Do you remember much from your freshman course in sociology? Me neither! I cannot remember the professor’s name, but I do remember one particular statement he made: “Anybody who wants to be a cop is therefore unqualified to be a cop!” Huh? His belief was that honorable citizens of a democracy find it so repugnant to beat-up other citizens that they will avoid that duty…
Generalizing individuals, especially millions of individuals, is tricky business and usually in bad taste, so here we go: Early last summer, the media was obsessed with the rapidly falling economy. While I can talk for hours about the defense measures our economy can deploy, I find it helpful to tailor my comments to the listener’s generation. After all, life’s expectations reflect life’s experiences. Members of…
The local Veterans Administration medical system has a new, modern check-in procedure . . . by text message. There is just a large sign instructing veterans to text a five digit number, and they would then receive a reply-text with instructions on what identifying information is needed and must be entered by the veteran. I was sitting in back of the waiting room when an…
My latest newspaper column lives here: https://www.pilotonline.com/inside-business/vp-ib-expert-flinchum-0116-20230117-rxidvdqb6vee3g77tigd36m644-story.html
It was 1969 that I was selected for a particular mission. We were told to report, of all places (?), to Fort Gulick in the American Canal Zone. When we arrived, we signed papers that said we would never disclose what we learned from the classified documents we would see. Punctual as always, the briefer and the documents arrived exactly on time. (We were even…
https://baycapitaladvice.com/comparative-debt-ceiling-economics/
Here is a column I wrote back in 2019 about the insanity of debating the debt ceiling. https://www.pilotonline.com/inside-business/article_fecaf2c0-5ace-11e9-a648-33d438ae14b0.html
The debt ceiling is stupid! While the goal is great, it has never worked. Why keep doing something stupid? Here is a blog entry I wrote ten years ago: https://baycapitaladvice.com/ceiling-uncertainty/
I’ve long respected the late Queen Elizabeth for providing the “stiff upper lip” to the British people but thought the remainder of the Royals were just a bunch of pampered sissies, except for the two princes. While both had military service, William was a military bureaucrat, and Harry went to Afghanistan TWICE. Obviously, I respect Prince Harry but regret his comment about killing exactly 25…
Years ago, I enjoyed scuba diving and did many open-water dives, as well as night-dives, cave-dives and even shark-dives, but the dive I remember most often was a drift-dive off Cozumel. For a drift-dive, you let the water current simply carry you along, drifting as the underwater world passes by. Cozumel has a ten mile long coral reef that you can watch while drifting. There…
Thirteen years ago, Bitcoin started to show up in the financial media. Soon, there were other crypto-currencies. Today, there are hundreds. This delighted younger investors, as well as younger advisors, as it was something new that older investors and older advisors could never understand nor appreciate. Annoyed, I decided to make a deep-dive into the subject. My first conclusion was that, except for criminals, there…
It is that time of year when pundits feel compelled to make forecasts. The overwhelming majority of forecasts each year are either (1) more-of-the same or steady-state or (2) the sky-is-falling. Of course, both are theoretically reasonable. The current U.S. economic data is almost uniformly positive. That optimism seems to be contagious, as more foreign countries seem to be improving as well. Even more positive,…
