In Search of the Perfect Investment

Wow. I punched in MAX (as in maximum) to chart the S&P 500:

Here’s the last ten days. What a great argument for paying tennis and not watching your wealth rise and fall faster than a whore’s drawers! (Australian expression.)

I don’t like gambling. But everyone should have some fun in a buoyant market> Latest “gambles” (with tight, tight stops): CLVS, CYBR, FEYE, RTNB, SUNE. Notice two of them are cyber-security plays. Nice hot area.

Weekend reading. Here are two long pieces you must read this  weekend:

+ Tomorrow’s Advance Man
Marc Andreessen’s plan to win the future by Tad Friend in the latest New Yorker.

Excerpts:

— Each year, three thousand startups approach a16z (Andressen’s VC firm) with a “warm intro” from someone the firm knows. A16z invests in fifteen. Of those, at least ten will fold, three or four will prosper, and one might soar to be worth more than a billion dollars-a “unicorn,” in the local parlance. With great luck, once a decade that unicorn will become a Google or a Facebook and return the V.C.’s money a thousand times over: the storied 1,000x. There are eight hundred and three V.C. firms in the U.S., and last year they spent forty-eight billion dollars chasing that dream.

— V.C.s give the Valley its continuity-and its ammunition. They are the arms merchants who can turn your crazy idea and your expendable youth into a team of coders with Thunderbolt monitors. Apple and Microsoft got started with venture money; so did Starbucks, the Home Depot, Whole Foods Market, and JetBlue. V.C.s made their key introductions and stole from every page of Sun Tzu to help them penetrate markets. And yet V.C.s maintain a zone of embarrassed privacy around their activities. They tell strangers they’re investors, or work in technology, because, in a Valley that valorizes the entrepreneur, they don’t want to be seen as just the money. “I say I’m in the software industry,” one of the Valley’s best-known V.C.s told me. “I’m ashamed of the truth.”

At a hundred and eleven dollars a square foot, Sand Hill Road is America’s most expensive office-rental market-an oak-and-eucalyptus-lined prospect stippled with bland, two-story ski chalets constrained by an ethos of nonconspicuous consumption (except for the Teslas in the parking lot). It’s a community of paranoid optimists. The top firms coöperate and compete by turns, suspicious of any company whose previous round wasn’t led by another top-five firm even as they’re jealous of that firm for leading it. They call this Schadenfreude-riddled relationship “co-opitition.” Firms trumpet their boldness, yet they often follow one another, lemming-like, pursuing the latest innovation-pen-based computers, biotech, interactive television, superconductors, clean tech-off a cliff.

— The game in Silicon Valley, while it remains part of California, is not ferocious intelligence or a contrarian investment thesis: everyone has that. It’s not even wealth: anyone can become a billionaire just by rooming with Mark Zuckerberg. It’s prescience. And then it’s removing every obstacle to the ferocious clarity of your vision: incumbents, regulations, folkways, people. Can you not just see the future but summon it?

— Yet math was no help with mass psychology. “Even if we could do perfect analysis, we just can’t know the future,” he said. “What if Google Ventures had access to all Google searches-could you predict hit products? Or perfect access to all of people’s conversations or purchases? You still wouldn’t know what’s going to happen. How is psychohistory going?” he went on, referring to Isaac Asimov’s invention, in his “Foundation” novels, of a statistical field that could predict the behavior of civilizations. “Not very fucking good at all! Which, by the way, is part of what makes this job really fun. It’s a people business. If we could revise the industry completely, we’d just dump all the business plans and focus on people-the twenty-three-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.”

He acknowledged, though, that his optimism dims once human beings-with their illogic, hidden agendas, and sheer bugginess-enter the equation. “We’re imperfect people pursuing perfect ideas, and there’s tremendous frustration in the gap,” he said. “Writing code, one or two people, that’s the Platonic ideal. But when you want to impact the world you need one hundred people, then one thousand, then ten thousand-and people have all these people issues.” He examined the problem in silence. “A world of just computers wouldn’t work,” he concluded wistfully. “But a world of just people could certainly be improved.” 

Read the entire piece here.

+ How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield by Sebastian Junger in Vanity Fair. Though only 10 percent of American forces see combat, the U.S. military now has the highest rate of post-traumatic stress disorder in its history. Excerpts:

— There are obvious psychological stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation. Most higher primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are few examples of individuals surviving outside of a group. A modern soldier returning from combat goes from the kind of close-knit situation that humans evolved for into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good, and people sleep alone or with a partner. Even if he or she is in a family, that is not the same as belonging to a large, self-sufficient group that shares and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society-and they’re nearly miraculous-the individual lifestyles that those technologies spawn may be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.

“You’ll have to be prepared to say that we are not a good society-that we are an anti-human society,” anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz warned when I tried this theory out on her. Abramowitz was in Ivory Coast during the start of the civil war there in 2002 and experienced, firsthand, the extremely close bonds created by hardship and danger. “We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is about an extremely narrow group of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that.”

This is an old problem, and today’s vets are not the first Americans to balk at coming home. A source of continual embarrassment along the American frontier-from the late 1600s until the end of the Indian Wars, in the 1890s-was a phenomenon known as “the White Indians.” The term referred to white settlers who were kidnapped by Indians-or simply ran off to them-and became so enamored of that life that they refused to leave. According to many writers of the time, including Benjamin Franklin, the reverse never happened: Indians never ran off to join white society. And if a peace treaty required that a tribe give up their adopted members, these members would often have to be put under guard and returned home by force. Inevitably, many would escape to rejoin their Indian families. “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European,” wrote a French-born writer in America named Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur in an essay published in 1782.

One could say that combat vets are the White Indians of today, and that they miss the war because it was, finally, an experience of human closeness that they can’t easily find back home. Not the closeness of family, which is rare enough, but the closeness of community and tribe. The kind of closeness that gets endlessly venerated in Hollywood movies but only actually shows up in contemporary society when something goes wrong-when tornados obliterate towns or planes are flown into skyscrapers. Those events briefly give us a reason to act communally, and most of us do. “There is something to be said for using risk to forge social bonds,” Abramowitz pointed out. “Having something to fight for, and fight through, is a good and important thing.”

— When soldiers return to modern society, they must go through—among other adjustments—a terrific oxytocin withdrawal. The chronic isolation of modern society begins in childhood and continues our entire lives. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 50 to 90 percent of the time, often in wraps that keep them strapped to the mother’s back so that her hands are free. That roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates, according to primatologist and psychologist Harriet J. Smith. One can get an idea of how desperately important touch is to primates from a landmark experiment conducted in the 1950s by a psychologist and primatologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire-mesh mother, however, had a nipple that would dispense warm milk. The babies invariably took their nourishment quickly in order to rush back and cling to the terry-cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. But even that isn’t enough for psychological health: in a separate experiment, more than 75 percent of female baby rhesus monkeys raised with terry-cloth mothers—as opposed to real ones—grew up to be abusive and neglectful to their own young.

In the 1970s, American mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with their nine-month-old babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level of contact that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the common practice of making young children sleep by themselves in their own room. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well-educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to trigger fears that make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them.

More broadly, in most human societies, almost nobody sleeps alone. Sleeping in family groups of one sort or another has been the norm throughout human history and is still commonplace in most of the world. Again, Northern European societies are among the few where people sleep alone or with a partner in a private room. When I was with American soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, we slept in narrow plywood huts where I could reach out and touch three other men from where I slept. They snored, they talked, they got up in the middle of the night to use the piss tubes, but we felt safe because we were in a group. The Taliban attacked the position regularly, and the most determined attacks often came at dawn. Another unit in a nearby valley was almost overrun and took 50 percent casualties in just such an attack. And yet I slept better surrounded by those noisy, snoring men than I ever did camping alone in the woods of New England.

Many soldiers will tell you that one of the hardest things about coming home is learning to sleep without the security of a group of heavily armed men around them. In that sense, being in a war zone with your platoon feels safer than being in an American suburb by yourself. I know a vet who felt so threatened at home that he would get up in the middle of the night to build fighting positions out of the living-room furniture. This is a radically different experience from what warriors in other societies go through, such as the Yanomami, of the Orinoco and Amazon Basins, who go to war with their entire age cohort and return to face, together, whatever the psychological consequences may be. As one anthropologist pointed out to me, trauma is usually a group experience, so trauma recovery should be a group experience as well. But in our society it’s not.

“Our whole approach to mental health has been hijacked by pharmaceutical logic,” I was told by Gary Barker, an anthropologist whose group, Promundo, is dedicated to understanding and preventing violence. “PTSD is a crisis of connection and disruption, not an illness that you carry within you.”

This individualizing of mental health is not just an American problem, or a veteran problem; it affects everybody. A British anthropologist named Bill West told me that the extreme poverty of the 1930s and the collective trauma of the Blitz served to unify an entire generation of English people. “I link the experience of the Blitz to voting in the Labour Party in 1945, and the establishing of the National Health Service and a strong welfare state,” he said. “Those policies were supported well into the 60s by all political parties. That kind of cultural cohesiveness, along with Christianity, was very helpful after the war. It’s an open question whether people’s problems are located in the individual. If enough people in society are sick, you have to wonder whether it isn’t actually society that’s sick.”

Read the entire Vanity Fair piece here.

 Johnny Depp’s two dogs — Pistol and Boo — face death in Australia.

Depp brought them into Australia on a private plane. When he found out about the dogs, Australia’s agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce ordered Depp to remove the two Yorkshire terriers from the country within 48 hours, saying “It’s time that Pistol and Boo b——- off back to the United States.” (The word he used is probably “buggar,” the Australia equivalent of p*ss in American.)

Depp, 51, who is in Australia to film the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, is believed to have avoided complying with Australia’s strict quarantine rules by bringing Boo and Pistol in on his private jet. He and his wife Amber Heard, 29, an actress and model, arrived on the jet in late April.

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard married on February 4 (Getty Images)

It’s going to be an expensive ride back for those two dogs. Australia is obsessive about importing rabies, which it doesn’t at present have.

Amtrak crashes.

+ Not good to ride in the first or second car.

Software to add to a new Windows computer:

My friend just bought a new ThinkPad laptop.

Software I recommended he should add: PDF Viewer, FreeFileSync, Search Everything, and old version Photoshop which is cheaper than the present version.

You also need to locate Scanpst.exe on your hard drive and initiate a link to it. Microsoft calls this software its “Inbox Repair Tool.” Its job is to clean up your Outlook.pst file – which contains all your emails, contacts, calendar – unless you’re using a server-based system. I run Scanpst every day.

Rome tennis is on. All the greats  are playing on the red clay. Fun to watch. I’m currently watching Federer play Berdych. Oops he just him.  The Italian Open is playing on The Tennis Channel.

Thoughts for this weekend

+ I am neither for nor against apathy.

+ They told me I was gullible and I believed them.

+ Experience is what you have left when everything else is gone.

+ One nice thing about egotists … They don’t talk about other people.

+ All I ask is one chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.

How to negotiate with your dentist! This one is for Dr. Mac.

A Glasgow man phones a dentist to enquire about the cost for a tooth extraction.

“£85 pounds for an extraction, sir” the dentist replied.

“£85 quid! Huv ye no’got anythin’ cheaper?”

“That’s the normal charge,” said the dentist.

“Whit aboot if ye didnae use any anaesthetic?”

“That’s unusual, sir, but I could do it and would knock £15 pounds off.”

“Whit aboot if ye used one of your dentist trainees and still without any anaesthetic?”

“I can’t guarantee their professionalism and it’ll be painful. But the price could drop by £20 pounds.”

“How aboot if ye make it a trainin’ session, ave yer student do the extraction with the other students watchin’ and learnin?”

“It’ll be good for the students”, mulled the dentist. “I’ll charge you £5 pounds but it will be traumatic.”

“Och, now yer talkin’ laddie! It’s a deal,” said the Scotsman. “Can ye confirm an appointment for the wife next Tuesday then?”

Harry Newton who wonders about Washington. All this stuff about the billions they need to fix the automated stopping system on Amtrak trains. Surely more attention to an engineer who’s running his train at twice the speed limit is in order? With eight dead, it seems to me that the train’s driver should be charged with manslaughter. Is it a good idea to have engineers who are under 30?

I got my math wrong yesterday. It’s 22 lobbyists for every member of Congress. No wonder Congress is dysfunctional.