The Haiku of Finance for 12/25/15

Dancing crossover
Same players, many costumes
Tech and the ballroom

SF Bay Area Costumed Dances And Other Such Events

Here's a Christmas Day cultural excursion for you folks, in the generous spirit of the holidays. I am a regular attendee of the annual San Francisco Great Dickens Christmas Fair. I figured out early on that many of the fair's performers also frequent the Northern California Renaissance Faire and the Guild of St. George. In addition to their day jobs in the performing arts and technology, these fair performers populate a huge arts subculture in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'll run down a few of the creative outlets where I'm pretty sure they spend time.

The Edwardian Ball (find the link yourselves) grew into its current incarnation as a two-day imaginary trip to the light and dark sides of Edwardian era culture. The ball has a very distinct steampunk vibe. The edginess of ball performers performers like the Vau de Vire Society (again, find the link yourself) is exactly what pushes the creative envelope. Some of the acts and exhibits have dark or adult themes, so the ball is not for minors. That's why I can't link to their sites. I respect my agreement with Google AdSense and its covenants on acceptable content.

The Period Events and Entertainments Re-Creation Society (PEERS) is a way for many of the Dickens Fair and RenFaire people to continue their fun traditions all year long. Ballroom dance enthusiasts can waltz, foxtrot, jitterbug, and swing to their hearts' content. Changing themes every month is like time travel without Doctor Who's TARDIS.

The Gaskell Ball is probably the grandest of all of the formal ball events in this area. The setting at the Oakland Scottish Rite Center certainly evokes an ornate ballroom of the Victorian era, Belle Epoque, and Gilded Age. The black-tie charity galas I usually attend in San Francisco all support today's anarchic modern non-dancing, which resembles so many epileptic monkeys on drugs freaking out at random. Formal balls should be about disciplined ball dancing.

The Bay Area English Regency Society (BAERS) portrays a niche in Great Britain's Regency era that complements the Renaissance, Victorian, and Edwardian events above. I suppose I would have to read some Jane Austen before I attend to get the flavor of things. I would also probably have to visit the Greater Bay Area Costumers Guild to find appropriate period clothing.

The Art Deco Society of California (ADSC) holds its annual Art Deco Preservation Ball and Gatsby Summer Afternoon to promote an artistic aesthetic that modern Americans have unfortunately forgotten. The Bay Area's rich Art Deco history includes the Golden Gate Bridge. A couple of my friends have attended these events for years and I wish I had gone already.

The Maker Faire Bay Area is the only event discussed here that I've actually attended besides the Dickens Fair and RenFaire. Check out my report from Maker Faire 2013. The steampunk and Burning Man crowd mixes with DIY techies here. It takes a combination of drones, printable circuits, and Tesla coil music to hold my attention.

I would attend these events if I had more free time. It looks like 2016 will be a very busy year for me, so I doubt that I'll be able to participate in some of these very appealing events. The list wouldn't be complete without mentioning Burning Man, but I have no desire to attend that one because of some very questionable activity there that no one seems to control. I think a Venn diagram mapping out the various fairs and events would show a lot of crossover. Historical period re-enactors, steampunk and dieselpunk aficionados, and modern tech innovators have a lot in common. San Francisco gives them many reasons to interact.

Investing In The Humanities' Material Future

Tonight I attended the Commonwealth Club's program "Living in the Material World: The Future of the Humanities" to see how the experts from California Humanities and Joint Venture Silicon Valley plan to save the liberal arts. I am intrigued with how data and technology now allow starving artists to prosper.

The humanities have always needed champions. Rich families like the Medicis were legendary for their patronage of the arts. The catch is that it took huge piles of wealth to sponsor a significant amount of art. The Commonwealth Club's panelists noted the gradual slide of the humanities in university life from a common language of civic engagement in the Middle Ages to an afterthought today. Turning the tide means advocates need evidence that the humanities matter in a modern economy.

The evidence for the humanities' commercial viability abounds. The AAC+U and NCHEMS released a report in January 2014 documenting the long-term viability of liberal arts degrees in the job market. Our Club panelists noted anecdotal evidence that senior business leaders hire liberal arts grads for the broad-minded soft skills that aren't taught in business schools. Check out the Council of Independent Colleges' Power of Liberal Arts for confirmation that the humanities add value in business. It looks like English majors offer way more than a punch line for sketches on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion.

One comment about successfully marketing museum visits to families was notable for what it implied about business. The tactic is viable because a live experience with loved ones is immediately shareable with what sociologists call an affinity group. Social media enables individuals to share their atomized experiences, but a photo of several family members allows sharing to instantly cross two or more affinity networks. Hey folks, that's the kind of business insight a non-humanities major like me brings to the table.

I am a fairly recent convert to the conversion of STEM education to STEAM, inclusive of the "A" for arts. I first noticed this change underway when I attended the Maker Faire Bay Area in 2013 and I was skeptical of its intent. I had gone from skepticism to acceptance at DesignCon 2014 because STEAM can prompt engineers to be more than linear thinkers. Technical domain experts increasingly realize that the STEAM paradigm incorporates the added value of the humanities.

There is enough room in the digital age for potentially unlimited attention to the humanities. The panel's Silicon Valley executive who performs commercially viable music after hours brings the quality focus and businesslike work ethic that the rest of the arts community should absorb. People working hybrid careers are the bridges between all of these worlds.

I still think some traditional academics will be very frustrated as MOOCs push traditional classroom education into obsolescence, regardless of whether Common Core's Socratic methods catch fire in classrooms. I'm pretty sure an AI avatar on a tablet can machine-learn its way through enough online interactions to make a simulacrum of Socratic instruction viable in MOOC curricula. I look forward to the first AI-driven MOOC platform that goes IPO. The humanities can finally enable money-making 21st Century enterprises.

The Haiku of Finance for 06/23/15

Pro-business culture
Strong on trust and rule of law
Good common market

Culture Can Impact ROI

Some cultures are just made for good business.  Countries with Anglo-Saxon common law and Protestant work ethics have high per capita GDP, like the good old USA.  Japan and South Korea manage to do well economically.  The rest of the world makes me wonder about the connection between culture and ROI.  Richard Lewis' When Cultures Collide explores the relationship between culture and business in some depth.  I'll just throw my own thoughts about the subject onto the Interwebs.

I would like to find some Big Data on cultural habits.  Searching Google doesn't help much at this point.  Big Data practitioners are forming their own professional cultures but they have little to say about data on national or sub-national cultural traits.  The most immediate waypoint I have found is a description of the Big Five personality traits and their measurement across cultures.  One NIH NCBI paper on cross-cultural personality studies offers more formal models that are more relevant for psychiatric diagnoses than business case studies.

High-functioning cultures should generate reliably higher GDPs and project ROIs than more primitive cultures.  It's an a priori conclusion supported with deep dives into global indexes for corruption, economic freedom, and other measures of well-being.  Countries in Scandinavia, the Pacific Rim, and North America tend to cluster at the top of most global rankings.

Culture has implications for common currencies and economic unions.  The tightest unions (like the EU and euro) are only viable with very closely linked cultures.  Looser unions (like the managed trade areas the US is trying to forge with Europe and Asia) work if they only involve business elites whose common outlook will facilitate large projects.  Transnational elites have more in common with each other than they do with common citizens in their own countries.  

The EU and euro became nonviable when the common market grew so large that too many ordinary citizens from incompatible cultures were required to interact.  I have long believed that a "Holy Roman Euro" of former Franks, Gauls, and Germanic tribes is the only viable future for Europe's common currency after the periphery explodes.  The former Hapsburg countries are better off having their own common market.  Poland and the Baltics need to go their own way.

The Alfidi Capital thesis offers the US as the most viable geostrategic link for loose common markets that would otherwise include incompatible cultures.  The US's long coasts with natural ports are the geographic links to European and Asian traders who would otherwise transit unfriendly waters (yes, China, this means you and your lack of commitment to freedom of navigation).  American business elites include many upwardly mobile Asian and Latin American immigrants with cosmopolitan outlooks.  We figured out the winning formula for linking culture and economic success right here at home.

San Francisco Needs A 21st-Century International Exposition

Tonight I attended a panel discussion at the Commonwealth Club commemorating the 100th year after the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.  All that I have read about that particular World's Fair makes me wish I had been alive in 1915 to attend it.  San Franciscans hunger for a recreation of their glorious past.  The obvious answer is to stage a new World's Fair that takes the PPIE spirit to a whole new level for the 21st Century.

The commemorations of this event began last Saturday with our Mayor and some historical reenactors at the Palace of Fine Arts.  I missed the fun and I'm pretty sure only a few thousand people could have attended.  Contrast that with the multitudes who came from around the United States to attend the PPIE in 1915.  The Commonwealth Club's panel of historians noted that the PPIE sponsors planned ahead to build hotels and railroad connections that facilitated the transit of tourists with money to spend.  The natural economic stimulus multiplied San Francisco's post-earthquake rebuilding effort.

One of the panel's final observations was to consider whether convening another fair like the PPIE would be feasible today.  The attraction of commercial conventions like CES in Las Vegas is obvious.  People today still like to travel to conclaves where they can personally witness technology exhibits, just as they did when the PPIE displayed that era's mechanical and electrical marvels.  The difference today is the prevalence of virtualization as a substitute for a physical presence.  Virtual reality interfaces like Oculus Rift promise to make the remote manipulation of physical objects an everyday activity.  Convening a future World's Fair here in the Bay Area must take this into account.

Here's my modest proposal for a Virtual San Francisco World's Fair.  The "virtual" part needs enough online activities to entice a Web audience to participate.  Publishing some addictive freemium games online, with instant machine language translation for non-English speakers, solves the problem of generating interest in developing countries whose people cannot come to a physical World's Fair.  Linking the virtual stuff to geolocated events in San Francisco closes the circle for tourists with the money and means to travel here.

The panelists mentioned that World's Fairs and other mass events tend to be tied to a local redevelopment effort.  The most obvious candidate neighborhood for redevelopment in San Francisco is the Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard.  It has plenty of space for the local component of a virtual World's Fair.  A few tens of millions to clean up some industrial waste is all it takes to make a pristine fairground.

World's Fairs continue today with little attention in mass media.  They lack attention because they have become sterile corporate blah-fests that do not capture the spirit of the times.  Notable World's Fairs like the PPIE, the 1939 New York World's Fair, and the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition succeeded because they captured the zeitgeist of their respective eras.  The PPIE heralded the end of the Belle Epoque, the Victorian Era, and the Gilded Age.  World War One brought the modern era into being and the PPIE's organizers were wise not to postpone their fair as war clouds gathered.

When San Francisco decides to hold its next International Exposition, it must be timed to match the Fourth Turning general dynamics that drive history.  The Strauss-Howe generational saeculum has entered a crisis period in most of the Anglo-West.  The crisis will not be resolved without a world-shattering cataclysm, with Indian and Chinese demographic confrontations over the food-water-energy security nexus as the most likely trigger.  San Francisco should plan its Expo for a date when that future crisis has passed.  Hunter's Point will be derelict for years to come.  It will be vacant and ready for the world's technology exhibits in a post-crisis cultural high.  San Francisco will then reclaim its role as America's Pacific Rim gateway, and a postwar Pacific Rim will look to America for ways to rebuild.

Piercing the Dark Clouds Over San Francisco's Young Professional Culture Groups

I have supported San Francisco's leading arts and cultural institutions for as long as I have resided in The City.  The institutions themselves are fine, despite the problems their labor unions cause out of spite for the audience.  I used to think the young professional support groups associated with the arts were just as fine.  I no longer believe that to be the case.  My membership in those support groups no longer makes sense.

That's me, posing at the War Memorial Opera House in a publicity shoot for the San Francisco Ballet's planned giving program.  The arts matter to me and I once believed The City's young professionals I met at cocktail receptions felt the same way.  Some do, but most do not.

My decade of networking with like-minded people over cocktails bore a lot of fruit.  I connected with dozens of intelligent, ambitious people who are mature enough to handle professional responsibility.  I also encountered hundreds of forgettable people who were not worth my time.  I periodically dropped such people from my circle of contacts.  Let's review a recent sample of these losers, complete with pseudonyms . . .

"The Continental" . . . a Silicon Valley engineer who routinely spends more than he makes, and only avoids bankruptcy because his recent employers got acquired and gave generous severances to terminated employees like him . . .

"The Singing Jerk" . . . a very irritating man-child with no verifiable employment history, who inexplicably breaks into Rolling Stones lyrics in the middle of a conversation . . .

"The Fashionistas" . . . some gaggle of aspiring supermodels throwing all of their disposable income away on wardrobe and makeup, living for the chance to be featured in 7x7 Magazine or the Nob Hill Gazette . . .

"The Gold-Digging Barflies" . . . aging single women who would rather prospect for sugar daddies than hold down paying jobs . . .

The barflies have become particularly annoying because some of them became fixated on dating me, literally pushing away other high-quality women I would rather pursue.  I reached my breaking point with these idiots when I recently became aware of some totally unacceptable behavior.  It is the kind of conduct more typically associated with a certain alternative festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada than with a coterie of young professionals.  I don't have time to dig around separating factual narratives from spiteful rumors, because the rumors of this behavior are enough to put me off.  Where there's smoke, there's usually fire, and I don't need to know whether someone is actually burning.  I never witnessed this conduct, nor can I produce evidence that it occurs, but people I trust now corroborate its persistence.  The possibility of a pervasive problem is too alarming to ignore.  I am now compelled to take decisive action.

I declined to renew my memberships in several of these young professional groups.  One remaining membership expires in 2015 and I shall allow it to run out naturally.  I have also dropped a large number of people from my contact list, more than I have ever dropped in one sitting.  Three figures worth of useless humans are totally gone from my life this December.  These people had very little in common with me anyway and I won't miss them.  I still attend performing arts events, including galas, where these losers congregate.  I will not let them cross my path to blight my life.  The San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center was named for veterans.  I go there to represent my absent companions, and for my own well-being.

The effort I make in meeting people just to weed them out is now a burden on my schedule.  I have discovered that I am more efficient at meeting worthwhile people at strictly business-oriented events.  There's a common saying that a person is the average of their five closest contacts.  If I picked five people at random from those cultural clubs, I'd have a handful of arrested development jerks whose adolescent flights of fancy belong with Peter Pan.  If I picked five random entrepreneurs or freelancers from my business event calendar, most of them would belong in a boardroom.

Yuppie social groups were useful to me a decade ago when I had few friends in San Francisco.  Diminishing returns set in after age 40.  These social groups are to real philanthropy what a cargo cult is to a real economy.  Going through the motions of success makes little sense if participants can't back up their incantations with competence.  I would rather apply my competence elsewhere than go through motions with permanent aspirants.

I have overstayed the time I needed to spend in several young professional groups.  I will say goodbye to some people at a few remaining social events and ignore a large number of people who do not deserve my goodbyes.  I have been free of debt, addictions, and irresponsibility for my entire life.  Most of the people I used to know in the San Francisco yuppie crowd do not share those preferences.  It is time for me to go.  

The Haiku of Finance for 02/15/14

"Triple Package" drive
Success has many faces
Anyone can win

Two Tiger Parents Bring The Triple Package To San Francisco

Yesterday I had the distinct privilege of hearing Yale law professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld discuss their new book Triple Package at the Commonwealth Club.  I'll have to get Triple Package at my local library because I'm cheap.  Reading the knee-jerk criticisms of this work online are not sufficient to get the whole story.  This sort-of sequel to Ms. Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother traces valuable connections between culture and the forces that build personal character.

These two geniuses tell it like it is about the profound effect of cultural traits on economic behavior.  They mentioned in passing that children immersed in non-judgmental environments often feel profound unhappiness in their later years.  The pride from earning a sense of self-worth is a stinging rebuke to the nonsensical childrearing garbage that erupted from "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" for decades.  I can see why critics unfairly paint Triple Package as racist, because it's a stinging rebuke to feel-good nonsense and lame excuses.  It's also a very useful counterpart to The Bell Curve, another misunderstood landmark work about precursors for success.  Triple Package finds that IQ isn't enough for success, and that success transcends race.

Jed Rubenfeld mentioned the classic sociological experiment of the Stanford marshmallow experiment to illustrate how self-control correlated very strongly with life success.  He also mentioned a follow-up experiment where the controllers broke their promises and every kid responded by immediately grabbing their marshmallow.  The point is that a broken social contract induces even a strong character to abandon impulse control.  Mr. Rubenfeld hinted at how broken expectations induce dysfunctional behavior in society at large when we witness huge transgressions go unpunished.  I've blogged before about the financial sector's egregious transgressions in the 2008 financial crisis and how few top executives have gone to jail.  I'm still waiting for Jon Corzine's indictment for destroying MF Global.  Critics who cry racism should know that the Triple Package authors offer another warning on how the rule of law is weakening in America.  We have common cause here, people.

I'm all about the authors' three main success factors of superiority, insecurity, and impulse control.  I've felt pretty darn superior to the neo-Neanderthals who've surrounded me my whole life.  I can be insecure about whether some jerk wants to steal from me or some lazy trust fund baby gets handed an advantage denied to me.  I'm also pretty good at controlling my impulses; I purchased my first car with cash after saving for years, and I did the same with my second car.  Folks, Anthony J. Alfidi is indeed the ultimate triple package.  They often substituted "exceptionality" for superiority during their talk but the effect is the same.

They admit that their most important conclusion is how later generations reinterpret the three success factors after experiencing mainstream American culture.  Redefining success recognizes other intangibles.  I was pleased to hear them value a mature understanding of success that balances money and status with honesty and fidelity.  I'm pretty sure that classically educated people like these authors would recognize the wisdom of living a good life that originated with classical philosophers.  The ancient words of Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tsu, and Omar Khayyam showed us the way.  The modern words of Khalil Gibran, Lewis H. Lapham, and Leo Buscaglia close the circle.

My readers may wonder why I diverge from business topics to discuss culture, education, and politics.  Folks, I'm a financial analyst despite the Web 2.0 mechanics and media reach of the Alfidi Capital brand.  Many factors affect the competitiveness of the American economy.  Education and parenting shape the personal character of America's future professional classes.  More of America's first-generation strivers should thank Ms. Chua and Mr. Rubenfeld for becoming their substitute parents.  I first wrote about Ms. Chua's philosophy in 2011 when I was more bullish on China.  I changed my mind on China but I haven't changed my mind on the importance of discipline.  The new line of thinking on business success should make room for culture.

Public Archives Can Build a Music Brand

Library science isn't just for geeky old spinsters anymore.  Information archiving and retrieval can be part of a brand building effort for digital properties.  Take the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as an example. Click on its Library Archives page to see the local music history they've unearthed.  Photos crammed into boxes from older students' attics are now online.  The SFCM's oral history project dovetails with other regional projects like UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library ROHO and the UC Regents' California Digital Library (specifically their Online Archive of California searchable database).

Uploading old folks' reminiscences is more than a way to keep their memories alive.  Mentioning the leading lights of modern music that have added star power to SFCM can help build that institution's brand when tied to an SEO campaign.  Impresarios like Kurt Adler, Frederica von Stade, and Midori Goto have made their joyful noises in SFCM's halls over the years.  Any performance materials they generated can be digitized.  Uploading their multimedia stuff to SFCM's website makes the whole site more attractive to Google's search engine.  Music enthusiasts worldwide will then have an easier time discovering SFCM's rich history.  The brand's value will rise and the school's graduates will be more marketable in music careers.

I wrote SFCM into my will because training young people in music is important to our society.  I don't want young musicians to go down the path of the San Francisco Symphony's stupid loser union musicians who deserved to be fired.  The Conservatory is exposing its students to entrepreneurial lessons that will enable them to produce and perform music in the free market.  Independence from collective bargaining may be one of the greatest gifts a musical education can give.  Archives of star performances can give an educational brand some superstar power in the marketplace.  

Too Many Fatso Opera Stars Ruin Performances

I'm an opera fan.  I've attended performances of the San Francisco Opera since 2005.  It's fun to see the spectacle on stage and hear powerful voices.  It is not fun to see fat slobs pretending to be opera stars.  This is a problem that cries out for remedy.

Fatsos in the opera pose a number of obvious problems.  Their extra girth burdens the stage.  You know how old and creaky some of the stages are at opera houses?  Well, some are even older than that.  A fat opera singer puts undue stress on the floorboards.  If they fall through the floor someone has to patch the hole and unionized crews charge extortionate rates for work these days.  Does your local metropolitan opera company want that kind of walking liability on their stage?  I don't think so.

Fat opera singers make productions more expensive.  Just imagine the extra material that goes into making their costumes.  That's twice the fabric right there compared to the cost of clothing for someone with a svelte figure.  I'll betcha catering is more expensive when tubbies are backstage.

Fatties are more of a financial risk because of their poor health.  Luciano Pavarotti died of pancreatic cancer and obesity is one of the disease's risk factors.  The guy probably could have extended his life expectancy if he had dieted.  Any opera company that expected to put him under contract toward the end of his life was out of luck.  Contrast his story with Deborah Voigt.  The London opera company that fired her from a production she was too chubby to perform still had to pay out her contract.  She lost over 100 pounds to become more marketable and it paid off.  She even looks healthier now than in her early days, as seen in her own parody video of her weight loss.  The lesson is clear.  Singers who keep up their health and appearance extend the length of their careers and enhance their earnings.  Opera companies and recording labels are wise to bet on slim singers.

The single most important reason for getting rid of obese opera singers is to have believable performers in a role.  There is zero scientific evidence for the long-held conventional wisdom in opera that heavier singers have better voices.  There is plenty of evidence that physically attractive people are more desirable employees.  Nothing is more laughable than a fat man portraying a Casanova-like adventurer or a fat woman portraying a Salome-like seductress.  Give me a break already.  Drama requires suspension of disbelief  but there's no way an overweight performer is believable in a romantic role.  Overweight people are simply less marketable.

Bring on the hot chicks like Anna Netrebko and Angela Gheorghiu who like to show off their goodies on stage.  Those gals deserve to be in the limelight because audiences want to see attractive performers.  Modern opera goers increasingly favor performers who can execute a full range of drama in addition to vocal projection and intonation.  We are all sick and tired of seeing walking lard buckets perform works of art.  

Rant About SFMOMA's Worthless Mark Bradford And Rineke Dijkstra Exhibits

I support the arts.  Let's be sure we're all clear about that.  I especially like the arts in San Francisco.  I like the arts in this town so much that I want them to be as high in quality as they can be.  That's why I'm calling out SFMOMA's new exhibit of works from Mark Bradford and Rineke Dijkstra as being unworthy of serious consideration as art. I got a chance to preview these exhibits because I bequeathed a legacy gift to SFMOMA in my will.  I don't regret my gift, but I hope the museum spends its portion of my estate wisely after I've departed.  Stuff like this is not an encouraging sign.

I saw the Bradford exhibit first.  The guy taped over a basketball and called it art, some kind of tribute to an NBA player.  How juvenile.  He also papered over a room with black paper and masking tape.  That is something anyone can do with zero artistic training.  His most complicated works were collages of found paper printouts from advertisements that he mixed with tape, tinfoil, and other street junk before scrawling and scratching on them in various ways.  The whole thing was embarrassing to see.  It was even more embarrassing to see so many urbane sophisticates standing around admiring this garbage.

I sauntered over to the Dijkstra side of the fourth floor after becoming thoroughly bored with the Bradford exhibit.  I didn't get any more excited.  Her photographs had zero emotion, personality, or action.  I'm guessing that she directed each of her portrait subjects to look as bored and uninspired as possible.  The only photo full of life was from her bullfighter series, with one guy smirking at the camera after a successful fight.  He was the only subject I connected with, because I actually wondered why he was so full of life among all of the Dijkstra photographs.  The curators praised Ms. Dijkstra's video works as some kind of inspiration.  I just think they were pedestrian.  The teenage video subjects could have shot the videos themselves and no one would have known the difference.

I haven't been this turned off by an SFMOMA exhibit since I saw a Richard Tuttle exhibit in 2005.  That was the dumbest display of non-art I've ever had the misfortune to witness.  I didn't think SFMOMA could ever top that but these current exhibits come pretty close.  It's depressing to see an entire industry of art critics, curators, and buyers degenerate into praising nonsense for the sake of exploration.  Conceptual art has its place but seeing the same concept repeated in a single exhibition - bored photo subjects, junk wallpaper - demands some minimal effort at differentiation.  I'm all about innovation, but when experiments fail then the gatekeepers of our most prominent art institutions should discriminate in favor of quality.  Someone has to say the emperor has no clothes.