Tag: food

REFEREES

Bob Ridenour: ‘I think maybe the Libertarians would prefer to play football without referees. The Republicans would prefer that the referees stay out of the game, but then follow you home and make offsides and illegal procedure calls in your bedroom. The Democrats want the referees to focus on the game, but they think that every player should be able to gain at least two yards, and the ones who are particularly skilled or lucky enough to gain 50 shouldn’t complain if the statistician marks them down for 30 and distributes the remaining 20 to those who were tackled behind the line of scrimmage.’

IRAQ

Hugh Hunkeler: ‘One thing to think about when discussing the potential war with Iraq: It may be that being willing to go to war will make it unnecessary to do so. But being unwilling to go to war could back us into a corner where that becomes the only choice. Think about Neville Chamberlain and appeasement. The whole ‘Bush wants a war’ crowd really missed the point. I doubt that he or any of us *wants* to go to war. However, being unwilling to enforce the UN resolutions could lead to bigger conflicts later. On top of that, giving Iraq time to hide all the WMDs and evidence thereof may prove to be a mistake.’

☞ I agree with most of that. I’ve bolded the part I think needs comment. I think this war was central to Karl Rove’s political strategy all along (don’t believe me – believe his own PowerPoint presentation) and that the timing – to have the debate fall precisely into the slot between Labor Day and Election Day – was not based on the national interest. Also, that the initial unilateral approach was rightly deserving of the large crowd of (bipartisan) criticism it got.

FIRING GAY ARAB LINGUISTS

Jim McElwee: ‘Maybe some semblance of sense can come of the perverse situation wherein the Arab-language students were discharged from the military because they were gay. Let the government hire these same people as civilians, send them to the same schools to develop the same skills they were learning, and finally assign them to sensitive locations as civilian intelligence analysts – and, of course, pay them ten times the amount they were earning in the military.’

☞ This is indeed the obvious (interim) solution. President Clinton lifted the security-clearance ban on gays and lesbians, which affected not just federal employees but – far broader in its implications – employees of government subcontractors, so now IBM and hundreds of others that proudly include sexual orientation in their official nondiscrimination policies (and routinely offer domestic partnership benefits to their GLBT employees) can make some money selling the taxpayers what some young Americans who hoped to serve their country would have provided for much, much less.

Rick Rood: ‘I cannot imagine that there is one family or one single survivor of 9/11 that would care if the person who could have prevented their loss were homosexual or heterosexual.’

☞ While both Gore and Bradley called for fixing Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, President Bush has said it’s OK as is. So – especially with a fundamentalist majority leader in the House who says he believes God put him on this Earth to promote ‘a more Biblical worldview’ – we are likely to have it a while longer.

ANIMAL RIGHTS

Bill Schwartz: ‘Regarding your November 14 column on the Pollan article, I’d like to suggest you take a look at an extremely elegant book on the subject, Animal Liberation by the philosopher Peter Singer. Though Singer has been viciously excoriated in the mainstream press, I think if you read his book (something most of his critics have obviously never done), you’ll see that he is actually quite rational and thoughtful. I’m a longtime vegetarian who loves every bite of food I eat. My take, in a nutshell, is that we should all be honest with ourselves about the moral compromises we make – and we all do make them. Torturing sentient animals is obviously wrong, no question. If we decide to eat meat or otherwise participate in that enterprise, we should honestly acknowledge that we’re not living up to our values, just as we do when we fail to invite homeless people to live with us (I don’t, though morally I should). Personally, I find that avoiding meat is so trivially easy that I can’t justify the moral compromise of doing anything else. I actually eat a much greater variety of food and enjoy it more than I ever did during my years of meat eating. Plus I feel far better and weigh a lot less. Other people draw a different line. In our culture, that line often stops at pets, not for any particularly good reason. But we all do draw a line.

‘What bothers me most are the intellectually dishonest apologists who actually try to morally JUSTIFY torturing animals and other obviously despicable behavior. The arguments are absurd, e.g. wild animals kill and eat each other, so why shouldn’t we? Well, wild animals sometimes kill and eat their own babies. Does that mean it’s morally OK for us to do that, too? Of course not: the whole point of morality is to help to behave better than we would if we just did what our instincts and desires tell us to, like animals.

‘P.S. I must thank you for the “Ask Less” link at upper left. As a result of reading Less’s comments there and in your column, I wound up hiring him for comprehensive financial planning. He’s been terrific, and I have benefited greatly.’

Kevin Brown: ‘I am conflicted about the idea of animal ‘rights.’ I certainly like a nice steak, and have worked on farms slaughtering animals. Not pleasant, but necessary. I guess it comes down to how much cruelty we are prepared to accept in order to save $1 per pound or whatever. And yes, when just getting enough food to live on is difficult these questions seem irrelevant. For another perspective, read Fast Food Nation if you haven’t already.’

Pete Costello: ‘The waste by-products from the meat industry are some of the more pervasive pollutants in the world – just look at the Mississippi River. We cannot afford to be so short-sighted not to realize by now that human health is inextricably bound together with the health of the planet. The environment in which we live would be much healthier if we ate less meat.’

CARROTS

Jonathan Edwards: ‘After 40 years on this Earth, I learned from a newspaper article the other day that ‘baby carrots’ aren’t immature carrots – they’re simply normal carrots chopped into small pieces and put through some sort of screen to make the ends rounded. I haven’t figured out how they shrink a normal corncob to make baby corn, but maybe the newspaper will explain it next week.’

SALMON

Jay Donnell: ‘Farmed salmon are raised in an environment that would surprise most people. (See this from Earth Times.) The farmed salmon have to be artificially colored to achieve the color of wild salmon.’

HORSE MEAT

Robert Rogers: ‘It was the Harvard College Faculty Club that served horse meat. An issue that is unrivaled in insignificance.’

☞ Not, perhaps, if you are a horse.

Tomorrow: Does Dave Need Life Insurance?

But first . . .

THE CHICKENS

Some of you read Thursday’s column too quickly or else I didn’t write it very well (or both), because the part about pigs and chickens was intended to be pro-animal rights. But I adopted something of a Friends, Romans, Countrymen, approach, trying to make the 95% of our friends who order Big Macs without qualm nod their heads . . . and only then get to the point. Forgive me if I did not make that point clear, as I will forgive you if you got too angry to reach it. But – throwing any subtlety, irony, or black humor to the wind – I do think it’s terrible to perpetuate needless animal suffering. And I do hope people come to see what we are doing to chickens and pigs and such rather than look away, so they can at least make an informed choice. That’s why I thought the Pollan piece was worth highlighting.

Steven Coultas: ‘I agree that if you’re going to eat other animals, why not cats, dogs and horses? I just take this the opposite way – since I wouldn’t eat cats, I won’t eat the other animals either.’

☞ Exactly. I just thought it would be more effective to raise the inconsistency and let people spot it on their own. And, in truth, I haven’t fully taken it to heart, either. I rarely buy meat. But if it’s served, I enjoy it. And I eat a lot of fish – although I would imagine that most of a shrimp’s life, or even a salmon’s, entails little of the torture we inflict on chickens.

More tomorrow – but don’t think you can get out of . . .

JURY DUTY

I don’t know how it works where you live, but in Miami they have actually figured this out. Indeed, I have only two suggestions. The first concerns the brutal, brutal time at which jurors are required to report. Eight in the morning! Who is even awake at eight in the morning? I finished posting my column around three, got three hours sleep, staggered into the shower, left a million dead skin cells on a freshly washed towel, staggered into my clothes, squinted blearily at the hundreds of other drivers I was shocked to find on the road with me at that hour – could this many people have been summoned for jury duty? – pulled into the parking lot, passed through the Dade County courthouse metal detector without even having to remove my shoes, found a seat as far from everyone else as possible, whipped the cushy blue eye-pad out of my cargo-pants pocket – these things could block out the flash from a tactical nuclear weapon – and went back to sleep.

My first suggestion is that Court begin at nine, but that the first couple of hours be spent trying to settle cases without going to trial, so jurors wouldn’t be needed until eleven – earliest. This would make jury service significantly less onerous.

My second suggestion is that some sort of friendly letter or brochure accompany the ominous jury-duty summons so people would be less apt to try to duck it.

(A similar brochure should accompany appointments to have an MRI. You are not, it turns out, locked like a torpedo inside a torpedo tube – at least with the ones I’ve had, you could wriggle out if you absolutely had to. And the noises! It’s so cool! Five minutes of nyack-nyack, nyack-nyack, nyack-nyack, nyack-nyack, nyack-nyack, nyack-nyack, nyack-nyack, nyack-nyack, nyack-nyack, nyack-nyack, nyack-nyack followed by five minutes of rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, rubba-dubba, switching to other other-worldly mantras until, completely relaxed, you emerge with a nice image of your torn rotator cuff and a bill for $800.)

For Dade County Jury Duty, the pitch might go something like this.

Hey, amigo! Just what you were hoping for – Jury Duty. But it’s not as bad as you think. Here’s what you should know:

It’s very possible you won’t even have to do this. Just call in after 5pm the night before your service and a recorded announcement will let you know, based on your summons number, whether you need to report the next morning. If so (on the third night, my luck ran out), you’ll find a very large room with TV monitors hanging from the ceiling and reasonably comfortable seats . . . adjoining rest rooms and a snack bar (great tuna salad sandwiches and vanilla cappuccino!) . . . an introductory video explaining why good citizenship is important . . . free movies the rest of the day . . . a ‘Quiet Room’ for those who want to read or work with their laptops (yes!) . . . at least an hour for lunch (we got 80 minutes, so I went across the street and explored the Miami Historical Museum) . . . and a couple of nice guys with good people skills who manage the process in a relaxed, friendly way from a podium mike.

If you’re not placed on a jury, your service will conclude at the end of the day. And if you are self-employed, you will be paid $15. But what happened in our case is that the 56 of us who had not been placed on a jury (out of about 80 called in that day) were given a choice shortly after we got back from lunch: Leave, but forfeit our pay; hang around until 5pm. All 56 of us left. Those with real jobs were told that must return to their regular place of employment for the remainder of the workday. A few doubtless did.

That wasn’t so bad, now was it?

This is the second time I’ve had to do jury duty. The first time, it was all phone – I never had to show up. The next time, I might even have to serve on a jury. But in that case, if it went past three days, my pay would notch up from $15 a day to $30.

So you start reading this past Sunday Times Magazine cover story on animal rights – chickens, pigs, chimps – and you are so pleased, if you enjoy a really crispy, crispy piece of bacon as much as I do, that the author, Michael Pollan, is not falling for any of the typical animal rights hogwash (pardon the pun, but if we’re washing the towels, we should surely wash the hogs). Which is I guess why the cover line for his piece is, ‘The Unnatural Idea of Animal Rights.’

(Eating dogs, which Lewis and Clark did with some relish, is, of course, beyond the pale, as would be eating cats – oh, the beating I took from some of you a year or so ago when I made a tasteless cat joke! Likewise, horses, which Lewis and Clark also ate, and which the Harvard Club of New York (or was it Boston?) used to serve but long ago discontinued. But those three – dogs, cats and horses – are about the only sacred cows, as it were, that spring to mind. Well, giraffe, and so on, but I’m talking populous animals. Cows themselves, outside the subcontinent – well, the thing about cows, and billions of chickens and pigs, for that matter, is that they wouldn’t even be alive, most of them, if we didn’t eat them, because if we didn’t eat them – or at least milk them and grab their eggs, both of which are hard to do with a pig – there’d be no reason to raise them in the first place. So most of them owe their lives to us.)

OK, ‘pass on the sea bass,’ but not out of some goopy sympathy for the bass – they’re fish – but only because at the rate we’re devouring eating them, we’ll soon be one menu item poorer.

Pollan’s is a long piece (though it does not extend to sea bass), as he takes us through all manner of moral distinctions between man and beast (beasts eat beasts, why shouldn’t we?), and then takes us on a tour of chicken factories and pig factories and shows us what the ‘lives’ of these creatures are like.

I put ‘lives’ in quotes because unfortunately he goes into some factual descriptive detail and, well, yes, it does appear we are torturing these animals in the most horrific way, but he recommends that we ‘look away’ – because otherwise we will find ourselves searching out vegetarian cookbooks or, at the least, those more expensive ‘free range’ chickens.

And this leads to a whole bunch of corollary thoughts.

The first is that no way are we going to swear off barbecued chicken or pork . . . the world has much bigger problems than the treatment of chickens and pigs and, well, this is just silly. What’s next – vegetable rights? Have you seen the way those little baby carrots are skinned and suffocated in those plastic bags at the supermarket? Are we going to start picketing with ‘Liberate the Carrots!’ signs?

The second is that, well, obviously carrots don’t feel pain – or at least don’t express it very well – and, even if they do, they don’t suffer all their lives until they’re harvested, the way factory chickens and pigs do; they only suffer (bending over backwards to give carrots the benefit of the doubt) when they are chopped up.

So the third thought is that, well, actually, if you read the facts – let alone actually visit the factories (not me!) – you come away thinking that, hmmm, maybe it wouldn’t kill me to pay a little more for my chicken and bacon and burgers if that meant they could be raised more humanely. (Slaughtering them more humanely might be good, too, although that’s just a few seconds of their lives.) Maybe those folks in Florida weren’t so dumb to pass ‘Question 10,’ the Pregnant Pig referendum, a couple of weeks ago, after all.

But the fourth thought is: Fine for us, who can afford it, to say – but what about the low-income folks for whom an extra $1 here and there means literally less or no chicken or ribs. Are you going to side with chickens over humans? Are we going to start passing ‘cruelty to animals’ laws now? First they make it illegal to smoke on airplanes, now they want something to protect dogs and cats and pigs and chickens? (You will correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we actually do have a body of such laws. They just don’t seem to cover the food factories.)

The fifth thought is that, with proper labeling, we could make these choices voluntary. You could choose to pay somewhat more to do what you consider to be the moral thing – buying only humanely treated and slaughtered animals – just don’t you dare to try to force me to pay more for your idiotic bleeding heart liberalism.

The sixth thought is that we could have used the approach with dogs and cats and horses. Treating them inhumanely could be legal . . . just something some would choose not to do . . . while others, either through lack of feeling or lack of funds, would let their animals suffer.

The seventh thought is that, given price competition, and absent regulation, there is a race to the bottom. If one supermarket chain has its meat products consistently $1 a pound higher than another, guess who’s going to lose market share? Or if the chains can buy their meat a little cheaper from one supplier than another, guess which supplier is going to get the business.

Which is why – eight – Peter Amstein’s pal Congressman Baird’s comment from yesterday comes to mind: ‘The Republicans think football would be a better game without referees. I’ve seen it played that way and I disagree.’

Forget the partisan part of that (although I’m guessing you’d find more Democrats than Republicans worrying about how chickens suffer) . . . the overarching point is this: without regulation, competition can take us places we don’t want to go. Because in many instances, one competitor can’t afford to do some socially desirable thing (pollute less, inflict less suffering on animals, pay its lowliest workers a living wage, provide clear product disclosure) unless all are required to do so. The irony of it – the game theory aspect of it – is that, individually, a majority of the competitors might actually want to do these socially desirable things. They’re nice people just like you and me. But until they can be sure their competitors all will, too, and that there will be some enforcement mechanism to discourage cheating, they can’t afford to.

This is also the dynamic of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons,’ explained so importantly decades ago in the Garrett Hardin essay of that name that every high school senior should be assigned.

And it’s why it’s dismaying that the administration would be cutting the proposed budget for the Securities & Exchange Commission. And be so adamant in opposing higher fuel efficiency standards, which are easily and economically attainable without loss of safety or comfort, in our vast fleet of vehicles.

Yes, regulation run amok is always a danger. But so is insufficient regulation.

The ninth thought (and I must report for jury duty in five hours, so if you’re lucky, this will be the final thought) is that it’s not just the suffering of animals we choose not to see.

(Let’s be frank. Most of you will not find the time to click the link to read Michael Pollan’s long piece, because you’re not keen on knowing much about what sort of life your chicken led before being chopped into McNuggets. Most of you will not want to know that pigs are pretty intelligent, relatively speaking – they are not carrots – or hear what we put them through before slaughtering them.)

The truth is, I am only moderately concerned about the animals. I’m more concerned than I used to be, the more so after reading Michael Pollan. But in a world of very limited resources, I do believe we should focus most of our attention on human suffering. I’d just ask you not to laugh too hard at the animal rights people – they are not suggesting animals be given the vote, only that they not be tortured.

But – still on this ninth thought – it’s not just the suffering in chicken factories we choose not to see. It’s human suffering. I believe that Republicans and libertarians looking into the eyes of a human in difficulty are every bit as compassionate as Democrats or anyone else. But in the abstract, I think they are less willing to make the connections, or go out of their way to look.

Take the minimum wage. Republicans generally resist raising it; Democrats generally favor raising it (within reason). Republicans don’t say they’re against raising it because they’re too selfish to pay a dime more for their fast food – and I don’t believe many actually feel that way. They say they don’t believe the government should interfere and regulate and that if we did raise the minimum wage – say, from $4.25 to $5.15, as was done early on in the Clinton administration – or if we passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, we’d wind up hurting the very people we want to help. Unemployment and inflation would rise as low-wage folks were tossed off the payroll and prices had to be hiked to pay the extra costs. Instead, of course, despite that long overdue hike in the minimum wage, we managed to enjoy the lowest unemployment and inflation in generations.

I readily admit that there are limits to what can sensibly be done with the minimum wage – or with the earned income tax credit or with a Marshall plan for the Third World or with prescription drug benefits for the elderly or with a whole lot of other worthy things. But I believe that if our Republican and libertarian friends looked at the problems closer, they’d be less quick to fight these things. Instead of gargantuan tax cuts for the rich and powerful – which cut deeply into the revenue available to make a better world – they might decide that the plight of the rich should not be our top priority, after all, and that we shouldn’t shift what looks to be about $2.5 trillion over the next 15 years back into the pockets of those at the very top of the pyramid at the expense of other priorities.

(Yes, I know: it’s their money! No one should have to pay high taxes! But I still feel this way.)

Jeb Bush, governor of Florida, who is now being talked about as a Presidential candidate for 2008, cut in half the one Florida tax that applies only to the well off. And then, because of budget constraints, he eliminated 51 out of 55 prison drug treatment programs and cut the budget for programs outside prison by 34%. Sure, he’d like to see every kid have a happy life and grow up to be a productive citizen – who wouldn’t? But he campaigned against the Florida initiative that would put a cap on classroom sizes. (And he told one group of insiders, not realizing a reporter was present, that if the initiative passed – it did – he would find some ‘devious’ ways to keep from having to implement it.) These are choices. There is no right answer. I just believe that if we would force ourselves to look at the chickens in the factory, or at the human suffering around the world, we might make them a little differently.

Sorry Friday wasn’t posted until Saturday. Next you know, they’ll be starting autumn a day or two late as well. (How did that happen? Wasn’t it supposed to start September 21? Has the Earth wobbled? Will Halloween be November 1 this year?)

Anyway . . .

Edward: ‘Pepsi has a new patriotic can coming out with pictures of the Empire State Building and the Pledge of Allegiance on them. But Pepsi forgot two little words on the pledge, ‘Under God.’ Pepsi said they did not want to offend anyone. If this is true then we do not want to offend anyone at the Pepsi corporate office. If we do not buy any Pepsi product then they will not receive any of our monies. Our money after all does have the words ‘Under God’ on it. Please pass this word to everyone you know.’

☞ In the first place, Pepsi is not doing this – it’s apparently one of those urban legends that just cycles round and round the Internet. Click here.

But the message obviously touches a nerve.

I totally respect Edward’s right to feel as he does and boycott Pepsi; but I see it differently.

The Pledge of Allegiance worked just fine from 1892 to 1954. That’s when, during the McCarthy era, “under God” was added.

Now that an appellate court has ruled this addition unconstitutional – which the Supreme Court may or may not overturn – attention has been focused on the issue of whether, to affirm one’s patriotism, one should be required to affirm one’s belief in God.

I think the great thing about this country is that faith is voluntary. That makes faith all the more meaningful, because it is chosen, not imposed.

To take a less highly charged example . . . I would never burn the flag or show it any other disrespect. But I profoundly oppose the flag-burning amendment that, thankfully, seems to have stalled.

Why? Because the whole POINT of this wonderful, wonderful country is that you CAN peacefully dissent without fear the government will come and take you away, as it would have in, say, the Soviet Union.

The reason not to burn the flag should be that we cherish what it stands for – not that we fear a $500 fine or a month in jail, or that the government compels us to respect it.

What if the official pledge were: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands – one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all who believe in God or are at least willing to pledge that they do.”

I think it works better as it was from 1892-1954: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands – one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’

Not bad.

Tomorrow (which may fall on Wednesday this week): The Difference Between Airline Stocks and Drug Stocks

SATIRE

Stephen Gilbert: ‘Your reader’s response to the Borowitz Report quote shows how acceptance of the increasingly incredible behavior of our ‘leaders’ makes satire a risky business. I wonder what you’d have to say about Bush/Cheney for it to be clearly untrue.’

Dan Albro: ‘I wasn’t upset with your inclusion of the Borowitz report article about how the administration is blowing off Hussein’s acceptance of UN weapons inspectors until the next day when I opened the newspaper and discovered that everything it said was true.’

WASHINGTON POST ARCHIVES – FREE FOR TWO WEEKS BACK

Gary Brown: ‘If you use the ‘search’ box on the Washington Post main page, instead of the ‘archives’ link, you can find the past two weeks worth of articles free. Here’s the link to the article you mentioned yesterday.’

☞ You’re absolutely right, of course. It did seem odd they’d be so Draconian. Thanks.

TRULY THE WORST IDEA OF THE MONTH

Ron Paul, Republican Congressman from Texas, in the House of Representatives, September 10, 2002: ‘Mr. Speaker, I rise to introduce legislation to restore financial stability to America’s economy by abolishing the Federal Reserve . . . Abolishing the Federal Reserve will allow Congress to reassert its constitutional authority over monetary policy.’

☞ Just what we need.

FROM A MAN WHO NEVER ATE PIZZA

Chip Ellis: ‘Fresh anchovies are not salty and they are delicious!’

FROM A MAN PACKED TIGHT IN A CAN

Jay Glynn: ‘Anchovies come from Sardinia. Everyone knows that.’

☞ Sure. But where does Sardinia come from?

AND NOW! DICK DAVIS #34

Item 34: A Critique Of CNBC

Many of you spend time watching CNBC. It has almost become a national pastime. It appears on the computer screens of stockbrokers so the customer won’t know more than the salesman. Because it’s a financial news show, the emphasis is on immediacy, the breaking story, the very latest news and opinion. The focus is short-term, which makes it an indispensable tool for the trader. But it is the long-term approach that serves us best as investors. This sets up a conflict of interest. Holding on to stocks for the long term may be difficult emotionally when exposed to a continuous barrage of news and opinion. Ask any broker how many times agitated customers call to sell solid, long-term positions after hearing unsettling news on television, news that can cause a sudden, dramatic move, with the stock symbol painting the tape, but news that is likely to end up no more than a blip on a long term chart. Television’s obsession with analyzing and dissecting the mostly meaningless news minutia of the day hampers our ability to see the big picture. Its up-close focus is incompatible with the broad perspective needed by the long-term investor.

How do we as viewers deal with the fact that CNBC’s non-stop, fast-paced, play-by-play format with engaging on-air personalities, energizing music and slick graphics produces an entertaining, financial variety show that makes for good television but does not make for good investing? We deal with this by being aware of what matters and what doesn’t matter. Although they are rarely mentioned in CNBC’s breathless, Walter Winchell, ‘tout TV’ type format, it is important that we put news and opinions within the context of the long term, over-riding directional influences on the market. Influences such as the likelihood that deeply entrenched trends in stocks or the over-all market are likely to persist; influences such as the likelihood that the market will travel deliberately down the path it must take to satisfy its internal needs. These needs might include correcting previous excesses or correcting current valuations or anticipating a stronger or weaker than expected economy, needs that take time to play out. During that time, the ‘news’ may or may not conflict with the market’s agenda but the latter will prevail. An awareness of these long term influences enables us to put in better perspective the news that XYZ company reported quarterly earnings one penny more than expected.

Yes, CNBC does lots of good things. It helps investors by teaching, by informing and by entertaining with extremely capable, articulate and personable reporters. My own view, however, is that the long term investor interested only in making money, and I repeat, interested only in making money, would make more of it by sticking to a strategy of buying quality, seasoned, industry-leader type stocks or top rated mutual funds or index funds – all at reasonable prices and then keeping his television set at a distance and using his broker sparingly. Such self-imposed isolation would avoid all kinds of emotional wear and tear and remove a major risk of being sidetracked from achieving long-term goals. Investors using a broker would give instructions not to call except when pre-determined price levels were reached (both on the upside and downside) or when news occurred that the broker felt represented basic change with long term significance. Being informed by mail would be preferable since it gives the dust a chance to settle and since only time puts news in perspective.

Of course, none of this advice is practical. It’s not going to happen. The investor will always want to know what’s going on with his money. He is not going to recuse himself from his TV or his broker or the Internet, nor should he – since these are all aspects of investing that make the pursuit of profit more pleasurable. And, for many investors, brokers play a key role. We need them; the best ones are invaluable. So the way to deal with the never-ending deluge of investment information is to try and scotch guard your emotions and observe with detachment. Develop your ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, to tune out the static and increase your filtering skills.

BREAKING NEWS

From the Borowitz Report:

September 17, 2002
Breaking News
IRAQ AGREES TO WEAPONS INSPECTIONS;
CHENEY BEGS THEM TO RECONSIDER
Don’t Make Any Hasty Decisions, Vice President Urges Saddam

Just minutes after the government of Iraq agreed to the unconditional return of U.N. weapons inspectors, Vice President Dick Cheney urged the Iraqis to reconsider their decision.

Mr. Cheney added that accepting weapons inspectors back into their country was a ‘big decision’ and encouraged the Iraqis to ‘sleep on it.’

ANCHOVIES

Chris Williams: ‘Only brine shrimp can live in the Great Salt Lake. It’s too salty for anything else. The entire lake region, including the nerve gas storage facilities to the south and the Air Force bombing range to the west, was once under a huge inland sea many thousands of years ago. It became separated from the ocean and largely dried up, leaving the salt behind. The deserts to the south and west are salt, not sand. BTW, that water you saw is at 4200 feet above sea level.’

DICK DAVIS #33

Item 33: The Market Has Its Own Agenda

Because the media fosters the myth that whatever happens to a stock or the market on a particular day is linked to news, there is the perception that the market follows the news. Actually, it’s the other way around. The market is the leader and the news follows. There is always good and bad news on a stock. Let’s imagine the good news is listed in Column A and the bad news in Column B. If the stock goes up, we use Column A to explain the move; if it goes down, we go to Column B. In 1987, there was no ‘trigger’ news, none, to explain the market’s 22% collapse on one day, October 19. But there was no shortage of negative stories cited after the fact. The obvious exception to the irrelevance of news is when the news is a surprise, in which case it can trigger an immediate, if not lasting, response.

So if it’s not ‘news’, what are the overriding forces that influence the market’s behavior? It’s my view that the market has its own needs and that whatever course it must take to satisfy those needs, it will take. Following a bull market, for example, its primary need is to allow enough time to pass to heal the valuation excesses of the previous cycle. Or it may need enough time to pass to allow earnings to catch up to unreasonably high prices. Or it may need enough time to restore the confidence level of investors. In the present market environment, for example, the combination of a bear market, a recession and September 11 has created a deep wound that is likely to take more time to heal. The market’s malaise has caused us to go from a ‘buy on weakness’ to a ‘sell on the rally’ mentality. It is only the prolonged reinforcement that comes from seeing the market go up, hold its gain, and then go up some more – from seeing that ‘buying on dips’ works, and then works again and again, that will restore investor confidence. Or the market may simply have a need to be true to its perverse nature by doing whatever it has to do to make the majority of people wrong. In any event, the market will play out its role, independent of the news, analysis and speculation swirling around it. Yes, news of earnings, the economy, interest rates and inflation are major long-term influences but, in terms of priority, the market will satisfy its own needs first. It will not be deterred from its own agenda.

Juan: ‘I think that it is OK to pay points when you take out a mortgage if you finance them (i.e., they become part of the mortgage). This way, you put the cash you would have paid for points to use in another investment at the same time as you get to enjoy the lower interest rate you got for paying the extra points.’

☞ I disagree, at least for most people. Here’s the thing: the only difference financing the points (or other closing costs of your mortgage) makes is that you now are paying them plus interest. Let’s say, after-tax, the effective interest rate on your mortgage is 4%. By adding the $6,000 in points (say) to the principal amount of your mortgage, you are just borrowing that much more ($306,000, say, instead of $300,000). So for someone who can easily make more than 4% on his money after tax, you’re right: financing the points makes sense, and can make paying extra points in order to secure a lower interest rate marginally more attractive (but only marginally). For someone who will make less than 4% after tax on their money, financing the points actually raises their cost. (And, of course, for someone who makes exactly 4%, financing the points is a wash.)

Well, you may ask, how is it possible for anyone to make less than 4% after tax on his money? And I would suggest that in a bank you will make less, in short-ish-term bonds you will make less. And if you go for the stock market or long-term bonds, there is the chance (if interest rates rise) you will make much less.

In short, I’m not sure that financing the points really does make them appreciably less costly for most people (and could actually make them more costly). Which brings us back to the straight calculation: Will the cost of the points be justified by the lower annual interest rate? And that, I think we agree, depends on the factors I cited. Sometimes the points will be justified, sometimes they won’t. Whether to finance them or not is a separate, less important question. It simply depends on whether you will earn more on that money than it costs you to borrow it.

QUESTION FOR YOU

I was just in Salt Lake and learned that it is ten times saltier than the ocean. Is this where anchovies come from?

Hang on – the concluding Dick Davis tips are on their way. And who knows what other divertissinvestment and investmentia. But today:

COFFEE

Monty Goolsby: ‘The day after I read your coffee column I was at this grocery store and counted coffee from over 45 countries. There were more but my girlfriend made me quit looking. I wonder how many people get their livelihood from that one store.’

Dean Cardno: ‘You might also look at a couple of books by Margaret Visser, a South African anthropologist, called Rituals of Dinner and Much Depends on Dinner. In each, she describes a pretty ordinary dinner, then goes into painstaking detail on the ingredients, their history of cultivation, and their importance to the cultures that grew them along the way. Do you know why an olive branch is a symbol of peace? Because it takes an ungodly long time for an olive grove to become productive, and it is a long and tedious time for a raw olive to be made edible. So in the days when olives first became a cash crop, they represented a civilized peaceful location where people would be willing to commit to the years of planning to plant an olive grove and wait for it to mature. Really good books – not as scientific-technical as the James Burke books others have mentioned. (They are good, too, although I get a little tired of James Burke – all bouncing from one idea to the next, and not enough thought about each one as he goes by.)

A SECOND CUP

And speaking of a cup of coffee – ‘a cup of Joe’ – did you see the really charming little profile of my friend Joe Cherner, the tobacco industry’s worst nightmare, in Thursday’s New York Times? It will make you smile.

TEA

I suppose the end of summer is an odd time to be writing about iced tea, but as many of you know, I have a small stake (equi-Tea) in a company called Honest Tea, started two or three years ago by a Yale School of Management Professor and one of his students. Well, sales have been growing like crazy (easy to do from a small base), and the publicity has been amazing (for an iced tea). It’s even been featured in Oprah Magazine. On the latest Top Tea best-seller list, in the health-food category, Honest Tea has six of the top ten.

But where I quibble is with which six. And with which varieties Barnes & Noble cafes (all of which carry Honest Tea) choose to stock.

Yes, I can see why Moroccan Mint is #1. It’s got a little caffeine kick (one-fourth the caffeine of coffee), 34 calories a pint, and the ‘green tea’ health caché. I can buy that. But where is First Nation, the caffeine-free peppermint varie-Tea? Barnes & Noble leans heavily toward Black Forest Berry and Assam, Decaf Ceylon and Kashmiri Chai, which are okay, I suppose, but hardly the stuff of Web columns. Instead, they should carry Gold Rush Cinnamon and Jakarta Ginger, which positively zing with flavor and a clean, healthy feeling.

[Note: No one likes ice more than me – I don’t care that the Diet Coke is cold, it must have an equal height of ice in the glass to be right – but, oddly, with Honest Tea it’s better to just drink it cold, right out of the bottle.]

TIVO

I am willing to grant that Honest Tea is not for everyone. There will be those who just need the sugar and the carbonation – or fermentation – of something else. Fine. But I cannot imagine someone who, once exposed to TiVo (in which I also own a few shares, but only out of wild enthusiasm for the product, not because it’s a good investment), could ever be happy again without it. Charles and I go nuts when we are watching TV the old way. Our thumbs instinctively click the replay button – what did he say? – or the pause button when the phone rings or the fast-forward button when a commercial comes on. Be honest: could you live without remote control? You could not. You will feel the same way about TiVo. It saves me 3,000 minutes a year on the Nightly News alone (which now takes a maximum of 20 minutes to watch instead of 30). And we never have to worry about missing a show we like. No, it’s not cheap, but this is why Santa Claus invented Christmas. And, no, it’s not completely simple to set up, but this is why God invented teenagers.

I had a cup of coffee. Black.

Nothing fancy.

Not bad.

Of course, to make the coffee I had to get some water from the tap. And for that, water had to get to the tap (and I had to have a tap).

And I needed electricity to run the coffee maker (and, yes, I needed the coffee maker).

And I needed the coffee, which in this case was grown in Colombia, which required a boat or a plane to get it to my supermarket (which required a supermarket).

And grinding the beans required a steel blade which required a steel mill and, previous to that, iron ore and huge equipment to extract the ore from the ground, and railroads to get it to the steel mill.

All of which required a tremendous amount of accumulated ingenuity.

I’m not saying Ben Franklin didn’t have coffee, and he certainly had tea, so, yes, one could have done it a simpler way. After five billion years, the planet and its inhabitants had evolved by Franklin’s day to the point of organized agriculture, and cooking-by-fire and horse-drawn transport. But I don’t think there was running water.

There he was – old Ben – on his roof, flying a kite in a thunderstorm (now there’s something his mother should have warned him about), trying to make sense of – and, who knows, someday perhaps harness – electricity.

This wasn’t very long ago.

I would like to see someone write book called, quite simply, A Cup of Coffee. It would have a chapter on each element that’s involved – or at least as many as could fit (decaffeination? color printing on the sides of coffee cans?). And it would be written for a broad audience – who of us is not intrigued by how the world works? – but especially for high school kids.

And there would be two points to it. One would be to teach a lot of stuff, like how running water works and how coffee is grown and what steel is (and who Bessemer and Carnegie were) and how hot it has to be to melt – and why whatever it’s in doesn’t melt, too (or, OK, but how did they forge that?) . . . so it could be a somewhat painless, maybe even fun, high school science text.

But the bigger point would be to show the centuries of astonishing effort, sacrifice and genius that have gone into the simplest things we take for granted. The hugely complex interdependence of our world. And the cataclysmic tragedy it would be if, having come this far, we allowed our most primeval of fears and hatreds and superstitions to screw it all up.

It’s just a cup of coffee . . . but it’s a darn good cup of coffee.

Please feel free to write this book.