Maggie's Farm

I like Guggenheim S&P500 Equal Weight (RSP). For equities, I prefer it to S&P 500 funds, which are weighted by market cap, but I keep my equity money to a relatively small % of my modest pile of financial assets.

My Godfather was one of the original inventors of mutual funds. At the time, he only sold his funds to rich guys.

His first fund was simply to sell shares of his own portfolio from his inheritance from his family. He had done well with it, and had sold the family business.

When I was a kid, he would tell me that he was certain that, in the future, retail funds would be a big business, diluting risk. I didn't really know what he was talking about. He was slightly ahead of his time but made enough money to build a custom 92-foot sailboat which is all he ever dreamed of.

Guy did not leave me a penny, but left me the memories of his companionship and the example of his Christian faith which has been a great gift indeed. I never told him that before he died at his desk in his office, aged 88.

I do not care to pay for actively-managed money. When it comes to investing on the retail level, I have always said that one can never get rich that way unless one is blessed with the same combination of recklessness and luck that wins the Powerball. Like investing every penny you had in Microsoft when it first went public in 1986. Some office secretaries did, though, just like all the regular citizens of Omaha invested in Berkshire 40 years ago just because they knew Warren from around town.

Over time, however, one can hope to maintain one's financial assets and keep up with inflation and sometimes exceed it. Public equity markets are a sophisticated casino. Over the years I have gotten some very good tips, but a prudent person without inside info never wants to risk enough for it to make a meaningful difference in the end. I will confess that I own a few individual stocks.

It's those occasional base hits in bullish markets which keep retail citizen dopes like me coming back to the casino, while the people making big money in markets are those who construct and sell the financial products we little people buy, and the people in the non-public markets (eg venture capital, hedge funds, etc).

I am still waiting for a major market crash or correction. I have cash waiting in my "retirement" account, but that ammo is getting rusty.

An English war for American independence:

 It is fashionable today to view the Revolution as one might a traditional war between foreign powers, but, in truth, the break of 1776 was the latest in a series of fallings out between brothers — a civil war fought by men who were separated by an ocean but not by a history. Reading through the extraordinary profusion of pamphlets and gripes that the crisis produced, one cannot help but be impressed by how keenly the revolutionaries hewed to existing principle. Thomas Paine, perhaps the most radical of the agitators, may have believed that he could start the world all over again, but the colonists who marched with him mostly definitely did not. Instead, they sought a restoration of their inheritance, the Constitutional Congress asserting in 1774 that British subjects in America were “entitled to all the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural- born subjects, within the realm of England.” In the same year, William Henry Drayton, a lawyer from South Carolina who later served as a delegate to the Congress, fleshed out the claim, establishing in a tract of his own that he and his countrymen were “entitled to the common law of England formed by their common ancestors; and to all and singular the benefits, rights, liberties and claims specified in Magna Charta, in the petition of Rights, in the Bill of Rights, and in the Act of Settlement.” With this popular sentiment, Drayton and his acolytes set themselves up as the Roundheads of the New World, linking spiritual arms with the parliamentarians of the English civil war, with the seditious architects of the Glorious Revolution, and with all who had established colonial outposts in the name of English freedom.

From Sultan's Remember Your Right to Happiness:

 The Redcoats are not about to march into Boston, but the Regulators are. The rising power of government has transformed its laws and systems into a means for the elites to impose their will on the whole country, to stamp out their private pursuits of happiness for collective ends.

The Problem With a Culture of Excellence - Asian Americans have become a model of academic achievement. This is bad news for basically everyone.

Is it?

It's bogus to compare nations, really. It's apples and oranges. In America, K-12 has tons of immigrants who are not yet acculturated and do not have excellent English. And when it comes to college, America aspires to send everybody there, not just the scholarly. Why? Don't ask me. A credential I guess. Thus it makes no sense to compare with places like Finland or Singapore, or places like the UK with high bars for university entry and without mass-market schools.

As Schneiderman asks, How good are American universities? How can you tell?

The main NYT article is Americans Think We Have the World’s Best Colleges. We Don’t.

I recently had a conversation with a multi-multi-millionaire who recently sold his second business start-up at age 43.

He is a humble guy, good golfer. He told me that he was advised that he was not "college material" - and "I am not", he says. "I am not a scholar, not intellectual, not very smart but I am energetic, and strong on practical and common sense. I learned my math at work because I had to." He became an apprentice (I can't say in what area) and in ten years owned a rapidly-growing company with 130 employees and two warehouses.

He told me his future plans too, but I want to keep it short and confidential.

Anyway, it raised the question for me: What is "college material"? Or is that term obsolete?

Bill Clinton: States should experiment with marijuana legalization

Pot should be decriminalized everywhere, state by state. It should never have been criminalized in the first place. All it does is make you stupid, lazy, and hungry. If you want to be a pothead, be my guest. Like heroin, you can already buy it cheap on any street corner in the US. It's a free country. Waste your life if you want, but not on my nickel.

How screwed up is the Ukraine? Very.

Canada pulls the plug on the U.S. Keystone Pipeline – will send oil to Asia

Such a greenie victory, to let the Chinese burn it. Great.

The SCOTUS decisions today? They don't really mean that much, despite the howling hysteria.

A sample of Luther's table talk, from a piece at Scriptorium Daily:

Although I know this [i.e., that I am to rejoice in the Lord and expect good of him], I am of a different mind ten times in the course of a day. But I resist the devil, and often it is with a fart that I chase him away. When he tempts me with silly sins I say, Devil, yesterday I broke wind too. Have you written it down on your list? When I say to him, you have been put to shame, he believes it, for he does not want to be despised.

Another:

Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches the meat! All his
thoughts are concentrated on the piece of meat. Otherwise he has no
thought, wish, or hope.

Luther was an outspoken, plain-speaking fellow. The piece is here.

Slaying, yet again, the idea that the languages we speak shape the thoughts we think.

I understand that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is out of favor if not largely disproven, but it still makes sense to me in many instances, especially with more abstract concepts.

How magical thinking haunts our everyday language, and fossilised ideas live on in even the most sophisticated science. One quote:

Newton’s wrong guesses are, however, as interesting as his correct ones. A well-known example is his conviction that light is made of particles, not waves. What he had in mind were solid ‘corpuscles’, not the photons of modern physics, but it’s still tempting to see him as having been half right. And in trying to explain the splitting of white light into a spectrum, he came up with the beautiful notion that the width of the coloured bands matches the mathematical proportions of a musical scale. People had traditionally counted no more than five colours in a rainbow, but for his theory to work Newton needed more, so he introduced two ‘semitones’, orange and indigo, and we’ve been counting seven colours in a rainbow ever since. Generations of schoolchildren have learned mnemonics that colour-code light, such as ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’, which have as much to do with physical reality as the signs of the zodiac.

Prof. Mankiw makes the case that inherited money is good for the economy.

Who cares? It's their money to do whatever they want with it. They are free to just burn it if they want to (or is burning money illegal?)  Mankiw is correct, though, about reversion to the mean.

Things are changing fast: Fast Times in Higher Ed. I believe that the old late-medieval model, designed for dedicated scholars, will survive but in small, elite places. It was never meant to be mass market.

Monkeys Are Better Stockpickers Than You'd Think - Why dart-throwing primates demolish S&P 500 returns and most active fund managers don't even come close.

Actively-managed equity accounts are widely considered a rip-off for the muppets. I am not rich enough to get into hedge funds, but I'd like to be because those smart folks can do far more than I can, hedging currencies, national economies, sovereign debt, etc. while the average Joe like me is stuck with mass market retail products.

I like to have money, and enjoy the concept of making money in markets while busy at my day job. I keep spare cash in a Vanguard bond fund, while my IRA is miscellaneous but mostly Vanguard funds with a focus on proven income-producing equities and some balanced funds plus some good (legal, of course) stock tips, and some cash for the next market crash, locked and loaded. I control my IRA.

I also have substantial debt in the form of a low-interest but fairly large mortgage which I intend to keep as long as I am able to work. As I have calculated it, keeping a mortgage is a net gain for me.

Most people want capital-preservation above all, but if you want risk to make real money in markets, do what monkeys do and use your crystal ball and pick the right stocks instead of indexes indices and buy low, sell high. After all, funds dilute gains. So hire a monkey.

What do y'all do with your spare cash and with your long-term savings?

Americans seem to want a little bit of both. The Founding Fathers knew that you can’t have both.

Jefferson well knew that one of those rights—to pursue our own happiness in our own way—would yield wildly different outcomes for individuals. Even this most radical of the Founding Fathers knew that the equality of rights on which American independence rests would necessarily lead to inequality of condition. Indeed, he believed that something like an aristocracy would arise—springing from talent and virtue, he ardently hoped, not from inherited wealth or status.

In the greatest of the Federalist Papers, Number 10, James Madison explicitly pointed out the connection between liberty and inequality, and he explained why you can’t have the first without the second. Men formed governments, Madison believed (as did all the Founding Fathers), to safeguard rights that come from nature, not from government—rights to life, to liberty, and to the acquisition and ownership of property. Before we joined forces in society and chose an official cloaked with the authority to wield our collective power to restrain or punish violators of our natural rights, those rights were at constant risk of being trampled by someone stronger than we.

Portrait is the deeply-wise dead white male James Madison. To be an American, you need to know what he thought about this experiment in freedom.

One of Bush's major errors was creating the Dept. of Homeland Security. Something like that was bound to become trouble in the future. It has produced a police/surveillance state which, I would suggest, no American wants: Has the Dept. of Homeland Security become America’s standing army?

What do traffic cameras on my semi-rural Main St. have to do with preventing another 9-11? Nothing, but they are getting a nice shot of me waving crazily at the camera as I park in front of the hardware store to buy a door hinge.

"Just stopping in to get a door hinge," I shout out to the camera as I wave. "Harmless errand."

You do not have to be paranoid to get creeped out by this stuff, and the NSA. It's not American. I would abolish it all. The FBI was enough.

The various ways of thinking about Constitutional Originalism: The Founders' Originalism. A quote:

The three schools of originalism are... incomplete at best. The framers did not intend to enable democracy simply through the Constitution's open-ended rights provisions, nor did they mean to constrain it just through those provisions; both Balkin and his libertarian-originalist counterparts simplify their claims too much. Rather, the framers wanted to enable democracy, but they wanted to enable it specifically by constraining its excesses — and thus the presumption-of-constitutionality originalists also oversimplify the political theory of the Constitution. No construction like a "presumption of liberty" or a "presumption of constitutionality" can reliably be used in determining original meaning because the framers had to make compromises among the ends of government and the three grounds of legitimacy.

Instead of reading the Constitution through the lens of a single theory of original meaning, we should simply read it with an awareness of its compromises and philosophic inconsistencies. This may actually be what a more complete and true originalism would entail — that we interpret the Constitution without resort to any modern construction, be it a presumption of liberty, of democracy, or of constitutionality.

All Dads need is a little appreciation, a couple of books, and butterflied lamb on the grill - cooked by Himself, of course. We do Costco for lamb.

I toss the lamb into a small garbage bag in the fridge overnight (we marinate everything in garbage bags) with olive oil, a pile of chopped fresh mint and rosemary, chopped garlic, salt and pepper. Wine is optional.

Next day, toss on grill, and let the herbs etc burn into it. Unless you are Irish, cook only until red in the middle. Overcook it, and you have made a very expensive dog dinner (or an Irish feast). One cool thing about butterflied lamb is that the variation in thicknesses permits all preferences of done-ness. The thick parts should be rare.

Serve with a mountain of mashed potatoes and salad, and a Cote Roti.

If you require mint sauce, do not use the store junk. Make this - it takes 2 minutes, assuming that your mint patch is already overflowing. No dessert - you don't want to ruin the experience. Just go straight to bed with your books, dogs, and wife because you have to get back to work in the morning.

In my opinion, it's the only grilled food that approaches burgers and hot dogs for pure grilling joy.

From last June, but still fresh: Leon Wieseltier’s 2013 commencement address at Brandeis University. One quote:

“For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning—to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality…”

From Richard Dawkins, Cyclops of Science:

The only thing worse than a pugnacious atheist is a pugnacious atheist who has a fetish for scientism. In that light, Dawkins’ bemoaning of childhood fiction actually makes sense. Devoting an inordinate amount of his life’s work to empirics makes any man coarse. Facts are blunt and stark, while imagination can be bright and stirring. The greatest works of art and architecture produced by man weren’t the product of cold calculation. They were inspired by a volition that doesn’t take cues from controlled laboratory experiments.

Here's a good piece on scientism as a superstition.

From The Government’s Bailout of College Grads Continues:

 Repayment caps such as those offered through income-based repayment and other policies put no downward pressure on college prices. After all, why should colleges reduce tuition rates if the government keeps increasing student-loan subsidies? Making income-based repayment options even more generous will continue to enable universities to raise tuition and fees, confident that students will have access to a deep well of federal loans and grants, which will be paid-off through IBR and loan forgiveness on the backs of the taxpayers.

Same topic from McArdle: Cheaper Student Loans Won't Curb Higher College Costs

Taxpayers already pay for high school. That ought to be enough.

Taranto: Springtime for Warmists - A Beltway commentator endorses "dictatorial" government.

Please give me the power. I promise to make everything new and beautiful for you ignorant little people who do not understand what you really want or what is best for you. Furthermore, I'll turn your slob husbands into young studs, your wives into Miss Americas, your bank accounts into mountains of gold, and I'll make the oceans recede by shipping water to the moon (with apologies to those with waterfront property).

Some of it is becoming invisible.

I blame global warming.

His report here. He does not sound happy.

It's about politics gone mad. The clip of Ted Cruz is good.

At Maggie's Farm, we believe that politics has become too important in life because government has become too large and powerful. Perhaps it has always seemed thus to regular people, through all history.

Good friends have a daughter who will be starting at the University of Alabama this fall. The brilliant (math, physics, dance, violin - not Asian but with 800s.) kid would only apply to southern state colleges. South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama. She wanted a cultural change, a complete change of pace from Yankeeland. Good for her. Each one she applied to offered her a full scholarship to go, but the parents honorably refused any scholarships, feeling that they should go to those in need. (This family was all set to pay for Harvard, so they got a windfall even without the scholarship offer.)

Mom told me that the kid had already lined up her roommates via facebook, that she had already found sponsors for the sororities she wanted, and that she had already gotten her football package online. Mom told me she said something like "Honey, this is supposed to be school. Are you planning on studying anything?" This was not the kid she knew.

"I'll worry about the details when I get there, Mom. I'm gonna be a physics major and a performing arts minor. I know what I'm doing, so don't worry about me."

Tuscaloosa. I enjoy seeing what kids will do. It will change her life, probably for the better.

Change is good, or people get in ruts. Over many years, I think we finally found our right rut. It's about friends, interesting activities, a comfy-enough home to sleep in and in which to hang some pictures, a couple of horses and a barn, and a church home. It takes many years, many adventures and a few failures, to find one's right happy rut for the long haul. Even then, who knows what might come next? For me, I plan to work until I cannot.