My sister is taking a summer course at Princeton University here in New Jersey, so after AC I met her at Princeton Station for a ride back to my folks' place.  Since she was on campus anyway, we figured we'd kill a little time and let the rush hour traffic ease up by taking a walking tour of the campus.

This consisted mostly of wandering aimlessly going, "OK, I thought the building I was looking for was over here somewhere, but they all look alike."  Princeton has a fairly uniform architectural style on campus: it looks like Old Money.

Every university has its little stories and traditions that get passed around orally but that you don't really know unless you have a connection to the place.  At my university, for example, there is a big stone in the lawn in front of the university's main hall that has been, for over a century, the unofficial place for couples to meet ... and if you kiss a girl while sitting on that stone, the tradition is that you will marry.  I don't know if this tends to encourage or dissuade people, honestly.

Princeton has squirrels.  OK, specifically, the campus and a small area of its environs are home to a sub-species of black squirrel that isn't found anywhere else ... so while the university's official animal mascot is a tiger, unofficially you can't call yourself a real Princetonian unless you have spotted one of these rare black squirrels wandering about.

One of the other students in my sister's class has been at Princeton for three years and has never spotted one.  This gives her, apparently, about six more weeks to make this happen, or her entire Princeton education will have been for naught.  It was her relating this story to my sister that informed her about the tradition of the black squirrel.

My sister didn't have the heart to mention that she had spotted one while pulling into the parking lot at her college on the very first day.  At least she didn't run it over before learning of its significance.

Anyway, my sister was telling me this story as we walked across a lovely lawn next to Princeton University Chapel, about to walk through an impressive stone gate named for someone called "Rothschild" (obviously he didn't have any money); and just as she finished and we were about to segue to another topic of conversation, there he was, calmly scampering across the lawn in search of foodstuffs: a black squirrel.  The timing could not have been any better.  I tried to get a photo with my cell phone camera, to record this historic moment ... but all he looks like is a little black smudge on the grass.

My sister is obviously blessed.  And I have just obtained most of the benefits of a Princeton education while saving myself $160,000.

Dei sub numine vigo, baby.

I'm visiting my folks after Anthrocon, as has become my established pattern.  Before anyone asks, yes, I did "clean up" my computer's wallpaper and turn my picture-displaying screensaver off.  :)

My folks are pretty up there in years, so their need for food is a bit lighter than mine.  As a result, I tend to eat regular meals with them, but then also have a fair number of between-meal and midnight snacks.

Around midnight the grazing urge was hitting, so I went to the cupboard, and there I found an unopened box of rosemary-and-olive-oil flavoured Triscuit crackers.  Man, these things are sooooooooooooo good.

I just ate the last one.  The whole box.

Good Lord.  Remind me never ever to purchase these things for myself!

I don't generally do "con reports", both because I can't imagine that what I did at a con was all that interesting to anyone other than me, and because by the end of the con I've forgot 95% of the things that made me think at the time, "That would make a funny LJ post."

Or as I put it to someone who asked how my con was: "I hung out with friends, I danced, I bought porn (and some non-porn) and books and T-shirts, I suited, I was sometimes bored, I ate, and I mostly had fun."  That's as good a con report as any.

That said ...

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I do like to dance ... in suit or out of suit (but not in my birthday suit), it's all good.  Good melodic techno is a drug, and there is just something about bopping around on a dance floor full of cute suits that makes me smile.  Give me a song I like and a cute suit or two to ogle, and there's no amount of tired that will pull me away, even if I've been reduced to little more than vaguely two-stepping.

Anthrocon puts on a heck of a light show.  Heck, as I was leaving the dance Friday night and was walking through the smoking zone in front of the Westin, a couple of young ladies pulled me aside and asked if there were going to be another dance on Saturday, which led to a hearty happy woot on their part as I nodnodded vigorously (if you want to ask a question of a congoer, ask a fursuiter!  You know he's with the con and you don't have to make eye contact if you're shy!).  Never mind that it's a furry convention ... AC is also possibly the best party going on in Pittsburgh that weekend, furry or otherwise.  And bully for AC: it boosts their attendance numbers and gets them extra revenue in exchange for doing practically nothing they wouldn't have been doing already.

Last year or the year before, to make the lasers more effective, they pulled out the smoke machine and started turning the lights way way down.  This year, to enhance the effect further, they turned the ambient lighting in the room pretty much down to zero.  With the exception of the strobes and a few coloured lights, most of that room was black ... and full of smoke.

This may make some folks happy ... but let me tell you, for me after a while it doesn't.  I want to see my friends!  Does that vaguely visible silhouette over there in the smoke have two bumps on top of it?  Ah, that's probably a fursuit!  Is it someone I know?  Is it cute beyond belief?  Who knows?  And let me tell you, once I have a head on I might as well just close my eyes, because unless I'm looking up and ooooooooooooooooooohing at the lasers, I ain't gonna be able to see squat.  Is someone dancing with me?  I don't know ... is that blackness in front of me changing position?  Ah, it must be a person.

The light show is fantastic.  The speaker system can make your ears ring even through a fursuit head and a pair of earplugs without turning into mud.  I give AC total kudos for that.

But I wanna dance with the cute doggie!  Don't push us off into the ghetto of the "fursuit friendly dance"!  On the first day, God created light.  Give us a little of that back?  Just a little?

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

AC is a family-friendly, respectable convention.  Well, OK, pretty much all furcons now want to be that way, if nothing else for the sake of not pissing off the hotel and/or providing ammunition to media trolls .. which means Post-Its over the naughties and no clipping a leash onto that fursuiter who looks so good in his "pulling harness".  The folks from Bad Dragon had a table in the dealers room covered with lots of closed-lidded boxes, which naturally contained nothing the least bit out of the ordinary.  The Anthrocon dealers room has nothing untoward in it whatsoever unless you're willing to go out of your way to look.

Supposedly.

So I was really quite surprised at the dealer in the back of the hall who had a whole table full of pretty, colourful little glass pipes that, although you could theoretically smoke anything in them, are pretty much an open advertisement for the wacky tobacky.  They weren't in boxes or anything ... and come on, everyone knows what they represent.  You don't see people using them in the smoking sections of restaurants.

On Sunday, when I went through the dealers room in suit, he was still there, so either the dealers room staff were cool with openly selling such things, or they just hadn't noticed.  I couldn't resist such nice props, though: I pointed at them like the Evil Monkey from Family Guy, then did a giggle-giggle gesture and ran away.  The fellow behind the table laughed.

Then again, I never saw anyone standing in front of his table.  Maybe he should have put Post-Its on them.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Sunday, while I was in the overhead corridor heading to the dealers room to run around it in suit (because the best time to do this is when you've already spent all your money), I came across the perfect little prop abandoned on one of the soft benches up there: an empty personal-sized pizza box.  Never one to look a gift prop in the mouth, I laid down on the bench next to it and started petting it lovely, holding it, pretending to eat it, cocking an ear when I tilted it and heard some abandoned crust sliding back and forth, and whatever else came to mind that seemed to amuse the people walking by.  Besides, since there was nobody sitting on the bench, or even anywhere near the bench, it was obviously litter ... I could make use of it as a prop while walking to the dealers room, then throw it away when I got to a trash can.  Two birds, one stone.

I'd walked about maybe fifty steps away from the bench when I got the idea to slip a claw into the little "open here" hole in the front of the box and snuffle around inside it, with perhaps a pitious little whimper at finding so little sustenance therein.  It took a few tries, but I finally got a claw in and got enough leverage actually to raise the lid without dropping the box on the floor in the process.

There was a whole pizza in it, entirely virgin and unconsumed.  Oh sh*t, I just walked off with someone's lunch.  I'd better ... go ... put that back now.

To whomever accidentally left their pizza in the upstairs corridor ... or to whomever later found it and declared finders-keepers ... ummmmmmmmmmmmm ... sorry about any blue fuzz!  *blushes*

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

And last but not least ... on the 4th of July I went up to the rooftop deck of the convention centre to watch the fireworks.  Shortly before the show, I ran back to the room to get into suit, because watching fireworks in fursuit just absolutely seemed like The Thing To Do (hey, I'd never done it before!).  He'd already been out at that point for about six hours, including four hours of dancing; but he was getting regular sprayings and airings out, so I thought he still smelled perfectly decent.  Then again, we don't smell ourselves as much as we smell other people, so I was sure I was biased.

Someone in the darkness up there on the rooftop deck came up to me, gave me a hug, then exclaimed, "Wow, you smell so clean!  I can't read your name, so I'm going to call you Dial."  I was all happy and waggled my hips side to side while I pantomimed taking a shower.

How very sweet of her!  Then again, I hope that doesn't mean that she'd hugged some stinkers ...

(Dial, BTW, for those not from the U.S., was America's first brand of deodorant soap).

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

One housekeeping note: for those who wanted to follow me on Twitter (yes, I've actually tweeted once now!), their search database went down a few weeks ago, so new accounts like mine aren't being added to it.  If you do a search for "KayshoHusky" (either the user or tweets), you will get no results until they fix this.  Follow this link instead: <http://twitter.com/KayshoHusky>.

Amusingly, if you do a search on my real name (Richard Wolf), the second hit is a furry from Bogotá, Colombia named Richard Wolf VI.  Small world!

Back at my first furry con, I noticed that an inordinate number of people were greeting me with a question that I couldn't answer.  Within a few hours of arriving at the convention, I'd been introduced to quite a few people ... and a fair number of them had asked right off the bat: "Who are you on FurryMuck?"

I wasn't anybody on FurryMuck, because I wasn't there.  But the gig was obviously up: if I didn't want to be left out of something that a large number of my new friends obviously considered to be of significance in their social interactions, so significant that it was the first thing they asked me, I'd better get my tail onto FurryMuck.

At Anthrocon 2009, within a few hours of arriving at the convention, half a dozen people said that they were happy to see me, and the next thing they asked was: "By the way, are you on Twitter?".  On top of that, apparently in the Twitterverse itself there was a conversation about whether or not the Kaysho on Twitter was actually me.

The gig is up.  I'm now KayshoHusky on Twitter.  The "Kaysho" on Twitter is someone named Kayshwar Mohan who is, presumably, not a husky, and who is not me.

I don't expect that I'll use it all too often ... but then, that's what I said about LiveJournal five years ago, isn't it?

Anyway, please do follow KayshoHusky if you'd like!

"Dear Richard Mr Wolf,

Thank you for choosing United for your upcoming travel plans.  Your itinerary is shown below.

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - O'Hare International (ORD) to Pittsburgh International (PIT)

Departs ORD 7:17am, Arrives PIT 9:53am

After you check in online, you can save even more time by checking your bags at the United bag check kiosk at O'Hare International.  This service is available exclusively to united.com customers blah blah blah ..."

*frantically waving a paw from San Francisco!*  Helloooooooooooooooo!  I'm over heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere!

I think I'd better give them a call ...

*ring ring!*

"[name of company], this is Richard.  How may I help you?"

"Oh hey, Richard, it's Steve.  I've got a question for you."

[various work-related tech talk ensues]

Steve:  "This was perfect timing for this to happen, since I'm leaving on vacation tomorrow, so I have to get this loaner laptop fully ready today."

Kaysho:  "Oh, where are you off to?"

Steve:  "Going to Pittsburgh for Fourth of July weekend."

*blink blink*

OK, there can't be that many reasons to go to Pittsburgh on holiday, much less this coming weekend.

Kaysho:  (deliberately maintaining an insouciant tone of voice) "Ah ... dare I ask what's taking you to Pittsburgh?"

Steve:  "Oh yeah, the American MENSA annual convention is going on.  We've got Dr. Demento as our keynote speaker, and it's just a big weekend of playing games and bar crawling and getting drunk."

Kaysho:  "Yeah, I'd figure a MENSA convention wouldn't just consist of sitting around being smart together."

Steve:  "So it should be a lot of fun."

Kaysho:  "Right, so what you'll want to do with that laptop ..."

[more tech talk, have a g'day, hang up the phone]

Kaysho:  *on the floor giggling!*

-=-=-=-=-

So I went and checked MENSA's website; and sure enough, they're at the Omni William Penn.  That convention is the reason we couldn't get the Penn as our overflow hotel this year.  And that means that, this coming weekend, downtown Pittsburgh is going to be overflowing with ETOH-soaked nerd-dom: the Furries and the Mensans.

Perhaps we should go bowling.

Steve is on my team at work.  He's the person I work with more closely than any other.  He and I are going to be three blocks apart this weekend while I'm running around dogging it up and he's ... you know ... being smart.  And come on, you just know that at least some folks from the MENSA Annual Gathering will be popping their heads into the Westin to enjoy the furry show after they've hit a few bars.

Steve has no idea I'll be up the street from him this weekend.  I must run into him sometime this weekend, no matter what subterfuge is required, just to see the look on his face.  I mean, someone at work was going to find out about my unusual little hobby eventually anyway.  For sheer comic timing and near-cosmic improbability, this is going to rock.

We live up on a hill, so sounds tend to drift up from down below ... and to sound much closer than they really are.

Something down there just made a sound that sounded exactly like one of Maxwell's barks.  It made me jump.  Our Malamute, Travis, scrambled to his feet and barreled through the doggie door out into the back yard, certain that that had been the voice of his Uncle Maxwell.

I knew it wasn't, of course, but ... yeah, I ran into the back yard too.  Just not through the doggie door.

Travis and I sat out there and watched the people go by, down at the bottom of the hill, for a little while.  Maxwell, naturally, wasn't there ... although I'm still at that stage of mourning where I'd almost expect him to come walking over to be pet, as though it had all been some big mistake.

My heart is still racing.  What the heck was that?

He was the bestest Max.  He was the maximum Max.  Jesus really did love the little Maxwells, all the little Maxwells of the world.

And if that makes no sense to you, don't worry.  It made sense to him.

They say that one of the signs that you've reached middle age is that the icons of your childhood begin to pass away.

Man, am I feeling middle-aged right now.

You know, if we Americans don't get over our prudish denial of the fact that powerful men will, more often than not, have mistresses ... we're going to have no one left to run for office.

OK, no, I have to take that back.  It's just that all our political candidates will be women.

We may not necessarily have to go to the other end of the spectrum, where it's almost a scandal if a powerful politician in France doesn't have a mistress or two (heck, French president Félix Faure died in his mistress's bed) ... but really, what do I care?

If the governor of South Carolina vanishes for a week while telling almost no one where he is going, to the point where the state legislature is forced to contemplate declaring him missing and making his lieutenant the acting governor, that I would care about.  That's dereliction of the responsibilities of his office.

If he makes a trip to Argentina at the expense of South Carolina's taxpayers, with only a thin excuse of having it be a trip in the state's interest (as is alleged from a few years ago), that I would care about.  If I lived in South Carolina, that would be my money being spent on his "personal business".

If he's having an affair, that is, as far as I'm concerned, between him and his wife.  Does it reflect on his "fitness" as a husband?  Certainly.  But does it reflect on his fitness for political office, or indeed for any other occupation?  I don't think so.

I wonder if Americans will ever swing their opinions on the subject the direction that we seem to be going on one of our other great "killer" questions in politics: when you were young, did you smoke pot?

In 1987, Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg was forced to withdraw himself from consideration after it came to light that, yes indeed, he had smoked weed a few times in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Even though he had given it up a long time earlier, it was still considered evidence of bad judgment.

In 1992, Presidential candidate Bill Clinton, when asked The Question, famously equivocated that he'd had a go at it once, but "didn't inhale."  Although widely mocked for his answer, voters forgave his infraction sufficiently that he won the election anyway.

In 2007, Presidential candidate Barack Obama, when asked The Question and the now-mandatory Clinton Follow-Up ("Did you inhale?"), replied, "Yes, I inhaled.  That was the point."  People laughed and forgot all about it ... well, perhaps except for the people who would never have voted for him in a million years regardless.  He won the election, and now people are merely chiding him politely about his occasional cigarette.

Give it ten more years, and nobody will even bother asking, because nobody will care.

Will we ever not care about mistresses?  The percentage of men who have ever had an affair and the percentage of people who have ever inhaled are, I'd wager (although I have no statistics to back it up), probably in the same ballpark.  Sure, you could argue that one thing was long ago, when one was presumably young and foolish, while the other is happening right now when one presumably knows better (although it's also tough to have an affair when you're young and foolish because you're also almost certainly at that time unmarried), yet people forgave Rush Limbaugh his long-after-youth-had-faded drug use.  But a mistress ... no, sorry, that one goes on your permanent record.

It's a good thing there's no "pee in a cup" test for sexual infidelity, or all our state houses would be deserted.

Last night I was over at a friend's house at a little poker game ... and something happened that enlightened me.

At the start of the evening, all of us were observantly playing the game.  After a while, though, some of the folks who weren't as much into the game began to mentally drift away, as people are wont to do ... and one of them pulled out his iPhone.  This led to an occasional little interruption to the pace of the game when he had to be cajoled away from the phone screen and back to his cards, often accompanied by a protest of, "Oh, is it my turn again already?"

After a few times, of course, the response was a good-natured, "Yes, it is.  Put the phone down."

After a few more times, I was beginning to think, "You're obviously sending us the message that you don't want to be here any more, because you pulled your phone out and won't put it away again.  We can deal you out if you don't want to play ... it's perfectly OK!  You really don't have to pretend to be here.  Just go be there."

The shared virtual world is invading physical space at last.

We've always had the ability to withdraw from physical space when we were someplace we didn't want to be.  The person sitting in a boring meeting drawing doodles on a notepad isn't really there.  Neither is the person sitting in the doctor's waiting room reading a magazine he would otherwise never have picked up off the newsstand, or the person staring out the train window at nothing in particular.  We all have our own virtual worlds, the Walter Mitty lands inside our own heads to which we can retreat whenever the physical world isn't particularly demanding our attention.

But these virtual worlds are private, solopsistic places.  We go there alone.

We started to build shared virtual worlds with the Internet, but these were (perhaps ironically) fixed in place in the physical world.  If you wanted to visit a shared virtual world, you had to be in front of a computer and have an Internet connection, both of which were pretty much non-portable.  Even as some struggled with the concept that shared virtual worlds now existed (for example, the parents who didn't consider that their children, while "playing on the computer" in the privacy of their rooms, were actually in a virtual public space getting themselves into trouble), we still had to go to the virtual world.  The virtual world couldn't come to us.

Now that we have smartphones with always-on Internet connections attached to our belts, it can.  We saw this first in the business world with CrackBerries, where people could withdraw from any physical meeting they found themselves in to go visit the world of E-mail, or even to start a virtual "sub-meeting" by sending E-mails to other people who were in the same physical meeting that they were.  But compared to what you can do with the iPhone and other devices of that ilk, that's nothing.  The massive shared virtual world of online friends, conversations, and games is always at your fingertips.  It's Timothy Leary's wet dream: you really can turn your phone on, tune in to the virtual world, and drop out of the physical world, any time you want to.

This is not a complaint at all.  Heck, anything that saves me, in the doctor's waiting room, from either staring at the walls or reading a six-month-old Reader's Digest, is welcome.  But it's going to be fascinating over the next few years, as smartphones become ubiquitous, watching the physical world and our standards of etiquette learn how to cope with this.  It's like the Matrix, except we're all taking both the red pill and the blue pill.  How long before we figure out how to make a workable purple pill?

Am I the only person who finds it amusing that the background music in UPS's series of television adverts that feature that guy drawing diagrams of "your supply chain" on a whiteboard is ... "Such Great Heights" by the Postal Service?  :)
Current Mood: amused

Since I'm new to the Bay Area (well, new-ish at this point), one of the things that is occasionally on my agenda is finding new medical professionals to give me a poke and a prod and a stick when I need one.  This is, fortunately, not very often, but if I were a sensible person I'd do this sooner, when I have the luxury of time, rather than later when there's a sudden acute need.

I am not sensible; therefore, I put off finding a new optometrist until I was down to my very last pair of disposable contacts.  But no matter ... there's one not too far away who is only too happy to help me.

Thus today began the Ritual of the Paperwork, the first thing that greets anyone going to see a medical professional for the first time.  Who are you?  Who was the medical professional who took care of you before this so that we can ask for your records?  Tell us about your insurance?  Whom should we notify if one of the tall potted plants in the waiting room falls on you?  And everyone's favourite: "Tell us all about every stupid little thing that's wrong with you or anyone else in your family, real or imagined, so that we can better diagnose what ails you."

Or rather, so that we can run lots of tests to cover our medical arses in case later something like this flares up and we get accused of not treating it.  Just like grandparents and grandchildren get along so wonderfully because they have a common enemy in the generation in between, this is where you and your doctor get on famously because your common enemy is the insurance company.

For the eye doctor the list of ailments is mercifully much more brief than for a GP.  Do you, or does anyone in your family, suffer from cataracts, glaucoma, detached retinae?  No?  Good good.  But then we moved on to what I'll call the "lifestyle" section ...

I find these questions kind of funny, both because their connection to the care that I'm about to receive is a bit vague (if I check "yes" that I smoke, are you going to warn me not to stick a cigarette in my eye?) and because the bipolar yes/no constraint on the response conceals more than it reveals.  Do I drink alcohol?  Why yes, I do ... most people do.  But whether or not this is of medical concern requires a lot more than a yes/no answer.  There's a huge gap between "likes a glass of wine with dinner" and "wakes up every morning with the proverbial lampshade on his head".

This is where our common enemy comes in.  My doctor I'm not worried about ... he gets straight, honest answers.  With the insurance company, you have to mind your Ps and Qs.  An insurance company makes money by paying quickly the claims of its good customers (the ones where their premia over the length of the contract are likely to exceed their claims) while doing what they can to control the cost of their bad customers.  If you insure, say, people's automobiles, nobody will make much of a fuss if you raise the premium rates (or cancel the coverage altogether) of someone who crashes his car over and over again.  The costs are occasional and not ongoing, and where a customer does cost a lot it's usually his own fault.

For the health insurer, their "bad customers" are often people with chronic conditions.  The costs of such a bad customer are ongoing and continuous, and it's very difficult to jack up the premium rates or cancel the coverage of such a customer, because it's exactly that kind of medical condition that they purchased the insurance for in the first place.  The customer is also usually quite a bit more sympathetic than the idiot who keeps crashing his car ... while you could argue that the smoker's emphysema or the HIV patient's need for a continuous lifetime supply of drugs is "his fault", the indirectness of the blame combined with the dire consequences of cutting him off from his treatments makes it very difficult to "manage" the costs of such a customer without getting hissed at.

But at least one Californian health insurer now stands accused of incentivising its claims staff by having them go through the medical records and the insurance application forms of people with chronic medical costs, and terminating their coverage if they can find any "undisclosed conditions" on their applications, even if they had nothing to do with what's costing so much (the example most often quoted is of an adult woman whose coverage was terminated because on her application she failed to list a prescription acne medication she took once when she was 13).  Although this is of dubious legality, if the common enemy is looking so carefully at the Ps and Qs on medical records, so should I.

So what do I say?  "No, I don't drink alcohol" because I know the tone of the question is aimed at people with alcohol problems and my only alcohol problem is that I spend too much money when I go wine tasting ... but then if twenty years from now I need a liver transplant the insurance company finds this record and denies the claim for "failure to disclose"?  Or do I say yes and then put on the record something that sounds as though I've "disclosed" a serious medical condition for which I am not seeking treatment?  If anyone from any insurance company ever looks at that form, I'm potentially damned if I do and damned if I don't.

And of course, I'm thinking about this while sitting in the optometrist's waiting room as his assistant is just waiting for me to finish up with the bloody paperwork.  I just want to get some more contact lenses.  Why should I have to think about this at all?

The first rule of good medical care is always to be totally honest with your doctor, no matter how embarrassing or personal or private your foibles are, no matter how much you'd prefer to tell your doctor that you're Practically Perfect in Every Way and of course you're minding your cholesterol in between those daily visits to McDonald's.

The second rule of good medical care, sadly, seems now to be, "Never admit any foible in writing, lest the insurance company find out."

With normal channels restricted, opposition protesters in Tehran are organising rallies using mobile phones and Twitter. What are you doing?

Most of the time, when we buy something, we follow a pattern.  The price drops to something we can afford, or we find it on sale somewhere ... it moves from the "would be nice to own" to the "must buy this now" category on our lists of purchasing ambitions, and we whip out the method of payment of our choice.  We treat falling prices on the things we want as an opportunity to buy.

Investments work just the other way.  We look at falling prices, and instead of saying, "Wow, now I can get this more cheaply!", we cringe and cower and fear that, if we buy it now, it will just become even cheaper still.  So we sit around and wait for prices to rise, which when they do then suggests to us that it's now a "good investment", even though it's more expensive than it used to be.

This is why trends in asset prices tend to be self-reinforcing (when prices are falling, nobody wants to buy, which urges prices to keep falling ... and vice versa), and why we get alternating bubbles and panics as people's emotions lurch around.  "Buy low, sell high" is simple and straightforward and in practice quite tricky actually to accomplish, because it goes against our instincts.  But the people who can overcome those instincts, who can make themselves comfortable with the risks, who can buy assets when their prices are down and then sell them when their prices go up, even though most people are doing the opposite, are the ones who actually make money in this game.

I say this as an apology to everyone who owns shares, because on June 1st I bought a bunch of mutual funds after deciding that I was comfortable being back in the stock market again, because it had "stabilised", and as a result everyone's share portfolios are down about 2% since then ... including mine.

Buy high, sell low.  Yup, I'm good at it, too.  Always have been.

I will think with my upper brain.
I will think with my upper brain.
I will think with my upper brain.
I will think with my upper brain.
I will think with my upper brain.
I will think with my upper brain.
I will think with my upper brain.
I will think with my upper brain.

In 1896, two then-obscure financial newsletter publishers named Charles Dow and Edward Jones began to publish a daily index of the share prices of twelve large industrial concerns, in an effort to create a metric by which to measure the market performance of America's industrial sector.  They limited themselves to twelve because that was all the share price information that the "computing power" of the day (people with pencils) could handle and still have the number ready to publish by the following morning's edition.

Dow Jones and Company later found themselves with a larger staff, and expanded their index from twelve shares to thirty.  Since the largest businesses in America were manufacturers and since the index captured the largest thirty of them, if you wanted to know how the stock market as a whole was doing, the best place to see it in one number was in Mr. Dow and Mr. Jones's little newsletter.  That fact turned that little newsletter, the Wall Street Journal, into the pre-eminent financial newspaper in the United States.  It has also meant that, for generations, when people have referred to "the market" they have meant the Dow; and when they have referred to "the Dow" they have meant the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The DJIA is now, honestly, an anachronism.  There is no reason to limit an index to just thirty price-weighted shares when now we have computers that can calculate a complete volume-weighted index of all the thousands of shares trading on the market in real time.  And the DJIA suffers from an inherent bias problem, in that it reflects the thirty widely held, publicly traded companies that Dow Jones and Company considers to be the most significant to the U.S. economy.  If a company starts to do poorly and loses significance, it gets stripped out of the index and replaced by one that is doing better ... which gives the index an inherent upward bias compared to the market as a whole.  But never mind that.  This is the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  It's not so much a number as it is a Who's Who of American Business.

Thus my jaw dropped reading this line from the Los Angeles Times this morning:

"Shares of GM continued to trade this morning, dropping to 54 cents, a 28% decline, in early trading. But Dow Jones & Co. said today it had dropped GM from its industrials index, replacing it with Cisco."

Sure, the bankruptcy of General Motors had been coming ... really, it's been coming for decades.  The filing was this morning, and nobody batted an eyelash.  But nothing drove it home for me like that line.  In the 1950s, General Motors was the source of fully one-tenth of the entire gross national product of the United States.  The famous line that what was good for General Motors was good for the United States, and vice versa, was uncontroversially, self-evidently true.  Had you asked someone in the 1950s if General Motors would ever be dumped unceremoniously out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, he would barely have grasped the question.  Of course not ... that was as ludicrous as asking if a Negro would ever be elected President of the United States.

The only constant really is change.

Please indulge me here for a minute, because I'm curious about something.

I know that a lot of folks like to throw parties, and this is a Very Cool Thing.  I've also noticed, when people are writing up their parties in their LiveJournals the following day, there's often a portion of the entry devoted to the Litany of the Left-Behind.  It goes something like this:

"By the way, we were cleaning up after the party, and we found some things that people left behind.  If you're missing an earring, a bracelet, a Casio calculator watch, a Nokia cell phone with a broken hinge, or a pair of thong underwear, please come back and get it."

Now, I tend to be fairly organised about things; but even so, I've lost a thing or two at parties (including one time my driving licence, which I never saw again!).  Therefore, I fully understand how such things could happen.  However, there is one thing that I don't understand:

The litany quite often includes "a pair of jeans / pants / trousers."

I can see leaving a party missing an earring.  Hell, I can even see leaving a party without your underwear if it were a rather friendly party, or a costume party with a changing room, or something like that.  If you had had a good enough time, you simply might not have noticed that you were accidentally missing that strategic garment, and then be too self-conscious to go back to your host and sheepishly claim, "Ummmmm, those are mine."

How do you leave a party without your trousers?  Wouldn't you ... perhaps ... and I'm thinking outside the box here ... notice a draft?  Or do I just not ever want to have what you were drinking?

It is springtime in California.  How can you tell, aside from the calendar?  Well, it stops raining, for one thing, as we go into the summer dry season.  The birds return from their winter migrations and start calling for mates right outside your bedroom window at four in the morning.  And, since this is California and we're all about the direct democracy here, we have a special election.

If it sounds special, it isn't.  It's how we Californian voters pay the price for how much we've tied our state's government in a big ol' knot with our good intentions.

The favourite adjective of the moment to describe California is "ungovernable", but that's not really so.  Californians are not somehow more recalcitrant in the face of authority, or unwelcoming of good governance, than anyone else.  But we are stuck in a vicious cycle.

One of the criticisms of the Bush administration was that its governing philosophy was a self-fulfilling and self-destructive prophecy.  Government is the problem, not the solution, and the public sector as a whole is a source of inefficiency and inefficacy.  Because of this, it should not be rewarded with resources (like taxes) to assist it in its functioning, to allow it to hire good talent, and so on ... which means that, in those circumstances where government would be the most efficient actor to solve a serious problem (like after Hurricane Katrina), it is too under-resourced and incompetently staffed to do anything about it.  This "proves" that government is inefficacious, which justifies starving it some more ...

Californians have headed down the same road with direct democracy.  The initiative and referendum were introduced in California in 1911 with the intentions of allowing citizens the ability to discipline a state government that was pretty much run by the railroads and for the railroads.  This was all good enough, but about a generation ago Californians began to succumb to the urge to micro-manage our state government through the ballot box.  In the face of a political system that requires too many "supermajority" votes for the legislature to do anything and too many legislators who have "safe seats" and therefore little urge to compromise to reach such a supermajority, people in the state who wanted to get stuff done realised that the easiest way to do that was to go directly to the voters.  In 1978 the state's voters voted to slash their own property taxes (which were soaring at the time thanks to the 1970s' rampant inflation), thus giving the state its overly-income-tax-dependent revenue stream that is now making it suffer.  In 1988 the state's voters voted to reserve a certain minimum amount of the state's budget for education, regardless of how much revenue the state was taking in or how much the state's educational system really needed.  By the 2000s the voters had put so many strings on so much of the state government that we were reduced to voting on whether or not to raise the tax on cigarettes specifically to fund a few children's health programmes, as well as to restore some funding to other health programmes that oopsie!, we'd approved in an earlier vote but accidentally "unfunded" in a later vote because we have so many poorly-worded propositions on the ballot now that we're inadvertently vetoing ourselves.

Meanwhile, our legislature is stuck in the Bush conundrum: it can do little, because we have tied it down so much; but the fact that it can do little proves that it is incompetent, so we react angrily by going over its head and tying it down some more to punish it for what we've done to it earlier.  Californians are not ungovernable.  Quite the contrary, we are TOO governable.  The problem is that we want to do it all ourselves even though we don't really know what we're doing and are therefore swayable by any special interest that comes along and offers something at the ballot box that makes us feel good.

So today, as a result of our earlier dabbling in self-governance, we have on the ballot for this special election a proposition (1B) that tries to clarify exactly what the 1988 education funding requirement means.  The legislature can't just handle this themselves, because the legislature in California isn't allowed to override a voter-approved proposition, no matter how old or out-of-date it is ... so we're being asked to decide if the state should have a "supplemental education obligation" in lieu of "maintenance factor payments" that the 1988 proposition may or may not require in a "Test 1 year" depending on how the "Test 1 level" relates to the "Test 2 level" ...

Even the state's own legislative analyst, producing the ballot pamphlet that is supposed to explain all this, has thrown up his hands (as he has on several other badly worded special-interest-backed propositions in the past) and said, "It is unclear how this would apply."  I'm an accountant.  I can barely follow this crap.

And we've done it to ourselves.

I think it's time to rip the whole thing apart and start over.  We're already starting in that direction with a change in how legislative districts are determined that will reduce the "safe seats" problem starting in 2011, but there is so much more we could do.  Propositions were supposed to be about helping people challenge the state's government if it got too uppity.  Now propositions have degenerated into a way for people to help themselves ... or even worse, to abuse the power of the government to hurt others (just look at Proposition 8).  Rip it up.  Give this state a simple representative government and let it get on with governance.

But power corrupts ... and through the ballot box Californians have tasted the power of direct democracy.  Will we be willing to give it up, or at least tone it down to where we stop shooting ourselves in the foot with it?  Or are we truly determined to have an ungovernable state by our own design?

<Court upholds 'hacking' charge against smut-surfing worker>

(For those who don't get it, my RL name is Richard Wolf.)

Although I am a bit concerned for people in the State of Ohio that that state's law against "hacking" is so broad that it makes it a crime not only to access a computer to which the owner hasn't given you access (the normal definition of hacking), but even to use a computer to which you were given access for a purpose that its owner didn't explicitly authorise.  In Ohio, surfing the wrong website from a workplace computer isn't just a private offence for breach of your employment contract: it's a crime prosecutable by the State.

My eponymous friend was also convicted of theft for stealing company time by websurfing when he was supposed to be working ... so if you have a job in Ohio, watch how long you spend in the bathroom, or you could find yourself in the slammer once you're off the john.

I wonder how many of the businesses in Ohio would collapse for lack of workers if this law were actually applied uniformly across all offences ...

But in any case, I'm not in jail, and all my smut is on my home computer.  Oh, and none of it appeals to a prurient interest or violates contemporary community standards, no sir.  :)