Category: Food for thought

Intriguing.

The problem isn’t that the youngest generation hates work; the problem is that many of the jobs offered to the youngest generation aren’t work at all.The spreadsheet-heavy, mid-level-manager-dominated, buzzword-filled roles offered to us are jobs, but they are hardly “work.” 

For any gamers out there, one of the oldest tricks in the book is giving your younger sibling an unplugged/disconnected controller, so they feel like they are “playing”, while you are in control the whole time. 

Many “jobs” today are simply unplugged controllers. The work would get done, whether or not we take part in the process. We are simply moving numbers, smashing buttons, and staying busy, with no regard for actual productivity. 

On Meaningless Careers

In recent years, Earth has been speeding up. In 2020, timeanddate reported that Earth had achieved its 28 shortest days since accurate daily measurements using atomic clocks began in the 1960s.

The shortest day of all in 2020 was -1.47 milliseconds on July 19.

Earth continued to spin quickly in 2021, although the shortest day of the year in 2021 was fractionally longer than in 2020.

Now, in 2022, things have speeded up again. On June 29, Earth set a new record for the shortest day of the atomic-clock era: -1.59 milliseconds.

Earth nearly beat its record again the following month, posting a length of day of -1.50 milliseconds on July 26.

Earth Sets New Record for Shortest Day

And there is something called as Leap Second.

People are very good at forecasting the future, except for the surprises, which tend to be all that matter.

…

The biggest risk is always what no one sees coming. If you don’t see something coming you’re not prepared for it. And when you’re not prepared for it its damage is amplified when it hits you.

Look at the big news stories that move the needle – Covid, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Great Depression. Their common trait isn’t necessarily that they were big; it’s that they were surprises, on virtually no one’s radar until they arrived.

It’s like that every year. It’ll be like that every year.

Never Saw It Coming

Interesting metaphor for technical debt by Andy Hunt.

Researchers studying urban decay wanted to find out why some neighborhoods escape the ravages of the inner city, and others right next door—with the same demographics and economic makeup—would become a hell hole where the cops were scared to go in. They wanted to figure out what made the difference.

The researchers did a test. They took a nice car, like a Jaguar, and parked it in the South Bronx in New York. They retreated back to a duck blind, and watched to see what would happen. They left the car parked there for something like four days, and nothing happened. It wasn’t touched. So they went up and broke a little window on the side, and went back to the blind. In something like four hours, the car was turned upside down, torched, and stripped—the whole works.

They did more studies and developed a “Broken Window Theory.” A window gets broken at an apartment building, but no one fixes it. It’s left broken. Then something else gets broken. Maybe it’s an accident, maybe not, but it isn’t fixed either. Graffiti starts to appear. More and more damage accumulates. Very quickly you get an exponential ramp. The whole building decays. Tenants move out. Crime moves in. And you’ve lost the game. It’s all over.

We use the broken window theory as a metaphor for managing technical debt on a project.

Don’t Live with Broken Windows

Makes me wonder, if some day electric cars rule over the Indian car market what will happen to all the tax revenue from petrol and diesel?

When it comes to sales of electric cars, Norway is in a league of its own. In September, battery-powered electric vehicles accounted for 77.5 percent of all new cars sold. That figure makes Norway a world leader by a long way—leapfrogging over the UK, where 15 percent of new car sales were electric as of October, and the US, where that number is just 2.6 percent.

Norway’s electric dream has been credited to a series of tax breaks and other financial carrots that mean brands like Tesla can compete on price with combustion engines. But these incentives—and their success—have created a unique predicament: Norway is running out of dirty cars to tax.

Norway Is Running Out of Gas-Guzzling Cars to Tax

A wonderful article by Walter Murch on how the birds came to have super-efficient lungs.

The answer seems to be that bar-headed geese, like all birds—hummingbirds, ostriches, pigeons—have super-efficient lungs. It makes our lungs—and the lungs of all mammals—look primitive. I’m sure when birds get together they gossip about how pathetic our lungs are!

All mammals, including us, breathe in through the same opening that we breathe out. Can you imagine if our digestive system worked the same way? What if the food we put in our mouths, after digestion, came out the same way? It doesn’t bear thinking about! Luckily, for digestion, we have a separate in and out. And that’s what the birds have with their lungs: an in point and an out point. They also have air sacs and hollow spaces in their bones. When they breathe in, half of the good air (with oxygen) goes into these hollow spaces, and the other half goes into their lungs through the rear entrance. When they breathe out, the good air that has been stored in the hollow places now also goes into their lungs through that rear entrance, and the bad air (carbon dioxide and water vapor) is pushed out the front exit. So it doesn’t matter whether birds are breathing in or out: Good air is always going in one direction through their lungs, pushing all the bad air out ahead of it.

How did birds get such great lungs? They inherited them from dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs! When I was growing up in the 1940s, there was a category in biology called Aves, which meant birds. But scientists have now folded Aves into a category called Dinosauria, and those dinosauria, like pigeons and seagulls and geese, are flying all around us today. If you want to know what a dinosaur probably tasted like, eat some chicken!

Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest

I have been reading quite a few articles about achieving financial independence at age of 30, 35, 40 and 45. But all of them sound unrealistic to a middle class person like me.

M. Pattabiraman from freefincal asks the question ‘Are we seeking work-life balance in the name of early retirement?’ and hits nail right on the head. With our already stressful lives and lack of work-life balance, we are actually seeking an escape route. At least I am.

Seeking early financial independence comes loaded with sacrifices. We will need to invest each month anywhere from 2-3 times our monthly expenses. This means less splurging on devices, holidays, entertainment etc. Is this sacrifice worth it when you are young? Particularly if you do not have a clear plan of what to do after FIRE. I am not suggesting one way or another here. Only pointing out that the importance of such questions.

Can we address work-stress and poor work-life balance with a change in outlook instead of FIRE? Can we work on our time management to find some leisure time each week? Can we convert “aimless time pass” to learning new things? Can we learn to develop a sense of detachment from the office? Will doing this regularly reduce our frustration? There is a good chance it might.

I am not trying to say aiming for early financial independence is wrong. Just pointing out that is the not solution for our work frustrations if we do not know what to after. Extreme steps are not always necessary in life. A judicious mix of regular investing (an amount = monthly expenses), leisure, health, fitness can help us lead fulfilling lives.

Are we seeking work-life balance in the name of early retirement?

He ends with a pragmatic suggestion to achieve financial independence which will work for 95% of the folks. Worthy of putting on a refrigerator magnet and reading it every single day.

Maybe I am over the hill, but this route to financial independence is a lot more appealing: Put your head down and work; smartly invest as much as possible; do not let the work get to you; do not deprive yourself of reasonable wants; stay fit and balance work, family and personal needs. Maybe one day, when you look up and take stock, you will become financially independent.

Are we seeking work-life balance in the name of early retirement?

This article was written in 2008. We are in 2021 now. And this article is still relevant.

A thermocline is a distinct temperature barrier between a surface layer of warmer water and the colder, deeper water underneath. It can exist in both lakes and oceans. A thermocline can prevent dissolved oxygen from getting to the lower layer and vital nutrients from getting to the upper layer.

In many large or even medium-sized IT projects, there exists a thermocline of truth, a line drawn across the organizational chart that represents a barrier to accurate information regarding the project’s progress. Those below this level tend to know how well the project is actually going; those above it tend to have a more optimistic (if unrealistic) view.

Several major (and mutually reinforcing) factors tend to create this thermocline. First, the IT software development profession largely lacks — or fails to put into place — automated, objective and repeatable metrics that can measure progress and predict project completion with any reasonable degree of accuracy. Instead, we tend to rely on seat-of-the-pants (or, less politely, out-of-one’s-butt) estimations by IT engineers or managers that a given subsystem or application is “80% done”. This, in turn, leads to the old saw that the first 90% of a software project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% of a software projects takes the other 90% of the time. I’ll discuss the metrics issue at greater length in another chapter; suffice it to say that the actual state of completion of a major system is often truly unknown until an effort is made to put it into a production environment.

Second, IT engineers by nature tend to be optimists, as reflected in the common acronym SMOP: “simple matter of programming.” Even when an IT engineer doesn’t have a given subsystem completed, he tends to carry with him the notion that he whip everything into shape with a few extra late nights and weekends of effort, even though he may actually face weeks (or more) of work. (NOTE: my use of male pronouns is deliberate; it is almost always male IT engineers who have this unreasonable optimism. Female IT engineers in my experience are generally far more conservative and realistic, almost to a fault, which is why I prefer them. I just wish they weren’t so hard to find.)

Third, managers (including IT managers) like to look good and usually don’t like to give bad news, because their continued promotion depends upon things going well under their management. So even when they have problems to report, they tend to understate the problem, figuring they can somehow shuffle the work among their direct reports so as to get things back on track.

Fourth, upper management tends to reward good news and punish bad news, regardless of the actual truth content. Honesty in reporting problems or lack of progress is seldom rewarded; usually it is discouraged, subtly or at times quite bluntly. Often, said managers believe that true executive behavior comprises brow-beating and threatening lower managers in order to “motivate” them to solve whatever problems they might have.

As the project delivery deadline draws near, the thermocline of truth starts moving up the levels of management because it is becoming harder and harder to deny or hide just where the project stands. Even with that, the thermocline may not reach the top level of management until weeks or even just days before the project is scheduled to ship or go into production. This leads to the classic pattern of having a major schedule slip — or even outright project failure — happen just before the ship/production date.

The Wetware Crisis: the Thermocline of Truth

Deepak Shenoy succinctly describing what momentum investing is.

In the financial world, our job is to react to change. Not to predict it, because predictions are folly. You can predict a hundred things, and one of them is bound to happen, so you can say you were right. No one sees the ashes of the ones that went wrong.

Reacting is easier. You wait till something becomes a trend, enough for it to sustain. And then you get in. You’ll never get in so early you can be called a soothsayer. You’ll get in after enough people have done so, at a higher price. And in the same way, you’ll be able to get out much after the top, but before the really bad damage hits. In the markets, we say – you might give up the first 10% or the last 10%, but at least you can get 80% of the trend.

In so many ways, that is what momentum is. The trend is established and accelerating. A stock makes a new all time high. And if you just systematically buy those stocks, you’ll win on a few of them that go on to make the 2x, 3x, or indeed, 4x returns that some stocks have seen. And when you lose, you lose 10% or so, and one big winner makes up for enough losers.

Wealth Letter July 2021: Following the Disruption