The Poisoned Watermelon

I know the story wasn't meant to be literal, but we have fruit trees that we've spent years growing and today somebody thought it was ok to completely strip 2 of our peach trees. They didn't take 1 or 2 which I could have lived with, but thought they were entitled to steal every single bit of time, money, and sweat put in to them. I'd have rather them stolen something much more expensive that I had just paid for. Some people really are awful.

Ah, this appears to be the answer to the question some of us had about your thoughts on Biglari Holdings! 😉

If there was ever a company interesting enough to justify breaking the "too small" guideline for, it would have to be Biglari...

Also, I think it's funny that so many of the regulars here have an interest in the same small cap company, all having found it (presumably) independently.

This vaguely reminds me of a lesson I learned while working at Walmart. It only takes one bullet to kill you (or your career). When I took this lesson to heart I knew I had to stop working hard and stop going out of my way to help customers and provide more value then I'm worth to the company. Instead I had to cover my own butt.

One of my current minor life goals is: To crush any who purposefully makes my life uncomfortable or eliminate anyone who threatens my health, family, or finances. I want to have a spine as they say. But at the end of the day I just don't think I could make the right decision and secretly poison one of my watermelons. Neither could I wait out there with a shotgun and kill the thief when I find him.

One things for sure, when I was reading the story I didn't identify with the thief, I identified with the Watermelon owner.

Reminds me of one of the rarely seen movies of Charles Bronson, "Mr Majestyk". He was in fact a watermelon farmer who just wanted to harvest his melons to avoid ruin. (a buck for any of you who have seen the movie, haha)

Joshua, do you ever worry about prying eyes in your brokerage accounts (ex. Bloomberg terminals) that monitor better than average investors for their own gain? Basically steaing your hard work /knowledge? How can you protect against this?

Joshua,

As a relatively well known figure, due to this blog and your about.com articles, how do you deal with many of the people who many envy your success. Obviously stealth wealth helps, but in your case, given your public persona, have you had issues with members of the public?

I know you talked in a mailbag post a few years back about people's misconceptions of wealth, with regards to religion, but I'm speaking more explicitly to envy as it appears given a large sum of money, many would squander it rather than invest it for the future.

Actually poisoning a few strategically placed watermelons without declaring it would be the logical solution. This might just improve society as well.

Could you clarify how killing the thief improves society?

Fewer thieves = better society. And less opportunity for thieves to breed, so win-win.

So do you disagree with the notion that stealing, being rooted in the reptilian part of the brain, is inherently human nature?

As if there aren't enough problems in the world already.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/comment/11602399/Ban-cash-end-boom-and-bust.html?fb_ref=Default

As it stands now, the Constitution gives Congress the authority over the monetary system. They could easily implement this tomorrow if they wanted. It could be entirely avoided if we, as a people, were to pass an explicit "right to privacy" constitutional amendment rather than relying on the Supreme Court to expand the freedom on a case-by-case basis, perhaps even carving out monetary anonymity and a European-style "right to be forgotten" online protection.

Shouldn't a person be able to walk into an ice cream shop and buy an ice cream cone without having that data recorded somewhere?

Shouldn't you be able to go to the movies, with cash in your pocket, and not have your personal information tied to the theater?

Shouldn't you be able to save up money that only you know about, that doesn't appear on the balance sheet of any bank or is any way tied to your Social Security number (provided you've lawfully paid taxes on it)?

I'd say yes. I don't consider giving that up worth the trade-off of fewer booms and busts. It's like the terrorism thing ... I don't consider giving up the freedoms of Western Civilization worth stopping a September 11th every generation or two. The cure is worse than the disease. The idea they would tax accumulators like you and me to juice a system that has already been inflated by government intervention ... I just ... the stupidity is too much sometimes.

Generally, though, when it comes to personal freedoms, the U.K. has what some constitutional scholars have called "[freedom] lite". They are much weaker than those enshrined in our system. In the U.S., things like the right to freedom of speech is so paramount, the idea of hate speech is absurd. It can't exist. You cannot criminalize speech, no matter how disgusting, unless it meets an extremely high test for clear and imminent danger (e.g., "Go shoot that person in the face!" during a riot). Something like this, were it passed into law, would result in half of Congress losing its job here in the U.S. It's seems ... wrong. It seems evil. No matter what it achieves, it gives way too much power to the government.

(In any event, this is going to send the people around this part of the Bible Belt into an absolute meltdown with the end-time belief of things like "the mark of the beast", without which you won't be able to buy or sell.)

Agreed. And I just saw your data post. I'd put it in the Top 10 you've ever published. Truly awesome.

The problem is, I'm surrounded by friends that went into teaching who report the following events:

1. Superintendent suggests measuring something that may not be perfect proxy, assuring that he "knows it's not perfect"

2. Once it gets implemented, the data is actually spoken of as Gospel, as if a teacher using a photocopier five minutes before class is proof that she is unprepared, and

3. The rise of no-parents-without-appointments, metal detectors, and doors that lock automatically at 4:30 already make some schools feel like lightweight versions of jail cells. Data-tracking bathroom visits only exaggerates the cutural death of schools when you add a double-helping of invasive-ness.

Yes, your post was great. Especially the caveat about not measuring intangibles and being sure you're interpreting the inputs and outputs correctly. The follow-up question, though, is what happens when you try to use data for purposes beyond yourself? How do you extend it to a large family, organization, or company without draining morale? No rank-and-file employee welcomes the arrival of the Big Data People, and I don't think it's solely because they want to get away with laziness. I'd love an addendum on how to implement data without destroying the morale of others.

That's a fantastic question and one of the reasons I hate the attempt to measure things that can't be measured, whether it's using beta as a stand-in for risk in securities valuation or total hours worked rather than actual productivity output. Like you, a lot of my friends are teachers and the things they talk about when we go out to lunch are maddening. (I think years ago I mentioned how one of them had a coworker who took over a freshman literature class at a local high school only to discover most of the students couldn't read beyond probably a 5th or 6th grade level (It's been awhile, I don't recall the exact figure but it was absurd) ... she had to resort to picture books. They were afraid to fail any of the kids to mess up their metrics and invite lawsuits by parents so they just kept socially promoting. That's crazy.)

The post, as you correctly point out, was aimed at individuals managing their own life. I believe everything starts with the individual, and by extension, the family. For an institution, it's a very different thing. I'd look at what you were attempting to achieve and measure that, allowing as much individual freedom as humanly possible without cutting into the metric because if you treat people like non-thinking cogs to be stuck in a machine, you're not going to end up with a very successful business now that we live in the the modern knowledge economy, a few industries or tasks being the exception. Some of Aaron and my best ideas occur when we're out walking in the middle of the afternoon, or not being particularly productive in a classic sense. Our mind gets to rest and wander. When you're at peace, a lot of things get connected; you aren't under pressure. Almost the entire business agenda for us this year, by way of example, was set during our trip to Southern California, sitting on the beaches or driving through farmland. It let us evaluate from a distance what we could improve. Those weren't wasted hours, or weeks, at all.

The problem arises when managers, clients, politicians, or others look at the data only, and don't think about what it means. This is especially troublesome when the metric in question creates incentives that directly conflict with the mission.

Prosecutors should be interested in justice, not "win" records.

Doctors should be interested in health, not "patient satisfaction scores" (how candid are you going to be if you know being frank with a patient might harm your career prospects?).

Portfolio managers should only be interested in risk-adjusted increases in after-tax, after-inflation purchasing power over periods of 5+ years, not performance relative to a benchmark over 6 or 36 months.

If you get the measurement wrong - and a good corporate culture that prizes thinking, avoiding idiotic "zero tolerance" type no-logic policies that treat human judgment as if it were a plague seems to be the only defense - you're going to be less successful than you otherwise could have been. That's the only thing I know that works. You have to have a culture that rejects pedantic idiots or special snowflakes who are obsessed with the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the task like a failed tissue transplant.

(On a somewhat related note: For your own case study files, if you want to see a business that has drastically increased its probability of failure unless upper management is removed for precisely that reason, go look at Reddit. Investigate the allegations surrounding the CEO and the recent move to transform the site into a "safe space". The culture at headquarters has been infected to the point it's going to be hard to salvage because it's completely disconnected from the customer and the broader world, existing in a hugbox echo chamber. They did a data set on what users wanted and twisted the results to fit their own ideology. If it isn't stopped, you're going to see entire groups and users banned for violating arbitrary rules that go against the entire spirit of the business they built in the first place. It's like watching an incredible enterprise be destroyed in real-time by incompetent executives. I've been documenting it for my own purposes. I also simultaneously deleted years, and hundreds of thousands of words, of my postings, wiping my words from public view in most ways because I no longer trust them to have my best interest at heart.)

I agree that the recent changes at Reddit are a severe departure from its original mission. However, the comments regarding Ellen Pao's questionable background seemed odd to me. Are you sure this isn't a case of horns-and-halo? If anything, I think her (seemingly) unscrupulous, Machiavellian nature might be beneficial in converting Reddit from an open platform into a mass-media franchise built on an illusion of freedom.

I say this because when I joined Reddit a few years ago, some of the old-timers had already made posts criticizing the upvote system and how the depth and variety of discussion were suppressed by frivolous digressions and downvotes, respectively. They had already started migrating into more obscure subreddits to elude invaders with nothing more to contribute than memes and pun threads. And since then, Reddit's membership has continued to grow. A lot of people will say they want free speech and expression, but in practice what they really crave is the approbation of their peers: to make it to the front page or lay down a creative one-liner and get gilded. I'm no exception to this: I went full lurker (and abandoned the Disqus account I used for your blog) when I realized that the incentive to hunt for upvotes (validation) was adversely impacting the quality of my contributions, both on Reddit and in the comments here.

Think of the mass appeal of Facebook - it caters to the human need for vanity and validation, and Reddit seems to be moving to fulfill a similar set of needs: entertainment and validation. Maybe Ellen Pao will give Redditors that by pulling the PR stunt of creating a "safe place." Essentially, herding users into a walled garden. Under this system, people are free to bask in the warm glow of validation, with no dissenters to unthrone you from whatever views you hold. They'd be happier there, even if that's not what Reddit was conceived for.

If it works, Advance Publications will benefit regardless of Ellen Pao's personal decisions.

If you want a feel good story: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/obituaries/leo-drey-dies-missouri-s-largest-private-landowner-until-he/article_736f1bd8-6103-5202-aad0-7f74cb8f9234.html