Independence Day, 2025

One path to success is to be the world's best in a sought-after skill. Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams says that the vast majority of us who aren't so gifted should work on our talent stack,[bold added]

developing a variety of skills which combine to make someone a sought-after commodity.

Adams describes his own talent stack in the following terms: “I am a famous syndicated cartoonist who doesn’t have much artistic talent, and I’ve never taken a college-level writing class. But few people are good at both drawing and writing. When you add in my ordinary business skills, my strong work ethic, my risk tolerance, and my reasonably good sense of humor, I’m fairly unique."

Your humble blogger is an adequate accountant--but far from the best--and I have reasonably competent communication skills leavened by a sense of humor.

On this Independence Day let all our talent stacks be good enough to provide a decent standard of living for ourselves and our families.

Too Much Communication, Too Little Specificity

OTOH, if they say it's an emergency
but don't self-identify, it's likely a scam.

The Two Most-Dreaded Words in a Text Conversation are "call me":

For years, people have complained about receiving “call me” texts from parents, siblings, colleagues and bosses.

Much like how generations interpret emojis differently and Apple’s tapback message reactions don’t mean the same thing to everyone, the meaning—and urgency—of “call me” isn’t consistent. If “call me” comes with a GIF or an emoji, it could mean the conversation isn’t serious. Used with a period, some may interpret it as a sign of trouble. No punctuation could indicate there’s an emergency.

The deliberate ambiguity of a texted "call me," IMHO, is a power play. The recipient is forced to call on the off chance it's an emergency:

Cindy Chang, a 48-year-old clinical health, weight-loss and wellness coach in Brooklyn, N.Y., frequently spams her 18-year-old son.

She calls him on FaceTime, texts him, and then continues to do both over and over when he doesn’t answer. She calls to find out when he’s coming home, what he wants to eat or what groceries to buy—all conversations Chang sees as important enough to warrant a call (or several).

Chang says while her son isn’t a fan of her “call me” messages, she loves them because they let her “be immature and bratty” with her son.

“I try to bring more fun and joy into our relationship even though it irritates him,” Chang says.

Maybe it's a generational thing, but this boomer sees "call me" as extremely discourteous: 1) If a call is necessary, I always initiate it and don't make the other party have to call me; 2) If I do text a phone call request, I always give a short explanation about the seriousness, i.e, "X is in the hospital" or "need to discuss dinner plans"; 3) at minimum I add at least add another word, "call me please."

I'm on so many text threads that I've turned notifications off (one reason: someone sends a picture of her kid, and 10 people respond with a love-it emoji). One benefit of being over 70: I can claim (feign) tech ignorance: "I'm sorry I didn't see your text--these phones are so complicated!"

They're Different from You and Me

I thought I was fairly knowledgable about communication--both verbal and non-verbal--but a segment of the population does not speak a language with which I'm familiar.

How the Super-Rich Signal Their Wealth to Each Other [bold added]

‘The Asprey,’ a Patek Philippe perpetual calendar
chronograph, pictured before it sold at Sotheby’s
for $3.88 million in 2018. (WSJ/Balibouse photo)

gauche display is out. A subtler set of cues and signifiers is required.

The most straightforward symbols start with watches. One Wall Street macher explained, “You see a gold Rolex Daytona, that’s one thing. You see a Patek Perpetual and you say to yourself, OK, this guy’s playing a different game.”

...Pretending to play down your wealth while emblazoning your net worth in neon requires a lightness of touch. You can’t say it outright, but you want it crystal clear.

It’s extra tricky in Manhattan, where you can’t employ the usual clues of estates and automobiles. Here, people live in apartments many stories up from the sidewalk and out of view. They tend to interact at restaurants and galas, and they never drive.

So everything depends on attitude. You must act like big things in life are, well, no biggie. When you can wrangle people to your abode, serve a tub of Ossetra caviar with Lay’s potato chips. Place it out like guacamole on the coffee table.

Verbal cues confer insider status. High-rollers in the art world now refer to the most rarefied paintings as “pictures.” Thus, for a would-be bidder, a $40-million Abstract Expressionist canvas by Rothko is not a “masterpiece painting” but a “picture.” For most people, a picture is what your 4-year-old paints with a thick brush and primary colors for Mother’s Day.

...Of course, how you travel is essential. As a former Wall Street bank chairman told me, “OK, so you went to St. Barts. So what? That tells me nothing. How’d you get there? That is key.”

To telegraph that you flew private over commercial, those fluent in the language of wealth-speak have created new verbs. People say, “We NetJetted into Aspen. We just had to.” Pause. “Because of the dogs.” Transporting “the dogs” is somehow a constant justification for private travel.

Owning your own jet is a huge notch up on the totem pole. The effort to be blasé about your new Gulfstream G650 can be positively tortured. To signal that your NetJetting days are over, you might drop into conversation with a sigh, “We’ve got to find a new pilot.” This should be said in the same tone as a wearied parent complaining about needing a new babysitter.

Most of the top tenth of 1 percent worked hard to get to where they are. However, they can't clip coupons and relax. They must continue to work hard to signal where they are, discreetly, on the totem pole.

The Limits of Competition

(Image from Yale Insights)

During my career I worked for a CEO who thought internal competition was the way to get the most out of workers.

The competition was at its fiercest when it came to devising a new line of business. My team worked round the clock, as did the others, to come up with an idea and the strategy to implement it.

No team "won." We ended up adopting a strategy proposed by a well-known consulting firm.

Internal competition often is counter-productive.

Internal competition often stifles innovation.

That is what we found in a study of companies that pushed internal teams to compete with each other—whether for formal financial rewards like bonuses, or for informal ones like greater prestige, access to executives and influence.

Yes, by some indicators, the teams ended up working harder when they were battling each other. But they failed in another crucial respect: The more teams competed, the less innovative they were. Simply put, they were wary of sharing information with other teams, so they weren’t getting unexpected, inspiring ideas from people in other parts of the company.

In fact, the only teams that excelled in the study were ones that did choose to share information with others, whether out of necessity or strategically.

Competition drives innovation, but it appears not to work if the organization competes internally. [bold added]

How, then, can companies leverage the benefits of competition without sacrificing information sharing between teams?

For one thing, choose an outside target: Instead of making internal teams battle each other, have them try to beat external benchmarks, such as how many patents a rival company produces. Companies should also make efforts to ensure groups share information, such as holding regular meetings or creating a shared database that any team could use.

Competition is one of the foundational elements of capitalism, but it is not the only element. The free flow of information is another, as well as the shared value to seek the good of the whole.

Mickey Mouse Plan

We continue to pay for an old-fashioned telephone landline despite its escalating cost (currently $90 per month). From 2010:

[Our Mickey Mouse telephone] survives because it's our one phone that can operate if the power goes off say, during an earthquake. As long as our landline has tone, we can dial out ("dial" for once may be interpreted literally).

Suffering from escalating maintenance costs on copper-wire technology and from a shrinking customer base, AT&T wants to exit the landline business: [bold added]

A proposal by telecommunications giant AT&T to withdraw landline service from most of the Bay Area has sparked widespread fear among residents, many of whom live where cell service is spotty, power outages are frequent and losing connectivity is “very scary.”

...Thanks to its earlier monopoly status and state law requiring voice communications for all who want them, AT&T is for large areas of California the “carrier of last resort” — the utility required to provide phone service to anyone wanting it in its service area. In its proposal to the utilities commission to escape that obligation, the company said it is seeking to stop landline service only in areas “where there is a demonstrated voice alternative.”

Nearly all those commenting said they opposed the plan, citing a host of concerns, from medical crises to loss of communications during earthquakes, fires, floods and storms because cell phone infrastructure is damaged or power outages cut off internet service.

We are not as exposed to power outages and cellphone interruptions as residents who live in the mountains, but earthquake risk is enough to make us landline subscribers. We plan to keep Mickey Mouse useful as long as possible.

Paper is Safer

Our paper pile in 2016. A cost we're willing to accept.

We have always filed paper income tax returns. It's a procedure that has worked for us for over 50 years, and it's much easier to prove something to the IRS with a physical document, for example a post office receipt, than with an image that can be easily doctored. From 2012:

I'm old-fashioned: I prefer mailing a paper version of our tax return. There's a solidity to the accomplishment, and its heft conveys a sense of the work involved. (I also confess to a streak of rebelliousness: electronic filing is for the IRS' convenience, not ours, no matter what they say about getting our refund a few days sooner..)

I always feel disquieted when sending sensitive information electronically. E-mailed documents or those transmitted via "secure portals" are much easier for a crook to intercept than a mailed envelope. From 2023:

We are old-school and communicate on paper whenever possible when doing business with the government. Electronic documents, emails, and payments get misdirected often enough that we are comfortable using tried and true, albeit slower methods.

(Most taxpayers who use professional help don't have the option of filing on paper. Paid preparers of 11 or more tax returns must file their clients' returns electronically. We prepare our own taxes and still do 4 or 5 paper returns for friends and family.)

It turns out that there were good reasons for our feelings of distrust. E-filing has resulted in some taxpayers getting screwed (a technical tax term): [bold added]

The problems with e-filing aren’t widely known, even by tax professionals. Paper is more secure, as demonstrated by recent malware attacks on e-filing tax software and preparation companies such as Wolters Kluwer, and by data breaches involving taxpayers’ personal information such as with the company TaxSlayer. E-filing income-tax returns can also lead to unfair treatment by the IRS.

The IRS accepts returns that are e-filed or paper returns deposited in the mail by the filing deadline. If a return has enough information for the IRS to calculate the proper tax, it is considered valid. But such protections don’t fully apply to electronic returns. Authorizing your preparer to e-file on your behalf doesn’t protect you as a taxpayer, because the IRS doesn’t consider an electronic return until it acknowledges receipt.

In recent years, courts have upheld harsh financial penalties for taxpayers who thought they had properly e-filed. Christopher Haynes’s certified public accountant e-filed his 2010 return before the deadline in 2011. The IRS rejected the return on a triviality: A Social Security number was entered on a line designated for an employer identification number. Mr. Haynes didn’t know this until he received a penalty notice from the IRS in August 2012. A district court upheld the penalty, ruling in a summary judgment in the government’s favor that Mr. Haynes’s reliance on his CPA to e-file didn’t constitute reasonable cause to abate the penalty. An appellate court later vacated the decision, and the final outcome isn’t yet clear. (Mr. Haynes didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Wayne Lee’s CPA failed to e-file his client’s returns for 2014, 2015 and 2016. The accountant told the IRS that the software he used couldn’t handle Mr. Lee’s complex returns. But Mr. Lee said the accountant never told him about this problem. In 2019 the IRS assessed Mr. Lee more than $70,000 in penalties and barred him from applying his six-figure 2014 overpayment to taxes owed in 2015 and 2016. An appellate court ruled that reliance on his CPA wasn’t an excuse for making errors. The court noted that taxpayers can confirm timely filing with the IRS by phone or on the IRS website. Alternatively, instead of e-filing, the preparer can attach Form 8948 (Explanation for Not E-filing) to Form 1040 and file a paper return instead.

When a dispute can’t be resolved within the IRS, a taxpayer can petition the Tax Court—either by mail or by e-filing—seeking a favorable outcome. E-filing a petition with the Tax Court, however, also is risky. Antawn Sanders said he encountered technical problems while trying to e-file a Tax Court petition and spent almost an hour trying to submit it before the midnight filing deadline. The document ultimately uploaded 11 seconds into the next day. The court rejected it as late.

Roy Nutt e-filed his Tax Court petition on the day it was due at 11:05 p.m. Central Time. That meant it arrived at 12:05 a.m., the next day, in Washington, where the Tax Court is located. The court rejected the filing because it was five minutes late. An appeal is pending. Had Mr. Nutt mailed a hard copy to the Tax Court postmarked before midnight, it would have been accepted.

The security risks posed by e-filing are equally serious. The IRS works with a third-party vendor, ID.me, to verify taxpayers’ identities. Registering with ID.me is a prerequisite to obtaining an IRS online account or using the new IRS Direct File tax program. Taxpayers must submit copies of their Social Security cards or employer identification numbers and other documents to ID.me as proof of identity. I advise my clients not to use ID.me because it is a private database of personal information. My clients have no control over it and must trust that it won’t be hacked.

E-filing is widely used and isn’t always voluntary. The IRS mandates e-filing of certain forms for every tax-exempt organization, preparers who file 11 or more returns, and for any business filing 10 or more returns; each W-2, 1099, and payroll return counts toward the 10.

E-filing has also spurred tax forms to proliferate, making it more complex and costly for taxpayers to file returns. For example, Form 1040, which before 2018 was two pages long, now runs as long as eight pages.

Considering that e-filing isn’t as forgiving as paper filing and raises other risks, paper returns seem the safest bet. Unlike e-filed returns, paper ones won’t get rejected for failure to click on a box. You might even get away with missing a deadline by mailing a day late—though I wouldn’t 'recommend cutting it close.

We operate under a general rule regarding government agencies and large companies: if they want you to change your ways and you don't see what you get out of it, you can be assured that the benefit to them is great and that there are risks that they are keeping hidden from you.

We'll file on paper until they force us to do otherwise.

E-Mails: a Curse and a Blessing

(Universal scribbler)

I entered the work force in an era when it was considered mandatory to respond to every phone call and letter request. The reasons were intuitively obvious: a response could lead to a sale, you're representing your company which has the highest standard of etiquette, treat others how you wish to be treated, etc.

Then telemarketing and email happened.

Re phone calls, I initially spent too much time on the phone listening to sales pitches. Worse, I fell for a few of them and was usually disappointed by paying too much for products that fell shy of promises. Now every call from a number that I don't recognize goes to voicemail, and even within that group I ignore nine out of ten messages, which are, no surprise, from telemarketers.

I receive over a hundred emails a day. The majority go to the aol account that was originated in the days of floppy disks and dial-up modems. The yahoo and google mailboxes were created for specific purposes and capture the remaining traffic. The only vestige of traditional etiquette is that I always open and answer emails from individuals whom I know and apologize to if their message goes unanswered because it got buried or was sent to the junk folder.

The sea of communications from people trying to reach others to serve their own purposes has become a modern burden:

So many of us spend our days ruled by email: constantly refreshing, wading through detritus, paralyzed by the pressure of crafting a reply to the one note that actually matters. The moment we reach inbox zero, and few of us ever do, the ding sounds again.

Consultant Greg McKeown's suggestion:

Start your day by writing a list of priorities on a piece of paper. Block two half-hour slots on your calendar to really deal with your email—rather than scrolling through constantly—and ignore it the rest of the time, he says.

Regardless of the tech tools at one's disposal, one must spend 30-60 minutes a day on email in order not to lose control of the inboxes. E-mail supposedly has improved our lives immensely, but it sure has us stressing while sucking up our time.

The Blue-Green Divide

I forwarded this WSJ article to
a thread with only iPhone users.

The political extremes live in red and blue echo-chambers, but to the under-30 crowd the more meaningful divide is blue vs green and has nothing to do with politics.

Apple got creative in its protection of iMessage’s exclusivity. It didn’t ban the exchange of traditional text messages with Android users but instead branded those messages with a different color; when an Android user is part of a group chat, the iPhone users see green bubbles rather than blue. It also withheld certain features.

There is no dot-dot-dot icon to demonstrate that a non-iPhone user is typing, for example, and an iMessage heart or thumbs-up annotation has long conveyed to Android users as text instead of images.

This pic of a Thanksgiving turkey went
to a mixed Android/iPhone group.

Apple later took other steps that enhanced the popularity of its messaging service with teens. It added popular features such as animated cartoon-like faces that create mirrors of a user’s face, to compete with messaging services from social media companies... customers were particularly fond of replacing words with emojis and screen effects such as animated balloons and confetti.

Avid teen users said in interviews with The Wall Street Journal that they also liked how they could create group chats with other Apple users that add and subtract participants without having to start a new chain.

Since your humble blogger very rarely uses emojis and never plays iMessage games, the blue-green divide seems like a contretemps in a teapot. The great MLK said something like you should never judge a man by the color of his bubble but by its content, and if not, he should have said it.

Mother's Day, 2021

I haven't visited Mom for over a year, but I "see" her on FaceTime nearly every day.

Now that retirement homes in Hawaii allow for in-person meetings when vaccinated, I will be heading to Hawaii soon.

Meanwhile, Mom's spirits have picked up because people have been coming to see her. Yesterday she called me twice to talk about relatives who visited recently.

A couple of my brothers brought her the food she enjoys. It has every unhealthy ingredient--fat, sugar, flour, salt--that the facility feeds her only sparingly.

On Mother's Day, dear reader, may you and the mothers in your life do what pleases you.

Naming the Players

A contest easier to understand and more quickly resolved

Economist Tyler Cowen opined (see yesterday's comment) that Washington, DC, and the San Francisco Bay Area are "power centers" on a collision course. This is an example of the "coming clash of the titans" (CCOT) type of prediction.

One sees the CCOT most commonly in sports; for example, Las Vegas bookmakers favor the Houston Astros to meet the New York Yankees in the 2018 World Series, though neither team, at 5-1 odds, can be considered a heavy favorite. A better sports example is professional basketball, where most experts thought a fourth straight championship match-up between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers was inevitable; both teams have performed worse than expected this year, and a Warriors-Cavaliers Finals is far from assured.

In the business world your humble blogger recalls 1970's newspaper and magazine features about the looming battle between AT&T and IBM, as communications and computers began to converge. Both companies were so dominant in their respective fields that the Justice Department pursued antitrust actions against both. AT&T was broken up in 1982, and IBM, which introduced the PC in 1981, lost control of its invention to Microsoft and Intel. Today Microsoft and Intel are each more valuable than AT&T or IBM, and the clash of the 1970s-tech titans never occurred.

In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw that Russia and the United States would battle for world supremacy.

Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

For half a century de Tocqueville's prediction was spectacularly true, though today the principal rivalry seems to be between America and China.

Picking #1 is hard enough, picking both #1 and #2 is tougher.

Treatable at Low Expense

The biggest impediments to longevity are smoking and obesity. Data analysis has discovered a third factor: loneliness. [bold added]

Social isolation, loneliness and living alone all have a significant effect on risk of early death—and the risk is equal to or greater than major health problems such as obesity, according to one of two meta-analyses of data from multiple studies that Dr. Holt-Lunstad presented in August at an American Psychological Association convention. The second, which looked at data from 148 studies, found that having greater social connections is associated with a 50% reduced risk of premature death...

About 44 million adults age 45 and older experience chronic loneliness, according to a 2010 survey by AARP.

Most people I know are continually connected to multiple groups through multiple modes of communication. Most people, including myself, yearn for life uninterrupted. Be careful what you wish for; the quiet of social isolation may arrive quickly and is difficult to reverse.

The good news is that, unlike most health conditions, loneliness is treatable by charitable strangers at low expense. Just make time to visit an elderly shut-in--friend, relative, or stranger--for a few minutes and make her day.

We visited a nearby elder-care facility during Christmas.

As Mother Said, Don't Slouch, Don't Mumble

Not very warm and fuzzy (Wisdom Times image)

CEO's make a lot of money. On the other hand they're scrutinized more closely than ever, and mistakes are often recorded for posterity. They have to be "on" all the time. And that's over and above getting the facts right and making good decisions.

New research shows that striking the right balance of power and authority with warmth and empathy is essential. If executives’ body language conveys too many power signals, they appear aloof. But too much warmth can prevent them from setting themselves apart and commanding the attention of others.

Some of the public speaking tips per the WSJ article are:

Keep your head straight.

Eye contact: not too little or not too much and don't lower your eyes (take it from me, Asians have a hard time with this one).

Point with your hand, not your index finger.

"Move around on stage...to convey energy and engage audiences."

Personally, I like moving-while-talking, because it means that the speaker does not need a teleprompter and knows the subject matter cold. For video productions, though, unless you have a cameraman who tracks the speaker, stifle excess, distracting movement.

As looking good becomes ever more important, the hardest part, IMHO, is the discipline to get enough sleep and hit the gym. Too bad they never taught me that in business school.

Let the Donald Be Your Guide

I've been getting a lot of calls on the landline from local numbers that I don't recognize. They don't leave messages, a sure sign that the calls are from telemarketers.

This morning I had to answer the phone because I'm expecting a call from a contractor.

"Good morning, sir. We're contacting utility customers. How are you this morning?"

Uh-oh. Another sales call. Fine.

"Would you like to save over $70 a month on your utility bill?"

I need the landline open. I'm not interested in solar. I've already talked to a number of salesmen, if that's what you're selling.

"OK, thank you."

I wasn't rude, but directness saved both of us time. The Donald is showing us the way.

(Business Insider image)

Father's Day, 2016

Dad walks regularly at Ala Moana's Magic Island

While we were waiting for a table in San Mateo, I called Mom and Dad on their landline in Honolulu. Dad's picture popped up on FaceTime. We switched to a mobile videocall and we spent the next ten minutes talking and looking at each other.

Everyone we discussed was doing fine, a remarkable and sadly temporary state of affairs in this journey we call life. 

Happy Father's Day!

Cutting the Cord is Inevitable

(examiner.com image)

Yesterday my uncle in Hawaii got a call from the "Minnesota police" who said that your humble blogger was collateral damage in a drug raid and urgently needed money for medical expenses. Of course, uncle immediately got in touch, and we confirmed the call as fraudulent. (This was a variation of the grandparent scam, which has been around for years.)

The puzzling aspect of this episode was how the scam artists knew that uncle and I were related. We have different last names, he doesn't have an electronic address book that could be hacked, and mine is encrypted on the iPhone.

The scammers aren't omniscient, though. Uncle has grandchildren living on the Mainland, and it would have been much more believable to him if one of them had gotten into trouble (no offense, cousins, if you happen to see this).

Uncle hasn't changed his phone number for over 30 years, and neither have we. With our personal data linked to them, the landlines have become inundated with telemarketing, fundraising, and scam phone calls. Keeping landlines has become increasingly costly on multiple levels. Cutting the cord, I'm afraid, is inevitable.

Recaptured for an Evening

Diane explains a point while I eat the macaroons.

One benefit of volunteering at Home and Hope is the opportunity to engage in conversation with fellow human beings outside of work and family.

Smartphones and other electronics are put away because, frankly, it would be rude to flaunt such devices in front of families (not all of them, to be sure) who can't afford them. So we have to talk....about the weather, about sports, about growing up in the 60's-70's-80's in [fill in the blank], about school and work, but only if the other party invites the conversation.

Between cooking, serving, and cleaning up, not to mention sharing a meal and conversation, the evening went by quickly. We closed up at nine and headed back home. Everyone would be in bed by ten, and so were we, the evening rhythm of a pre-digital age recaptured for an evening.

Enormous Discipline Needed

The communications revolution has yielded enormous efficiencies. Yet, like any tool, e-mail and calendar-appointment software can be overused:

“A small handful of people are really off the charts,” says Chantrelle Nielsen, head of customer solutions at VoloMetrix. In studying more than 25 companies, ["people analytics" company] VoloMetrix has found executives who consume more than 400 hours a week of colleagues’ time, “the equivalent of 10 people working full-time every week just to read one manager’s email and attend his or her meetings,” she says.

Time drainers:

Common time-wasting habits include copying too many people into emails and overuse of “reply all.” Inviting too many people to meetings is another common mistake, says Michael Mankins, lead author of the study and a Bain partner based in San Francisco. He suggests following the “rule of seven” people at a meeting: Every attendee added to that number reduces the likelihood of making sound decisions by 10%.

I laugh at colleagues who "reply all" when they decline meetings and disclose too much personal information about their reasons (a sorry, can't make it is sufficient). But the joke's really on me when I sometimes join a new humorous thread based on those responses.

Throughout most of human history food, information, and entertainment were in short supply. Now that all three are plentiful for the middle class, it requires enormous discipline to keep one's bearings throughout the day.

[Related note - Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams on the same disciplinary theme: Can Your Phone Make You Fat?

I don't know about you, but my biggest drain on willpower during any given day is my iPhone 6. It calls to me continuously during the day. Often I need to be focusing on something more important, or it would be socially impolite to check my text messages, or I am driving and it would be dangerous. These situations come up all day long. It's mentally exhausting. The conversation in my head goes like this: "Look at phone. DON'T LOOK AT PHONE! Look at phone. DON'T LOOK AT PHONE!" And so on to infinity.]

Different Goals, Different Styles

The old explanation: men interrupt women because men are sexist.

The new: generally speaking (as it were), men are trying to establish dominance while the goal of women is to make a connection. Men are not necessarily "sexist"-----they speak that way to other men.

Amherst researcher Elizabeth Aries

analysed 45 hours of conversation and [discovered] that men dominated mixed groups—but she also found competition and dominance in male-only groups. Men begin discussing fact-based topics, sizing each other up. Before long, a hierarchy is established: either those who have the most to contribute, or those who are simply better at dominating the conversation, are taking most of the turns. The men who dominate one group go on to dominate others, while women show more flexibility in their dominance patterns. The upshot is that a shy, retiring man can find himself endlessly on the receiving end of the same kinds of lectures.

In conversation your humble observer's main goal is not to dominate or connect with others but to learn something new about a subject (and if ignorance is on display, at least he'll have learned something about the speakers). A justification for introversion? Perhaps, but as a wise person once said, one learns by listening, not by talking.

"Satellite Valley"

Beaton Park, Perth (Skybox image)

Another new industry competes for talent and venture capital, not to mention headlines, in the local business scene:

a slew of Bay Area startups have begun launching small, relatively inexpensive satellites into space. They lug powerful cameras that send back pictures and video, and those images soon could dramatically change the way we perceive our orbital home.

A satellite that once cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch is now doable for a tiny fraction of that amount. And there's plenty of money to be made selling satellite photos, as well as the data they impart, to governments, analytical firms -- and even huge retailers such as Wal-Mart, who could see things like traffic flow in its parking lots every day of the year.

The Bay Area is home to leading companies in video streaming, cloud computing, and social networking. The commercialization of outer space is where those businesses were ten years ago, that is, unknown to the general public.

"Satellite Valley"---few people have any idea what it's going to look like, but it's going to be big, and it's going to be important.

Patent Mess

The iPhone "slide to unlock"

Patent wars in mobile technology are being waged over nearly every feature of mobile phones:

In the past two years, legal disputes have erupted over digital-image storage methods, camera designs, Wi-Fi technologies and well-known software applications like email and calendars, as well as secondary features most consumers barely notice.

Non-insiders will be surprised to learn that major battles are being fought over slide-to-unlock technology. Patent-holder Apple is suing rivals Motorola and Samsung over their "stretch-to-unlock" and drag-outside-the-circle unlocking techniques. Meanwhile, Samsung has unearthed an older patent that has some features similar to Apple's. (Disclosure: I am long Apple.)

The larger issue is the mess that is U.S. patent law. Patents that should never have been approved are stifling innovation while disputes are being contested in overburdened courts. An entire industry of patent trolls has been built around the extraction of royalties from producers who, usually unknowingly, have infringed upon an idea that someone has patented but not exploited with an actual invention. In this litigious environment I am personally acquainted with very small companies who spend precious management and financial resources on obtaining patents for largely defensive reasons.

One of the principal issues in this election year concerns whether and how much taxes, regulation, and other government activities are stalling the American economic engine. Our patent and intellectual property laws--and their administration--clearly contribute to the problem. However, because of the powerful interests on various sides of the question, not to mention its complexity, it is highly unlikely we'll soon see a solution that improves the general welfare.