A brief analysis of baseball, history, movies, society, dreams, ambitions, women, music, culture, environment and anything else I can jam into my little piece of Idaho...
A little Latin for ya: An nescis, mi fili, quantilla sapientia mundus regatur? - Don't you know then, my son, how little wisdom rules the world?
I just saw the new Star Trektrailer (yeah, I know its old news - November 18th) and I am thrilled to say it looks, and sounds, like a winner. The version begins at the most appropriate time - from their youth - and with the wild days of the early space conquests and battles.
Director J.J. Abrams takes over this incarnation of the 11th movie in the historic franchise. While using the Star Wars formula, going back in time to fill in the details (and make more Hollywood cash), this looks more visually stunning (as well it should) and with a wild streak that may turn this character line into a 3-5 movie arch.
Zachary Quinto (Heroes' Gabriel) plays Spock and looks very much like Mr. Nemoy's younger self. But it also seems this Spock will be an action-filled role, with a maturing Vulcan that we can find appealing on many, many levels.
Zoë Saldana (Drumline beauty and Ashton Kucher's girl in Guess Who with the late Bernie Mac) plays Uhura and will definitely spice up the role as a sexy lady on the set...(the trailer gives you a peak of that.)
For James T. Kirk, a relative newcomer, Chris Pine, may be the wildcard, though his credentials on an array of differing projects gives one hope that he can be many faces on a classic character.
To the side, I grew up a Star Trek fanatic. The original movie with V-ger (Voyager, that now fabled satellite the U.S.A. sent up, as the quest), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home with the call of the whales needed to save Earth. (Not necessarily considered a very good movie, but it had its moments, like Mr. Scott talking to the computer, and then having to type really fast to come up with the formula for clear plexiglass made out of titanium or some such item.)
It is my hope that all Star Treks will turn out well. We need a new frontier to roam in these unsettling times.
I just finished up Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton, a memoir about his recent experience as a graduate student at Harvard Business School, class of 2006. Considered by most as the pinnacle school to receive that prestigious MBA at, Broughton’s story (and the title aptly reflects) on what we should be considering during these difficult times, and on the people who make these decisions.
As a first aside, President George W. Bush (’75) and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson graduated from Harvard Business. President-elect Barack Obama received his Juris Doctorate from Harvard. Michael Bloomberg, New York City mayor, amongst other things, is a MBA from Harvard. The always quick-to-be-proud of his business acumen, ex-presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, did his work at the Crimson. And today, on the 45th anniversary of his assassination, it should be noted Kennedy graduated from Harvard (cum laude) in 1940, majoring in government. (Thus the Kennedy School of Government.)
So indeed, being a Harvard grad has its potential perks and peaks of power.
Englishman Broughton wrote for a living before stepping into the hallowed foray that is Harvard. As a neophyte to the world of banking, finance, hedge funds and leverage buyouts, he got a crash course in what is the terminology, psychology and manipulations of business numbers, and where it would lead him even before he got started on his two-year trek. As he soon learned, there are no clear answers; just measurements of risk and reward, possibilities defined better, and the balance of what is important to know in business, and in life.
Relating to current financial malaise, a passage from the Ahead of the Curve:
“…I once asked a hedge fund manager in New York about the reckless way credit was sold to people who could ill afford it. I said they would be ruined. They would lose their homes and their possessions. Where were the checks on all of this? What would happen to all these firms lending like crazy when people stopped paying back their loans? The hedge fund manager looked at me like I was a madman and said, ‘It’s just economic.’ He meant that over time these borrowers would learn their lesson. The bankrupted lenders would be bought cheaply by other investors and turned around. The economic wheel would keep turning, no matter how many lives had been crushed against it…” (pgs. 232-233)
As we have seen with the demise of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearnes, WaMu, IndyMac and others likely in the queue (GM, Chrysler, Lear), the economic wheel is spinning quite well as it has indeed crushed retirement funds, and stocks and put people out of work in droves. (Citigroup announcing 50,000+ in job cuts in one week.)
Our current leader, George W. Bush, seems to have adopted a technique not-as-yet-perfected when he attended Harvard, but discussed in Ahead of the Curve, the levering up through debt. This preferred technique, of financing a buyout mainly through debt, thus recording interest paid as an expense (on that debt), produces more return on equity, to equity stakeholders, thus making them extremely happy. It worksif you produce a profit, can generate the cash to pay the interest payments, and can keep other expenses down, preferably through frugality to all other concerns. At some point, you take the enterprise public again with all the miscellaneous expenses cut, but likely only a real benefit to the LBO starters of the once-fat company. The actual company, the workers, are unlikely to have received any benefits.
(2nd aside)How this relates to our current government: During the Bush administration, we have ‘levered up’ the balance sheet of the United States. Taking on more debt, trying (but not succeeding) to trim other programs (those nasty entitlements) while keeping taxes on those multi-millionaires low, even giving a tax holiday to them for a decade. The low-interest rates that spurred out-of-control lending to the non-financially savvy, and the opportunists, that both got caught in the wheels of sub-prime and housing market free falls, has loaded up more debt on the U.S. Treasury balance sheet. We continue to make our interest payments on a $10,000,000,000,000 national debt, of at least $500,000,000,000. But when do we run out of fiat money? (At least if you don’t print and print, devaluing our currency to the point of worthlessness.)
But as we’ve also seen, the entities under the auspices of too much leverage have indeed failed when the cash flows stopped to these many, many banks, insurance companies, manufacturers, retailers, and now, oil entities. The deflation of the value of things is reminiscent of the Great Depression.
We are now Behind the Eight Ball: What Harvard Business School Did Not Teach President Bush.
With a new President, Obama will have to get well ahead of the curve in order to stave off the impending doomsday scenario discuss on more than one occasion here, and now, at many other media outlets.
As Broughton also learned, business is not solely the most important entity – as ex-CEO of GE Jack Welch had surmised, quite smugly – as the government too, has its place. For one, without a government in operation, a business cannot protect its interest via laws or the enforcement of contracts. (A business would have to act as a thug to accomplish contract enforcement. Essentially, become a government entity with enforcers and judges of people’s misdeeds.)
The argument made by Welch, that government generates no revenues, and business generates all the money, so we can ignore governance, leaves aside that a symbiotic relationship has always existed. Businesses can exist without government, but only for so long as people ascribe to obeying business edicts. Otherwise, chaos and revolt and failure soon comes. Governments can exist only if people are willing, and led to accept its rules, and abide under its control. And provides some benefit, else why have it. Neither operates in a vacuum.
The book presents Broughton engrossed in the whys of how he decided on Harvard B-School, only to not go immediately from there to a big corporate job, either as an marketing/product manager at Google, a hedge fund operator at Bain, an overworked, type-A financier on The Street, or a start-up city controller as he envisioned in one entrepreneurial leap-of-faith posited. Mr. Broughton’s book maybe a business school companion volume of One L by Scott Turow, the exploration of what it is to become a legal mind and those ramifications, but it truly reflects, that writers, are what they are: able to mirror, emote, characterize, judge and divine truth when at their best.
That somewhere on the curve, there is a path to another road, with another curve to come out ahead on.
In thinking about what would be a really different and challenging thought, I came to this idea: Design a MBA program around internet searched materials, library books and course materials bought on the cheap or obtained for free. Now, (I know) this seems reaching into an area that is all ready done well enough to turn out so many competent and creative souls. I mean, look at Wall Street and all their recent successes?
To me this will a be a project of compiling data, doing the actual course work discovered at MIT Free Online Courses, incorporating known models at Harvard, Princeton University Economics, Columbia, Stanford, Michigan and Northwestern resources, while adding in the latest business thoughts, from entreprenuerial to regulatory practices.
A music interlude:Johnny Cash's I Walk The Line
By no means is this going to be groundbreaking or money making. It's a desire to learn and study in depth what makes all these $100,000 a year people (well, more in NYC, less, in Midwest fly-over) include oddities and books that are classic, and others, that teach a different mantra, that isn't in Milton Friedman's wettest dreams.
I wanted to take the GMAT years ago, back in 1998-99. Studied, bought the Princeton Review book, etc. Got sidetracked and wound up taking the LSAT. Scanner at heart and soul.
So, this will be a new project with a twist or two likely. I like to incorporate information into a model of how something works. Which is what Business is: a model of what works and what doesn't.
More interesting is to discover how Economics, Business, Law and Public Policy work (or don't work) together.
I figure it will take 2-3 years of reading, writing, researching and designing the course work. With plenty I won't learn or know, but plenty that will enlighten me to the history and evolution of what a true MBA graduate should know.
Example: Jim Kramer's Warning in October 2008 about Stock Market
I will post my work: course study, books read or researched, internet articles, business channel stuff, youtube vids, research papers I will write (God willing) and compiled program of PDFs, Powerpoint stuff, Excel spreadsheets, etc. Maybe it will work out well.
There is a few of goals to this: to create both a virtual program and get what others are learning (or mislearning) in their programs. Criticism is welcome - as well as resources that are good to use or available for free. Nearly free is also the goal. Who is getting their education on the cheap in these hard economic times?
I figure if I can put together a comprehensive, intelligent and understandable model for a learning (with the undergrad course stuff included), why does education need to be so expensive?
I'm not selling this idea yet. But it has merit. People need choices that are low cost and digestable in 1 1/2 -2 year window of learning. Also, the path to enlightenment is usually a personal experience more than a guided tour by people with their own motivations and shortsightness built in.
I hope that in the end I can be more informed while informing others in the process.
My 1st semester will start in January 2009. Till then, I am compiling the nuts and bolts of what I need to include and discover during the next 2 years.
(So, that Perfect Storm post will take a backseat.)
Final Music: Johnny Cash'sGod's Gonna Cut You Down
I took awhile before writing this final 2008 baseball blog. The Chicago Cubs had a wonderful regular season. Not since Ryne Sandberg was MVP and Gary Matthews was the 3-hole hitter have the Cubs piled up as many victories. So, it was a shame they bowed out early to a hot Dodgers team.
What probably hurt more was the way they lost 3 straight games. Game 1: Ryan Dempster suddenly can't find the dish. Gives up a granny and the Cubs offense disappeared under the Meadowlands with Jimmy Hoffa. Game 2: A comedy of infield errors led this Cub fan to want drink excessively, start a fight with a 65 year-old Dodger fan geezer and hope Game 3 in La-la would be fa la la la, la la la la terrific. Game 3:No life in this body as the Cubs showed up dead on arrival.
Sure, I am poor enough that a new Democratic president will have to give me a tax break in order for me survive through the Second Great Depression. Pitiful would be dependent upon whether my income, car options, job prospects, lack of girlfriend or living arrangements deserves such pity. (I think they do.)Cubs fan: We have seen the last 100 years leave us behind in a dusty trail of Texas dust. But I am not a poor, pitiful Cubs fan.
As an original member of the National League, one steeped in an odd ball history of very good play for nearly 34 years (1876-1910), that went through 2nd division droughts like the one between 1946-1966, and have the tagline lovable losers attached to one's franchise woes, ineptitude and managerial stupidity, it almost seems too funny to get an attack from a Ranger fan.
I wrote a piece about Josh Hamilton this season shortly after the Home Run Derby display. I felt that Texas had bargained shop a guy that should have been where I was, in life - and that was likely given his addictions and proclivities before he 'got saved.' But he turned it around. And that impressed.
I don't harbor any delusions about the Cubs or the playoffs. As Billy Beane was quoted (or miquoted): "My shit doesn't work in the playoffs." The Cubs' shit didn't work in the playoffs because they left their shit in the shithouse of 100 seasons of disappointments. I can relate to these Cubs, with all their potential, their dreams and ambitions, only to come up on the very short side of a playoff ass kicking.
But I don't need curses or Bartmans to know that being so close to the brass ring is actually more a kick in the teeth that being a mediocre also-ran team for 3 decades plus that can't find pitching, but digs up the hitters a plenty, is.
No one is promised a shot at the playoffs.
If the wild card was nixed, the Cubs would have played the Los Angeles Angels in the World Series this year. (Using pre-1969 rules.) Of course, many many millions of dollars would have been forfeited under that design, and thus, not in the best interests of baseball. So we have a playoff. We reward team mediocrity by allowing barely .500 teams in the dance as division winners or wildcards undercast in the same role.
The 1998 Cubs benefited from this rule. So did the 2003 Florida Marlins who beat my Cubs and the Yankees to boot. (And they, the Marlins, still can't get fans, a stadium deal or whatever else a South Floridian needs to root for them. Let me live on South Beach and I'll build the goddamn stadium for them.)
But I can't feel pity or sorrow for teams that haven't mastered the new playoff paradigm. I've seen enough baseball to know that it is as much luck as it is skill in building a champion - or at least a playoff bound team. Oakland did it with money that wouldn't buy a 3rd rate action film in Hollywood. Texas had A-Rod, and nobody else. Spent foolishly on pitchers that couldn't get me out.
But that's the past.
We all need to go forward except for those fans still lucky enough to root for their 2008 teams.
To the side, I grew up a Star Trek fanatic. The original movie with V-ger (Voyager, that now fabled satellite the U.S.A. sent up, as the quest), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home with the call of the whales needed to save Earth. (Not necessarily considered a very good movie, but it had its moments, like Mr. Scott talking to the computer, and then having to type really fast to come up with the formula for clear plexiglass made out of titanium or some such item.)
