaviour from time to time due to his manic-depressive cycles, Gibson’s manically inspired work Braveheart is truly amazing. Apocalypto was also an engaging, unique movie in the current Hollywood landscape.

5. M. Night Shyamalan. I like the issues he explores more than anything, with movies Signs and The Village being my favourites. Shyamalan typically slows everything down, instead of simply trying to throw explosion-chase-whatever after whatever at the viewer.

Honourable mentions: Peter Jackson for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Zack Snyder for 300 - both amazing technical achievements, even if I didn’t like some of the content.

(4 of the 7 aren’t Americans, which is interesting since the U.S. has 300M people, while the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Germany combined have only 170M people.)

Daniel Larison here discusses resisting the “Facebook menace”. (For another view see here.)

I have people ask me “Are you on Facebook?” My answer is no, but I’ve now come to regard the question as something like “Do you have e-mail?” - i.e., a request for contact information. I now respond by giving them my e-mail address. If I really want to contact this person or do something with them, I can by exchanging e-mail … but the repeated questions about whether I’m on Facebook have left me seriously pondering this question:

What are the costs of not being on Facebook?

People who don’t like Facebook are quick to point out the costs of being on Facebook. To answer the posed question, however, it doesn’t really matter that I have an instinctual dislike for it, or that it reminds me of high-school, or that I have legitimate privacy concerns about it. These things simply make it more difficult for me to honestly appraise the costs of not being on Facebook, because they bias me against it.

That is, I think I can conceptualize the costs of using Facebook fairly easily because they jump up at me when I look at a Facebook page, but it seems more difficult to conceptualize the potentialities I am missing by not being on it.

Presumably, there are several gains to being on Facebook. One is getting in contact with people you used to know. My response, though, is if you used to know them, why did you stop contacting them? Presumably because your interests or commonalities diminished, in which case why do you think that you would want a relationship with them now? It seems like nostalgia and novelty more than anything else …

The second big gain presumably is cultivating a social network through sharing experiences, online conversation, and coordinating actions. I suppose if everyone I knew were coordinating their lives through Facebook, it would be difficult not to be there. Many people I know do coordinate through e-mail, for example, and it’s a convenient way to do lots of things. This is the big unknown - what undiscovered world is waiting for our Facebook holdouts? To find that out, however, you can’t talk to people who aren’t or haven’t been on Facebook.

In Tim Ferriss’s book The Four Hour Workweek he talks about a ‘low information diet’ (p.86):

“Go on an immediate one-week media fast.

The world doesn’t even hiccup, much less end, when you cut the information umbilical cord. To realize this, it’s best to use the Band-Aid approach and do it quickly: a one-week media fast. Information is too much like ice cream to do otherwise. “Oh, I’ll just have a half a spoonful” is about as realistic as “I just want to jump online for a minute.” Go cold turkey.

If you want to go back to the 15,000-calorie potato chip information diet afterward, fine, but beginning tomorrow and for at least five full days, here are the rules:

No newspapers, magazines, audiobooks, or nonmusic radio. Music is permitted at all times.

No news websites whatsoever (cnn.com, drudgereport.com, msn.com, etc.).

No television at all, except for one hour of pleasure viewing each evening.

No reading books, except for this book and one hour of fiction pleasure reading prior to bed.

No Web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day. Necessary means necessary, not nice to have.”

My New Year’s resolution is to do this, not for one week, but for one year. Then I’ll see how things are going and decide whether it makes sense to continue.

If you start thinking of your time as having inherent value (and translating that into dollar terms, say $50 per hour, or $30 per hour, or whatever, based on the amount of money you could make if working during that time), then suddenly information consumption becomes very expensive, even if “free” on the internet.

(Consider a movie. It might be $10 for a ticket, but if it takes 2 hours of your time the implicit cost is $50 x 2 + $10 = $110 dollars. Suddenly, walking out of a movie that isn’t adding significant value to your life starts to make a lot more sense, as the further costs of staying are much, more more than the explicit cost of the ticket - and you can usually get a refund on the ticket if you leave, although it actually doesn’t matter much. If the emotional cost of requesting a refund is greater than $10 to you, forget about the ticket.)

For me, the 1 year media fast will have a few tweaks.

• I can read newspapers, magazines, and so on, if the information contained is pertinent to action I will be taking immediately (i.e., that day), since there will be areas where they will have relevant information (for example, a trip magazine for booking a tour company).
• Since I’ve already read 4HWW, I can read one other non-fiction book at any given time.
• I don’t watch television, so I’ll reduce that to 0 hours per day.
• Finally, to keep up on events in the world, I’ll allow a handful of blogs I read regularly, and any articles linked to by them.

Oh, and I started this on January 1st, so it lasts until December 31st, 2009.

Tim Ferriss’ book The Four Hour Work Week (here and blog accessible through here) distinguishes between “Deferrers” and the “New Rich”. He then lists key beliefs that differ between the two. Here is one:

“[Deferrer]: To retire early or young.
[New Rich]: To distribute recovery periods and adventures (mini-retirements) throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is.”

This got me thinking about how the “Deferrer” belief described here is a secular version of a Christian Heaven. You have an earthly life (a job), then you ascend to Heaven (retirement), which lasts for the rest of the time and is what you are striving for here on earth (because this “Heaven” will be highly enjoyable).

The question is how accurate this notion of a paradisiacal, secular “afterlife” is, or will be. The problem with retirement is that you don’t actually know if you’ll enjoy it. Imagine you like sailing on the weekends. You imagine how great it would be to retire after 20 years (that’s retiring young!) of work and go sailing. You have sailed for longer periods before (1 week, 2 weeks, even a month). It is possible, however, that you enjoy sailing because it is part of a cyclical process (work -> relax). Once you retire, it’s all relaxing (relax -> relax), and after a short period of time - if you don’t have other interests and passions that you have cultivated - you might find that you are bored. In fact, many people who are enticed to work 20-40 years and then retire find that they are bored or unhappy, and some simply return to work, or revert to a “semi-retired” status.

The idea with the “New Rich” in 4HWW as relates to the belief described above is to take time now to develop personal interests or passions, alternating between doing them and work time. For example, 2 months working -> 1 month pursuing interests, x 4 times a year. How do you do that if you have a job or own a company? That’s described in the book.

Merry Christmas to everyone. May you enjoy a relaxing, refreshing Yuletide.

“It is the chain of ownership that provides the incentive for well maintained property.”

“[Intellectuals are] ingenious fools too clever to be wise, though brilliant at inventing the most ingenious reasons for their fatuous beliefs. But, tiresome as intellectuals can be, even they are probably much less menacing and pernicious to the world than anti-intellectuals.” - F.L. Lucas

I agree with the first point, and am thinking about the second point …

Our society seems fixated on the right to speech, but there is little emphasis in daily rhetoric put on the right to quiet - that is, not having other people bombard you with noxious sound and images.

Which leads me to Personal Entertainment Devices (PEDs) and flying. Although PEDs open up a lot of possibilities for making airplane travel more interesting, and making the time go more quickly, they also open up another possibility.

On a recent flight with Air Canada, they had PEDs installed on the back of everyone’s seat. It is easy to see the PEDs of someone next to you, or in front of you if you’re in an aisle seat. Because they are personalized, the restrictions on what is being displayed (for example, movie content) have been relaxed. Some movies now contain relatively graphic violence, for example.

So what happens if someone is watching a movie and you don’t want to see what they’re seeing? Inevitably, you are going to catch glimpses of it - and can certainly see it out of the corner of your eye. What if your child is on the flight, and someone has a movie going that you don’t want your child seeing?

This point applies more broadly, to people playing movies on their laptops and so on in public spaces. What is the proper sort of etiquette for public spaces when it comes to these sorts of devices?