Grant, partner since 2018 (Downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba)
Photo by one of our advisor partners: Lonn Vokey
Canadian personal debt
Investors: The one thing separating excellent from competent
The market exerts an enormous gravitational pull. Because managers are constantly being compared to it. This is great when they’re beating it, but horrible when they’re not: It creates a toxic mix of peer pressure and personal financial risk (chiefly getting sacked). The pressure to ‘copy’ the market is huge, so most end up mimicking it to one degree or another.
Humans naturally fear an outsider, and acting differently marks you out as a threat (even if the thing you’re doing is perfectly harmless). We instinctively know this and feel the pressure to conform for safety’s sake. And you can see this allotment’s peer pressure a mile off, which is why, despite not appearing happy to, most are doing the same as everyone else.
All great investors, past and present, are specialists, not generalists. They’re laser focused on doing one thing, and doing that one thing really well.
The rub is that, no matter what your one thing is, it won’t work each and every year. This means there will be years when everyone else — the market — looks better than you (even Buffett — he’s had plenty of years like that).
Now, if I (or you) pick managers who say they only do one thing, but stop doing it after a tough year or two, I’m stuffed. It means I’m spending too much time exposed to their one thing when it’s not working, and not enough time when it is.
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.
This week’s fun finds
Don’t Just Spend Your Time – Invest It
The go-to verb for what we do with time is “spend” it. Researchers say it might be better to think of time as something we invest, using our precious hours to accumulate a wealth of fulfillment and meaning that our future selves can draw on.
This shift in thinking is particularly important because it might help us think longer term. Recent research by Hal Hershfield and Cassie Holmes, both professors at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and their collaborators indicates that those who think about their time over longer horizons—say, years or a lifetime—tend to be happier day-to-day and more satisfied with their life.
When we invest money, we tie up our present resources in exchange for future gains. But investments of time have the advantage of paying out in both present enjoyment and far-off benefits, says Prof. Holmes.
Prof. Holmes recommends determining your own best investments by performing an audit of your time use for a week or two. This exercise, which Prof. Holmes details in her book “Happier Hour,” consists of recording, in half-hour increments, what you did and how happy you felt while doing it on a scale of 1 to 10.
When choosing between different ways you could allocate your time, it can also help to imagine what your future self might hope you chose.
“Who am I, what am I going to be doing in five years, 10 years?” asks Prof. Hershfield. “When we look back, we don’t want to regret finding that our time slipped through our fingers, being spent on stuff that turned out to not be all that meaningful.”
This 22-year-old is trying to save us from ChatGPT before it changes writing forever
After the fall semester ended, [Jeff] Tian traveled home to Toronto for the holidays. He hung out with his family. He watched Netflix. But he couldn't shake thoughts about the monumental challenges confronting humanity due to rapidly advancing AI.
And then he had an idea. What if he applied what he had learned at school over the last couple years to help the public identify whether something has been written by a machine?
Tian already had the know-how and even the software on his laptop to create such a program. Ironically, this software, called GitHub Co-Pilot, is powered by [ChatGPt’s predecessor] GPT-3. With its assistance, Tian was able to create a new app within three days. It's a testament to the power of this technology to make us more productive.
Now humanity faces the prospect of an even greater dependence on machines. It's possible we're heading towards a world where an even larger swath of the populace loses their ability to write well. It's a world in which all of our written communication might become like a Hallmark card, written without our own creativity, personality, ideas, emotions, or idiosyncrasies. Call it the Hallmarkization of everything.
Which brings us to the other purpose that Tian envisions for his app: to identify and incentivize originality in human writing. "We're losing that individuality if we stop teaching writing at schools," Tian says. "Human writing can be so beautiful, and there are aspects of it that computers should never co-opt. And it feels like that might be at risk if everybody is using ChatGPT to write."
