A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
I’m off to the BIO conference in Boston, dear readers! Blogging may be pretty light, as I likely won’t have much free time, between exhibit hall hours and dinner. Still, I’ll try to take neat pix, make funny observations, and otherwise entertain you when I’m back.
In addition to being the Comics Reporter, a smart cultural critic, and official VM Bestest Pal, Tom Spurgeon also knows a little something about horse-racing. Here’s his guide to the Kentucky Derby (and the other Triple Crown races), which I guess is being run in a few minutes.
Berkshire Hathaway just held its annual meeting, in which Warren Buffett fields questions from shareholders. For six hours. He’s 77. I’m just sayin’.
Anyway, the Wall Street Journal had some highlights from the Q&A (I think it’s $-to-read, but that’s probably why Rupert Murdoch bid $5 billion for it, and not the Times or the WaPost). I never really knew anything about Buffett till the dot-com boom, when he was getting lambasted in the press for not buying into internet companies. At the time, he basically responded that none of those companies had a viable business model, and he didn’t understand how any of them could make money. Since he wasn’t one to trade on volatility, he stepped aside, was regarded as a dinosaur, and is now back to being regarded as the sage of investors. Perspective’s a funny thing.
I think his aversion to derivatives mirrors his dot-com experience:
In fielding a question about derivatives, which he once referred to as “financial weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Buffett told shareholders that he expects derivatives and borrowing, or leverage, would inevitably end in huge losses for many financial participants.
“The introduction of derivatives has totally made any regulation of margin requirements a joke,” said Mr. Buffett, referring to the U.S. government’s rules limiting the amount of borrowed money an investor can apply to each trade. “I believe we may not know where exactly the danger begins and at what point it becomes a super danger. We don’t know when it will end precisely, but . . . at some point some very unpleasant things will happen in markets.”
And, in fact, he brings the derivatives issue back to the mentality that ruled the dot-com era: volatility.
Exacerbating the problem of derivatives and leverage is the short-term trading mentality and high turnover in the stock and bond markets, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger added. “There is an electronic herd of people around the world managing an amazing amount of money” who make decisions based on minute-by-minute stimuli, said Mr. Buffett, adding, “I think it’s a fool’s game.”
It seems that the Q&A is also a venue for people to grill Buffett about his personal life:
A shareholder from St. James, N.Y., who said he brought one of his five daughters to the meeting, asked Mr. Buffett to explain why he supports organizations such as Planned Parenthood. “It just doesn’t seem to jibe with the hero that I studied,” the shareholder told Mr. Buffett amid boos from the audience.
“Men set the rules for a lot of years, and I think it’s wonderful that women can make reproductive choices,” Mr. Buffett replied, as shareholders applauded and cheered.
Almost makes you wanna raise $109,500 to buy a single share of Berkshire Hathaway.
(Speaking of which, here’s a link to a PDF of the tangled web of investing in PetroChina.)
(Update: more coverage from a variety of sources.)
 People actually buy books when there are so damn many?
People actually bought books when they had covers like these?
Imagine how much better this blog would be if I had time to write about all these stories!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: May 4, 2007”
I hit a nearby Apple Store after work yesterday to pick up a pair of iPod Nanos. I’m using them as giveaway incentives for a couple of surveys we run at my magazine. While I was at the counter, a strange transaction took place nearby.
I had missed the early stages of it while I was shopping (I found a neat future purchase), and it reached “I want to speak to your manager” level by the time I was checking out.
The gentleman next to me was in his mid-30s, wearing a t-shirt, athletic shorts, and flip-flops. He asked the store manager, “What’s the problem with returning this? I didn’t open it.” and pointed at the box on the counter.
The manager replied, “The box is still sealed, so that’s fine, sir. The problem is that we stopped selling this version of the iPod in early 2005.” At this point, I looked over. It was a 40gb iPod Photo, which would’ve dated it late 2004/early 2005.
“So?”
“So, if you bought it from Apple, that means it’s been sitting in that package for two years. If we accepted it as a return, what are we supposed to do with it? We can’t resell something that’s been obsolete for two years.”
“Why is that my problem?”
“Because you don’t have a receipt and you’re asking us for $499 credit for something with no value.” I forgot how much those were selling for. The biggest iPod nowadays costs $150 less than that, with twice the capacity, video, and longer battery life.
“I’m going to take this up with your corporate office.”
“Do you want their number?”
He stormed out, flip-flops slapping at his heels.
Someday, I’m hoping there’ll be a biography about me with a title as good as this one.
I can’t even come up with a funny headline about this post. Just read it.
When I was an undergraduate at Hampshire (1990-1993), I didn’t really understand what “the culture wars” were. I just thought it was a hassle that I had to go over to UMass to take a Shakespeare course, since the only offering we had was “Shakespeare’s Treatment of Women.”
I ended up with plenty of academic horror stories that I share with the incredulous from time to time, especially when they think they went to a far-left, theory-laden school. Trust me: you had nothing on Hampshire.
That’s not to say that the school only churned out jargon-spouters and bitter rejects. My buddy Mark considers his Hampshire experience entirely worthwhile and definitely doesn’t fall into the pomo camp.
Ron Rosenbaum recently posted about a particularly theory-focused Shakespeare professor, whom he called The Relic:
It’s not about him, but about a sadly obsolete, discredited vision of literature he shares with all too many in academia who committed to it without much skepticism when they were graduate students and lack the intellectual independence to question it now. The Relic was the embodiment of two generations of pseudo-scientific sophistry that gave itself the shorthand name Theory in literary studies. It was based on the work of a French theorists, notably Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, whose transmittal by gullible relics continues. Continues even despite the recent revelation that Foucault had, in his recently translated late works, repudiated the sophistry upon which most academic literary criticism is founded (I wrote about this in an earlier blog post citing the distinguished philosopher Richard Wolin writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education last fall).
Now, as long as this stuff “only” affects literary studies, I guess we could recover. After all, I went on to St. John’s, where we throw out the critics and dive into the books themselves. (Early on, most of the graduate students face the moment in seminar when they cite a critic or theorist’s take on one of the books and get asked, “Yes, but what do you think about the book?”)
But according to Ron’s followup post, this trend has walloped the study of physics, too. Ron included a long comment by Professor Frank Tipler of Tulane (coincidentally enough, my other undergraduate institution):
At the overwhelming majority of physics departments at American elite universities, the importance of gravity is denied. I am aware of no American university that requires, for an undergraduate degree in physics, a course in general relativity, which is Einstein’s theory of gravity. At the overwhelming majority of American elite universities, one is not even required to take a course in general relativity even to get a Ph.D. in physics! As a consequence, the overwhelming majority of American Ph.D.’s in physics do notunderstand general relativity. If a problem arises that requires knowledge of Einstein’s theory of gravity, almost all American physicists can only look blank. This is in spite of the fact that general relativity has been known to be the correct theory of gravity for almost a century.
And it gets worse. The greatest achievement of physics since the Second World War has been the discovery of the Standard Model of particle physics, a unified theory of all forces and matter not including gravity. The Standard Model has been experimentally confirmed, and some dozen and more Nobel Prizes in physics have been awarded for the discovery and experimental confirmation of the Standard Model. Yet I am aware of no physics department in the United States that requires a course in the Standard Model for an undergraduate degree in physics. Very few, if any, require a course in the Standard Model even for a Ph.D. in physics.
So one can get an undergraduate degree in physics and even a Ph.D. in physics, without knowing anything at all about the fundamental forces that control the universe at the most basic level. Since our entire civilization requires at least somebody knows basic physics, requires that at least people who have Ph.D.’s in physics know basic physics, this is a disaster.
In the Mathematics and Natural Science segment at St. John’s, some students took issue with the definitions at the beginning of Euclid’s Elements. The first two gave them fits: A point is that which has no part, and a line is breadthless length.
They kept trying to deny the validity of the rest of the geometry by denying the truth of the definitions (when we studied Lobachevsky, things really went off the rails: ha-ha). All of this bickering came to a head on the first day of the semester. My buddy Mitch got up from the table, stormed to the blackboard, hit the chalk against it once, then dragged it across the board, and said, “There! That’s a point! And that’s a line! The only people who really need to get them right are NASA and they can’t and that’s why the Mars Observer vanished!”
This shut everyone up. Except the incoming graduate student who happened to work for NASA.
The moral? Get yer basics down, and worry about denying reality later.