Category: Career Biography

The Snowball

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The Book of the Week is “The Snowball, Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” by Alice Schroeder, published in 2008. This authorized biography described how one of the world’s richest men, accumulated his wealth.

Born at the end of August 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, Buffett was obsessed with making money. He became the general partner of the eventual conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, an initially money-losing textile company.

In August 1991, a financial scandal broke at the bond brokerage, Salomon Brothers. One representative, on various occasions, had broken the law to corner a specific government-securities market in auctions. His indiscretions, about which his bosses knew and took no disciplinary action for months, cost Salomon’s competition $100 million.

Buffett was tasked with restoring Salomon’s reputation and his own, as he was a major investor in the firm. “Everything at Salomon was turned topsy-turvy as the new culture of openness went into effect.”

BUT, the late college basketball coach John Wooden always said– one should worry about one’s character, not one’s reputation. One’s character is indicated by the following cliche: “When you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.” In other words, if you associate with people of bad character– stooping to their level, your own bad character will be exhibited.

Buffett helped punish the former executives at fault, by refusing to pay their legal fees and severance pay. The main perpetrator went to arbitration to restore his severance pay. The arbitrators ruled against him; he didn’t get a penny. The book’s author commented it was unclear why he was perceived to have been punished so severely.

As securities-industry insiders, those arbitrators were wisely trying to hold up the perpetrator as an example– to deter future bad behavior. Clearly, unmitigated hubris and unconscionable greed was “in the air” and was not going to stop anytime soon.

Numerous monster-sized financial scandals caused havoc in markets worldwide from the late 1980’s onward. Countless innocent people were fired– who had nothing to do with the scandals! The author omitted the inconvenient fact that in 1993, an unsupervised, rogue bond-department trader at Kidder Peabody caused that firm to go belly-up.

Buffett was a strong believer in pay-for performance. He drastically slashed Salomon’s employee bonuses because they didn’t perform– make money for Salomon’s shareholders, who were the real owners of the firm. Unsurprisingly, the employees were mad as hell, and thought the billionaire Buffett was a hypocrite. By the mid-1990’s, prosecutors would act aggressively to indict financial law-breakers unless they showed “extreme contrition and cooperation” when caught. How times have changed.

The leadership of the United States has been reduced to a small group of alpha males with hubris syndrome and their lawyers, running the country like a corrupt Wall Street brokerage. Economic decline is inevitable, unless the next president behaves the way Buffett did– legally requiring transparency and competence rather than loyalty. He or she must bring adult supervision to the major drains on the nation’s treasury: war / military spending, tax cuts, space exploration, and in the most recent twelve years– litigation.

Anyway, read the book to learn much, much more about Buffett, his family, and his times.

Walter Ralegh

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The Book of the Week is “Walter Ralegh, Architect of Empire” by Alan Gallay, published in 2019. There are alternate spellings of “Ralegh” but the author used this spelling.

In this hodgepodge of a tome, the author recounted the tenor of the times and exploits of the explorer, colonizer and treasure-seeker Walter Ralegh. Around the time Ralegh (born circa 1554), men originally from Spain owned most of the riches of the world. Humphrey Gilbert, Ralegh’s older brother by seventeen years, got permission from Queen Elizabeth of England to go on expeditions in order to steal those riches.

International voyages were dangerous, and use of multi-disciplinary expertise (of mathematics, ship-building and maintenance, cartography, alchemy and medicine, etc.) somewhat reduced the risks involved.

Queen Elizabeth believed she was (the Anglican Church) God’s representative on earth. England had an anti-Catholic bent. So when she funded Ralegh’s trips sailing across the Atlantic to colonize the Eastern Seaboard of North America, he recruited dissidents (who tended to be Catholic) to help him, to get them to leave England and become some other territory’s problem.

The voyages were made at intervals of several years, as they involved planning (data collection of the location of enemies whose ships could be pirated for their cargo), fund-raising, provisioning, recruiting of crew, etc.

Ralegh truly wanted to civilize the natives of foreign shores, but pirating of ships was so much more lucrative. He had thousands of men including his cousin, under his command. Through the decades, they encountered Native Americans when they hit land after their transatlantic voyages. Some expedition leaders ruled by fear and force and provoked violent incidents with them. The land was richly endowed with resources such as seafood and timber, and crops such as maize and tobacco could be grown for a profit. In his thirties, Ralegh named the territory now known as Virginia.

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about Ralegh’s adventures at sea, on land along the coast of North America, southeastern Ireland, and Guiana in South America.

Martin Van Buren

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WARNING: VERY LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Martin Van Buren, America’s First Politician” by James M. Bradley, published in 2024.

In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author recounted many of the historical events to which Van Buren was witness in his lifetime. Throughout, the reader can see the evolution of American politics, and how some bad situations have become reversed, and others have stayed the same or gotten worse.

Van Buren was born in December 1782 in Kinderhook, New York State, now a part of Columbia county, a couple of hours’ drive north of New York City. For most of his teenage years, he was apprenticed to an attorney. His preliminary training was spent in a version of “night court” in a tavern– the courthouse of his generation.

Republicans were the “bleeding heart liberals” of the 1800’s, while the Federalists were the free-market capitalists who believed the country should be governed by a centralized authority. Van Buren began his political career as a Republican. Nevertheless, he accumulated great wealth while practicing law. There were wealthy politicians who bought the votes of the lawmakers to make themselves richer. He became one of them through the decades. Back in the day, there were no campaign finance laws, so no one was required to disclose any information on campaign donations.

Van Buren was elected New York State senator, and began his first term in November 1812. The governor of New York State appointed him to be that state’s attorney general in early 1815. Politics were fickle, so his job security was poor. At the same time, he was allowed to finish his term as senator before starting the attorney general job. By December 1821, the Republicans were the only political party in the United States.

In the last half of the 1820’s, Congress frequently succeeded in opposing president John Quincy Adams’ initiatives. For months, senator Van Buren and his cronies fought against one initiative Adams managed to push through: funding for a diplomatic trip to Panama, to make nice with various countries in South America. Adams and his vice president Henry Clay (of the Whig party he founded in the mid-1830’s) had wasted resources on this project that ended up a bust anyway, because a few of the key diplomats passed away. Meanwhile, Van Buren had been building a bipartisan coalition to oppose his political enemies on hot-button issues such as race and slavery.

In the early 1800’s, ninety percent of federal revenue came from tariffs, as a federal income tax wouldn’t be levied until 1913. Various parties were hurt or helped by those tariffs. New York City’s business stakeholders, as did the southern states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama, mostly agricultural, were hurt. Commercial entities located around the Erie Canal, and states in New England began to favor tariffs as they built new factories. At the dawn of the 1830’s, the federal government was able to purchase its own Treasury bills and pay off its debt entirely.

At the same time, President Andrew Jackson, claiming it was an anti-corruption measure, imposed a policy of mandatory turnover of federal office holders every four years. Only about ten percent of the workforce was affected, but drawbacks included: disruption of corporate culture and loss of institutional memory in the workplace, so that new hires had to re-invent the wheel, and the replacement-workers would likely be inexperienced. Jackson later named his party the Democrats.

In 1836, Van Buren ran for president as a Democrat. He was the only candidate on the ballot at the Convention in Baltimore. Separate states were allowed to push various Whig-party candidates, and they did, so they all became spoilers of one another.

Then then-philosophy had been to leave the economy alone, and not grant bailouts. President Jackson’s Democrats blamed the banks on hard times. But after the president himself enacted banking legislation, that wouldn’t fly. A financial crisis hit the fan in 1837. Van Buren’s presidency was the first in which ordinary Americans blamed the bad economy on the federal government.

President Van Buren proposed an Independent Treasury– a federal entity that would simply be a conduit for collecting federal revenue and paying bills. It should be unconnected to commercial and savings banks, which were proft-seeking and had to answer to shareholders. It should not be subjected to political meddling.

Nonetheless, the politicians were greedy hypocrites all, of both parties. Ordinary Americans of course, were brainwashed by propaganda, and didn’t know the half of it. The legislation for the Independent Treasury was finally passed in June 1840.

By the late 1830’s, America’s government consisted of a two-party system. The party that was out of power trashed the one in power. But, presidential candidates didn’t travel around campaigning. They promoted themselves by writing letters that got published in various newspapers (which were partisan). Whig candidate William Henry Harrison broke tradition by traveling around the country, smearing Democrat Van Buren.

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about Van Buren’s life and times.

Crazy Town

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The Book of the Week is “Crazy Town, The Rob Ford Story” by Robyn Doolittle, published in 2014.

In this volume, the author described political shenanigans before, during and after a mayor of a major world-class city was caught: on video committing a shocking act, behaving badly, spouting inflammatory nonsense, and palling around with criminals. Canadian-style.

These cobbled-together writings of Doolittle, an investigative journalist, were chronologically disorganized and thus became redundant, but she did take a lot of trouble to fact-check and make the story suspenseful.

Rob Ford was born into a wealth family in May 1969 in a Toronto suburb. He and his siblings spent their own money to get him elected to the city council in 2000. For more than a decade, he amassed a grass-roots base of supporters whom he helped personally. Ford remained a “loose cannon” even after he and his siblings hired political consultants to advise him on how to get elected mayor of Toronto in 2010. He promised voters he would minimize taxes, cut the budget on subsidies of events and programs of a cultural nature, and cancel an already-in-progress, above-ground, light-railway project to plan and build a subway project instead.

In early 2011, Ford could brag that he had balanced Toronto’s budget without service reductions or tax increases. However, he got away with that only because he was coasting on surpluses from his predecessor’s prior years. By autumn, he was forced to propose budget cuts. As of spring 2012, “According to three former staff members and a close confidant, senior staff had been trying to get Ford into rehab for more than a year. They believed his drinking was affecting his job.”

The author considered the aforementioned video, “the scoop of the century.” Really?? Political wrongdoing has become a cliche in the past couple of centuries, even for world leaders, not just mayors. It has become trivial in recent decades because people have become desensitized to it. The scoop of the century really ought to be breaking news of a truly world-changing event that is, for instance, associated with large-scale genocide and / or atrocities, such as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the dropping of the atom bombs, or 9/11.

There are always going to be celebrity scandals, but global game-changers merit mention in the history books. They have big ideas behind them– although tabloid trivia is entertaining and a welcome distraction from infuriating and depressing politics.

Anyway, read the book to learn Ford’s entertaining story.

The Optimist

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The Book of the Week is “The Optimist, Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” by Keach Hagey, published in 2025.

The Baby Boomers generation of the 1960’s had its Timothy Leary, who was a big advocate of dropping out of school, work and society in general. The goal was to experiment with LSD and other drugs with the hope of becoming more creative.

From the 1990’s into the single-digit 2000’s, computer programmers and Web developers chose to engage in tech startups as their drug. In 2011, Peter Thiel, born in 1967– just around the time Leary’s popularity was waning– also encouraged students to drop out, but awarded them grant money with the hope they would manage successful businesses.

Sam Altman, one such student, was typical for his time and place. Born in 1985, Altman grew up in the Chicago and Saint Louis areas. His philosophy was “Go big or go home.” He never heard the word “impossible.” Beginning in summer 2005, a Boston-area technology consultant called Y Combinator helped startups get started with funding and mentoring. Altman was accepted to this program.

Altman’s first venture was a social-media application eventually called Loopt. The major drawback of its business model was inefficiency. Another was privacy concerns. Years later, the concept was joked about by comedian Aziz Ansari — meeting up with his friends (if they happened to be nearby) by seeing their locations on their electronic devices.

Back in 2006, Loopt had to negotiate separate contracts with multiple, competing cell phone companies across the country. Big Tech had yet to introduce the smart phone, on which the internet would be visible worldwide on one website that Loopt could have had, regardless of which phone service its tech-savvy, young customers subscribed to.

Altman’s peripheral hobby consisted of working to achieve nuclear fusion (not to be confused with the radioactive– carcinogenic!– fission) as a “clean” energy source. Propagandists repeatedly use certain words, such as “clean” in an attempt to reassure people that certain products will do them no harm. The following is just a small sample of other overused, euphemistic words:

  • free (nothing is ever free; someone is always paying for, say, government programs; usually taxpayers);
  • safe (nothing is ever 100% safe; instead, say “low-risk” or “high risk” but never safe);
  • cheaper (everything is expensive; instead, say “less expensive”).

Anyway, fusion is one of those problems that will be solved when enough resources are thrown at it. But even when it gets solved, it is possible such an endeavor isn’t worth doing in the long run, like when chemist Glenn Seaborg proved that alchemy could create gold from bismuth.

At any rate, the author went on a tangent naming the Silicon Valley men who joined the Extropian community, thinking deep thoughts on the mysteries of the universe.

Simply put, AI software applications can replace any kinds of human activities that have mathematics behind them: all games of 100% skill such as chess, some vehicle-operating skills, robotics, medicine, marketing of consumer products, etc. But, AI will never replace, in a completely unbiased way, activities with linguistic-oriented aspects to them: music and art.

Creative works need to be translated into words for AI software to work on them, and the translators (with all their ethnic, religious, cultural, social and political biases) control their interpretation. Besides, in order to take the actions that allegedly improve humans’ lives, AI software must become spyware on everything users do.

The propaganda of American science fiction in popular culture, is no longer:

“Commies are going to infiltrate the world so we must kill them!”

It has become:

“AI is going to infiltrate the world so we must learn to control it via a few thousand alpha males’ brain power, financial power and political power!”

The arrogance is matched only by the title sequence of the TV show, The Outer Limits: “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control…”

For decades, the world has seen the ways the United Nations has monitored, and tried to stem conflicts, among diverse peoples. AI presents a similar challenge, as it can globally manipulate human thought and systems.

It is unclear whether the world is ready to sit down at the bargaining table to discuss international cooperation on the future of AI. In the United States, in recent years, waves of propaganda have screamed about:

  • privacy concerns;
  • of various kinds of online crime; and
  • of how psychologically damaging all-day, every-day, staring at, working, playing and communicating through, an electronic toy really is.

The prolonged, forced confinement prompted by the COVID lockdown got anti-social (solitary) behavior out of the country’s system. Influenced by more of the above propaganda, in the future, Americans might be ready to spend less time on their toys, and more time on face-to-face activities, outside.

Read the book to learn about Altman’s career, and the common problems that plague tech startups in the context of the brave new world of AI: bureaucratic shenanigans, hypocrisy, secrecy, conflicts, competition, and regulation (or lack thereof). Hint: It is yet one more worldwide technology project consisting of redistribution of wealth among the wealthy, run by alpha males.

ENDNOTE: Grammar sticklers would take issue with the less than perfect writing in this book. The author made errors commonly seen in books published in recent years in America. She didn’t know what “a.m.” and “p.m.” stood for, and awkwardly put “being” in the middle of sentences, among other minor errors.

Yankee From Olympus

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The Book of the Week is “Yankee From Olympus, Justice Holmes and His Family” by Catherine Drinker Bowden, published in 1944. The bulk of this volume recounted the lives of the members of Supreme-Court-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ family, beginning with his grandfather.

Born in March 1841 in the Boston area, Holmes was born to the white male privilege typical of his generation. His father was a prominent medical doctor. The Protestant Work Ethic dominated the aristocracy. Due to the potato famine in their homeland, Irish families were arriving on America’s shores in droves. “Boston had developed a caste system toward them almost like the Southern feeling for the Negro.” The South End neighborhood’s Irish boys threw hard snowballs or mud at boys such as Holmes, who attended private school.

Holmes acquired life-experience in psychological and physical trauma as an officer in the American Civil War. After his military discharge, he simply went over to Harvard Law School to sign up, paid the $100 a-year tuition, and in autumn 1864, began attending lectures. There was a total of three professors at the school. He didn’t need to take any tests, or do any assignments. Yes, times have changed.

Holmes practiced debating fellow students, though, and was told to read various texts written by law students or attorneys, that expounded on contracts, jurisprudence, or jurisdiction. At that time, academic culture consisted of males who were (presumably passionate about the law) mostly self-starters, sufficiently mature and disciplined to undertake independent study. Working at a law firm after graduating, Holmes became somewhat famous for writing articles for the Harvard Law Review.

Through the 1870’s, Holmes hated the drudgery of practicing law, and basically wanted to be a one-man legal think-tank. At the dawn of the 1880’s, he presented a Harvard lecture series to lawyers and their ilk, but his new theory was heretical for his generation. He suggested that public opinion should play a role in how the law was shaped. In 1882, as a Harvard law professor, he used the Socratic method along with the newly instituted case-analysis curriculum.

In 1904, a case reached the U.S. Supreme Court that tested the Sherman (antitrust) Act. If the monster-sized Northern Securities Company of merged railroads was going to restrain trade, then it should be dissolved. President Theodore Roosevelt believed in free-market competition and therefore became known as a monopoly-buster. But he was a political hack, and aroused public opinion whichever way was expedient for himself. Holmes (by then a Supreme Court justice) believed the law should be crafted pursuant to the economic tenor of the times, without regard to conscience, morality, politics, self-dealing or art.

Holmes was a quick study. He had already formed his opinion about each case before arguments of both sides were even finished. The other justices took months to give the impression that they had spent a long time thinking about a case, so as to come to the correct decision. That’s still the situation today.

The reason some justices make everyone wait, is that they use the delay as a form of control. Or, they are putting on a show of discussing weighty issues because they have big egos– they think they’re saving the world with their decisions, though some issues are not a matter of life and death, and affect only a tiny percentage of ordinary Americans. Anyway, Holmes’ fellow justices complained that his writings were too brief, so his meanings might be misconstrued.

As is well known, in early 1932, the United State was suffering extreme economic hardships from the Great Depression, at which time Holmes humbly realized he was no longer mentally competent to do the job of Supreme Court justice. The nation shuddered at the scary prospect that President Herbert Hoover got to choose the next justice. Ordinary Americans were crying out for more regulation. The Court already had a solid conservative majority, and adding another conservative would worsen most Americans’ situations by (excuse the cliche) making the rich, richer and the poor, poorer.

Read the book to learn much, much more about the lives of the Holmes family members.

Trotsky in New York 1917

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The Book of the Week is “Trotsky in New York 1917, A Radical on the Eve of Revolution” by Kenneth D. Ackerman, published in 2016. This volume had a misleading title, in that it described not only Trotsky’s activities, but those of his contemporaries and their times. There were backstories and flashbacks– insulting the intelligence of a reader who desired to read the book from cover to cover, rather than use it as a reference book. It repeated itself as history does; “When war [WWI] hysteria hit, people began to look for scapegoats, traitors, and spies. And the first accused of disloyalty were always the same: immigrants and socialists.”

Anyway, in January 1917, the man latterly known as Leon Trotsky, his second wife and their two sons arrived in New York City by boat. He and his wife confidently lied to immigration officials who had visited them personally in their cabin. They were able to bypass the Ellis Island third-degree inquisition because they were first-class passengers. The Spanish government paid the extra cost of upgrading them from second class because it was so eager to exile them.

Trotsky worked in the East Village office of Novy Mir (“New World”), a Russian socialist newspaper with a circulation of eight thousand. He had numerous intellectual and political friends in high places. Trotsky was a spellbinding speaker and prolific writer on socialist ideology. He doubted the elitist president Woodrow Wilson could help make peace in Europe because America was capitalist and ruled by its moneyed class. That class wanted to maintain the status quo of the gravy train of great profits derived from weapons contractors. Trotsky thought similiarly of the American Socialist Party leader– Morris Hillquit, who, as a lawyer, charged big bucks to represent labor and radical political activists and wasn’t opposed to using violence to get candidates elected.

In March 1917, after the tsar in Russia was deposed, Trotsky was on the move again, as he was a member of the Russian revolutionary organization. He and his family acquired proper identity papers and booked passage on a boat back to Russia. However, he was detained in a prison west of Halifax by Canadian authorities (ultimately ruled by Britain) for fear his native Russia would ally with Germany to defeat the French and British. He prepared several telegrams to inform various parties of what was happening with him; one of which was actually sent. This spawned letters, demonstrations, telegrams and newspaper articles in America, Canada, Britain and Russia that put pressure on officials to allow him to return to Russia.

By late 1917, Trotsky and the gang were well on their way to forming a dictatorship in Russia– breaking their previous campaign promises. Via violence, they eliminated free speech and all political activity except their own. Trotsky made the excuse that such measures were necessary to head off a French-Revolution-style peasant-uprising. However, in order to stay in power as the top leader, Vladimir Lenin scaled back the brutality by instituting the New Economic Policy. Because the common people were starving, he actually allowed them to engage in capitalist initiatives in agriculture. Of course there was corruption. Hilarity did NOT ensue.

As is well known, hilarity is associated with the American sitcom, a bygone era. Trotsky’s scene was more like a modern-day reality show– whose viewers vicariously release their rage along with the overpaid noisemakers on the idiot box. Here are the sentiments of some other Americans.

TRIPE

sung to the tune of “Escape” with apologies to Rupert Holmes and whomever else the rights may concern.

I’m tired of the president.
He’s been in office too long.
He’s a worn out recording of a boatload of wrongs.
So while he’s hiding and golfing, he’s trying to clear his head.
And his personal consultants, keep the media fed.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains.
All the negative emotions, and the race to defame.
I don’t like his fluff night AFTER night, the views, and the hype.
It’s not fluff I voted for.
I TUNE out the tripe.

I don’t think about the president.
He’s always so mean.
He and his media slaves,
require a staged and scripted routine.
It should be in all the papers– his mind is going bad.
GOP doesn’t want to SHOW it. GOP is power-mad.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains.
I don’t like the xenophobia, the greed campaign.
I hope Vance steps up soon,
and cuts through all this red tape, via the 25th Amendment,
and changes the leadership landscape.

The prez can’t TALK off the cuff.
He’s in an embarrassing place.
It’s another Reagan instance.
Billionaire boys set the pace.

Vance MUST be less shady.
He’s a Millennial coup.
You can laugh for a moment.
But he’s dangerous, too.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains.
All the negative emotions, and the race to defame.
I don’t like his fluff night AFTER night, the views, and the hype.
It’s not fluff I voted for.
I TUNE out the tripe.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains.
I’m into sane healthcare, NOT the greed campaign.
I don’t like his fluff night AFTER night, the views, and the hype.
It’s not fluff I voted for.
I TUNE out the tripe.

I don’t like this queen’s drama.
He’s GOT mush for brains…

==================

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Trotsky’s life and political career.